559: The Tall Lettuce

51:21So the M2 Max was 38 and 30. Now we're 40 and 30. Up to 128 gigabytes of RAM. The previous limit was 96. And here's where the computer initially got sold to one KC list. up to 80 % faster than the M1 Max. My goodness. 92 billion transistors, 25 billion more than the M2 Max, which is a lot. 67 billion. That is a lot of bees. A lot of bees. That's a big increase year over year. Yeah. This Max is not, you know, just like an incremental increase over the previous one. It is like this is separating itself from the rest of the line. Like four or more performance cores, 25 billion more transistors. The GPU cores, even though there's only two more of them, they're again they're different gpu cores 128 gigs of ram is great because if you squint at it you can say the ultra is going to have 256 as the max which is you know wonderful i think the minimum ram uh is 36 i mean i guess now now's the time to jump into the ram things for the max because there's well we'll do the ram things for all the things in a second but but yeah let's just talk about the max like i i heartily approve of this chip if it is not a giant power and heat destroying monster which i suspect it is not boy this is great and this really does make people with m1s and m2s look twice i think oh yeah that's that's what got me too we'll get to that but yeah this is incredibly impressive yeah like especially like to go you know they had a a process shrink here from five nanometers to three and so you would expect that you know that you're able to cram in more stuff with the same general size class of chip.

53:04And to go from eight performance cores to 12, that's a huge increase. That's amazing. 50 % more performance cores and to have each of the cores be more powerful than the previous ones by something like 15%. That's really good. That's a nice... When we sit around as nerds and we watch the process sizes from the fabs and we're like, oh man we can't wait until the next you know process shrink because it'll be a big jump and in this case i think it was i think this shows you that this this was a big jump this was worth like if you if you had m1 or if you didn't even get that and if you kind of skipped m2 because you're like well m3 might be a process shrink this is this is the kind of jump you were waiting for and that's fantastic well they didn't they didn't give the size of the die in millimeters did they though because that's the question like have they just simply made a bigger chip which again i still approve of but uh i'm not ready to put the a a you know a laurel wreath around the three nanometer process quite yet because if they just simply made the thing bigger and the density is similar as the five nanometer process that's not impressive and again we have to see the power draw figures i endorse adding more power i'm not entirely sure how much of that uh more power we got not for free but we got as as a benefit of the new three nanometer process i think you know time will tell and benchmarks will tell and real life use will tell uh but you can you know they did give you some idea in the presentation with their mostly label free graphs um it it appears that the m3 line of chips will push higher at peak power than the previous ones it's a similar move the m2 did to compare to the m1 it is able to peak higher but they also claim it does seem like it's going to be more efficient in in the same way that you know the m2 is technically more efficient than the m1 even though it peaks higher um but also they claim longer battery life on the on the uh on the 16 inch now so the 16 inch max versus max they're basically claiming one additional hour of battery life compared to the previous ones yeah i would think that the battery life claims we'll get to them when we get to the machines but i would think a lot of them have to do with the fact that pretty much all of apple's battery tests are not like let's max everything out oh not even because the efficiency cores are more efficient and better and because you know overall efficiency is better i would imagine that yeah the battery life is going to go up because you're mostly hanging out on the efficiency cores and they're better but like that we never see like the okay what's the uh everything maxed out battery life and i would imagine as we go from m1 to m2 to m3 the everything maxed out battery life is going to decrease even though the work you accomplish while burning your entire battery should be increasing that's that seems likely yeah i think that's right um but but you know like when you compare you know from my position as an m1 owner who keeps his laptop plugged in yes well i do bring it when i travel somewhere um i've always thought the m1 pro and max didn't have enough e-cores the efficiency cores like we only have two e-cores and then we have eight you know pro core you know performance cores um and when you look at you know modern mac os a certain background type of tasks um things like you know indexing and stuff only ever take place on the efficiency cores like that's the way the os schedules them And so when I look and I see my iStatMenus menu graph in my menu bar here, those first two cores are almost always well above 50 % use.

56:26Like sometimes they're peaked at 100 % both for a while if it's like indexing something or whatever. But like the efficiency cores get well used on modern macOS. And so to go from two in the M1 line to four in the M2 line, that's a nice jump. And like that's the kind of thing like when you're looking at overall battery life usage. My understanding, like what I've heard from people who know more than I do about this is that maxing out the efficiency cores is basically free in terms of power budget and battery life. Like you really don't notice them. They're that efficient. They're that low powered that you can basically max them out and not really worry about it.

57:03And so all of this adds up to this overall battery life picture of these chips where, yes, you're right that if you actually do push them hard, of course they're not going to get 22 hours of battery life. That's your movie-watching kind of battery life. But as time goes on, more and more tasks that you actually do are running on those efficiency cores, or a larger portion of what is happening is running on the efficiency cores. And as the performance cores get better, they do finish their work in less time. so i think there is a lot of merit to the fact that yes these actually are getting you know probably slightly better or the same battery life as the predecessors even though the chip might be running bigger or hotter or whatever related to the m3 max uh obviously there's no ultra announcement today um because the max studio was just updated and it's probably not ready um looking at the max it's tempting i'm excited about the max because it's great chip for the laptops it's more powerful love to see the separation from the middle tier love to going uh harder on the high end and you love laptops yeah if they if they do the ultra as two m3 maxes that means the ultra will be that much more powerful again 256 gigs maximum ram all this gpu so many cores looks great um i gotta find a link to this the show notes but i watched a video recently of johnny surugi giving a talk at his old university i'm not sure how recent it was but anyway uh obviously he's not going to say anything about anything but if you watch these apple executives during presentations they're very careful but usually you can glean something from them and of all the questions about what is apple going to do about x or what do you have planned for y or whatever he was willing to say one thing kind of in the way the same reason we all knew that apple was going to make a phone once uh steve jobs started saying the phone is very interesting or whatever it's kind of like i'm sure using tim cook phrase but tim cook would talk about arvr in the same way sort of an open secret you haven't said apple is going to do anything once executives say an area is interesting in some way you listen so what he said about you know future silicon stuff whatever because obviously that's his business uh as part of the business um was that he thought that packaging i'm not using the right phrase but packaging was an area of interest packaging for the future might be an interesting area of innovation or something something to that effect and by packaging i mean you take the silicon chips that you get from the wafer and you stick them inside a container with all of the other stuff that they need and in the apple's case you put the ram chips in there and everything you make a little package out of it that's your soc you know um he said the packaging might be interesting i'm not sure if the silicon interposer between the maxes that makes the ultra counts as packaging because i'm not entirely clear on you know does that nomenclature apply to the silicon interposer is that actually part of fabbing like what do you consider that but we do know we've talked in the past that many other chip manufacturers have used various packaging innovations to put more stuff in a single package for this the chiplets things the various we've talked about some past episode years ago like the various words and for the different technologies of arranging a bunch of different chips inside a single package and how you connect them to each other and what the cost trade-offs are and what the efficiency trade-offs and all of that and because i'm desperate to hear good news about desktop max i heard him say that and saw this monster m3 max and thought maybe in the m3 generation or the m4 generation because the timelines these are so long they won't do the end-to-end maxes as an ultra with the interposer maybe they've come up with a new way to package multiple units of stuff that they've made inside a larger chip that would allow them to here it comes put four of them i would love that i'm basing that on nothing other than the fact that johnny seruja said the word packaging on it in a talk that he gave where he otherwise revealed nothing about apple's future plans but when i look at this m3 max at least i think okay if you make an ultra out of this it will be a good ultra good thumbs up like by ultra i mean you put the two maxes together but if this really is a generation where there'll be packaging changes and based on the fact that the m3 pro is its own thing and not you know or not its own thing but i guess like it it is more differentiated from the max than it used to be to marco's point it's less differentiated from the plain m3 than it used to be maybe but it's more differentiated from the max so maybe apple is putting some separation between the middle and the upper upper high end so stay tuned to see if there are any packaging innovations that happen when we finally go beyond m3 max or if this is just another uh ultra interposer year did you want to talk memory stuff now or do you want to save that for later yeah let's talk about ram because it is actually people have questions about the ram of the machines and we'll talk about the machines in a moment but in the end uh the the soc the m3 m3 pro m3 max dictates a lot about the memory configurations of the computers apple cells so here this is from uh cameron mckay another uh inserted follow-up in an event episode uh he says unprecedented yes i'm not a chip designer but i work in a related field here's how i make sense of the strange ram configurations on the m3 series this is based on looking at the memory controller blocks around the perimeter of the m3 series die shots and apple's text and apple's tech specs and apple does put like in their presentation that they they put what we assume are real die shots where you can actually see the silicon chip photoshopped a little bit to beautify it as it would be in the wafer where you can see the different functional blocks uh you know by how the how the little transistors are arranged uh camera continues the m3 two ram chips with 100 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth and you can divide up those two ram chips this way if you've got two four gigabyte chips that's an eight gigabytes of ram if you've got two eights that's 16 gigs and two 12s that's 24 so that explains the memory configurations of the plain old m3 you can get eight 16 and 24 we'll talk about the eight later when we talk about machines but anyway there's only two of them and those are the sizes they come in uh and that's what you get m3 pro three ram chips 150 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth because there's you know three memory controllers you know 50 gigabytes per second each um if they're six gigabyte chips that's three times six is a total of 18 and if they're 12 gigabyte chips three times 12 is 36 that's where you get 18 and 36 from that's where we got our little bonus instead of 1632 we 1836 it's because it's three times six or 3x12.

1:03:32The M3 Max with the 14-core CPU has three RAM chips, 300 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, and it's either 3x12 for 36 or 3x32 for 96. And then finally, the M3 Max with a 16-core CPU has four RAM chips, one more than the 14-core one does. So it's 400 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth, and you get 4x12, which is 48, 4x16, which is 64, and 4x32, which is 128. camera continues the m3 max is a bit odd the memory controller blocks in the die shot are twice as big as on the other m3 series chips i assume that means twice the bandwidth to each memory chip maybe the memory chip packages each contain two memory dies apple says memory bandwidth is up to 400 gigabytes per second i'm assuming this means the top end m3 max has 400 gigabytes per second and the lower lower 14 core version has 300 megabytes per second the available ram configurations support this interpretation it makes sense that apple would disable one memory controller in the lower end m3 max look how much die area those memory controllers take up so this is another example of apple really pushing the top end like to the point where the big max is better in a substantial way than the not so big max because the big max has four ram chips 400 gigabytes per second memory four controllers but if if you just saw the right hand side of this little thing and says so the configurations are 36 and 96 for this max but 48 64 and 128 for this one what the hell this is why it's how many ram chips and what size they come in and that ends up bifurcating especially the computers that come with the m3 max into these weird ram tiers that don't make any sense when you're using a configurator in fact apple has a little message i feel for them because i was making similar messages on our like membership thing of like when you click uh you click a different cpu it it changes the ram for you because it has to and then it pops up a little apology message and it's like sorry based on the cpu you picked we've changed you to 48 gigs of ram which is a number you're probably not used to seeing but it makes sense if you look at the chips on the on the soc yeah and and in fact um uh user f housler earlier in the recording posted a mastodon an annotated diagram of the chip dies uh to f's best guesses of what these what these different sections are.

1:05:46And it looks right to me, or at least plausible, or at least I'm sure most of it's probably right. So it's helpful to look at this to see like kind of how these chip designs differ, what, you know, what they're using their die space for, you know, kind of the trade-offs that they make. So it's interesting. We are sponsored this week by Collide. If you work in security or IT and your company has Okta, this message is for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have something in common? It's employees. Hackers absolutely love exploiting vulnerable employee devices and credentials.

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1:07:17We have to talk about the MacBook Pro. It appears to be the same with some asterisks and daggers and double daggers. So there is no more 13-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro. Ding dong, the witch is dead. Thank goodness. It's about, you know, we've been talking for a while. One of the most scary things we ever heard from Apple wasn't in their scary fast event. It was, I believe, last WBDC when they said that that was their second best-selling laptop. Remember that? And everyone was like, oh, God, really? And it makes sense. As we talked about before, there's a lot of individuals who go into an Apple store saying, I want something called a MacBook Pro, and that's the cheapest one by a lot.

1:08:06And so they picked that. Also, a lot of corporate and volume buyers, they say, oh, yeah, we'll give our employees a MacBook Pro, and then they buy them that one because, again, it's the cheapest laptop that's named MacBook Pro in the lineup. And so a lot of sales of that were basically people buying it because it was the cheapest thing called Pro, not because it was necessarily the one they liked the most. and so it seemed kind of a tragedy to us nerds that all of the modern conveniences of the the actual new macbook pros and even the macbook airs were not applying to this product and yet they kept selling so many so it it seemed kind of seemed like one of those kind of um you know tragedies in the lineup like you know similar to like the old non-retina imac with the spinning hard drive like man when are they going to get rid of this thing they got rid of this thing yeah And there's an explanation for this, which is not very satisfying.

1:08:59But I've come to believe it. We joke about it all the time. I've come to believe it more and more. In fact, I think I said in Slack earlier today, this is the real Tim Cook doctrine or the real Cook doctrine, which is not owning control the primary technologies behind your products or whatever. It's actually keep selling old products that you already manufacture to maintain margins on your product line. because we've heard like from actual sources inside the company that it's not just a thing we think on the outside but that decisions are actually made inside apple based on the overall margins of the product line so why why is this laptop been around for so long with the touch bar or whatever why didn't it get the m2 why you know why do we have to wait till the m3 it's not because the people making these computers don't know how to make good computers or like are trying to stick it to you or whatever the straightforward thing to do would be okay you know well the touch bars are going away so let's upgrade everybody to non-touch bar i bet the people who control these product lines that's their first plan like yeah all right well you know we decided we're leaving behind touch bar we got this new design let's just do it and apparently inside the company there is actual pushback from people who care about the numbers saying if you did that the overall margins on the apple laptop product line or the macbook pro product line would be unacceptably low.

1:10:15So you have to keep selling the touch bar one for another year to maintain our margins. We don't want to hear that on the outside, but that's just the fact of running a company sometimes. You know, again, maybe that's not the way we think it should be run, but we see from the outside that it is how it happens. And apparently it's not just an accident or like they're not thinking about it or like, whoopsie, they forgot to update that one. It's someone inside Apple saying you got to keep selling the crappy one for another year and this is the type of thing where it's like I know Apple's big thing is we make long-term decisions not short-term ones but I do feel like that type of decision doesn't it it hurts Apple's reputation as a company a tiny tiny tiny bit because if you buy one of these not knowing the weird limitations and the the fact that the features have been updated on the other laptops and you might be happier with them maybe you're slightly less satisfied or maybe maybe even who just listen to a tech podcast and everyone is saying that's the bad one and you bought the bad one you feel bad about it or whatever that type of situation it's not a big deal it was still an okay computer it's fine right but the fact that it was if they sold so many of them they're not selling their best work they know they can do better they have done better but they're still selling this lesser computer that is less satisfying to customers and less useful overall to maintain the margins on the product line of the MacBook Pro.

1:11:41That is not long term brand preserving thinking, in my opinion. Maybe it is the right decision if you care about the long term financial health of the company. But as a tech nerd, I care less about that to the degree as long as they're not going out of business and they're doing well. I don't care about the tiny percentages like I don't have a bunch of Apple rsus that are vesting or something like i'm not investing and honestly i don't think tim cook cares he's a bazillionaire he doesn't need any more money but i feel like tim cook the the real tim cook doctrine is uh you know don't let margins fall do what's right for the company financially not because he's greedy and wants money he doesn't care but i think as a ceo of a company as a person who is whose expertise was in like operations or whatever i think he sees that as his responsibility to make sure the company does well financially in addition to all the other things and he's really good at that and so he does things to pursue that goal that i personally think are the wrong decisions for the apple brand in the long term even if they're the right decisions for the apple stock price in the long term yeah i don't think it's as ruinous to the brand as you seem to think I said a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit, but non-zero, measurable, real.

1:12:57Yeah, it's not ruinous so much as corrosive. Yeah, you know, that's a better word for it. Not even corrosive. It's just like it's a less optimal decision. If your decision was I want our customers to be the happiest, you wouldn't keep selling that computer for a year, right? I don't think it's a big deal, but it is a thing. It is a trade-off. Well, if they wanted their customers to be happiest, they wouldn't have anything that starts with 256 gigs of disk space. Oh, yeah, we'll get to it. All right, so moving right along. So no more Touch Bar. The Touch Bar is dead. Oh, thank God. But what was the other, the dagger, if you will, on that laptop?

1:13:30It only has two non-Thunderbolt ports. Yes. Non-Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, right? Yes, so this new kind of lower end 14-inch is basically a replacement for that Touch Bar Mac, price-wise, sort of. It kind of replaces the high end of the price. It starts at$1 ,600. The outgoing Touch Bar 1, I think, was$1 ,300 and$1 ,400 or$1 ,500 as two configs in that ballpark. So this is a little more money. But first of all, I think the need for that in the price slot is greatly reduced by the existence of the 15-inch MacBook Air. And frankly, the 13-inch MacBook Air. I mean, the MacBook Air is, I think, will solve almost everyone's needs who have this kind of need with very few exceptions.

1:14:15But anyway, what's interesting about this new low-end 14-inch Pro, yes, it does only have two USB-C Thunderbolt ports. Only the two left ones. There's no more one on the right for that model. And that's because the M3 does not support three USB-C Thunderbolt ports. It only supports two. So there is a reason for that in the silicon. Again, die space, market segmentation, these are trade-offs. That's why they did this. They didn't just delete the port to save$10 on the cost of the port or whatever. you know they delete the port because the entire silicon chip does not support that that many of them that's the same reason why macbook airs only have two ports because they're using the same the same chip trade-offs and i think that's fine for again this is a low-end product um and well kind of i kind of a mid-range product at this point because what's interesting also you know when they were starting the presentation and they said you know we have you know all three of these chips and they said they're all going to go into macbook pro i thought for a second oh crap they updated the touch bar one because where else would the regular they were going to put an m3 in the touch bar one that would have been terrible because like where else would they put the non-pro and max chip i figured well it's not going to go in the 14 and 16 so it must go anyway so over time as they were introducing this low end 14 then i was thinking wow okay so they added a low end config to the 14 to fill that void that's great news but surely they're going to do things like take away some of the nice pro screen stuff.

1:15:40You know, maybe it's not HDR or it doesn't have 120 hertz or whatever. And they didn't do that. Then I thought, oh, maybe they'll take away like some of the speakers or the microphones or whatever, make the webcam worse. They didn't do any of those things. They really just took the 14 inch pro with all of the proness, which by the way matches the 16 inch in almost every wave in terms of like nice pro features. They took the existing awesome 14 inch and pretty much only changed the chip down to the M3 rather than the M3 Pro and deleted a port, there's not much other change. And that, to me, is actually a huge win for the lineup.

1:16:19Yes, it is a lesser computer than the 14-inch with the M3 Pro and Max chip, of course. That's why it costs$400 less also. But it is a significant upgrade from the Touch Bar 13-inch that it's kind of mostly replacing. and so i i consider this you know i know this is kind of a hot take against everyone you know all the all the youtubers are given that face about this you know the youtube thumbnail thumbnail face you lost a port oh my god you know but i think this is a win this this seems like they made this new low-end 14 inch way better than i would have expected for a replacement to the 13 inch touch bar model yeah i agree with you this is a solid machine i'm glad that the touch bar one is gone because that machine was ridiculous uh in this day and age i'm glad they've got this new one i like how they phrased it as a price drop well the person said the price drop they fooled me for a second i was like did they drop the price of the no never mind like they because they had never sold uh this line of product with these this you know hardware case and all that stuff uh with the plain m3 in it and or with a plain m whatever in it and now they were and that is why the quote-unquote price drop didn't really drop the price of anything although to be fair they didn't also crank up the prices either uh you know and this this is a slight price increase from what it's but it's a better machine um again in the in the age of socs as you pointed out when you get the m3 you get everything that comes with it uh in the days when the the components were more separate and battery life was worse uh you could do things like buy the low-end cpu with a ton of ram can't do that uh in this day and age it's just it's just a side effect of the architecture apple has chosen it's not that bad the plane m3 can go up to 24 which is fine for a low-end config uh the fact that eight gigs is still the default in a thing that is called the macbook pro i still think is not and here's the thing i wouldn't care if they offered that if we didn't know that apple's ram and all of apple's upgrade prices are insane that's where the margin is that's where tim cook all right it's not so much that they're offering an eight it's not even that 8 is the default and that it's unusable with 8 it's none of those things it's that we all know the second like at a Porsche dealership the second you don't want you want anything that's not comes with it by default the price goes up so fast because that's where all the margins are and yeah that's another thing we have to talk to people about on all these computers this is not specific to the laptops or anything like that it's just about Apple it's like okay you're gonna go in there and they're gonna get you in the door with the the the price that you're gonna see is like starting from blah blah blah now let me begin the long process of convincing you not to buy that one it doesn't have enough ssd space it doesn't it might not have enough ram and yes as soon as you see how much it costs to upgrade those to even the very next notch like the reasonable notch of like 512 instead of 256 ssd you're gonna be like whoa whoa whoa you sure i can't get by with this like please do not buy a 256 ssd in your laptop you're spending so much money trust me on this you're going to fill it and then you're going to be sad so it's not that i think this machine is bad i think that apple has still essentially done nothing to address uh the real problem especially on their lower end devices of huge margins that they collect on the upgrades huge margins disconnected from reality every possible way that's where their margins are like i get it i understand but it's just it's so painful that's why we're always waiting for the kind of like we We were with the 16 gig iPhones or whatever they were stuck at for years.

1:19:45We're waiting for that year where Apple finally says, OK, this is the year where we raise the floor and now you can't get an iPhone with less than this amount of storage. So it should lessen the pain. When does the low end of Apple's, you know, of the Mac line get off of eight gigs? because that will be such a relief because we presume we assume i hope that they will in fact double and go up to 16 and not go to like nine or something ridiculous like that right when they go to 16 like that first year that they go to 16 again thinking about when is the year to buy when are the good ones that year that they bump to 16 if they don't wait a ridiculous amount of time that's a great year to buy because you will never have a healthier amount of default ram and then you can we hope if they fix the ssd situation buy the base machine and not be punished for it but right now if you buy the base m3 macbook pro with eight gigabytes of ram i think it does come with 512 on the pro at least but that's that's a machine when you have to really think twice about so yeah that's just uh the cook doctrine plus the m3 equals uh be a little bit careful with this machine.

1:20:54So Marco and I, well, I don't know if I speak for you on this. I think I might, but Marco and I have wanted for years, for sure, we've wanted a cellular modem in the MacBook Pro. That's not happened, unfortunately. But in my computing life, I have very few regrets. I had a long time in the PC world. I don't regret it. I know John regrets it on my behalf, but I don't regret it. I do. No, I'm sorry for you. Sorry that happened to you. But perhaps in part because of my long time in the PC world, I spent a lot of time, as we discussed on a member special, I spent a lot of time with ThinkPads. And those ThinkPads were almost always black, or at least all the good ones were.

1:21:35And one of my computing regrets was not buying, not ponying up the$150, whatever it was, to get a black polycarbonate MacBook as my first Mac. Those things were so freaking hot. And I wanted one so bad, but I was too cheap to do it. And I had a white one that immediately had all my hand grease all over it. It was not great. However, I can right this wrong because Space Black is here, baby, and I'm excited. I think this thing looks real good. And I'm told from Jason Snell, among others, that I need to pump the brakes a little bit. It's not as black as I want it to be. But oh, man, this thing looks good.

1:22:16and Marco we didn't get our cellular modem but we got space black and I'm excited for so first of all again I got to see this in person I'm really curious about it I think it would be cool to have a really black looking MacBook Pro for the first time ever but yeah by all accounts and like it's hard to tell like from like the YouTube hands-on videos you know when you when you click the thumbnail after they they give that face usually you can see some kind of clip from behind the scenes of the event Apple held yesterday with all the YouTubers being able to take b-roll and they're like turning the macbook around but like it's under this harsh spotlight because they have like all this like you know trendy lighting and so it's really hard to tell how these are going to look in person it seems like they're going to look fairly dark but like space gray was not a very dark gray at all space black looks like it is darker but then like you see the the black plastic of the keyboard well and like well that's much darker than the black aluminum surround you know so i don't know yeah it's not thinkpad black no it's not even black book back like the the original black macbook i think was blacker than this thing appears to be yeah and and i don't i'm not sure what color apple thinks space is um they have had a number of colors over the years called space gray and space black and midnight and all these all these terms that suggest an absence of light which would suggest black and yet they keep making all of these different shades of what basically are medium to dark grays look around your office look around anywhere in the electronics business lots of stuff is actually black just black like power cords black cases for the thing the keyboard yeah like lots of stuff there's a very clear reference for what black means in electronics and i don't know what they're doing here i mean i think there's a threshold like like like obviously the keyboard is not actually black black it's not like that vanta black it's not like a black hole like it absorbs all light there but there is a threshold where most people will consider that has passed now from dark gray into black and no computer hardware that apple has made in recent years has passed that bar i think the original black macbook did pass that bar i think if you show that to anybody they would say this computer is black but if you show this space black computer people i think they will say it is really dark gray yeah that's what it seems and yet it's called space black which is a different shade of black than the space black on the apple watch it's a different shade of black than space and black like it just and you know so one of the one of the issues with uh with black like on the midnight macbook air which is a very dark blue um is fingerprints and so apple actually uh has something regarding that they said it in the video you know that has a special finish that makes it so fingerprints don't show up as much whatever their wording was but the idea is that they know this is the problem and they have what they think is a solution and i've heard two different reports about this uh jason snell says you can still see fingerprints they're not as prominent and it is a big improvement over the midnight one but it does not totally fix the finger fingerprint problem uh john gruber says uh as far as he could tell it pretty much solves the fingerprint problem so i guess it depends on what lighting you're in how greasy your fingers are any improvement is good though the fact that it's a coating worries me a little bit because does that coating wear off like same thing with the you know with the color the dark gray color um one of the advantages of the more natural looking silver and even the the old space gray thing is that if you do scratch it and get through that finish there's not much of a contrast but we've seen with the iphone 15 pros with their various finishes this year where the youtubers take like a razor blade to it or whatever they do for for views and jab it into the side yeah underneath there is very shiny titanium in that case and it really shows up a lot so the darker you make this thing if the darkness is just a coating when you scratch that coating it's going to stand out more than if you had a lighter color so the coating for the fingerprints plus the fact that the anodization is darker and the aluminum underneath presumably is lighter may present some challenges for the appearance being preserved over a long period of time but we'll find out once people get these like maybe the coating holds up really well maybe the anodization doesn't scratch easily uh either way i endorse them addressing this problem instead of saying johnny ive style we've made the perfect computer now don't touch it yeah yeah i think first of all i think it's really funny that i think they spent almost as much time introducing the color as they spent introducing the m3 max chip like that's that's how important it's a very important innovation they've almost figured out how to make black yeah exactly i mean almost not quite maybe next year uh but it's funny too like literally like all the youtubers all the faces half the video is about the color so like i get it and that is like a big appealing thing for people who like shiny things and and don't care about setting money on fire so i get why it's a big deal to everybody uh but that is it is pretty funny like how big of a deal it is that we took your silver and gray laptop choice and made it silver and darker gray and everyone's freaking out it's amazing i can give the people what they want yep i'm excited so uh then we got kate bergeron to come up and tell us a little bit more specifics the 14 inch macbook pro 11 times faster than the fastest intel macbook pro see intel i felt like they were i want to say snarkier i don't think that's the word i'm looking for but they were more aggressive about crapping all over intel this presentation the thing is they're not crapping all over intel intel is actually making better and better chips where they're crapping all over is whatever chip was in apple's intel laptop like three years ago like yeah they're crapping all over themselves like intel is not a stationary target intel continues to put out new cpus and some of them are actually getting better and so it's not like like they have to stop comparing to intel eventually because maybe the idea is if you just say intel people won't think and they'll say that means that apple ships are a lot of times better than anything intel has to offer which is obviously not true uh because they don't realize they're comparing it to a really old computer but like how long do you compare like how long were we comparing power pc computers 68k counterparts how long did we compare the you know intel ones to the power pc predecessors like you got to let it go eventually like because that eventually the number becomes meaningless like because it's so many things have changed the operating system has changed everything all the software has changed it's it's no longer meaningful so you know as much as i complained about not comparing to the m2 comparing to intel i guess it's fun to put a big number on the screen but it's silly and they should stop doing it let's say next year yeah i think the context is basically i don't like when they're making that kind of comparison to the you know the fastest intel version of xyz of their own computers i think they're they're talking less to pc people and more to apple's customers who haven't upgraded to the m series of chips yet that's really the idea here is like hey look this this old this old you know intel iMac you're holding on to you got to upgrade now's the time yeah i know but like the thing is they can make that point in other ways and like i think those people know like people with really old computers they know that no matter what they get it's going to be so much faster and maybe they need apple to say 11 times faster or something to to convince them but i don't know i just i feel like that point could be maybe it's because it tends to be like in the same part of the little thing where they're talking about benchmarks and so they they're basically jumping from here's what you need to know in terms of what kind of incremental performance improvements we've made to jumping immediately to and by the way if you've got an old back you should really buy a new one we would like to stop supporting intel please and thank you so now's the time so yeah so 11 yeah sorry john 11 times faster than the fastest intel macbook pro uh kate specifically said for the vast majority of workflows you'll never hear the fans ahem gentlemen applause for that line by the way 1080p facetime camera uh i i wrote down but i wonder i might have this wrong i think it's for hdr specifically it's a thousand nits sustained 1600 nits peak that was unchanged what was changed was that the the non-hdr sdr you know right regular content met that max went from 500 nits to 600 and they made an interesting point which it took me to the second viewing to put it together what were talking about that if you have a studio display that also for sdr content i guess for everything really is 600 nits so the brightness the max brightness between the two screens is identical just in terms of brightness and that's that's kind of neat i mean it's not a big deal but it's kind of neat they haven't raised that in a while so that's that's why that was noteworthy like it's been 500 on the pros for for some time yep and it's isn't it 600 on the what is the 600 on the macbook air is something that's out now is 600 i don't remember offhand i have you thinking of a phone but yeah no there's like this is a thing in the world of televisions as well because you've got you know uh high dynamic range hdr video and then you've got i guess sdr standard dynamic range which is like regular tv and there are specifications for you know that you know before high dynamic range there were specifications for regular regular tv that would say here's what the maximum brightness should be for a non-high dynamic range video signal.

1:31:31But that brightness is pretty low. And so most TVs these days say, yeah, even though the spec says we shouldn't show higher than whatever it is, 300 nits or whatever, it's really low, like what the non-high dynamic range TV maximum brightness should be. We know that it makes the thing hard to see if you've got a sunny room. So pretty much every TV says, hey, if we can make the non-HDR stuff brighter, we will and i think that's what apple is doing here not that there's any spec dictating what you know they should have on the screen but like yeah at hdr you can do this amazing stuff like your ui is not hdr the windows the titles the menu bars the buttons the background of your text editor none of that is hdr unless you're looking at hdr video it's it's quote unquote sdr or whatever but and they want to separate the two because otherwise high dynamic range doesn't look high because it's the same as you know but raising the standard dynamic range level so you can see it better is a is probably one of the most important things they can do because unless you're editing hdr video all day you're looking at your screen in the you know standard dynamic range mode all the time and if you can't see the screen because it's sunny and you're at the beach or whatever with your laptop getting sand in it uh it's great that you can now crank that up obviously it will burn your battery more but i i do wonder how like because they could choose they could in their utilities you can get to do this you can just run your screen at 1600 nits all the time when your windows can be 600 nits.

1:32:53I do not recommend this. It will burn your retinas out, but they could keep creeping those two things closer and closer to each other. Like, oh, the max is 16 and then the regular non-HDR max was 500. Now it's this, now it's it. Like they can keep creeping it up, but if they get them too close to each other, then HDR loses its effect. So maybe the HDR peak will start moving up because televisions can go higher than 1600 these days, but we'll see. They also have 16 inch versions of all these models, which um that's not for me it's not to say they're bad just not for me um they're for me they're great fair enough the release schedule uh john turnus took us through the so you could order anything immediately uh the m3 is available immediately the m3 pro is available this coming week or next week i guess actually i'm sorry and then the m3 max later in november is all we know it's the teens like nove it's like the teens of november are all the ship dates for the m3 maxes Okay.

1:33:50I guess we can talk here about whether or not we ordered anything, then we have to briefly talk about the postscript of this entire presentation. The entire iMac, you mean? That's exactly right. I have not yet ordered anything, but my current intention is to basically duplicate this machine, but in space black with an M3 Max. So I currently have a 14-inch M1 Max with 64 gigs of RAM and 4 terabytes storage. My intention is, although again, and I just haven't had the time to do it. My intention is to order a space black 14-inch M3 Max with 64 gigs. The 96 is tempting, and 128 is tempting, but I don't think I would ever use it.

1:34:28I probably don't even need the 64 if I'm really honest with myself, but here we are. Also, if you want all the CPU cores, you can't pick 96. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Yeah, you're right about that. And then I tried to convince myself that eight terabytes would be nice for a little extra breathing room. You saw the price. Then I saw the price and I said, nope, I'm just going to have to delete some stuff because that's not going to work. And so I'm going to go four terabytes again. So like I said, I plan to get a replacement for this computer. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with this one, to be honest with you.

1:35:01I might just trade it in. If somebody's looking for one, let me know. But Aaron doesn't need one and the kids don't need one. So I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But we'll figure it out. John, I know you bought at least three laptops, right? As excited as I am for the M3 Max, I think it's going to be great in a laptop. I don't like laptops. I'm not getting one. All right. So, Marco, the person I actually wanted to talk to about it, I just had to get John out of the way. So what have you ordered or what will you plan to order? As I've talked about many times in this show, I've loved using my 16-inch M1 Max MacBook Pro as a desktop this entire time.

1:35:38I have the ridiculous Pro Display XDR. I have this amazing laptop that has been a fantastic desktop this entire time. This has been amazing. Best computer I've ever had. My favorite computer I've ever had. All of the downsides of using a laptop as a desktop from pre-M1 days are gone. It is reliable. I keep it in clamshell mode and a little stand-up stand. It is reliable. It is quiet. It is silent. I never hear a fan. It has just been fantastic. And, you know, when the Mac Studio came out, it was tempting, you know, hey, maybe I should double my CPU performance by getting the M1 or M2 Ultra versions of the Mac Studio.

1:36:18A lot of things kept me in the desktop laptop lifestyle. Number one of which is I've been portable. You know, I've talked about, you know, I'm moving my house. And so I'm back and forth a lot to different places. I'm so happy with the 16 inch as that role where when I'm actually traveling somewhere I bring that and I have all my stuff on it I can get all my work done on the biggest screen that is available in an Apple laptop that's why I haven't gone to the desktop I haven't gone to the studio even though the performance jump would be substantial I could double my CPU performance for all my super heavy duty Xcode work that I've been doing over the last few months and that I will continue to do for probably the next year very heavily, I really am maxing out the CPU all the time, doing a lot of Xcode compilation, a ton of Swift UI work, a ton of Swift work, like tons of very CPU-intensive work happening here.

1:37:14I skipped M2 because it was a nice upgrade, but it wasn't quite enough to make me replace it. This one I'm going with. This one I'm buying this. So I got the 16-inch M3 Max. I'm not going to apologize for this even a little. I maxed the whole thing out. It's ridiculous. Oh, my word. Because, you know, I actually use this. You think you'd use the RAM? Like, I can get behind the SSD and I can get behind the cores and whatnot. But you really think you would use all that RAM? I mean, his other choice is 64, though. That's the problem. That's the thing. Like, if 96 was an option, I would have picked it.

1:37:48But I wasn't going to give up CPU cores for that. And I actually do occasionally use swap on my 64. and I'm expecting this to last me another two to three years. So I'm like, well, if I'm already, you know, kissing that 64 limit now, what's going to happen over the next two years? When you say you use swap, like everybody uses swap. The swap files will be created and there will be things in them, but it could be just dormant stuff. So are you swapping? Do you see, I don't know what weird, you know, resource destroying things you're running in your menu bar, but like, do you see swapping activity where your computer is spending time shuffling things to and from the swap file when it could be doing useful work?

1:38:25Or is it just the fact that you see a swap file has been created and it exists and has some stuff in it? I see Activity Monitor reports there haven't been swap usage. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, there will always, there will almost always be swap usage. Like, because when things get dormant, they'll get put into the swap file. Swap files will be created. What you care about is swapping, which is excessive movement of things to and from. Like, to accomplish, this is the worst case of swapping. To accomplish your task, you need some stuff that's in swap. but then to do stuff later in that same task you need to put things in swap and get the things you put there back out again that is swapping because then you're going like to do a single thing you're going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth i'm not saying you shouldn't buy more ram i'm all for buying more ram again with my computer you just want to solve the ram problem so you never have to think about it again it sounds like whether it is justified or not you are currently thinking about ram a little bit sometimes so by going 128 you get in a situation where you can be like me and no longer think about RAM.

1:39:20But I'm not entirely sure that it was actually a thing that was affecting your life performance-wise. Maybe not. But again, this is kind of being forward-looking. Also, there is a trade-off. RAM uses power. And so if this was a laptop that I frequently used on battery and was really stretching battery life needs, I would not have jumped that RAM up because I would want to keep the power usage a little bit lower to conserve battery life. Although I do wonder, like, I mean, you're right that more RAM is going to use more power than less. but back in the bad old days when we you know where a lot of our instincts about computers came from uh if you got more ram it would be in the form of like more dims and each of those would be you know have like x number of chips on them and have to be powered and everything like that but these days the ram increases pretty much come within a you know a certain range come entirely from larger capacity chips but of the same number so you're getting four ram chips no matter what i think it's just the question of how big they are and yes the big ones do use more power than the smaller ones but it's not the same as doubling your ram and then doubling the number of chips that was that's what it was in the bad old days no but but you are doubling the number of those little transistors that store the bits you know yeah you know it's true like i do i do wonder like what the difference is like i think it was much worse when you had an entirely new printed circuit board with all of its like power regulation stuff and you know like as opposed to just just paying the price for the extra transistors that implement the memory so it's not what i'm saying is it's not as bad as it used to be.

1:40:44This is one of the advantages of the SOC era is that doubling your RAM is not as big a hit to your power usage as it used to be. You're probably right. It isn't as big of a hit, but it does still use power the more RAM you have. And from my understanding, as of a few years ago, this might be out of date now, but as of a few years ago, that power budget was not nothing. It was not massive. It wasn't as big of a deal as maxing out the CPU versus not maxing out the CPU. Or turning out the brightness on your screen right right but it was it seemed to be a contributor to battery life of you know something on the order of like maybe five percent of your battery life you know so five or ten percent like something like that uh that that's i believe what it was a few years ago again i don't know what it is now uh but it so it wasn't nothing but it wasn't massive but anyway so i i wouldn't max out the ram if this was like my my portable battery life monster you know then i then i would actually be more conservative with it but again this is my desktop and uh and and i love by the way I love so much that, you know, being in the desktop laptop lifestyle, we get the good chips first.

1:41:50The Mac Studio and the Mac Pro have to wait until the Ultra chip is ready. Right now, if you want the fastest Mac at most things, it's a MacBook Pro. And that has been true for the last two years and will probably continue to be true for the foreseeable future. that like there are there are large parts of each year where the fastest mac at most tasks is a macbook pro when you say most tasks though you're just excluding anything that has to do with the gpu because you kind of have to no i'm well i'm thinking you know things like the the individual single core performance is pretty important yeah no sure and even even multi-core even most multi-core things can't take advantage of the parallelism but the gpu thing is really the elephant in the room mostly also because if regular people are doing anything with a computer that they find slow chances are good it's a game and in that case the ultra is going to stomp all over the max because it's got twice as much well chances are they're not playing the game on a mac though i don't know apple is that was one of the rumors by the way we didn't talk about this but like why was this at 8 p.m oh because it's spooky that seems to be the answer because it's spooky but there was a lot of things like oh they want it to be they want it to be during the daytime in japan because they're going to have the big gaming announcement they're going to have all people from Japanese game companies and they did talk about gaming and they did show the same games they always show you're like what like but it was not they didn't have like famous people from Japanese game companies talk to us about their games they didn't have any announcements about any partnerships with big Japanese game companies so I feel like the whole we wanted this to be on during the day in Japan thing didn't really pan out and you know then again they emphasize gaming in the same way that they always do when they talk about the Mac lately but they didn't have anything to announce in this area.

1:43:31I do like that the Max GPU is better. We'll see what the benchmarks look like, but you know, don't game on a Mac laptop, I guess is the answer. I think at this point, you know, regarding gaming, it is wonderful and it's a huge game changer. Sunglasses? I see what you did there. That all Macs with Apple Silicon now have decently gaming capable GPUs. That was something that was not the case in the Intel era. Like the Intel era, only the MacBook Pros and only the high-end MacBook Pros had GPUs that could do anything in games. Now, every Mac with Apple Silicon, which is now every Mac that's sold, has a decently gaming-capable GPU.

1:44:14Yeah, I know it's not the highest-end thing in the world, but it's decently gaming-capable. That wasn't the case until, again, the modern era. The issue with gaming on the Mac now is not GPU power. Now it's, say, environmental factors. it's a little bit gd power on the high end still but only in the high end but again apple's not getting high-end gamers like high-end gamers are going to build gaming pcs but i know but max you know max are the pcs of the apple world like this is that market right and to the extent that uh that you're that you're looking at that market at all as in pc gaming when you say pc gaming you usually mean the games that will stress your pc and people want the pc that costs more money than they can afford that will play the game that they want to play on their pc at a better frame rate uh and to the extent that apple wants to be in that market at all they are now less competitive than they had ever been that's just that market in the whole rest of the you know if you don't look at pc gaming but you look at like mobile gaming casual gaming stuff like that uh playing triple a games that everyone else played three years ago yeah apple's doing well from a game maker perspective you know in the intel era there was not there were not enough people who would play who would buy games on macs who had gaming capable gpus because everyone had these crappy intel and graded gpus on almost every mac so that limited the market by a lot now the numbers are now there like now like it's not going to be as much are there the percentages well right now the percentage of the mac the percentage of the mac user base that can play your game at all and have a good experience is going way up which is great but the absolute numbers of mac sold is really the convincer in terms of like should we make a mac version of this game there's a thing in the follow-up we'll talk about in a future episode about another company saying yeah we're not going to make the mac version of a game anymore and why it's not because mac hardware is bad so just aren't enough mac users even if literally a hundred percent of mac users that exist in the entire world bought your game some people may be like yeah i'm not sure we can just and that's on apple like that's why iphone gaming is so popular you know how you get gaming to be popping the iPhone, send it, sell a bazillion iPhones.

1:46:22And then people are like, my potential customer base is how many billion people? Sure. Yes. Whatever my game is, I will make sure I can port it to the phone, the iPhone, because you've sold so many of them. If Apple could sell as many Macs as iPhones, gaming on the Mac would be amazing, but we're not quite there yet. Well, and I know this is not, this is probably a better discussion for another day, but like, you know, Apple seems to have an institutional inability to court developers. Developers come to Apple willingly for the high volume platforms, mostly the iPhone, because we are so motivated to be on those platforms that we will tolerate Apple's BS as a developer, that they give us as developers.

1:47:06Whereas the platforms where Apple kind of has to try to get people to them, they are terrible at that culturally. They are not used to not having the power because Apple is so, they think of all of their developer markets the same way they think of the iphone like why why aren't people lining up and knocking on the door and tolerating all of our bs and paying all of our fees what do you mean everyone isn't desperate to do that on this platform that has way lower volume like but apple apple is just incapable culturally of dealing well with those markets of actually courting developers of actually getting big companies to care about their platforms in a strong way and devote a lot of resources when they don't have to you know and and it's unfortunate But that's the way Apple is culturally, and it would take a lot of change in the company to change that.

1:47:51We saw that in a lot of the court cases. It's kind of like an attribution mistake, which is understandable. But when they would talk about the App Store and their fees that they take and whether it's justified or whatever, it seemed like when a lot of Apple executives were up there, the misattribution they were making was, we have made this amazing product, the iPhone. and you want to be on it because of the great job that we did in making this great product and that's why you know we deserve some of the value because you know without this platform what would you be deploying your thing on like it's a give and take but they're saying like it's because we did such a good job with the iphone that you want to be on it but it's like you said marco like the actual thing is the thing you did a good job with apple is selling a lot of iphones now yes those are two things are connected oh they sell a lot of iphones because it's a good phone.

1:48:41Like I get it, right? But I feel like the Apple executives feel like because we have made a really good product, that's why we deserve to be successful in this market, to have developers wanting to develop or whatever. And same thing with the Vision Pro. Like the Vision Pro may be an amazing product, but like eventually when, you know, how do you get sustained developer interest? You have to sell a lot of your product. And despite the fact that those two things are linked, product quality and how many of them you sell, they diverge in certain areas for historical and you know other reasons like on the mac right the mac is a great product we love it they don't sell as many of those as they do iphones they don't even sell as many of those as the world does windows pcs and so the thing apple always seems to be proud of is the quality of their product but i feel like i should say we deserve part of your money because we sold 17 billion iphones that like we did that and that makes you able to make money on our platform why not because the phone is great but because you sold a billion of it's like one degree like they they're so focused on we've done such a good job on our products that's why we deserve this when they i wish they were focused more on how can we sell more of these and if you wanted to sell more macs for example you'd cut your margins you'd make a low-cost macbook that we keep talking about that will maybe eventually be released like there are different ways to sell more macs and i love the fact that they made the macs better and they're great and they're awesome that should help them sell more but if you ever really want to move the middle and mac gaming you shouldn't be like people should be coming banking games on our platform maybe we just need to make the technology better no apple you need to sell more macs that's how you do it sell more macs i know tim cook doesn't need to hear that and in the meantime like it is kind of a chicken and egg problem like yeah there's not a lot of gamers who want to game on macs because there's not a lot of games on macs like there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there and the way you solve that is not by making apis that or making faster hardware you you got to do that too you do that's not yeah but the way you solve that is by making much larger changes and investments things like paying for your own games to be made or dealing better with game developers buying a couple of gaming studios and bringing them in house like every other big game platform does that's how you do that kind of stuff like apple has spent decades giving the finger to gamers mostly and game developers and and so you you can't just all of a sudden expect that to change there's a there's a deep cultural resentment of apple among many gamers and game developers based on their actions over years and years and years and based on the market realities over years and years and years and you don't just change that like i mean god look at the mac app store it's it's it's an abandoned flea market at this like there's so many problems they would have to address certainly no one's going to want to pay them 30 percent um you know look at apple arcade a wonderful idea that seemed to have a decent start that has seemingly been super either under invested in or at least under promoted it's being so successful they raise the price exactly like you know there's they would have to change a lot to make big impacts in gaming and they seem to be standing around you know twiddling their thumbs expecting developers to just you know line up and knock down the door and that's just that's not going to happen with gamers I mean and again if you want if you want to essentially force developers to pay attention to you and go on your platform sell a bazillion more macs seems easy right yeah or apply money to the problem like you know buy a studio like whatever it is like that's yes yes that's how you do that i mean yeah that i mean and to be fair that that seems like what they're trying to do bootstrapping this they are spending more money more time and more attention uh it's just it's slow going right uh but i just always get back to like you know the if if they sold 10 times as many macs this conversation would be so much easier for them because it'd be like they are with the iPhone.

1:52:21We're like, no matter how annoying you are, people are like, well, I got to grip my teeth and do it because look at all those iPhone customers. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so yeah, I bought the big MacBook Pro and I decided to get the black one, which is uncharacteristic of me, but I just, I've had silver now for a few generations in a row, and I just kind of wanted a new change of pace color, even though if it looks a lot like space gray, I'm going to be disappointed by that. It doesn't match your stand. Well, the stand is wood, but But the bigger thing is it doesn't match my monitor stand or my headphone.

1:52:54Yeah, it's not going to match. But it's all the way off to the side. So I don't actually look at it that much. And by the way, on this desktop laptop thing and your discussion of it again, I just want to reemphasize the point that we gloss over a lot when we talk about this. One of the biggest advantages of your desktop laptop, of you basically having your life with you in that thing, like when you go from place to place and you put it down and you connect it to a monitor, there you are like you pick up right where you left off i feel like that that huge advantage uh is kind of a condemnation of apple's adoption of cloud storage and syncing we talked about with the chromebooks and everything like that that is a that is a fact of life because most things are local and there is no easy solution for syncing that much local storage efficiently but imagine if apple only made chromebooks you wouldn't be having this conversation you'd be buying mac studios for every place where you need it to be because you'd be like well of course all my stuff is there i'm not saying that apple should do this and it's easy like i understand like there are there are technical reasons why we're not there yet most people don't do a whole lot of their work on chromebooks right exactly like i i get it especially with the more demanding you work the more important it is but like when i look to the future and i say this is actually a vestige of history that when technology we should be working towards making it so we don't have to deal with that because because that i feel like that is one of the biggest reasons you use this rick and looking at this machine that you're buying i do think it is ridiculous like you want a desktop you're maxing out this laptop it's to the extent that you're sacrificing like it's portability and battery life but you want the power why are you doing that you want a gaming pc you bought a mac pro i know but i'm saying but i'm saying like the reason you're doing that is the massive advantage of i unplug it i will go somewhere else i plug it into a monitor there's nothing else i need to do everything is exactly how i left it that advantage is so huge that you're willing to do this because it's the best option available to you.

1:54:48And I do, I do look forward to a day when the availability of our stuff of, you know, even your bazillion files and Xcode and the SDK and your Git repos and like just all that stuff, everything, your entire computing life was as available to you everywhere as like my Gmail is. We're not there yet, but I hope I live long enough to see it. We are brought to you this week in part by ATP members. Please consider becoming an ATP member today. Membership comes with all sorts of great little fun things, chief of which is the ad-free version of the show. That's what most people get membership for, or the bootleg version of the show, both of which are really fun.

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1:57:28What's a 27-inch iMac? Yeah, exactly. By the way, this is one area. John Ternus, so what he said, he was describing this, and he said, he was talking about how the 4.5K 24-inch screen is, quote, the perfect size to replace both the 4K and the 5K Intel models. That, to me, says if you've been holding out hope for a 27-inch iMac replacement, you might want to give up that dream. Like maybe in the distant future that might come, but that statement to me says, stop waiting. It'll come in time for me to win my bet. We'll see. It's in the calendar. I don't even remember when that was. Yeah, look forward to the calendar.

1:58:07It's in there. All right. So yeah, so it's two and a half times faster than the fastest 27-inch, four times faster than the fastest 22-inch. It gets a, quote, unmatched video conferencing experience, quote. $1 ,300. You could order it yesterday. And that's basically it. all the colors are the same size is the same you know everything's basically the same still lightning port uh peripherals yeah which is a bummer usbc for yeah because reasons i mean so i i think i talked myself into being uh feeling weirdly about these macs in our past episodes i i love the fact they have m3 they they were the this was the machine that needed to be updated the most and it did thumbs up right but as i said when i look at this machine i think okay but the thing that made it the updated the most about this is the base configs the maybe the 8 gig of item less but the 256 gigs of storage and the fact that it costs 200 bucks to go to 512 and 400 bucks to go to a terabyte like regular people don't use a lot of cpu but even just regular like non-tech enthusiast people can and do eventually use a lot of storage space just and like it feels like i don't know i i don't know maybe this isn't the year maybe this isn't the year for the iMac to bump its base configs and it's certainly not the year for it to decrease margins on on the bumps to its configs but at a certain point this thing is going to be overdue for one or both of the baseline specs to move up while maintaining the same price range and honestly i think at this point it's the ssd that is worse because 256 gig ssd is going to affect people's lives much more than eight gigs of ram yeah and so if someone was buying one of these machines and they and i had to convince them to click one of those upgrade buttons i'd be working hard to convince them to do the ssd one the fact that this gets the m3 that doesn't help with any of this like that's why i feel like i'm slightly more disappointed than this machine like i i thought you know the m1 is not going to be so slow that people like oh you're using a slow computer because they all have ssds everything's nice you can do all the things you want to do the m3 is great i endorse it it's a upgrade but it doesn't fix any of the other stuff and as far as i can tell none of the upgrade pricing none of the baseline pricing none of sort of the value proposition of this machine has changed except for the fact that you get way more cpu and a better wi-fi and connectivity and stuff like that but every other value proposition thing has not changed in three years in terms of like what do you get for a given amount of money in terms of uh ram and ssd so i really hope this machine keep it on the m3 for three years i think it'll be fine but you know next year or the year after uh get rid of 256 gig ssd option i would love to see that kind of thing happen but ultimately i think the imac seems to be you know it's there's there isn't a huge market for this but the market that there is for it it seems to still be serving it just as well as it did two years ago so they they seem to be putting as much effort into updating it as the market justifies and it seems to be serving it well you know this is a market that oftentimes has very low-end needs where they're kind of like terminals for things and in like you know front desks of offices and stuff like that like so i i think it's i think they're doing fine with this product and there's not much to talk about i mean and and to that end i think the lightning on the peripherals i don't care that much about it like it's i do it's it's i know this is it's people think it's a shame because they think this machine is going to be around for a long time which essentially extends the maximum lightning peripheral lifetime out to the lifetime of this line of IMAX, which could be two or three years, and I get that, but...

2:01:45from an end user perspective the fact that this uses lighting for the peripherals doesn't really affect their life. like the computer comes with the cable that does it the only things you're dealing about are the keyboard and the mouse that are right next to the computer all the time and it has the cable and so it's not the same as phones not being updated or like other you know other things it seems silly but i think it's fine no i i think most of most of the reaction about oh god it still has lightning ports on the peripherals is not because we all wanted to buy imax and we're afraid and we're upset about that cable is that we all want to buy new peripherals that have usbc and we were you're not gonna buy these colored imac ones anyway right like all the imac peripherals are color matched to the imac yeah but don't they come in gray yeah there's a silver one yeah and then also like you know everyone kind of wants like hey wouldn't it be nice if they updated the mouse maybe to be updated to what you be careful what you wish i don't even use that mouse it is but like you do not want them to that's that's what i was thinking like i was a little afraid going to the event like the the apple magic mouse is i think the oldest apple product that i use it is my mouse i love it i you know there's i would change the charging situation but otherwise this is my favorite mouse and this is the one i use everywhere and so like i was a little afraid like what if they ruin my mouse but they they didn't touch it so i guess that's better than ruining it how old is it we should look that up what's your guess is it eight years old i think it was like 10 20 well it's there's a there's some asterisks because they revised it like it used to have the double A batteries.

2:03:13And then they later changed it to just have the lightning port and the, and the built in rechargeable battery. I'm just talking about the overall shape, like the overall shape of this mouse. 14 years ago, October 20, 2009. Oh my God. I mean, I'm not complaining. Like I think if people like it and it works for them, I think it is beautiful to look at. Some people do like the mouse. I don't think it's, you know, bad that Apple can use this. I hate it, but like whatever, you can always buy another mouse, but it is interesting. Like when will they decide now is the time to make a new mouse? and what what will they do at that point i can only imagine what a a mouse made by modern apple would look like it would not look like this that's for sure i'm picturing like you sitting down at my computer like so you'd be sitting down to a laptop with an apple mouse and a microsoft keyboard this is like your idea of hell obviously i think i would like your keyboard better than the default mac one that doesn't have the inverted arrow keys like the default key the default small keyboard sitting in a desk with that keyboard i see people do it all the time and i can't especially even programmers like how why are you doing this to yourself but your microsoft one is weird but at least it has arrow keys did you just send me a tooth that was reminding me that the small keyboard has arrow keys well stop because i know that they're just not as conveniently placed as they are on the extended keyboard that's what i don't like and they're half size all right thanks to our sponsors this week trade coffee and collide and thank you especially to our members who support us directly.

2:04:38You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

2:05:07You 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-E-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. So I know Casey wants to get to lunch. And I know because I had the wonderful idea we should all pack box lunches for ourselves for this recording. That was a good idea. I did not do it, though. How much time do you think we have to pack a box lunch? A box lunch? Yeah, unfortunately, that idea did not get traction in our Slack channel.

2:06:04No, I was here for it. I just didn't do it because it seemed like that wasn't actually a thing. What would be in your box lunch if we had gotten our acts together and actually made them? What would be in your box lunches? Is this a box lunch for the purpose of eating while podcasting? Like, am I making something that I can eat in front of the computer? Yeah, that's part of the logistical challenge of one of the reasons I didn't push it harder than just saying, wouldn't this be a fun idea nobody actually wants to hear us eat lunch on a podcast no uh but but but if you were to pack a box lunch for eating right now you know as we are still recording for another three hours what would it be that's a good question i mean so yesterday i was volunteering at declan school and i did bring a lunch and i don't eat sandwiches very often typically for lunch i'll make myself a salad um but uh on occasion i will have a sandwich and in this particular case, I had a ham and cheese sandwich yesterday, and that would probably be what I would do in this sort of scenario as well.

2:07:01You know, a salad is, assuming you don't, you know, absolutely drown in dressing, a salad is in many cases a lot more healthy, and that's why that's what I typically eat. That was my question in your salad thing. What is in your, when you make yourself a salad, what's in it? So it's a lettuce base. I would use spinach, which is arguably more nutritious, healthier, et cetera, but I developed a spinach allergy a few years ago that I haven't been brave enough to test to see if it was like a couple of year thing or if it was a you know forever forever more thing anyway so i use uh whatever the the tall lettuce is not the circular lettuce

2:07:37food aficionado casey list identifies romaine lettuce by its height does it have a roughly edge or a flat edge uh it's romaine it's romaine is it right i think that's right so tall lettuce Anyways. Oh, my God. So that's the base. And then I've, you know, it's just the three of us here, right? So I can be honest. Do you put chocolate chips in it? Just tell us. No, there'll be the shells and cheese just lumped on top. No, if only. If only. No, the thing that's going to get me. Is it going to have bacon bits in it? Oh, I love bacon bits, but no, I don't. Bacon in quotes. I typically do not. Yes. No, the thing that's going to get me to move to California one day, it's not the weather, which is perfect in most places.

2:08:17It's not that the cities at least are super liberal and whatnot. It's not the fact that it's going to fall off the continental United States one day. It's not the fact that it's hilariously overpriced. It's the avocados. Because I have become obsessed with avocados recently. And so I probably put an unhealthy amount of avocado in. Typically, the protein will be either some shrimp that I'll just quickly cook with not a lot on it. Or occasionally some chicken. We'll oftentimes get a chicken from Costco and strip the skin off and use that. What else do I put in there? Chickpeas sometimes. Onion. What else?

2:08:57I'm trying to think. Cucumber. When you say onion, you mean like red onions, raw red onions you cut up? Yeah, raw or red or white, but always raw. I don't typically saute it or anything like that. This is quite a mishmash you've got going here, but let's get to the… This is a complicated arrangement, too. No, it takes me a while. It takes me a while every day. Let's get to the big finish, though. What dressing are you putting on this? Oh, that's what you're aiming for. We talked about this once before. It depends how health conscious I'm feeling at the moment. I try not to use a lot, regardless.

2:09:25But, you know, I think we had this very conversation on the show at some point semi-recently. But Ken's, what is it, low fat or low cal, Thousand Island is so good. And that's my fat free. No, it's not the fat free, I don't think. I don't know. I'll have to look it up. I forget. That's better than I thought it would be. I mean, I'm not sure culinarily if it holds together with all those ingredients you just described. But health-wise, it seems like you're getting a lot of different food groups in there. Yeah, and I got – usually I'll use cherry tomatoes. There's different colors. I don't put on like tortilla chips or anything like that.

2:09:59Yeah, it's low-carb so far, right? No croutons. Yeah, I did do croutons for a long time, but I've weeded that out of my diet even though I love them. Just replaced it with avocado. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's true. I've replaced all of my carbs with tons of fat. Yeah. Well, you know, you make your choices, right? But anyways, no, I'm trying to think what else. Because I used to make much unhealthier salads, and I've been doing better. Oh, carrots. I always include carrots. I love carrots. So you wouldn't do that as your box lunch because I guess it's too much stuff. It's too messy, and it's too long prep time.

2:10:28Well, also, you have some temperature contracts going on in there that would not age well on a box lunch. Like your hot-cooked proteins. Yeah, no, that would make it perfect for WWDC. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's Ken's Real-Time Follow-Up. Ken's Light Thousand Islands. I'm pretty sure what my favorite is. I'm kind of surprised you don't go ranch. Ranch would be, within your character, within your Americana processed food, Velveeta shells and cheese character would be ranch. I like ranch. And Ken's, if memory serves, makes a pretty decent light ranch as well. There's a vinaigrette, a balsamic vinaigrette that I've used periodically.

2:11:02I also like a Caesar dressing quite a bit, although that tends to be very unhealthy if you're not careful. Look at any dressing. Oh, that's also true. They're all unhealthy. they like comically so yeah but i was talking to a couple of friends of mine that i that i meet for lunch like once a month and we were discussing our routine lunches and they and i was describing the salad the same way and they were like my god that must take you forever and it takes i don't know maybe 10-15 minutes on an average day it's not that bad and i'm not too fussy about you know chopping the ingredients in a particular way or anything like that but that's my typical salad i don't know how we this is a show of tangents but um actually you know before sorry before we get off your salad and speaking of chopping how do you how do you address the lettuce like do you cut it up into pieces do you tear it like what is your lettuce size target for salad so uh it used to be that i would chop it up because i really i i have an unreasonable unnatural distaste not well that's a poor choice of words given we're talking about food but i really don't like when the like the backbone of the romaine uh more more very precise culinary terms yes we know what you mean the spine so i i like to split i like to split the backbone such that that's part people love that crunch yeah okay no i like the crunch but i don't like when i have this like you know four inch wide piece of lettuce with the backbone right in the middle it's hard to you know get it in your mouth well that's got to my question is that you're cutting it into that's what you stab with the fork well no but are they four inches wide like What is your maximum dimension you're willing to accept in lettuce piece?

2:12:34Right. So what I used to do, for a long time, I was fussy about it. And I would cut straight down the backbone. And then I would just chop it up into, I don't know, an inch or two per bit, if you will. Like basically squares or rectangles per side? Yeah, exactly. And then Aaron eventually was like, what are you doing? Just tear the damn thing. And I was like, yeah. And then eventually I got to the point of, what am I doing? I should just tear the damn thing. And so that's what I do. and I try to tear off of the backbone. The backbone is still there. It's not like I'm throwing the backbone away.

2:13:04It's just that it's split between two different bites. You've got to stop calling it the backbone. What is it called? What is it, the spine? I don't know. The stem, maybe? I feel like you're going against the grain here. It's definitely not backbone. It's not a vertebrate. Well, no crap. I just didn't know what else to call it. No, in my opinion, the best way to cut a remain heart, which is what I assume you're actually using, being that it's the tall lettuce. The tall lettuce. is if you stand it on its end upwards, you're cutting it in the horizontal axis in that orientation. Right, right. And cut it at one-inch intervals, and that way every strip contains two or three inches of leaf and then the spine in the middle.

2:13:44In the middle, yeah. And then that you can stab with the fork, and so that way you're not squishing the soft parts of the fork and not being able to pick it up. You pick it up really easily. You get that nice crunch. You don't have to throw away any part of it. and that's how the best Caesar salads are always chopped. Yeah, he's being saved in his cutting by the fact that romaine lettuce, the leaves aren't that wide, so he doesn't even have to cut along that dimension if he doesn't want to, but his allergy to the spine as we call it, is causing him to mess up his romaine. Anyway, now we all know more than we ever need to know about your salad, which is not what you would pack for your Bach lunch.

2:14:19No. Oh, and I also had bean sprouts or I think, what are they, broccoli sprouts, bean sprouts, little sprout things. I used to hate those, but over time I got into... The little white wormy things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're great for food safety, too. Bean sprouts. That's true. The little spermies. But anyways, for box lunch, I'd probably pack a sandwich, either peanut butter and jelly or ham and cheese or something like that, just to make it easier. See, if I'm packing a box lunch for consumption on a podcast, I would go for things that are very dense, that I could eat fairly quickly and not need a bunch of accessories like maybe you know too many drinks or for silverware so i would i think i would go like a banana and some cheese cubes you know nice and simple like it you know covers some of the basics will keep me full for a while until the show's over but not it doesn't require a big ordeal or special tools uh to eat and i can eat it somewhat quietly you know i actually meant to bring up and now i wish i had because i'm starting to get hangry i had meant to bring up uh i have i'm Is it Archer Farms?

2:15:22No, I don't think it's Archer Farms. There's some beef jerky vendor or whatever that makes just these absolutely delicious teriyaki, but I call them beef sticks. I think it's actually jerky, strictly speaking. But anyways, and I meant to bring one of those up as like a holdover. A lot of protein will hold me over until after we're done recording and I accidentally forgot to bring one up. So now I'm hangry. All right, John, what's in your box lunch? I would never eat on a podcast, so I don't like the idea, the premise of this whole thing. I don't even like laptops. for any box lunch thing though like i think portability is key so i would probably go with the sandwich the food invented for its portability um rather than like the you know the the fruit and nuts type route although i did think about yogurt because you can eat that silently or more silently anyway and i do like yogurt for lunch sometimes uh but no i probably go with the sandwich and like there are many many uh unhealthy sandwiches filled with lunch meat that i would love to eat but we tend not to have it in the house because if we have it in the house i will eat it and it's not good for you uh so we usually have in the house and what i usually go to in case you already mentioned it i'm peanut butter and jelly guy i like peanut butter and jelly and my move with peanut butter and jelly is i often make it on toast because i think sometimes that improves it huh peanut butter and jelly on toast uh it's not not great for a podcast because it's a little bit crunchy and a little bit crumbly yeah i would destroy my office like it would be covered in crumbs like yeah no it is a good portable box lunch so if i set aside the idea that you're saying we're going to bring this to a podcast thing a sandwich of some kind of work i mean I wouldn't do toast probably if I actually, if you said you have to eat it when you're on the air, I would not toast it.

2:16:52I would have a softer bread or whatever. But yeah, peanut butter and jelly is a good meal. And then, you know, maybe some little side snack. Again, this is not great for podcasting, but I have been on Nut Kick lately trying to find inexpensive and yummy nuts. They're good. And I would probably throw them in as my side snack. I found it. Real-time follow-up again. Wenzel's Farm teriyaki sticks. I don't think you can get these on Amazon, which has been a point of contention in the family because they're a pain in the butt to order. I forget where we source these because we get like a box and they last frigging forever.

2:17:22But the teriyaki beef sticks are super duper tasty. I really, really like these. They look like dog treats. They do. They absolutely do. Like all jerky does. Yeah. Dog treats for people.