539: The Strap Situation

50:48Neil O'Meara was one of many, many people to point out the following. Neil writes, isn't it odd that at the exact same time Apple launches an iPad or iOS warning that people are too near their screens to ward off myopia, that they launch a device that straps two HDR screens fractions of an inch away from your eyes? It's a good illustration that they are successful and big enough such that one arm of the company doesn't have a clue what the other is doing, but it's surprising it got through their keynote quality check. Hey, who needs consistent messaging anyhow i don't think it's actually inconsistent and here's why uh the whole myopia thing and sitting too close to things it has to do with uh you know when you hold something close to you it doesn't hurt your eyes if you're not looking at it which sounds silly but like that gets to the point like what is it about looking at screens too close to your eyes that it's bad the screen close to your eyeballs doesn't shoot out rays that you know destroy your eyes they're not shooting uv light out of these screens they're killing your eyes the sun does that exactly um the reason how looking at a device close to your face is because you're looking at it and by looking at it you must force your eyes to focus on something that is inches from your face it is the focusing of your eyes on something that is close to your eyes that is you know presumably causing the whatever the myopia that they said comes from this or whatever right again if your eyes are closed and you hold a phone close to your face it does not cause myopia because you're not looking at it now when you have the headset yes the screens are really close to your eyes but what are your eyes focusing on your eyes are not trying to hopefully focus on something that is inches from their face what they're focusing on is a screen that appears to be four feet in front of them and your eyes don't care that the screens are right there they just care where are we focusing like how in focusing the eyes i'm not an eye doctor but you know my understanding of focus is first you've got the convergence point of like where are your eyes pointing they have to be pointing at the thing and if the thing is close to you they're pointing you know you can go cross-eyed after you take something and push it right up to your nose right and if it's really far in the distance your eyes can be you know straight ahead and parallel if you're focusing on infinity right and the second thing is the muscles that squish your eye and squish the little parts of your eye i think they squish the lens anyway there's muscles that are attached to your eye that squish squishy stuff which is why when you get old they can't squish it anymore because everything gets hard when you're old yeah um anyway uh they're squishing parts of your eyes and those muscles are working and the the closer you're focusing the more they have to do squishy stuff and that causes eye strain and so on and so forth so it's not the fact that the screen the screens that are fractions of an inch from your eye inside the headset that only matters if you're asking your eyes to focus on something inches from you in the virtual world you're not looking at the pixels on the screen you're looking at images on the screen and i would i would imagine i don't know this for sure but i'm going to say i would imagine that because your eyes think they're focusing five feet away it's the same as if they were focusing on five something five feet away so i i if they're going to put on my opiate warning in in apple vision pro it should be when you drag one of the app rectangles to be two inches from your face exactly the same way it would be if you take your phone and put it two inches from your face but if those rectangles are out at the end of the coffee table like they're in the demos no myopia warning totally consistent messaging what about using it on a plane that's the situation we talked about where if you've traveled on a plane recently and you've been in coach the seat back in front of you is inches from your face it feels like you know especially if the jerk leans back not a lot of room we were like how is it going to draw the screen like a virtual screen in sort of you know transparency mode or whatever the core where you can see the rest of the plane around you but there's just a floating screen in midair where you're watching your tv show but wouldn't that screen like clip through the seat wouldn't it be weird that the screen looks like it's three feet in front of you but the seat back is a foot and a half in front of you well in the keynote they had a you know a video of this of someone watching a movie on a plane uh and as sage points out it looks suspiciously roomy so maybe it's business class so we still don't know the answer of how this is going to look uh you know how far away can you get the screen from you what does it do when you want the screen to be farther away from you than the seat back but apple has put out a video of showing someone watching it on a plane so they seem to think it's possible so first person to get this please board a plane and try it out i think it's kind of interesting like their their focus on ar first like this is this is an ar first experience will kind of require you to have more space to make use of all the virtual real estate even though that's not like physically necessary like if you want to have like a large computing space it seems like you know unless there's other features or other implementation modes we don't really know about yet it seems like you have to also be in a large physical space to get a large virtual space.

55:21Well, unless you do that whole put me on Mount Hood, I forget what they called it, but you know, transport me somewhere else. I've cranked the digital crown all the way in the one direction. So I don't get to see anything of my actual space. I'm living in virtual reality. Like in that case, you have infinite space to play with. But yeah, if you're doing the like, I want to be present in the room thing, I think you're exactly right. I mean, you could turn it halfway. so it's just got the mount hood around like the front of you but like in the end it's not going to stop you from putting a screen where it couldn't physically be it just will take away from the reality of the situation a little bit because you'll know there could not be a plane floating in that place because it's it would be in the middle of that piece of furniture but tough luck it's there i can see it like i don't think it's going to like say oh sorry you can't put it there i'm going to show you the seat back right i think it's going to show the movie in a quote-unquote impossible sort of mc escher type space just because it can and that's what you want and the transparency is just so you don't feel like oh someone's gonna sneak up on me or like i want to be able to see what's going on around me the same way when you look at a movie on your seat back you can see in your peripheral vision what's going on right that's what they want to reproduce so you don't feel isolated you feel like you're still on the plane with the other people who were there but you're also watching a movie the movie is just a little bit bigger like that's one of the things they were very careful a not to show and b not to allow anyone in the press demos to do because it It was a very controlled environment in the press demo.

56:42Like people pointed out, like, you know, at no time did any of the Apple employees like go into a place where they weren't expected. Like they did the thing where they pop in and break through like they demonstrated that. But it's not like there's people walking back and forth and like a bunch of crap in the room. It's a very controlled environment. If you put one of these things on and went outside and walked onto a New York City street, the AR experience is not going to be able to keep up. Because we know what's in the front of this thing. It's like a LiDAR scanner. There's IR blasters, right?

57:09but they can't handle an outdoor city environment with people everywhere and cars and stuff. So it won't know what the surroundings are like. It will just do its best. And that's what the first people to get this are going to have to try. Like some YouTuber is going to strap this thing on and go out for a walk and see like, what does it make of a walk in the woods? Like, how does it handle it? You know, how does it feel? You know, does it take away from the experience when the floating rectangles are in possible places? Or is it just fine? And, you know, as long as the rectangle looks clear, I don't care.

57:37if the guy in front of you leans the seat back on the plane do all the windows like hit you in the nose like does it like push all the windows forward like i there's so many questions all right lars would like to know hey why did they call it vision pro apple vision would have been so much more elegant do you think they already plan to release a low-cost non-pro version of the headset and if so how would you build that without ruining the entire experience well yeah it is called vision pro for a reason but uh that reason is uh the non-pro version that they could make now would be unacceptable by apple standards right this what they're releasing i feel like is the minimum spec of one of these things they will ever release but it is expensive right now they will come out with a non-pro one but only when the non-pro one can be way cheaper than this one and equal or better specs maybe it will be literally this one and they'll just repackage it kind of like iphone style where they take old iphones they repaction or whatever right but putting pro on the name it's it's a signifier of the price it's it shows that this is the high-end one but this is the minimum they would put out like they're i don't think you will ever see a headset that has appreciably lower specs than this ever from apple because i don't like i feel like this is like the original iphone on the ragged edge of what's possible and acceptable and it will only get better from here and there will have to be one or two more generations of this before we get a non-pro, I feel like.

58:58I think also it's part of the marketing expectation setting that, look, this is an expensive device. Not only is this a high-priced device, but we are acknowledging that it is high-priced and we are acknowledging this is high-end. And it kind of gives them like a, it kind of disclaims to the world, this is not our answer on pricing for this category. This is not like the final word here. This is going to be our first thing, it's a big thing, we know it's expensive, and it's aimed at a high-end market, and then that kind of gives them room later to come in with something lesser. And it sets expectations to the world.

59:37They don't think $3 ,500 is a mass market consumer level price for this device long-term. This is just what they have now. all right tell me about vision pro in gaming this is a point that we didn't talk about last time when we should this product and they would they would want it because the screens are amazing right it looks cool the screens are amazing the transparency effect is something a lot of gaming headsets don't have at either at all or not any close to this quality right so people would want this hardware but this product and i imagine all future headset products that apple makes will never be high-end gaming vr headsets for one simple reason and that is apple seems to think this should be a standalone device.

1:00:36It does not connect to anything. It does not, it doesn't even tether to your phone. High-end gaming headsets connect to a gigantic 500-watt multi-fan blowing water-cooled PC in the tower thing under your desk. And as technology marches on, the gigantic tower that draws 500 watts and is water-cooled will always have more computing power than the battery-powered thing that you put on your face. So that means the high-end, those people who like high-end VR gaming like i can't wait i'm going to get one of these vision pro things yeah eventually the vision pro will have the power of today's tower computer but but then tower computers will have gotten faster too and so apple has essentially taking itself out of the highest of the high end of vr gaming with their design of this product by saying it must be standalone and based on what they've shown and what they're using it for that's the right choice because that's not what this device is about it's not like you're going to be able to play the most advanced 3d games if they were doing that they would have to have the hand controls and everything right they're not interested in that market they're and standalone is way more important for them to do that right so that is important to point out and if you're wondering well this thing seems pretty powerful you can run pretty good games on it remember that the r1 chip has its own job it's basically doing all the sensor fusion and all like it it is busy so that leaves the m2 to do everything else what kind of high-end games can you run on an m2 not an m2 pro not an m2 max not an m2 ultra a plain m2 that is the sort of power class of uh you know cpu gpu combo that is going to be in a standalone headset and yes it will advance with time uh but just think of you know think of your favorite game and think of how well it runs on an m2 macbook air uh yeah you can play lots of cool games they look really good but the highest of the high-end game these pc gamers who like have overclocking their giant water-cooled things to get the most frame rates out of the most demanding games they want this device because the screens are amazing but they don't want this device because it does not have the gpu power and there is no you know like kind of like the home pod there is no input where you can say all right apple vision pro just forget about what you're doing but just can you just be an awesome screen for my gaming pc and the answer to that is no well just look at your playstation and it will project the screen into the into vision os when apple buy sony maybe that'll happen oh my word and then uh allegedly there are some options with regard to writing code for the vision pro um there's a work with apple uh page uh i forget where it is but we'll link it in the show notes and it has three options apple vision pro compatibility evaluations if you currently have an ipad or iphone app in the app store we can help you test it on apple vision pro request a compatibility evaluation from app review to get a report on your app or game's appearance and how it behaves in Vision OS.

1:03:23Apple Vision Pro Developer Labs. Apply for the opportunity to attend an Apple Vision Pro Developer Lab where you can experience your Vision OS, iPadOS, and iOS games running on Apple Vision Pro. With direct support from Apple, you'll be able to test and optimize your apps and games so they'll be ready when Apple Vision Pro is available to customers. Labs will be available in six locations worldwide. Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. And then finally, and this is what we were all wondering about apple vision pro developer kit to support great ideas for apps and games for vision os developer kits will be available to help bring your creations to life on apple vision pro these kits will provide the ability to quickly build iterate and test on apple vision pro so your app or game will be ready to deliver amazing experiences stay tuned for how to apply so this sounds really cool and and theoretically great i would we don't know a lot of the details yet This is probably an order in which you have to do the operations.

1:04:17I'm guessing it's like, use the SDK to build something in the simulator first. Then, submit this ticket to Apple saying, hey, can you see if my app works okay on the real hardware? And then, maybe they'll say, hey, you know what, this app looks pretty cool. Let's offer more stuff. Let's offer a lab or maybe a developer kit. That's how I'm guessing this is going to go. given given the level of excitement and hopefully secrecy around this platform and given how incomplete the software still is i'm guessing they're going to be very careful giving those out first of all i'm guessing that it will not have like any other software to run and might lack many of the capabilities of the final shipping device like you know maybe it won't have any of the eye stuff like the where it shows the eyes on the outside maybe it won't be able to like make facetime calls or whatever like i'm guessing those dev kits are going to be very limited and of course they're going to be nda'd like crazy because i can't imagine apple being very willing to risk like some youtuber getting a dev kit and doing a review of it you know in you know november or whatever you know months before this thing is going to ship so i'm guessing they are going to be hard to get and limited and and certainly um you know nda'd like crazy i think the only place where you got that order of operations wrong is that if you are a company that apple really wants to make vision pro apps and you haven't done the compatibility evaluation and you haven't gone to developer labs apple's still going to come knock on your door and say hey uh you should take one of these do you want one i know you haven't come to our labs and you haven't asked us evaluate anything but we really love to see what you can do with it and that's you know the the big important companies that apple wants to be on the platform they will proactively offer but everybody else yeah it's going to be difficult to get one of these i imagine yeah and and again like if you're if you were hoping to get a dev kit to like have the early experience of what this thing is like just in usage it would not surprise me if you can't do much with the dev kit except run your own app so yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't hold your breath on that we are brought to you this week by notion getting work done can feel impossible some days especially if you're tracking tasks writing docs and setting goals in three different places so if that sounds familiar notion is an incredible tool that makes it so much easier to make progress on your project.

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1:07:59John, this is your favorite part of your favorite episode. Let's talk about follow-up for Macs. So we've got the MacBook Air 15-inch. A couple of more details have come out about that. So first, the base model 15-inch. I mean, we could have looked this up on Monday, but we didn't. The base model 15-inch has all the GPU cores enabled, which is different than the base model 13 inch because you can get a binned one that only has eight working gpu cores out of the 10 um and so that means that all cores working 13 inch is within a hundred dollars of the 15 inch this is all just making the 15 inch look like an even better deal right you know the two the quote unquote 200 price difference from you know 1099 to 1299 it's actually really just a 100 price difference because all the 15 engines have all working parts in their socs that's great um the base model 15 inch comes with the 35 watt dual port charger as a no cost option oh no with a no cost option to get the the 70 watt charger whereas the base 13 inch comes with the cruddy 30 watt single port charger and you have to like pay to upgrade to the better chargers so that's another plus the 15 inch for merely 100 more than an equivalent 13 inch comes with your choice of two better chargers at no additional cost so loving the 15 inch and And also I just recently saw a teardown of the 15 inch and the insides of it look like Apple has done a little bit, put a little bit more effort into cooling.

1:09:22I know it's weird because it's fanless, just like the 13 inch, but like the 13 inch had the barest of amount of material slapped onto the top of the SoC. And now it looks like a little bit thicker kind of, you know, metal-y tape-y parts are on there. We'll see when people start testing these for a temperature or whatever, but I'm loving the 15 inch. yeah i actually went to the local apple store today just to very briefly hold the 13 inch air and the 15 inch air and when i first picked it up i was like wow this is heavier than i expected but actually i think that was not the correct reaction to truth be told it actually is not very much heavier than the 13 it does look ever so slightly wonky not having speaker grills on either side of the keyboard but i don't find it nearly as bothersome as most people seem to but it looks really nice.

1:10:06I mean, I only played with it for literally two or three minutes but even though I am not in the market for a large laptop and certainly I would get a MacBook Pro for several different reasons but yeah, if you're interested in a big screened but otherwise not bananas laptop, something that's aimed more for a regular human and not somebody like the three of us, then yeah, it's a really good deal and it seems like a really nice computer. everyone who's had a had a press model or whatever a test model says that it's basically exactly like 13 but bigger and pretty much anyone who has a 13 inch macbook air says it's the best computer apple's made in years so yeah this is two thumbs up for me even i mean based on my very limited usage and as marco would say they didn't half butt this like in the in the tear down yeah yeah the motherboard it's not the 13 inch motherboard just shoved into a 15 inch case it's a different motherboard it's it's smaller than the 13 inch motherboard because they'd have room for the speakers or whatever and if you look at like the differences between the 13 and the 15 there's like more bracing and more metal and more screws in the 15 to keep it from flexing because it's bigger like they it's a it's a typical apple laptop where they thought it out it's not just i will take the guts of the 13 inch shove it into a 15 inch thing and put it in some bigger batteries they it's a fully designed computer yeah all right let's talk about the max studio and apparently there's good news in the noise department yes the the uh m1 mac studio had a bad reputation for making more fan noise than we all thought it should not that it was super loud but because it was using in all cases except one the exact same so key socs that apple had in laptops and the laptops were silent we felt like the mac studio should be silent as well and it wasn't so here are some measurements straight from apple we put links in the show notes to apple's own specs for both idle and quote wireless web usage the 2022 mac studio with an m1 in it apple measures it at 15 decibels for both of those things the 2023 mac studio six decibels which because of the way decibels work a 9 db difference equals eight times quieter because it's a logarithmic scale so that is a big improvement and jason snell says i'm happy to report that apple has rejiggered the cooling system in the mac studio i could only hear the fan blowing when i turned mac studio around so that's vents reporting right i mean even then it was pretty quiet when properly oriented uh the computer on when i properly oriented the computer on my desk i couldn't hear the fan i placed my m1 mac studio on a nearby table and i could still hear it blowing i wouldn't call the m2 mac studio silent but it's noticeably quieter than the m1 model and if you were to keep it on top of your desk you probably wouldn't hear it good news apple should have touted this but then again if they touted this it would have been like admitting the m1 had a cooling problem love to hear it love to here they fix this this is not a small change good job apple yeah this is because again that was always such a a baffling flaw in the first one because it seemed like the first mac studio was such a great computer in so many other ways like every other way and then it had this weird unnecessary flaw so now this is great because now we can just you know there's there's no more like gotcha about the mac studio now it's just like yeah this if this product works for you buy it no questions asked yeah the only the only remaining it's not a gotcha but the only remaining thing holding back the mac studio is the fact that the fans are low diameter so while that doesn't affect the number of decibels it affects the frequency right and sometimes the higher frequency smaller fans higher frequency noise can be more annoying at exactly the same level than lower frequency which is why if you want to you know a silent pc you get gigantic fans like they're in my mac pro uh you know but you know huge improvement like the size of the fans it's a small case right the fans kind of have to be small um they could do way better cooling as i said with the with the when we looked at the m1 one way better cooling if they did front to back airflow uh they don't they do bottom to back airflow the air on the on the uh the max studio comes in the bottom and goes out the top of the back uh so we'll see if they ever redesign that case but uh big improvement year over year and it's not just jason got like a blessed perfect press model because like i said these are links from apple's own spec pages saying what they measure the sound to be.

1:14:13And I feel like Apple's probably being honest with themselves. One would hope. All righty. There's good news in the fan department, but some very questionable news with regard to pricing. The pricing seems a little wonky. What's going on there? Well, you know, we talk about this all the time with Apple's upgrade prices being disconnected from reality. But even within the weird anti-reality of Apple's pricing scheme, their own, you know uh options uh prices in the porsche style have bumped up against each other so sloan studio pointed this out a mac mini with an m2 pro and a 19 core gpu with 32 gigs of ram one terabyte ssd is the same price as a max studio with m2 max a 30 core gpu and the same ram and ssd with the studio you get 10 gigabit ethernet two more usbc ports an sd card reader and 11 more gpu cores with exactly the same price.

1:15:04That's a problem. You know, when things are literally exactly the same price, one should not be that much better. Remember, this is a mini compared to a studio. It's not two different classes of machine. It's not laptop versus desktop. It's literally a mini and a taller mini. And the taller mini with way more stuff in it is exactly the same price because of the ridiculous cost of add-ons. All right, tell me about John Ternus on the talk show and discrete GPUs. So I'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube clip. this is a feature that youtube's added recently where you can take any youtube video that you're watching and save a clip which just saves two offsets on it you know start this time end at this time kind of like the overcast clip thing uh and i love it because you know youtube has always supported time offsets in the url you can just put t equals 3m 4s for three minutes and four seconds but it wouldn't tell it when to end and the clip thing adds that so anyway we'll have a youtube clip linked in the show notes which will probably break in five years when youtube sunsets the clip feature but for now it will work uh here is the quote from john turnus when gruber was asking him about discrete GPUs and Macs.

1:16:02Ternus said, fundamentally, we've built our architecture around the shared memory model and that optimization. And so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems. It just hasn't been a direction we've wanted to pursue. Now, John Ternus is not part of the marketing department, but like all the op executives, he is, you know, press trained, media trained, as they call it. so it's hard to say whether this answer tells you anything because if phil schiller said it i would say well this is there's no information in this statement because he's so well trained that when he says something like this he's not making any statement about future products but when i see someone closer to the engineering side say something like this when he says it hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue now that's past tense right but when he says it's not entirely clear to me how you bring in another gpu and do it in a way that was optimized if there was you know systems in apple's labs that they had developed and decided not to ship or that they were planning on developing that brought that quote-unquote brought in another gpu i don't think he would have phrased it that particular way so you know take it these are his words take it as you will it technically doesn't say anything about future products but when i heard him say that it made me think they're not really interested in discrete gpus at all now in the past or in the near future we'll see yeah i wouldn't hold your breath on that i the way i interpreted that was basically this does not fit into the direction we've chosen we've chosen to go and they're not going to change their direction especially just for this one you know edge case product you know it seems like the mac pro was made for people in recording studios basically this is this is like you know a recording studio or video editing studio kind of product where people have a lot of cards for like audio or video io and that's it like it seems like that's the main well we'll get to that in a little bit because even in that application there are some problems yes but but yeah it seems like the mac pro you know as we discussed last week this is a product that looks like it's designed to kill the mac pro um but it at least is going to keep it a marginalized product it's not going to expand its market it's going to lose some of its market but we also don't know you know as outsiders how many people have actually been buying the mac pro and using graphics card expansion like besides you and and i don't think anyone else is doing what you do with it like to basically buy a mac pro to be a gaming pc well i mean one one thing to gauge it by is apple has released a bunch of new video cards for this and they almost never like you know the mac pro way of doing things is you release a product and you don't touch it for five years but over the course of those five years they've been steadily releasing new graphics cards someone's got to be buying them otherwise why would they keep making them i guess that's fair but i would guess that they looked at the market and they're like all right well we sell this many mac pros you know this percentage of them adds pci cards for you know audio and video io and then this other percentage of them adds gpus and you know given our new architecture is it really worth serving that you know sub market of a sub market that adds gpus to their mac pro and and they they clearly decided not to it's not to say they never will but i think that whatever factors led them to make that decision for this product that's those factors are going to continue to be the case in the future or even become more you know more extreme we'll see about that that's what this statement is weird because like apple makes all sorts of stuff internally that never sees the light of day i i know for a semi-fact firsthand all sorts of things that apple has done internally that they decided not to ship for you know mostly good reasons but like if you you know the experiment like what about this what about that right and just in you know not they make a fully formed product but they're like if we made a product with this does this make sense do we have the parts can we put it together can we prototype it what do you think of it right the fact that he said it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another gpu and do so in a way that is optimized can be read multiple ways you can say well we did make a thing with another gpu and we couldn't figure out how to integrate it in the system in a way that made sense like we got it to work you know it's no there's not people people wondering it's not impossible to connect another gpu to these things you could do it it's just like well then but then what about the gpu that's on there and how do we integrate them and is it useful and does it work well right he could be saying that uh he could be saying we never tried that because we that's not the path that we're pursuing we didn't even prototype it we just set it aside uh you know i don't know any of these things i don't have any inside info of what they tried with respect to this particular thing but a statement like this doesn't really close the door on oh yeah we tried it but it was it was crappy like it wasn't it wasn't good it wasn't worth it nobody would want it uh and we think we can do better without it and we'll see how it goes but speaking of doing better without it let's let's assess how they've done here um if we look at now we've got metal scores you know geekbench scores for all this stuff so look at the metal scores this is like a benchmark of apple's graphics api so you basically only see apple stuff here because it's apple's api uh what uh and and we're talking about the m2 ultra here and the m2 ultra remember is in the mac studio but it's also the exact same thing in the mac pro as far as you know they're not clocked differently there's no it's the same soc in both places so when i say m2 ultra you can think mac pro in your head but you can also think mac studio um with the metal scores the the m1 max soc was around 108k the m1 ultra was around 150k so that's a 1.3 times the m1 max performance but the m1 ultra had two times the gpu cores of the m1 max the m1 ultra is two m1 maxes stuck together so if it has twice the gpu cores why is it only 1.3 times faster in a gpu benchmark gpus usually scale linearly and the answer to that is something i think we touched on ages ago when we were talking about the m1 ultra is that there's i forget what the i forget the details now but there's some limitation in the m1 ultra that doesn't let it scale its gpu cores linearly i don't know if it's like some some cache or translation buffer or something that wasn't big enough and uh and that's kind of a shame because you did get twice the gpu cores but you didn't get twice the performance you only got 1.3 times the performance and that was crappy all right so now we've got the m2 max which is 130k which is 1.2 times as fast as the m1 max for 1.2 times the gpu core so there's that's linear as well uh now the m2 ultra the m2 ultra is twice as fast as the m2 max for twice as many gpu scores yay for linear gpu scare and scaling and that means the m2 ultra is 267k which is a respectable metal score um the m2 ultra is now the fifth fastest metal metal score overall on the geek bench charts the top three scores on the metal charts are the 2019 mac pro with graphics cards in it so So good showing for the M2 Ultra.

1:22:51Linear scaling, awesome. And by the way, if you're wondering like, oh, should I bother getting the M2 Ultra? The M1 Ultra was not as good a deal if you care about GPU cores. The M2 Ultra, it's linear. It's got twice as much as the M2 Max and it does twice the performance on GPU. So it is, it's doing great. It's doing exactly what we wanted. But here's the thing. The M2 Ultra is two M2 Maxes. The M2 Ultra is not four. M2 Maxes is what we were hoping for, right? So two M2 Maxes, the M2 Ultra, that's an amazing soc for a tall mac mini right you know it's it's the fifth fastest ever right it is not an amazing soc for a gigantic tower computer okay so here is the m2 ultra versus nvidia and this is not like metal performance scores or opencl or whatever this is running a graphics benchmark this is the the gfx benchmark.com i'll put a link in the show it's uh this is running their aztec ruins uh high tier benchmark right we're looking at frame rates because like well forget about what the metal score is forget about this but like frame rates right uh an nvidia 4080 has 16 higher frame rate than the m2 ultra yeah you know the m2 ultra is in spitting distance of the 4080 not bad the 4090 has 37 higher frames per second and the 4090 remember is a card that launched eight months ago so the 4090 is still kind of pooping all over the m2 ultra uh which is you would expect but it's kind of a shame right and this is you know putting in their perspective, Apple does not have a computer with a competitive, with any GPU that's competitive with a single one of the eight-month-old king of the PC GPUs.

1:24:23I will, for whatever it's worth, the 4090 also currently costs about$1 ,600. Still less, it's, you know, how much does the Mac Pro cost of that one? Fair, but like, you know, also how much power does this thing draw? I mean, yeah, well, that, this is for, it was for the Mac Pro, right? So, you know, the M2 Studio, the M2 Ultra Mac Studio. Great. Awesome. No complaints. Really good performance. Scales linearly. It's in a tiny little case. It's quiet. Love it. Thumbs up. The gigantic Mac Pro has the same exact. And this is what I'm always talking about. It's like Apple with this generation of Macs, Apple is seeding the high end.

1:24:59We're talking about GPU, you know, seeding the high end of GPUs to the rest of the world. Apple does not have anything that is in the conversation with the best PC GPUs. And in the past, when they've had horrendously expensive Mac Pros like the one I bought, you could buy them with a video card that would, A, cost you way more than$1 ,600. Like, I think the video card that I have in mind now was like$2 ,800 from Apple originally. And it's way slower than a 4090. Way slower, right? But anyway, they're not in the conversation anymore with high-end GPU. Setting aside that you can put multiples into like the 2019 Mac Pro if you need them for computer or whatever, setting that aside just for on a single gpu basis the 4090 crushes the m2 ultra as you would expect that's the reason when we discussed this on the back of the envelope years ago we were like the quad would be in the conversation if it was basically you know four m2 maxes or you know two m2 ultras then you'd be in the conversation but they didn't ship that so we've just got this so just to be clear what about non-game gpu performance um so app this is an article of someone crapping on the Mac Pro from some PC company or whatever.

1:26:02But anyway, he points out that Apple in the keynote called out the performance of Octane, Redshift, and Blender in the keynote. So he's like, fine, let me look what the Blender scores. Our Blender is a 3D rendering thing. GPU rendering on the M2 Ultra. So the M2 Ultra score is 3 ,400. The 4090 is 3.8 times faster. The score is 13 ,000. The 3080 is 1.8 times faster. The 3060, which is a$330 video card, is about the same speed as the M2 Ultra. That's not a good look. Now, here's the killer. The 3070 has a score of 3 ,396 compared to the M2 Ultra's 3 ,412. That's a laptop GPU. Oh, that hurts. That hurts.

1:26:46That's deep. And if you think about it, that laptop is probably noisier than a Mac Studio, right? And I'm not saying the M2 Ultra is a laptop SoC. it's an amazing soc but it is not a powerhouse so gpu apple is sitting out this generation they're not in the conversation on high-end gpu power which apple i think is fine with and most of their customers are going to be fine with because most of the customers buy laptops and these things are amazing laptop gpus just fantastic phenomenal just amazing but are they amazing gpus to put in a gigantic tower computer that cost seven thousand dollars no they are not let's look at the CPU.

1:27:24The M2 Ultra has a CPU. Single core score of 2217, multi-score score of 18735. Pretty good. How does that stack up to Intel and AMD? Again, setting aside the M2 Studio and all the laptops where these chips stomp all over everybody. What about your$7 ,000 gigantic tower with three humongous fans in it? That, you know, they could have and have in the past put Intel Xeons on there. I've got an Intel Xeon in there. If they were to build this tower today with a modern intel xeon what kind of scores would it be getting well the intel xeon w9 3595x which is a 56 core xeon is 2.8 times faster in multi-core than the m2 ultra uh again if they had made a quad they would have beat that but they didn't the intel core i9 13 900ks uh is 39 faster in single core and 15 faster in multi-core and those chips you cannot put those in a mac studio to be clear like that chip is useless for apple anywhere except for their gigantic tower computer with a huge power supply and tons of cooling so with this generation of the mac pro apple is out of the conversation for high-end cpu and high-end gpu entirely uh what about pci express lanes in the xeon uh generation of the mac pro the 2018 mac pro as far as i've been able to tell they believe it had 64 gen 3 pci lanes now gen 3 lanes are half the speed of gen 4 lanes which was the new mac pro has but even taking that into account the new mac pro has more the old mac pro has more pci express bandwidth than the new one because the new one only has 24 lanes or not only has yeah 24 gen 4 lanes and the old one had 40 lanes connected to the cpu and 24 lanes connected to the io controller um hector martin on mastodon pointed out that the m2 ultra basically just has two internal pcie switches with all these lanes hanging off of them so even though they have all these slots they're shared bandwidth because they were they go through these pci express switches so the m2 ultra also doesn't have the pci lane capacity that the uh xeon did it's kind of a shame now finally we go to uh neil parfit who has a youtuber who talks about his use of the mac pro in his audio application and he stuffs it full of cards doing audio stuff so he seems like the audience of the new mac pro and here's what he had to say in the video we'll link in the show notes his current rig is 28 core xeon 2019 mac pro with 768 gigs of ram that's all and his problem with right yeah and his problem with the hit with the new uh mac pro is when he just launches all his apps and starts working on a project he he's around 300 gigs of ram usage but the m2 ultra mac pro max ram is 192 gigs so him just starting up all his projects and launching into all his editors and editing his big composition with all the samples and everything he's already pushing into swap that's not great uh and his old mac pro had four 16x pci express lanes and then one only has two blah blah blah probably doesn't matter for audio but he did note it uh the other thing he pointed out was that he kind of thinks that for his particular usage having a tower version of this is useless because this is always going to be in a rack mount because it's just so noisy and it's got all the cards and the cards have their own fans in them and he's just stuffed to the gills and it's a rack mount you know type of thing like it's out of sight out of mine shoved off into the side somewhere so this new mac pro it's probably good for some people's somewhere but it is an extremely compromised in every aspect it is extremely compromised it is it is not competitive with the high end of the pc world in any category pci express lanes gpu speed CPU speed uh and it's a gigantic tower computer uh that's you know like Marco said if you wanted to kill the Mac Pro this is the type of machine you might put out uh it's not the end of the story the maybe they make a quad in the future maybe they couldn't pull it off now maybe the M3 will change the equation because it'll be on a different process size but for right now the takeaway is M2 Ultra is an amazing SoC that is not compromised like the M1 Ultra was the M2 Ultra Mac Studio is an amazing machine that's quieter than it used to be.

1:31:22And the M2 Ultra Mac Pro is the machine for I don't know who. And for me personally, Apple sitting out and seeding the entire top end of the computing world feels very disappointing to me. And I want them to claw that back sometime in the future. So did we get a Mac Pro? Like, I don't mean that to be snarky. I'm genuinely asking. Like, it seems to me, John, that you're saying, maybe without saying, maybe you're literally saying it that this isn't really a mac pro yes it is a name but in a little in little else like do you consider this a successor to your price it sure is well that yeah fair fair yeah no it is it's just not a great one because it does have expansion slots and no other computer does and it does have a really big case with tons of cooling right it has it's it is more capable it has more has more you know thunderbolt slots like it has more of everything than any other mac does so yes it is a mac pro but i that's why i'm comparing against the pc world like that apple's not in that conversation anymore like they're not even contending setting aside the the horrendous price difference that they've always had they're just they're just not close to the high end of stuff that's been out for months or even more a year or more right and that usually doesn't happen usually when apple comes out with the new mac pro it on its day of release it's in the conversation with high-end pcs you know granted potentially at twice the price and this one just isn't uh but it is a mac pro like that those slots are there that case is there those you know those ports are there um it's just you know a little bit of a uh not so great mac pro and we've had not so great mac pros before and we'll have them again we had not so great power macs let me tell you not every power mac was a winner they were shipping power wax with a front side bus that was like uh you know seven times slower than the cpu speed and that was not a great time to be around but then there are great ones like the the original power mac g5 uh the my beloved 2008 mac pro i think the 2019 mac pro is an amazing machine that just kind of got blindsided by the arm transition but you know in in many respects my mac will still be at the top of the benchmark charts because you can put graphics cards in there that are modern and good uh and you can't do that with a Mac.

1:33:28The Apple Silicon transition has been wonderful for all other Macs. But what they've done with this strategy of these chips is basically, they just make two chips that are actually kind of similar to each other. They make the MX, M1, M2, and then they make the Pro version of that and the Mac's version, which is kind of an extension of the Pro version. and they're just applying those chips and those design decisions and those trade-offs to the entire product line the mac pro is just you know two macbook pro chips glued together and the macbook pro chip is not that different from macbook air chip and the macbook air chip is the same as the ipad chip and so they're they're using designs that were that are made for much smaller and lower power products and just kind of you know copy and paste them scaling them up to to go to higher end products and that works great for all the other macs everything else in the lineup that works fantastically but that strategy it just doesn't scale to the needs of the mac pro very well well it would if they made the quad one right and it's not that's not just like a fantasy that's not a thing that happened that was part of a plan inside apple is a plan that they didn't follow through on but i feel like it got farther than just them noodling on it like that it didn't come to fruition you know again for reasons that probably have to do with cost because you know like when they were buying zeons yeah zeons cost a lot of money and they had to pay intel's profit margins but zeon sells a ton more zeons or intel sells a ton more zeons so they get economies of scale apple has to pay for every single one of these quad socs and they're the only person who will ever buy them the only person they will let buy them uh so that wasn't viable for them but that's that's a problem that i feel like that's a problem for apple they have to figure out the high-end thing their solution of doing four of them glued together i think would be great if that could work and scale linearly it would be amazing right that's what we all wanted they just couldn't do it with the m1 or the m2 we'll see if that changes but like i you know this the strategy like oh this is great for everything except for the high end the high end was always going to be the hardest but they had a plan and the plan seems viable they just haven't executed yet like i It's not like they're like, oh, they're stuck.

1:35:51They're in another thermal corner. They have no solution. No, the solution is the quad. Get the quad to work at some kind of reasonable price. Boom, you're back in the conversation. You got all the PCI Express latency. You got the GPU power to be in the conversation with single GPU things. And yes, you can put other GPUs connected to it. You could put extra RAM on. Like, those are all technical possibilities. Apple has not precluded that or painted themselves into the corner where they can never, ever do it. But A, I don't think they need to do it. but b they do need to do the quad at some point i really hope they eventually pull it off the other option is they just abandon this entirely phase out the tower and there'll never be a quad but i'm really rooting for that and i hate calling it the quad it should have a better name i'm really rooting for that but that that's that's the solution they just haven't done it yet but you know even with the quad you know it would so first of all that would solve some problems you know that would that would get them in you know in the right performance category for the gpu it would certainly it's certainly great for the cpu but it still has the trade-offs that apple silicon has brought in terms of you know first of all your ram ceiling will be lower significantly compared to the the intel layout for this product but it would be double what it is now yeah but you'd be going you know from you know a tenth to a fifth of what it was before basically yeah yeah so you know that's not great or maybe you know an eighth to a fourth whatever um but also you you are then you're you're not expandable anymore assuming the ram would still be soldered on like just like this so you have no ram expansion in the future um you would still probably have some pci bandwidth issues or hacks needed no i think you'd have you'd have double the bandwidth and you'd be right back to where the 2019 was like you'd again be in the conversation like that five years later like it's not you know so anyway i know but it would be it would be competitive like as the new quads come out they would have more pci express lanes just like the m2 has more PCI Express lanes than the M1.

1:37:42I think it would solve their PCI Express lane problem if they committed to the quad. It would, but part of the reason why you have this PCI Express lane problem is that the way they scale this chip up is by multiplying a bunch of stuff that you actually don't need copies of. When you look at the M2 Ultra, you have a whole lot of that chip that you actually didn't need to be doubled. And if they have a quad, you're going to have a whole lot of silicon space wasted on even more stuff that they don't need to be quadrupled. you know different certain parts of the chip just aren't used in this configuration you know the the the zeons worked well in this product because they they were designed from the start to have massive amounts of pci bandwidth going to the chip massive ram support like all you know all the stuff that workstation high-end workstations need the zeons are designed for that the m series chips are never going to really be designed for that they're always going to be like you know unless they would make custom chips for the mac pro which i don't i don't see happening i mean if they made bigger to instead of doing quad of the like the the size that goes in the mac studio if they instead made double of a chip that is bigger than will fit in the mac studio that would also work but i feel like that's even more cost like here's the question where is the cost is the cost in designing the chip or is the cost in fabbing the chip and i feel like for this generation they bailed on it due to the cost of actually fabbing it because they had it designed so maybe they'll go back to the drawing board and say we thought that it would be too expensive to build a custom chip for the mac pro that we only use on one computer but it turns out even if we reuse the things the problem is doing the interposer for four things you know like whatever the problem was but like there's some part of the process of building it ended up being more expensive than they thought so maybe it actually is cheaper to do a single interposer of just having the things end to end just like the maxes only instead of two maxes end to end it's two alt you know two extremes end to end and the extremes are like you said let's not let's not waste time duplicating things that we don't need more of and let's make two bigger chips that when combined when either in a single and a double configuration make sense for the mac pro that is also a viable path forward i feel like the other thing too is like the the cost of like if we actually got this thing to a quad you know right now if you if you have a mac studio to go from the max to the ultra so basically the singles the double is a 1400 to 2000 dollar option um you know the the mac pro with the you know quote double the the ultra mac pro with a double right now is an eight thousand dollar machine um you know what would it be twelve thousand dollars to start with a quad maybe i mean someone did do it someone did do that article of saying uh the the new 2023 mac pro in its maximum expensive configuration is forty thousand dollars cheaper than 2019 was why right because when you brought the 2019 one up like if you want that 56 core xeon intel charges you a ton apple charges even more on top of that right like the mac pro you know the 2019 mac pro was a more expensive machine than this one so yes doubling it into the quad would make it more expensive but it still wouldn't come close to matching the 2019 because everything in that was so expensive like going up to the high end the high end was only 28 core and like going to 28 Corp was like add$5 ,000 or something like that.

1:40:54So I don't think cost is an issue here. First of all, Apple gets to keep all these profit margins without giving any of them to Intel. And second of all, they're not shy about adding$5 ,000 to the price. No problem. Yeah. I mean, I hope this goes in that direction in the future. I hope that this product is, I hope that Apple knows that this is a compromise and maybe a temporary placeholder until the chip situation gets better for this product because again like i love the way apple silicon has worked out for all the other macs it's fantastic just for this particular product you know we've as the rumors of this product existing have been going around for years we kept saying on this show like how are they going to get around you know issue xyz with the with apple silicon and the answer is they didn't they didn't get around any of it and they probably won't and if you looked at them on the talk show live when turnus was up there talking like they did not seem like they were super duper enthusiastic boosters and defenders of this machine not that they they you know were lukewarm on it or were down on anything like that but the reaction they had wasn't like are you what are you talking about this is the most amazing machine we've ever made they their response was measured so they're not going to come out and say we wish we could have made the quad and by the way people are pointing out in the chat or they threw out a name from a name from my youth which they can bring back and i would highly encourage this quadra i lusted after a quadra it had a 68040 in it the four quadra get it oh they made a quad and called it bring back the quadra name hell they bring him back the apple vision name bring back the quadra name anyway m3 quadra that sounds good but didn't nobody like the quadra wasn't that like the beige box era the quadras were no the quadras are amazing nobody could afford them i can only see them in the computer store the only time i ever got to touch them but they were amazing um but yeah i it's they didn't again no apple person is going to come out and say we're really disappointing the new computer we just put out right they're gonna they're gonna tout its strengths and it does have strengths and they touted them but it didn't seem like they were you know just think of how schiller was beaming about the trash can like they were so proud of that computer they thought they had done an amazing job knocked it out of the park it turns out they kind of didn't but they thought they did.

1:43:08And I did not get that vibe from any Apple person talking about the 2023 Mac Pro. So I feel like they know what's up. Now, does that mean they know what's up in terms of this thing is going down the tubes, they're not going to make any more of these? Or that means they know what's up. And then the M3, they've got different plans. Speaking of the talk show, you know, I was expecting some sort of victory tour from a Mr. John Syracuse about something that was said on the talk show and I heard nothing because that's really not your style but it seems pretty damn clear to me and I don't know if it's because a birdie told them or because a delivery actually was successful but it was pretty clear to me that they understood that the Mac Pro Believe shirt exists and and they have seen a copy of it and I will put my own YouTube clip this first time I've ever used YouTube clips feature I also thought it looked exactly like the overcast clips feature uh but anyways i'll put a youtube clip in the show notes uh yeah they definitely knew about the shirt and that makes me extremely extremely happy oh i do wonder what they think about the shirt i think i mean jaws was putting the happy face on it and saying you got the believe shirts and we delivered the mac pro is that what you wanted it's like kind of you delivered a mac pro yeah let's talk a little more i mean better than not introducing it like yeah thumbs up there but We should have a conversation about this Mac Pro.

1:44:28But yeah, two Apple executives clearly know that this show exists, and yet only one of us can get an invite to WWDC. Not that I'm bitter. Gruber didn't do us the kindness of saying where the shirts came from. He used the passive voice and said, shirts have been printed. Who printed those shirts, I wonder? We'll never know. We are brought to you this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud computer backup for Macs, PCs, and businesses for just seven bucks a month. Backblaze is an amazing cloud backup provider. I strongly recommend cloud backup because that means that anything that happens in your office or in your house, physically to your computer, whether there's fire, flood, theft, doesn't affect your backups.

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1:46:46Let's talk gaming, particularly, I guess not specifically on the Mac Pro, just gaming in general. There's been a lot of news with regard to the game development toolkit. And I think, John, you are certainly the most appropriate person of the three of us to talk that over. So what's going on there? In the keynote, they talked about it like, hey, port your games to the Mac. If you've got a windows game you can use this cool tool we have that will run your windows game right on the mac and you can see what kind of performance it'll be like and then based on that you can use our amazing tools to help port your shaders to metal and to you know rebuild your game on our apis and it will run even better than it does in this you know a little test environment um you can find the source code to this we'll put a link in the show notes this is an open source patch to a bunch of open source stuff that was existing uh interestingly uh apple's patch i mean i saw christina warren say this and i don't know if it's actually true but in in the heat of the moment on during monday's keynote i think she was saying like um because of open source like uh you know gpl licensing type stuff or whatever they didn't submit patches to the actual open source projects instead they submitted a patch to homebrew the package manager for max so when you install it the homebrew package that apple added will modify the open source software but because it's part of homebrew and not part of the open source package the licensing is different i don't know if that's true but the bottom line is it is a homebrew thing it's like 20 000 lines of code and a homebrew thing um and what it messes with is something called proton which is uh i'll put a link in the show notes to that this is right from the people who make proton proton is a tool released by valve software software that is integrated with steam play to make playing windows games on linux simple proton comprises other popular tools like wine and dxvx among others that a gamer would otherwise have to install and maintain themselves this greatly eases the burden for users to switch to linux without having to learn the underlying systems or losing access to a large lot of their library of games proton is still in its infancy so support is inconsistent but regularly improving uh for for those who don't know what that whole big thing means you know the steam deck which is a handheld thing where you play windows games that thing runs linux how does a linux thing run windows games this is how um and so apple's thing uses this uh and also there's an existing apple product called mac product called crossover third-party product called crossover crossover from their website is the easiest way to run many microsoft applications on your mac without a clunky windows emulator it is not an emulator it does the work of translating windows commands into mac commands so that you can run windows software as if it were designed native to the mac that's existed for many many years wine has existed for many many years um apple has done some work to make this whole setup work on apple silicon max and from gokan avkaragulari who is the director of software engineering at apple working on gpu stuff he posted this i believe to mastodon he said we built a dxil to metal lib converter dxil i imagine is direct x intermediary language and metal lib is the library that implements metal we built a dxil to metal lib converter and a direct text 11 and 12 to metal runtime translator non-graphics apis are translated by wine which is that open source product that converts like windows calls to mac calls but we don't use any tech from molten vk or dxvk or spur of cross etc the shader converter can be shipped by games and can be used in the game development asset pipeline so what did apple do they wrote trans the required translators to talk to metal from the modern direct x apis metal as it runs on arms this is kind of the piece that apple is best positioned to do because who knows how to write really good gpu drivers for apple silicon gpus the people who work at apple who write those drivers for a mac right and this was the missing piece for getting wine crossover proton all these open source projects to play windows games on apple silicon max better and so everybody's saying i'm going to try out this quote-unquote porting toolkit and they're like hey i put diablo 4 on my my macbook and it runs amazingly through this you know don't call it an emulator not an emulator translation layer now apple's pitch for this is use this to see how your games are windows game developer and if they seem like they're okay you should port them to mac and i imagine a windows developer is gonna be like why would i port them they already run okay now now here's the difference that i read that description of proton and talked about the steam deck for a reason, right?

1:51:04The reason people buy the Steam deck and play with it, and maybe they don't even know it runs Linux, right? Because they're just playing like the same Windows games, you know, you know why they're able to do that? Because Valve, the company that runs Steam, has taken the burden upon themselves to take these quote unquote Steam games, which are just Windows games, and make sure they work on their Linux handheld. They make sure the ports work, they make sure all the controls work they make sure the performance is good they qualify them to work on on the hardware that they sell they are taking that responsibility valve is the company that's working on proton this translation layer valve doesn't make all those games they sell the games and take a cut of them like app store time out right but they don't make all those games but valve has put themselves in the position of being the responsible party valve says we have a platform come steam deck it runs linux but you don't need to know that in game developer we are going to make sure that your games run okay on it and so you can sell them to people on the steam deck and those users won't have to worry about any of this crap they don't have to worry about emulation they don't have to worry about downloading a weird thing they don't have to worry about it's not going to work or the performance not going to be good we're going to take care of that apple very pointedly is not doing any of that they're saying game developers here's some tools do what we want you to do which is to port your games natively to the mac and no game developers can do that because there are so few mac users who want to buy games apple is not taking like apple arcade is like all these native games you can run them on all our platforms that's great but the entire world of windows games valve recognized that if they wanted to have a platform that was not running windows and therefore not beholden to microsoft they would make that platform on linux which is what they did but it needs to run windows games because that's where all the games are um so i think this environment is really cool but what's missing is a business commitment from apple to do what valve is doing because remember valve like that's a real platform like i don't think valve is demanding that people make linux games although there are native linux games right valve is committed to making windows games run well on its linux handheld apple is not committed to making windows games run well on max they're committed to trying to figure out if they can get more windows developers to port their games and honestly a bad port of a windows game to a mac will probably run slower than that game running through wine dvx these metal libs or whatever which is sad but true.

1:53:22So this is really cool technical stuff, but continues to kind of highlight Apple's non-commitment to gaming on the Mac. Sigh. And then we have more bad news in that department. An anonymous ex-Apple employee that I guess didn't necessarily work on gaming, but worked on gaming inside Apple. They wrote, man, you have no idea. It's so much more screwed up in so many weird ways than you would ever believe. Ducked. It's so much more ducked. The only reason any core tech for games is getting built is because Nat Brown is still there. For now, holding it down on the engineering side. The business side is the big issue, and it's really an executive issue.

1:54:03Mike Rockwell hates games, which makes me sad about the future of games on Vision Pro. Once Phil is gone, it's going to get worse. And then, John, I think you pulled out a little snippet from the talk show. Is that right? Yeah, this is another sort of tea leaf reading from the talk show live, which is why this show is so valuable. You get to hear Apple execs talk without prepared remarks and you get to hear their actual voice. Mike Rocco was out there talking about the Vision Pro. He had one snippet that's vaguely related to this. And he said, we wanted the Vision Pro to be useful and we wanted to build an incredibly powerful tool, not a toy.

1:54:34And that drove a whole set of decisions around making these displays that have incredible resolution so you can read text. And we'll put a YouTube clip to this in there. I even put a little audio link in case Marco wants to. The part of this that's relevant is they wanted to build an incredibly powerful tool, not a toy. Now, if you have an uncharitable interpretation, you could say, boy, when Mike Rockwell said not a toy, I can tell he hates games. Or what he's really saying is just we wanted to make sure the screens look good so you could read text. Or what he's saying is the gaming headsets don't care that much about resolution because frame rate and graphics power is more important.

1:55:10you can read it tons of different ways but here is one random anonymous person from inside apple saying mike rockwell quote hates games which is obviously some kind of exaggeration um but it seems like mockwell mike uh mike rockwell who was in charge of the headset uh did not have again high-end gaming or any kind of gaming in mind when designing this thing because it's supposed to be a powerful tool not a toy well i don't for whatever it's worth i mean first of all i came away from you know this whole thing thinking pretty highly of mike rockwell he seems like not only a very very smart person but also a very um broadly smart person like he's he's smart about a lot of different areas um so that's you know i i would first of all you know not underestimate or simplify him too much um but you know also if you look at the headset market that as it exists so far it has been mostly a gaming market and it had like what we've seen is like in that context yeah game games on a whole games are a big category of thing but vr gaming really is not a big category and really has has not set the world on fire and has not proven to have tons of broad appeal or necessarily lasting value for a lot of people so in the context that mike rockwell has worked the headset i can see why taking gaming seriously has not been a super high priority for them and we don't even know that hasn't been a priority this is one anonymous source versus one statement that's only vaguely created it's just more of an example of you can read this both ways depending on what mood you're in right because we don't i don't know how much you know again hates games hates games like what does that even mean like he hates to play games that's you know whatever like but you know it's what we can tell is what apple produces not a gaming focused headset which is perfectly fine and perfectly fair and i think like you know to your point a smart move because it's not like vr gaming has set the world on fire like vr game has existed for years and years and it is not not i'm going to say it hasn't caught on but when you can get one for your playstation uh for a fairly low price and the attach rate to the ps5 is as low as it is it hasn't caught on you know it's i mean and so i don't i don't blame it for not doing it but in terms of gaming at apple we know the entire organization setting aside the headset the entire organization doesn't seem to be super into games and this person's saying like once phil is gone it's going to get worse is phil our gaming champion he's got his what doesn't he have like the vr driving rig at home or whatever the rumor is right uh but i wouldn't call him like a super duper like the champion of games at apple he's just a powerful person at apple who knows the game exists and likes to play them and i think we need more of those people not less and you know mike rockwell like i don't think uh if you're gonna put someone uh pin apple's approach to gaming on someone it's not the guy who did the vision pro he seems like he did a great job with that and gaming is not his responsibility but uh he also doesn't seem like he's a champion of gaming either so our anonymous friend continues the overall issue with mac games could easily be solved or at least helped in a meaningful way through clever diplomacy with valve or steam epic is obviously dead to apple now which is a shame because epic is kind of important in the world of gaming because of their unreal engine yep but if you ask valve the biggest issue they've had is apple's reluctance to commit to ongoing support of the technology which is accurate and true and that's why apple has trouble in the gaming space because anybody they talk to if it's somebody with a long memory they're going to be like we've done this before and you always bail on us and it sucks and if it's a new person they're going to be like apple you don't have anything to do with games and so they've kind of made their bed here and this would be a difficult thing to turn around even if they wanted to but it seems like they don't want to well i think overall you know i think um there um i believe it was either jaws or craig i mean it's coming during the talk show but you know if you look at the mac gaming market i think it was craig if you look at the mac gaming market um one of the challenges they faced over time is that they were using these crappy intel integrated gpus for most of their products you know like the average mac sold you know most mac sold were like macbook airs and stuff that had just you know no GPU power from these little dumb Intel chips.

1:59:11Now the hardware is much better at the base levels for gaming. So maybe, I mean obviously Apple has lots of problems getting game developers to care about them. There's a lot of challenges there on multiple levels, but at least that one big one of most of your hardware can't play games very well that is dramatically improved now. Now the Apple Silicon GPUs are so much better even even the the lowest end one in like you know the regular old m1 is so far ahead of intel's crappy old gpus in similar products like so at least that problem is is alleviated now so there so it it isn't like nothing has changed things have like the environment has changed significantly so i i think the odds of getting a healthy mac gaming ecosystem going um are i I wouldn't say they're great, but they're better than ever now.

2:00:07And they are significantly different than where they were, you know, three or five years ago. Yeah, I remember when that point came up. That's good to bring that up because it is like, and what we're not saying is like, oh, Mac GPUs are good now. Here's the important point. The addressable market for your game, if you're a game developer, is going to get bigger. Because previously you could sell to 1 % of Mac users and everyone else couldn't run your game. Now you're basically going to be able to sell to 100 % of them. because there are no Mac, you know, Apple Silicon things that are useless for games.

2:00:36Every single one of them is gaming capable. Is it going to be amazing, amazing frame rates at amazing? No, but there is not a single one that does not have a GPU that can play a modern game reasonably. And that has never been true before. We still have to wait for a lot of turnover. People got to get rid of their Intel Macs. People got to get new ones or whatever. But the addressable market was essentially going to be 100%. Now, is 100 % of the Mac market attractive enough? it's more attractive than five percent right but you still have an uphill battle like so it's kind of an if you build it they will come if you build it you'll be able to have more reasonable conversations but you still have to talk to them apple right so i think the situation is looking up and i hope that comment coming out i hope that means that like maybe they're seeing that in their conversation with gamers like that's part of their game developers is that part of their pitch it's like i know you don't want to talk to us because like none of our users could run your games but pretty soon they'll all be able to run your games and so now are you interested and they They might go, eh, still not interested, but, you know, it's a positive move for sure.

2:01:33All right, let's talk Sonoma. And I am not running any betas anywhere, including Sonoma. But, John, based on Switchglass stuff alone, I think you're running it. Is that right? I am running it, and I have two important things to report. First, number one, the notifications UI, where you try to mouse over the thing to make the buttons appear, and they squirm away, and they disappear. I think they fixed it. Oh, thank God. i'm not willing to say 100 because i've only been in a little bit but i i think they fixed it every single time a notification came up and i just went to click on the button in the normal way that a person would i was able to click on it hallelujah and this is sonoma beta one so already i'm liking sonoma that's good so it's still a crappy looking design but at least it'll work better yes well and then you can at least you can click the button at least you don't go to get it and it disappears big thing two years we had to deal all right thing number two my weird window dragging bug does not happen in Sonoma.

2:02:31Oh, that's exciting. Now, does it not happen because it's a clean install? Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Or does it not happen because it's fixed? I think it's fixed. And the reason I think it's fixed is because I've been tearing every single third-party thing out of my computer for months now. I made two brand new fresh accounts with nothing in them called Test 1 and Test 2. And I used those accounts and didn't log into my other accounts. There's nothing in them. They're not signed into any Apple IDs. They're clean as clean can be on a clean system with no third party anything. And it still happens in Ventura 13.4.

2:03:06Does not happen in Sonoma. So right away, I'm going to say that I am liking Sonoma so far. Good. How's system settings? Still not great. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Backblaze, Notion, and Eagle9 Locked. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join, and we will talk to you next week.

2:03:58You can find the show notes at atp.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech podcast so long All right, so earlier today, you know, Wednesday morning is my time to look at all the links, the just copious amounts of links that Marco and only Marco has put into the show notes document and make sure I'm caught up so I know what I'm talking about in the evening. And at the top of our internal show notes document, our Google Doc, we have a few sections and one of them is after show.

2:04:59And sometimes we'll have things here. A lot of times we won't. But this week we have the following. And my interest is very, very piqued. It says after show, John's special treat. What's going on, John? Well, you've heard my take on the new Mac Pro and how that it's a good thing, but also a bad thing. And I'm slightly disappointed and I'm not going to buy one. And even in the Mac Studio, I'm going to wait for the M3, even though the M2 one is pretty darn good. And so I kind of have this, and I didn't get to go to WWDC. And so in typical Casey fashion, I'm thinking, well, I didn't get to go to WWDC.

2:05:36I would have paid a lot for that plane flight. But now I have, does that count as extra money? Oh, my God. Yes, it does. And you know what? I thought to myself, as the internet would say, John's can have a little SSD storage as a treat. Okay. I was hoping you bought a Mac Studio. yeah right same because what you should do yes this is more important than that i have finally said goodbye to spinning rust in my mac oh that's exciting i have had a hard drive in my mac since my mac plus since it used to be under the computer my mac plus in 1986 or whatever that was or my mac 128k upgraded motherboard internal upgraded to a plus which is a thing you could do back then believe it or not um you could upgrade your computer what official apple would sell you an upgrade to upgrade your original macintosh to a mac plus you'd swap the motherboard the the the back case the analog board uh you would leave the crt in there i believe you swap the floppy drive anyway i've had a spinning hard drive for all that time uh part of the reason i love the big tower computers is because you can have internal storage uh and over the years that internal storage is usually taken the form of spinning hard drives the the uh the big the original cheese grater had sleds like four different sleds with 3.5 inch hard drives on it where you could slide the thing it was awesome loved it uh 2019 mac pro i had to buy this to a bent piece of metal but it's got a place for spinning hard drives and i put them in there and why did i put them in there because spinning hard drives are really cheap per megabyte they're still really cheap per megabyte but over the years having spinning hard drives has become more and more annoying obviously they're slow also i've had to do all sorts of unix shenanigans to get them to spin up and spin down i had that whole thing that would like wake my mac up in the middle of the night and spin up my time machine drive and mount it into a time machine backup and unmount it which also meant that i couldn't run time machine during the day because i didn't want that drive spinning up when it did time machine backups right and everything is slow um when i was doing sonoma i was without all of my little unix scripty things that deal with my drives and so they were constantly spinning up and they're driving me crazy and then during my various reboots in and out of Sonoma.

2:07:42I accidentally booted off my clone drive because I have a super duper clone drive in there as well. Oh no. Which of course I didn't realize because it looks exactly the same because it's a freaking clone. But I noticed when logging in was taking 30 minutes. Oh my word. Because spinning hard drives are slow. APFS is not designed for spinning hard drives. And yeah they're cheap per megabyte but you know what? I decided it was time. So I replaced my spinning disks with the cheapest ssds like the cheapest slowest ssds i could possibly find that are exactly the same size as the spinning drives that they replaced those spinning drives were bought three years ago one of them by the way came with a bed piece of metal so it's not really a 400 piece of metal it was a 400 8 gigabyte 8 terabyte hard drive plus a bed piece of metal so i replaced my internal 4 terabyte and my internal 8 terabyte spinning discs with internal 4 and 8 terabyte ssds now there is nothing spinning inside my computer and it is glorious i finally made it it took me such a long time because i'm such a cheapskate uh but now uh i i can leave my time machine drive mounted all day and it doesn't make any noise i still leave my clone drive unmounted for safety and it still wakes up in the night and clones and goes back uh but no noise i did have one last challenge with the bent piece of metal because what i was buying was basically sata ssds which are you know i they're going to be connected to sata ports and they're cheap you know rather than buying a pci express card that's fast and nbme storage like no that's too expensive i need it to be cheap so i bought cheap sata ssds and i took out the 3.5 inch drives and you can mount a 2.5 inch sata ssd thing in there you can just buy these little adapters that like make it fit into the screw holes of a 3.5 inch type of thing so i did i bought one of those for like seven bucks and put it in there whatever and it was like oh there's a single sled can hold two of these tiny you've seen like a 2.5 inch ssd they're really skinny they're not even the size of 2.5 inch spinning discs right so i bought one sled put the two ssds in there took the bent piece of metal out took the hard drives out they're so big and heavy that bent piece of metal is actually you know yes granted it's 400 with the with an eight terabyte drive but it's got rubber rubber isolation mounts and it's really solid it's you know but and what am i putting in this rubber isolated frame thing two tiny little solid straight drives that have no moving parts that weigh like as much as a feather so it's so ridiculous but i put them in there and they're stacked on top of each other and then i was putting the thing back inside my computer and i realized i can't fit the connectors on it because the connectors are right angle connectors and these two ssds are right on top of each other and you can't put two right angle connectors right on top of each other i could have flipped them so they went the opposite directions right but the the wire the sata power and data cable that came with with the bent piece of metal is so precisely fit that if you do not have the ports exactly where they would be on a 3.5 inch drive, the wires don't reach.

2:10:35So no, I couldn't flip one over and have them work like that. Forget it. What I also realized is that the sled that I bought didn't put the port in the same place as it would on a 3.5 inch drive. It put it dead in the middle. And that's not where it is. If you look at a 3.5 inch hard drive, like a SATA hard drive, the port is to one side of the edge. it's not in the middle these wires are so precisely made that if you if you have the ports in the middle you can't connect both of them without like basically tearing the wires apart because one of them reaches on the left and one of them reaches slightly higher into the right and that's it if oh you want them both in the middle just move each one over a centimeter up nope can't do it anymore the wires are straining and pulling and it's like oh my god yes i could just bought more SATA cables but the the precision of these cables is kind of like when i talked about my logitech 4k camera it comes with a tiny little cable that's exactly the right length to fit from the the thing to the back of the xdr i love that that's why you know people make pcs they get like exactly the right length wire with no like extra wire anywhere that's what i want inside my computer so i had to buy a second caddy that was offset and now the uh they fit in the bent piece of metal so one last rep and one last go around with the bent piece of metal for the realities of the inside of this computer which by the way the inside of this computer on every like this is part of the joys of my 2019 mac pro people wonder why i buy the stupid thing every time i open this thing up it's like a joy it's a work of art in there there are no wires anywhere it's not like they neatly routed the cables like they did on the power mac g5 or the g4 or the g3 there's no wires to be routed it is a thing of beauty except for the sata cables for the stupid bent piece of metal so i'm damned if those things weren't going to be perfect i didn't want to go by other cables i didn't want them to be bent or kinked or torn apart or untaped and re-taped so i got them to fit and now my computer is silent and i have these ssds which yes they're horrendously slow i mean like they're they're what quarter a fifth the speed of my main ssd but it doesn't matter because they're so much faster than spinning discs and they don't make any noise and i'm loving it congratulations john this is like when apple stopped selling the non retina imac it is or when they when the last optical disc left the mac line this is this is an important part of my life because everyone's like oh ssds sds and i've had them for years and years but i've always had spinning discs because just you can't i couldn't i couldn't stay away from the bargain they were so cheap and now all i do is to turn my eye towards like the synology and say you know if i could fill that with 22 terabyte drives well it's funny you say that because uh just earlier today paul haddad who works uh is working on ivory uh the mastodon client tweet bought before it uh he tooted getting so close to an all flash uh network attached storage and it's a screenshot of amazon showing the the prototypical samsung um ssd eight terabytes for four hundred dollars now four hundred dollars is a lot of money but for eight terabytes that's really not bad at all i know that's what i got i got i can i can i should find the links to the i bought samsung name brand ssds like good quote-unquote good ssd but they're sata ssds like they're stepping through a straw someone put it in the chat room it's at 60 megabyte 600 megabytes per second which is maybe a maybe a tenth of the speed of my boot drive like the sata interface itself is the limit here obviously not the ssd um but it's fine like for i'm using it for it's a time machine drive and a clone drive um i haven't actually booted from the clone drive yet but boy it's got to be faster than that spinning disc but most importantly no noise no of the spinning up no like that just that's what it would sound like it would sound not just like an old hardware like tech talk tick talk like just there's you have no idea how much disc there i o there is in modern mac os because it's designed for ssds and who cares there's no you know there's penalty for seeking there's no penalty for random access any location is the same as any other we not on a spinning disc so this is this is a turning point and this is a turning point in my life the whole rest of my family has been living in this reality for ages they don't have spinning discs everything's been ssd as soon as apple started shifting but i've always had the spinning discs i do still love having the internal storage though because i mean let me tell you there's room for way more inside there like if i got pc like i said if i got pci cards with nvme storage on them i can put even more even faster storage it's all inside one box and i love it but i love the silence i am excited for you john i'm glad that you got yourself a treat i have not yet gotten myself a treat but earlier tonight i was thinking to myself i really i really need to make moves on replacing my sonology because i really feel even though everything sitting here now is fine you're gonna jinx it everything sitting here now is fine as i knock on the relay uh challenge block thing whatever um i i feel like i'm going to have some sort of catastrophic issue sooner rather than later there's actually a story related to that so we have you have the same drives as i have in yours right the western digital red uh yes although many of mine have been replaced i don't think i'm full-on ship a theseus yet but i'm close my sonology which we were better we were given these by sonology back in the good old days when people would give us free things that was the best and this was what nine years ago or something yeah 2013 uh 10 years ago yeah it was 10 years ago 10 years ago right so they they sent us these sonologies for free which is very nice of them uh with hard drives yeah and mine came with western digital reds every single one of those hard drives is still there 10 years they've been spinning continuously in the basement except for during power outages for 10 years oh my god every single hard drive is there where do you figure that out i forget now uh storage manager i mean we know when we got them we got them in 2013 no no but you can go in the software and see how old these drives are power on time now here's the story related to that western digital recently got into some hot water because their new western digital reds uh come with this new feature that's like oh it's better than smart it will tell you more about the health of our drive i forget what it's called like wdda or something it's some western digital like a diagnostic thing and synology supported this western digital diagnostic thing but the western digital diagnostic thing one part of it was it had just a flat out timer that said when three years have elapsed fire off this thing and when it fired it off the synology would say whoa this drive is damaged and it wouldn't let you like rebuild the rate array on damaged drives of like and it was there was nothing wrong with this except for three years had passed and that pissed off everybody so Synology stopped supporting this thing and said we have learned we can't pay attention to your stupid diagnostics so you're going to pull shenanigans that oh this drive is three years old you should really think about replacing it which is such a scummy thing to do because again it wasn't looking at the drive health at all it was just a literally a timer and i have western digital reds that are all 10 years old and they're all doing fine knocking on all the wood in the entire world but yeah i i was looking and i'm like i would probably buy western digital reds again these are great they also had a thing where they were trying to sell shingled magnetic drives but not telling people it was shingled shingled is a way of jamming more data on but it's not as reliable western digital has done some shady things lately but the reliability numbers from like backblaze for western digital drives still look pretty good but yeah they've been in some hot water lately i'm kind of surprised to hear you've replaced so many of those drives but then again it's maybe your synology is maybe not in mine is in the you know it's like people have wine cellars or places for cheese and stuff my synology is like in my basement which is the most temperature mediated part of my house because it's like you have a synology cellar yeah it's because under it's underground it's cool in the summer and you know stays warm in the winter because you know it's so it's and we have a dehumidifier down there so it's a pretty controlled environment but they've literally been down there spinning for 10 years um so looking at my array five of the eight discs are three terabytes which is what originally got loaded with but i think a couple of those still have been replaced like this one's 22 000 hours so yeah i think only like one maybe two of mine are the originals i mean the funny thing is now you know just capacity wise you could probably get away with two yeah they make they make 20 they make 22 terabyte drives now yeah like you could you could just get two drives and raid one and be done but what if you had eight 22 terabyte drives mark on right that's what i'm talking about no so my initial thought i don't have a model name in front of me, but my initial thought is, you know, this is an 1813 plus.

2:18:45And so I was basically going to get the 1823 plus or whatever, you know, the closest equivalent is, because the way I remember it is eight indicates the amount of drives, 23, or in my case, 13 indicates the year it was built. And I was just going to get whatever the newest version of this is. But I wonder, like, I probably will do that because I'm a dummy, but I wonder if I should go like four or six bay instead because as you as you pointed out marco you can get much much much bigger drives than three terabytes now and most of mine in this like it's like two-thirds three terabytes than a handful of 10 terabytes but i do i really need an eight bay nas i probably don't you really don't but well i mean i know i can't talk to you about this because you're not as into this as i am but uh i don't know i i if you are a sonology person and have a thought i'm happy to hear it but i don't know i i just feel like it's about time that i get something new and start the migration while i while it's happy you gotta ride this out it's like the people who drive until i run out of gas so they go as far as they possibly can you gotta ride it out when it dies yeah by all means get a new one but like but don't preemptively get a new one yours is not as in as golden as mine and by the way i just look like some of my drive hours i'm in the same ballpark 85 ,760 hours which is like 9.7 years um but yeah i'm just riding this thing out until it goes but in terms of the bays i'm constantly shopping for synologies because i love doing that um sometimes to get like the good stuff like the good networking 10 gig ethernet the good uh you know the good cpu gpu whatever for video encoding right you end up having to get like the only choices are eight bay or six bay yeah or no one of them i think the only choices rate bay or 12 bay so sometimes you're forced to get more bays you know but you know just get them just get them empty you can always fill them like if i would just fill them with this motley collection of drives that i have you know i just i just freed up a four terabyte and eight terabyte which are and you know and you don't want to probably buy the 22s like so you look at the backblaze backblaze is our our frequent sponsor and backup uh provider that we all use actually sponsoring today yep yeah um they do a report they have tons of hard drives and they have spinning hard drives because they're cheap and they do a report on reliability of these incredibly abused drive that they have literally hundreds of sometimes thousands so they have really good numbers on reliability and sometimes when you look at them you find out like oh this is the exact same drive from the same manufacturer but the 22 terabyte drive has a reliability that's twice as bad as the 16 terabyte drive or vice versa like it's not even just that the bigger ones have lower reliability it's just sometimes certain sizes have lower reliability than certain other sizes and there's no formula for you to figure it out you just have to look at the numbers so when i was looking it turned out that i think the 22s well 22s first of all there aren't as much isn't as much data because they're new but also they had less reliability than the 12s but the 16s were the best and so you try to want to buy in that sweet spot i also did the math on like cost per gigabyte and let me pull that up while you're looking at that drive stats for quarter one 2023 from backblaze 236 ,893 hard drives of which there have been 889 failures yeah they have Lots of numbers.

2:21:48Yeah. So the cheapest one per per gigabyte or per megabyte or whatever was the 18 terabyte, believe it or not. It was$16 and 67 cents per gigabyte. And the most expensive one was the two terabyte at$40. So$40 per gigabyte versus 16. That is the range on the Western Digital Line. And they vary. There's 18, 18, 16, 17, 18, 21, 25. Like as the sizes get smaller, they get less and less of a bargain. So the sweet spot for cost is 18 terabyte. And the sweet spot reliability i think was the 16 but anyway look at those backblaze numbers uh and you too can have a magical synology that lasts for 10 years longer than 10 years you hear me stay good well that's the thing is having lived through and it happened to be early on in the pandemic when it was difficult to do anything about it but having lived through uh what i thought was a catastrophic failure i now have just an asinine amount of backups of my synology I don't think it's quite Syracuse level, but I am knocking on the door.

2:22:47But anyways, I don't want to have a desperation upgrade. I'd rather have a casual upgrade. And so because of that, I told the family chief financial officer, chief family financial officer, I told her that my plan is sometime this year to go ahead and get a new one. However, that was before I was mentally... Saving money for a headset. Right. And we're talking about similar money to get an eight-base Synology and load it up full of drives. One of those is more fun than the other. And one of them is, well, I don't know. You and I both get unreasonable. Synology is a lot of fun, but... Yeah, exactly.

2:23:24So anyway, I don't know what I'm going to do. I think I will upgrade at some point. And it's just a question of which one I get and how many bays and so on and so forth. But it's a good problem to have. I'm very lucky that this is something I can contemplate doing. So it's not so bad. And if you want to make it easier on me, atp.fm. Join.