560: They’re All Rectangles

47:06That is true. And yeah, to answer your earlier question, the thing that I don't love about it is the 8 gigs is the only one external monitor. It's not wrong. It just feels icky. It doesn't feel like a pro machine with those kinds of limits. But what are you going to do? And actually, I didn't get a chance to go back and look into this, but apparently somebody who works on the Mac team, or excuse me, the iMac team, was like, oh, 8 gigs for us. It's like 16 for PCs. and yeah bob borcher right um yeah that was that was uh that's going around today too a lot of people complaining about that i i don't think that was bob borcher's best moment in the press honestly well let's see i think there was enough weasel words in there to make it actually true because he was comparing it to like windows or something right so like i i mean it could be that the windows operating system and the apple similar applications take up more ram or they're less free like it's just it's so not apples to apples haha that it's hard to invalidate it but it's not what people care about like here with the eight gig thing i mean on the one hand it's good that you can upgrade it unlike the external monitor there's nothing you can you can't add you know you have to go up the next uh the m3 pro to get the external monitor but you can get more ram if you want it but the reason people complain i meant to look this up maybe i'll look it up for next week is that we know that in the technology world component prices go down over time uh if you go back 20 years in the past max did not come with eight gigs of ram they came with way way less but the prices were in the same ballpark because RAM used to be way more expensive than it is now.

48:36So over time, we have some expectation that you'll get more RAM for the same amount of money. And Apple holds the line on that so long that it's incredibly frustrating. We don't expect to be like Dell where when the price of RAM drops by a dollar, it's reflected on Dell's website because their margins are always like, cutthroat competition. We really need to be the cheapest possible option. So if our component prices go down, and we pass it on immediately to the customer apple passes none of it on like you know how much does how much does five gigs of iCloud storage cost right so how long have we been at eight gigs of ram as the minimum like and how long like the component prices go down we know they go down it costs apple and i'm not saying apple has to pass on all of that like i understand the longer the apple makes the same machine the higher the margins go like we're not begrudging apple their margins we under like by all means reap the margins but you can't hold the line forever you have and so it's like when we get closer and closer to the point where we're like oh come on apple like for the past however many years you've been saying just eight gigs eight gigs eight gigs we know that eight gigs is getting cheaper at some point the the dam has to break and you have to say okay we'll give you more and if does it go to 16 does it go to nine like we don't but whatever it is enjoy your time when you keep the price the same and your component costs go down like enjoy that time but there has to be a point where you move off of eight gigs and when we get closer to where like collectively we tech nerds think they should be starting to get close to the point especially when at this point it's not like oh eight gigs is too little for a minimum we because they put it in something with pro and it costs 1600 we're saying in this scenario you're really highlighting the fact that you're being stubborn about you know not passing on any of your component cost reduction status which you know i mean that's we talked about last episode it's the reason the touch bar one was sold for so long because because of margins and so now it's like okay fine you get the new computer with all the new whizzy stuff but we're still holding the line at 8 gig and it's frustrating i don't think it's that unreasonable in my in my mind of course this is my my little nitpick i don't think there should be anything called macbook pro that is an inadvisable purchase if one of your relatives comes to you and says hey i just bought a macbook pro you should have no dread oh no did they buy the wrong one you know i mean ideally you'd have that same feeling about all the computers but ideally yes but i recognize you know the the thing you know the the lower end models in this you know currently the airs you do have to have low end models to hit certain low price points i get that um and and there are and i'll get to this in a second there are certain buyers where that would be okay i'll get to that in a second please um but but like i think something called a macbook pro the minimum standard should be 16 gigs and 512 gigs and they did increase the ssd to 512 yeah thank god for that like because that to me i think that is if you are at all a power user 16 and 512 is your minimum baseline um and ideally 16 a terabyte but and and it's if if you're mad about ram prices don't look at how inexpensive ssds are right now it is shocking how inexpensive good fast ssds are right now ones that are faster than the ones that apple is putting in its laptops you can get for just a pittance right so yeah that's i mean the fact that they went to 512 like that's a relief because they were holding 256 for so long but still still 512 seems a little tight yeah all the pros should be 16 one terabyte at least at minimum but they're not and okay maybe we'll get there yeah yeah apple's profit but you know bob borcher's statement first of all i mean look he didn't he didn't mean to cause a cause a press hubbub uh with that i think it's just one of those situations where like talking to the tech press or to any journalist really is like talking to the police you know ideally don't but if you have to be very careful what you say because it will be twisted against you in some headline posted on social networks and so you know the what he said was a whole paragraph that basically the gist of it was basically the ram quantity is not as important as you think because there's lots of reasons why modern apple silicon max are super fast and they're faster than you think go try one you'll probably see it's faster than you think and that's all true and when the apple silicon max first came out the very first ones the m1 based ones that were the only ones for something like six or six or nine months, they maxed out at 16 gigs of RAM.

52:50And those of us who bought them and use them, I was one of them. We had to go oftentimes down from 64 or 32 down to 16 to use them from our previous computers. But they were so much faster that it wasn't as big of a problem for a lot of work. Some work, it was still a problem, but for a lot of work, it wasn't because the entire computer was faster. So that's not wrong. That's not untrue. The whole computer is faster, but it is also held back when you don't have enough RAM, and it could be so much faster if you gave it enough RAM. I mean, yeah, the processor's speed and the architecture with the unified memory and everything, that does make a lot of things faster.

53:31So the overall system does feel very fast, even with eight gigs, when you're not doing that much with it. But when you do start getting into a lot of multitasking and anything involving if you ever use chrome for anything or anything that uses chrome like a lot of electron apps like all you know a lot of apps are super ram hungry including many of apple's own apps now um and so it is you need ram in a modern computer eight gigs and you know anything less than a terabyte i think is is inexcusable for anything marketed towards any kind of power user at all on the air if you have to get a super low price point for entry that makes more sense nothing called pro should have really stingy specs even at the base and that's i think that's a that's a relatively new thing most macbook pros you know years ago like most macbook pros the base model was respectable and you know it wasn't it wasn't super top of the line of course but it was always like respectable this i'm not you know the eight gigs really hurts this another angle that a lot of people are saying are like well these users over here these casual users or the people who just use business computers, they don't need it.

54:38They don't need more than 8 gigs or they don't need more than 256 or whatever. And I think we have to be very careful as power users and as nerds what we assume other people don't need or won't appreciate. Honestly, there's a lot of gatekeeping that is kind of under the surface there and a lot of elitism under the surface there and a lot of condescension under the surface there. And so we have to be very careful when we're making assumptions about what other people would need or wouldn't need or would or wouldn't appreciate in many ways the computers that we use that many people around the world use all the time are way over specced in certain areas for what they need all of the modern apple silicon chips are way faster than what people need to do like you know word processing and you know do fill out forms and web browsers for their job or whatever but we give them to them anyway.

55:32The phones in our pocket, as I mentioned earlier, are way, way better than what most people, quote, need or would notice the difference between. But we keep making them better anyway because that's what we do. That's what we do as technologists. We make things better and faster and nicer and more capable over time. Whatever we think someone won't need or won't appreciate or won't notice, that might be true a lot of the time, but not all the time, there are those times when people notice and they appreciate it and they use it and they need it. And who are you to say what someone is never going to need or is never going to appreciate?

56:08Computers oftentimes have long lives. You don't know what someone's going to need now or five years from now. So give people the most you can give them with whatever resources you have available. Give them good tools and let them decide what they do or don't need. Yep, I agree with you. Building on a little more about the base configs, Ewan Makepeace writes, with regard to the penalty of quote-unquote unusable base configs, in Indonesia and presumably other countries, there are zero official Apple stores. While the standard Mac configs are available from stock in stores, custom builds take months and months to arrive.

56:45So when Apple ships laptops with 8 gigs of RAM or 256 gig storage, that's what many, many, many customers end up with. It's very frustrating. Yeah, all the more reason why the base configuration of something named Pro should be pretty decent. Yeah. Tomer Schmesh writes, I am absolutely shocked that they didn't announce Face ID on the new MacBook Pro. At this point, I'm starting to feel like there's a specific reason they are not doing it and they don't plan on it. But at the same time, why is that not so freaking huge if all it has is the camera? Well, it has a camera and a light. I don't know.

57:15I really wanted Face ID for the longest time. I don't have any particular problems with Touch ID, especially since we now have external keyboards with Touch ID. in a perfect world i agree that yes i would prefer face id but i don't know this is not one of the things that's like actively bothering me am i wrong about this yeah well whether or not it's actively bothering you the reason i put this in here is because uh you know we've spent many uh months praising the new macbook pros uh mostly because they undid the mistakes of the past and got back on the right track and because obviously apple silicon is amazing and laptop uh form factor uh but it may lead some people to think okay so are the laptops are they done now and now we're just quibbling over like what the configs are and how much they cost like have they have they perfected it and my answer is no there are still obvious things they should do and my number one slash number two depending you know this in cellular is face id uh i'm i think touch id is great i enjoy it i think face id would be as big a game changer as it is on the phone just because the act especially of laptops like they're sitting on a desk the act of the act of sitting down in front of something and having it just unlock without you having to do anything is that still one step better than having to put your finger on the little spot on the keyboard not a big deal just like it wasn't a big deal to put your thing on touch id but i'm a big proponent of face id on my phone i would love it on my mac uh it's not on laptops there's kind of a goodish reason it's not the fact that they're not just plenty wide it's just the screens aren't deep enough at this point to fit the face id stuff i believe if you took like the face id component out of a phone and tried to like you know disassemble the screen and tried to shove it in there i think it's still kind of tight and apple doesn't want to have a weird bulge or whatever but like but yeah that's on my list like oh are they just done they never have to do anything to laptops again no they should be working towards face id they should be working towards getting rid of the notch and they should be working towards face id and those two things could be combined if and when they figure out how to do under the screen stuff or getting rid of the dynamic island we've talked about this in the phone yada yada all this is to say is that uh the laptops are not perfect they're not done there's always to marco's point there's always ways that we can make them better with technology we're in a good period now where there are no glaring errors anymore no unforced errors no stupidity but like thank god for that yeah why do they not have cellular why do they not have face id look they have working keyboards and they have a reasonable complement of ports and the processes are amazing so we will enjoy this period but let us not forget there is always more that they can do and those i think those are obvious ones put cellular and do face id right uh and you know i'm sure there are other obvious ones that you can think of like we're not demanding them this moment we're not saying the laptops are bad because they're missing them it's what we're looking forward to for the future so hang in there tomer like i believe it will happen someday by the way some real-time follow-up i i just did some quick research on every mac because i remember the 2015 15 inch retina macbook pro the base ram was 16 gigs yeah that's what i wanted to look up how how long how far do you have to go back so if you're looking at the the cheapest 13 inch macbook pro it has been 8 gigs standard ram since the mid-2014 model oh my word nine years ago which uh sold for at the price at the time 12.99 and i'm gonna say ram prices have dropped in the past nine years nine years like that's the thing component prices like they go and now i understand it's not the same ram because ram gets faster ssd gets faster but like same thing but it also gets cheaper yeah the ssds that we have now are cheaper than they were before they're also faster like that's the march of technology right and i'm again i'm not saying every you know from month to month as ram prices fluctuate apple should adjust the prices of their laptops and pass all the savings on to us like but but nine years ram prices have gone down in nine years apple like just please give us give us like and to be fair apple might say well like the most expensive component in this laptop is actually the screen and the screen we're making zero profit on because we we're basically selling it to you at cost and to make up for that we have to charge you know like there's always some reason why like the the sum of the components in this laptop adds up you know we demand our margins because business business right they have to be this amount otherwise our stock price will go down and we'll lose our employees because they're retained by their you know the the promise of the stock price like i understand all the reasons behind it what we're saying is like the balance they have struck with holding the line on eight gigs of ram and pro laptops for nine years is perhaps not the right balance that's it yep and by the way it's not inflation either i just figured that out too so this was 12 and 12.99 in 2014 in current dollars that's about sixteen hundred eighty eight dollars um so that's almost the same price that these laptops are now so they've accounted for inflation and it's still eight gigs of ram on the base small macbook pro nine years later all right uh natash singh writes dynamic caching is tripping up almost everyone talking about it and in fairness the way apple presented it wasn't clear but they did specifically say, quote, on-chip memory, quote, which is SRAM.

1:02:18Apple Silicon's RAM is on package, not on chip. And John, I think you had some other notes about this? Yeah, Apple also said, I re-watched the video to see, what did they actually say? They didn't say on chip, but it was written on the screen in the slide. And they said local GPU memory. Apple was talking, this is, this is Natasha continuing, Apple was talking about maximizing the use of on-chip SRAM to maximize GPU utilization, as the chart shows basically intensifying its use to increase gpu hardware hit rates and utilization i would still like to say like a white paper from apple or i don't know why they would have a wwc session because this is totally transparent to the developer so like i don't know why they would do other than to just brag but i would like to just for instance for all like i i believe this i think this all makes sense like this i think this is what it is too but i would like to see the technical details involved just because i'm curious not that it matters but if they're gonna brag about it or whatever you don't you know obviously don't go into detail in the presentation but do link to something on your website that brags about the cool technology i don't know is it a secret they're trying to keep from everyone else but uh you know looking at the benchmarks and everything of the uh the gpu on the new macbook pros i don't know if it's dynamic caching that's helping with it at all but yeah the gpus do look pretty good so i'm you know now i'm doing the thing that's marketing at work is it good because of this dynamic caching thing who knows but the gpus are pretty good we are sponsored this week by hatch and the hatch restore to in a world where innovation shapes every waking moment why settle for outdated sleep routines redefine how you fall asleep and how you wake up with the hatch restore to this is in my opinion quite simply this is like an alarm clock that was made for this century with all the technology we have now at our disposal so the hatch restore two is a sophisticated sound machine light and alarm clock all in one with a nice beautiful design that fits next to your bed so the hatch restore two can teach your body when it's time to sleep with restful routines sound machine you know relaxation sounds and things like that mindfulness exercises and meditations that can transform the time before sleep and then when it's time to wake up they have these you know this built-in light and you can be any different color and you can slowly get from dim to bright and they have all these wonderful routines built in light patterns and they span all sorts of different color schemes and warmth coolnesses and moods and it is great and then the sounds it comes with they they have these nice kind of modern relaxing sounds and it's all digital it's all you know you can control it from the app and everything it's a really nice experience and it's so nice in fact that i was using it for a little while my son found it who's in middle school he stole it it's now his i now have to buy a second one because he totally took it and he loves it too and this is a kid who has grown up with 100 technology in his life he's never had any alarm clock you know he just you know we would set an alarm on a home pod in his room and this is so much nicer and he loves it for his school morning so it's already been stolen from me it is a great product right now check it out the hatch restore 2 hatch is offering you 20 off your purchase and free shipping at hatch.co slash ATP.

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1:05:38There are apparently no half-speed SSDs on the new MacBook Pros. Again, Luke Miani has a video about this. And John, I think you've done a copious amount of research. There's many, many figures in the show notes and our show notes, many of which are bolded. So can you walk us through this, please? Yeah. So what we're talking about, the half-speed SSDs, is that on the previous generation, the M2 generation, if you've got the base config, speaking of being planished by the base config, Apple would only use one SSD chip instead of two. I don't know, because of component costs or whatever. So if you got it with 256, you'd just get one 256 gig chip.

1:06:14If you got the 512, your inside would be two 256 geek chips and you'd be like well why do i care how many chips the storage comes in i get you know 256 512 whatever uh when you had the two chips you would get literally twice the speed reading right into the ssd because it would do both chips in parallel so this wasn't like a one percent difference or whatever so the base config in addition to having very little storage obviously you only get 256 it would be half the speed and that was one of those things where you're like oh you're buying a macbook crow wait a second or whatever whatever don't don't buy the base config because the ssd is half the speed again maybe it didn't make a difference maybe you don't care but you'd want the consumer to be informed like do you do something where you where you're waiting around for large volumes of data to go to and from the ssd uh don't get the one with half speed if you don't if you never do that and don't care just be aware that it is half speed if you're okay with it get it but it's just one of those things where you don't want to have to have that conversation so the rumor right after the the keynote um last week was oh they didn't do that this time every even the base models they don't have like a you know know one ssd chip when the other ones have two they're all they all have two chips or like there's no difference or whatever so uh someone did some benchmarking and they found the base luke did benchmark a bunch of other people did as well uh that the base 256 gig m2 macbook pro was like 1400 megabytes per second so that's like the bad one that we're comparing it to and so let's try the base 512 again they bumped the storage for the base 512 m3 macbook pro and that gets 3000 megabytes per second so like yay the old one was the old bad one was 1400 and the new good one is 3000 so the old bad one was half speed and the new good one is twice that so we don't have to worry there are no bad base configs the base config is twice the speed of the bad old m2 with just a one ssd thumbs up right but then people tested the one terabyte m3 pro macbook pro and that one gets 6 000 megabytes per second which i mean i i think the truth is that the base model is not so here's the thing the base model is half the speed of the next one up right it's 3 000 versus 6 000 but it's double the speed of the old bad base config and this is kind of the way it is with the march of technology right and to be clear by the way uh the playstation 5 which came out many many years ago had a minimum spec where if you bought an off-the-shelf ssd like an m.2 ssd stick and shoved it in there to expand the storage it had to be able to be capable of at least 5 500 megabytes per second read write i think the one i have in there i think is like 75 now and it's a terabyte just fyi so you know consumer uh console you know playstation 5 a many year old console you can get something that's 5500 megabytes per second uh but to get something faster than that in macbook grow you got to go up to one terabyte anyway uh technology marches on the more money you spend the faster it will get the one that costs more money is indeed faster this year's quote unquote slow one is twice the speed of last year's slow one i don't know how to feel about this i like i do like the fact that they didn't if you look at the the uh the logic board you can see there's no like empty spot where there could have been an ssd but uh that's you know i don't this is the type of thing people might might not think about when they're buying this they're like i should just pick up based on the amount of storage that i need it's not obvious until you benchmark that going from 512 gigs to one terabyte in your ssd is going to double the speed of your thing especially since they both use two chips apparently so i don't i don't know like do with this what you will i give apple kudos for not making the same mistake they made last time and and again i don't begrudge the more expensive one being faster but boy that seems like a big leap yep yep definitely is a couple other differences between these if you're worried about like a lots of dissection of the plane m3 because the plane m3 is not the it's not the ugly duckling but it's the it's the most interesting and novel one because there wasn't one there wasn't a plane 2 m2 one in the same case with the same features and now there is but inside they're quite different so one of the differences is that the plain old m3 macbook pro just has one fan instead of two fans that are in all the other better m3 based macbook pros and you know the m3 is a smaller cooler chip so it doesn't need two fans but there's that it just has one fan it's a goes a little bit higher rpm it's a little bit louder not not that big a deal you probably won't hear it unless you're benchmarking it um and interestingly the uh the plain m3 macbook pro has a slightly smaller battery than the next one up even though the case is the same even though if you look at them it looks like the battery's the same but apparently the plain old m3 macbook pro is 6068 milliamp hours and the m3 pro is 6269 milliamp hours again the batteries look identically sized but apparently they're not so this is apple you know uh trying to ensuring that the battery life is identical by taking the one that has the chip that uses less power and putting in a slightly smaller and presumably also slightly cheaper battery.

1:11:14Yeah, that's kind of a shame. I mean, so some of the differences here remind me a lot of the old MacBook Escape. That was my nickname for the back when in the early touch bar days, 2016 era, when they redid the whole MacBook Pro line like this, they tried to replace the MacBook Air with an inexpensive version, very similar to what they did here with the M3 MacBook Pro. They tried to replace the MacBook Air with a cheaper MacBook Pro that was cut down in a few ways, had fewer fewer ports fewer you know a lower lower spec chip it was like the whole it was like the macbook air class of intel cpus like the that old like 15 watts uh chip line um but in the 13 inch case and and they did similar things there was only one fan instead of two like but in that case they gave it a bigger battery and what i loved about that computer until the keyboard broke very quickly but what i loved before that happened was that it was a battery monster because they they had taken this 13-inch size that was made for pro chips, a bigger case that had a lot of room for battery, and they had put a MacBook Air chip in there, so it really sipped power.

1:12:22And the bigger battery that they had room for in that case, because they filled the thing with battery as much as they could with the space they had, and so that thing was great for a long plane trip, for instance. I was kind of hoping that this base M3 MacBook Pro would be able to take that role again now, and it seems like they they kind of half stepped towards that but but didn't quite push all the way like imagine if this thing had an even bigger battery than the 13 inch m3 pro and m3 max models which theoretically it should have the room for having a bigger battery and a lower powered chip should be an amazing airplane computer but instead i think they have yielded that spot to more likely the 15 inch macbook air yeah i mean it just makes you know some sense from that you're trying to get this thing to get a price point uh it's on the one hand there may be economies of scale using the same battery but on the other hand of these are just you know standard-ish sizes and they just because it's like uh you know six different individual modules so maybe they just shrunk a couple of the modules or whatever yeah and to be clear like the need for that is also less now that like now that all macbooks now get amazing battery life like you know that was back Back at the time when like, you know, when I was every year we're like when I fly to WBDC, you know, flying from New York to California is like five and a half hour flight.

1:13:38And because I was going to or from WBDC, I'd usually be running Xcode for at least part, if not most of the journey. And that was always great work time. And it was always such a challenge during the Intel days trying to get, you know, trying to use Xcode for five and a half hours back at a time when most planes did not have power outlets. That was always a stretch. you like that's when i would turn off turbo boost with those various utilities to turn off turbo boost i would like turn the screen brightness way down and like turn off the reading light make make my seat dark so hopefully i could like see the screen still like all these hacks to try to like just barely stretch it and it would never make it it would always come close i would always make it like four and a half hours and then well i guess i gotta take a nap now because like it would and now every laptop apple sells could easily do that even using xcode and it would be totally fine so you know i get that there is less of a need for that kind of thing in the lineup now but it is it is kind of a bummer that they like they came close to that and just didn't really follow through with it yeah i would think this one the m3 is still probably gonna have better battery life because the battery is just a tiny bit smaller and the m3 is less than a tiny bit more power efficient than the m3 pro yeah true i mean and the other thing about the m3 with the benchmarks is people are pleasantly surprised at how much faster the plain m3 is than its plain m2 predecessor uh very often there's these you know youtube videos saying forget about the plain m2 let's let's run the plain m3 against the the m2 pro right in various things uh so the m3 looks like it's pretty i feel like the m3 is a worthy successor to the m1 with the m2 kind of being in in between and again remember i keep i don't know if these are true is this just rumors but all the rumors were that the m2 was supposed to have this new gpu and i feel like if the m2 did have this new gpu and was on three nanometers according to the supposed original plan the M2 would have been much more impressive but it seems like both 3 nanometer and the new GPU got pushed back to the M3 generation and so the M3 reaps that reward and the M2 is just kind of in between there holding down the fort waiting for the M3 to arrive Alright, so speaking of M3 and eventually M3 Pro and M3 Max our friend on Mastodon F.

1:15:47Haussler has revised their chip diagrams with I don't know, like annotations and whatnot John, do you want to take us through some of the highlights here? Yeah, the reason I put this in here is I was trying to find a bunch of like presumably real photos from Apple of what these dyes look like. So the annotated ones are sort of coloring regions saying here is the CPU cores, here is the GPU cores, here is the IO interfaces, here is, you know, to show where all the different parts are on this thing. And the reason that's relevant is the whole thing about packaging that I talked about with Johnny Surugi mentioning the packaging was interesting.

1:16:22what i wanted to know was you know because we don't haven't seen the the m3 ultra or whatever it's like is this year going to be a year where it's interesting packaging or not and looking at these annotated chip diagrams uh and the diagrams of what the m1 max look like before and the m2 max and the m3 max uh i look at these and i think this year is going to be another year where they take two maxes and stick them end to end because if you look at the way the components are laid out on the m1 m2 and m3 max all of which were all the m1 and m2 were ultrafied by sticking them end to end all the same pieces kind of line up like you can see the long rows down the side of you know i can't even see because i'm not zoomed in but like the way the features are arranged you can see where the interposer is going to go it really really looks like the guts of this chip have been arranged to support the silicon interposer and the ultra will be made by taking two m3 maxes and putting them end to end yeah if that's not the case i will be very surprised if there was because if there was going to be some more exotic packaging for the the step up from the m3 max i would expect the layout of where the internal components are to be different so if you were getting your hopes up for an m3 max that's not too or for an m3 ultra there's not two m3 max stuck together uh maybe you know push those hopes off to the m4 generation that said two m3 max is stuck end den is going to be pretty amazing so i'm still kind of excited about that all right and then do we want to talk more about m3 ram chip counts yeah this is just to confirm what we said uh last week there's an anatech article with photos from apple that shows the chips and it's kind of funny looking because we were mentioning like oh there's this many ram chips on each of these things uh the ram chips first of all having three ram chips looks weird because it's not symmetrical i guess and also the uh the the size and shape of the ram chips is interesting like if you look at the ones on the Max.

1:18:15The Max has four RAM chips around it, and they're kind of more squarish, but then on the Pro, they're kind of rectangular. Anyway, just to confirm, two RAM chips on the M3, three RAM chips on the M3 Pro, and four RAM chips on the M3 Max. Indeed. A friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz Jr. writes in with regard to TSMC's three nanometer nodes. Jonathan writes, you can ignore N3X. TSMC's X nodes, such as N3X, are process variants tailored to higher drive currents. These nodes are mostly for x86 designs and trade higher leakage or power for the highest possible clock speeds. This is for products like AMD's Ryzen desktop chips and not anything Apple would ever use.

1:18:56N3X offers about 5 % higher peak clock speeds in exchange for a, I hope you're sitting down, 250 % increase in leakage. And yes, that's as stupid as it sounds. You didn't mention N3S, which is scheduled to follow N3E by roughly six months and should reach volume production around April 2024, just in time to ramp the A-Series chips for a September iPhone launch. N3S is a higher-density variant of N3E, which sounds like just the ticket if Apple wanted to largely avoid regressions while moving from N3B to the N3E-based family. TSMC has been mum as of late regarding this node, which indicates to me that it may well be another Apple-only node.

1:19:35Various ideas have been floated as to how the density improvements will be implemented, either through library optimizations or the introduction of a higher-density SRAM bit cell. personally i believe the simplest solution for dsmc would be to allow apple to take the four percent optical shrink slated for n3p six months early yeah this is the question for next year we talked about how n3b has some density advantages over n3 but n3 of course will be cheaper uh so on and so forth but when it comes time to make apple's next phone they're like the phone is the one where every little millimeter counts and you really don't want a regression from n3b in terms of density and n3e would be a regression uh so n3s to the rescue supposedly it's more dense and you know and apple's willing to pay for it or whatever so tune in next year when we have another series of n3 things with the letter at the end uh it is interesting they were writing off m3x of like apple's never going to use this you have huge power increase for a tiny clock speed increase if only apple had a case that had a huge amount of excess cooling that's currently going to waste Oh, well.

1:20:34Wow. Of course. We need a different sound effect for the Mac Pro. I think we're running out of esoteric instruments, but we've got to figure something out. All right. And, John, maybe we should get a sound effect for this, too. A new error network changed bug report has emerged. Tell me about this. Yeah. We are well into the error network changed era of our lives. Well, Chrome did just update, so maybe they fixed it. But anyway, this continues to rumble on. someone filed a new bug against chromium open source project you know with the same complaint but this person has has a has a new theory that they are putting forward and you'll have a bug reports don't just say what's happening but they say here's why i think it's happening in some respects that useful in other respects i don't know if this person is right but here's what they have to say uh starting with sonoma this is from the bug report starting with sonoma 14.0 mac west uses a different way of communicating with other apple devices iphones homepods etc and the smart home home kit it regularly creates and tears down uton interfaces i don't know if that's supposed to be micro like a u like micro but it's a utu and uton interfaces by means of the processes remote pairing d and remote d this happens several times a minute as long as a mac is in a network with other apple devices although it can be best reproduced if there is also home kit hubs like homepod and apple tv whenever the tear down of a uton interface happens as can be seen in mac os console logs if in that very moment chrome attempts to load a website it will abort with er network changed as it detects the changing network setup uh in typical frustrating bug reporting fashion although obviously this did get responses so they're what they're you know head and shoulders above apple someone's like well since reproducing this bug requires hardware i'm filing i'm tagging this thing with like hardware dependency basically saying like no one can reproduce this bug unless they have like a bunch of other apple hardware or something I'm like, look, everybody's seeing this.

1:22:23It is a problem in the Chromium engine. And is it because a lot of people happen to have other Apple devices? Like maybe they bring their phone close to their Mac when they use it? Like, so frustrating. Like, I don't know what it's going to take. Again, this bug was originally filed in 2019. So here we are four years later still fighting with them to say, is this a legit issue or just some esoteric thing? It's legit. Chromium should not flip out when interfaces that have nothing to do with it change. Anyway, I don't know if this thing about remote parenting and remote D being new and the U-turned thing, like, is that what's affecting it?

1:22:54My experience has been I got this when I was on Ventura as well. I just got it way more and I thought it was because of Docker, but it might have been because of Sonoma. Either way, Chrome, Chromium, stop flipping out when something about the network change doesn't affect you because you're making your product not work. And people continue to send me screenshots of their Electron apps with their network change topics, mostly Discord because it's a popular application. But anyway, tune in next week when the saga of Err Network change will continue.

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1:24:44It is just a fantastic way for any kind of business. There's so many features there. Online storefronts, obviously fully supported, flexible payment methods, amazing checkout experiences, you get high conversions, analytics, email support, all sorts of stuff. So go to squarespace.com, start a free trial, and you can see how well it works for you. When you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash ATP to get 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. So once again, squarespace.com, start that free trial. When you're ready to sign up, go to squarespace.com slash ATP for 10 % off.

1:25:17Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.

1:25:23Now we should talk about the orders that we have all made over the last week or two. Let's start with everyone's favorite laptop superfan. John, has your MacBook Pro arrived? I didn't. I'm not on a MacBook Pro. You know I didn't R1. We covered this last week. I'm trying to be funny, John. You've got to play in the space with me. You get one episode per joke, and we did it last week. Oh, my God. We've reached our joke quota. We cannot make that joke ever again. That's right. It's in a set. It's in a set case. You'll put it in terms you can understand. Oh, my God. All right. So, Marco, where's your laptop?

1:25:56This is the most frustrating thing ever. It is next to me right now. It is ready to be set up. But because it arrived a few hours before I had to record this podcast, I decided I should not try to set this up now. this is a tremendous amount of self-control that i can assure you i would not have expressed if i were in your shoes you could have just you could just boot it up and had it running next to you although i do have to point out now that you have the box but i'm gonna like transfer everything over like it's sitting on the screen that's saying do you want to transfer your stuff with migration assistant and i'm i'm not ready to click it yet because i have to do this podcast on the computer what you could have done is opened it up uh and then just put it on your desk but not actually powered it up and just touched it with your greasy fingers a bunch to test that but we'll save that for next week but i do have to say like now you have the box next to you you see the cover art where it shows like the the open laptop and it's got that background it's like black with like a bunch of wavy gray lines that leaked yes some there was i always watch these things i always like keep track of the leaks to see if they're true or whatever the box art leaked early on this thing which usually doesn't happen with accol products but someone posted that i'm like that looks like it could be real guess what it was 100 real so kudos to whoever's leaking the packaging although again it's pretty boring packaging yeah but it's so i have not used it enough to know how it how it works as a computer i can tell you i have high hopes based on my previous outgoing m1 max 16 inch macbook pro um but i did get the black um i've taken a break from black over the years because i kind of overdid it uh for a while like i was like wearing a black t-shirt every single day you know for years and years and years i bought everything in black because of course, I was a nerd, and that's, you know, standard issue for nerds.

1:27:36I kind of overdid black, and then when I moved to the beach, I went everything white and colorful. Like, I went the total opposite direction. And I still generally prefer the light and colorful lifestyle for most things, but I decided to get black for this one because I've had silver now for so long that I kind of just wanted something new. And so far, in just looking at it here, it looks pretty good. the one glaring error is that for some reason they still have not made a black power brick yet so the they have a wonderful black magsafe cable with the black end is the magsafe cable actually black or does it match the dark gray of the computer um it is darker i mean it's nighttime right now but i'm in a pretty bright lit office and it looks close enough to black um and and the And even the USB-C end of the MagSafe cable, the end that goes to the brick, that's also now black.

1:28:35Back when they first did colored MagSafe cables, I think for the Air last year, I remember, I think the ends were all white still. The iMac has white ends too, right? I think so, yeah. But anyway, this one, they made the end black, so the whole cable is black. It looks great. And then they still have this bright white power brick. I'm kind of surprised. anyway um i honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they did like a some kind of mid-cycle update where like maybe in six months these all start coming with black power bricks um because it is kind of a glaring thing and and i think they're gonna i think they're gonna sell a lot of this color um because the color looks pretty good um i i still am a little concerned that's not going to age as well not because of fingerprints but because of little minuscule like scratches and rubbing on the edges because underneath this thin black coating is silver aluminum.

1:29:22So any little scratch or dent and any edge wear on the edges and corners, that will show silver probably pretty easily. So I'm a little concerned about that over time, but for the most part, I treat my things pretty well, so I don't expect to see a lot of that. It does look very dark in person. Based on a lot of the reviews and the early press photos and the videos. I was afraid it would be lighter than I wanted it to be for a, quote, black laptop. It is pretty dark. I would consider this a black laptop for all intents and purposes under most lighting conditions that people are actually likely to use it in.

1:29:59Yeah, if you bring it outside, it's going to look closer to a dark gray. That's fine. But in indoor lighting, this thing looks great. It looks nice and dark. It It looks fresh and new, and it's a cool look. I cannot wait to start using it tomorrow. So hopefully I'll have more to report on the actual use of this thing next week. Fingerprints. What's the fingerprint deal? So far, it's been fine. I have not been able to get a fingerprint to show up on it pretty easily, with one exception, the touchpad. Touchpad doesn't have the coating. Yes, the touchpad is coated glass. It's a totally different surface.

1:30:38so the touchpad still does show fingerprints fairly easily just like they always have because it's glass it should be easy to clean them off though yeah and and you know but keep in mind that is also the part that you tend to touch a lot uh so that's something to be aware of um because the fingerprints are a little more visible on the black than they would be on say a light color like the silver um just because darker colors will show them a little bit more easily it's fine other than that it's fine um everything else seems great so far but again i've had it for like two seconds so ask me again next week i forget what youtuber did this but here is the tip because you may if you get one of these and you're like you're you're going to review it or whatever you're like oh i got to test the fingerprint thing you're like so do i just get nervous and make my hands sweaty like how do i get the maximum greasy uh fingerprint to test this and this youtuber came up with the ultimate solution uh i'll give you a chance to guess what it would be do they get like a hot dog and whack it against it or something that's a good guess that's a good guess but you got to think a little bit more a little bit more gross oh grosser than that uh what is the greasiest part of your body your head your scalp i mean that's close you're in the right area you got to go to the t-zone oh no they rub their face on it they rub their nose on it greasy nose grease nose grease is the ultimate weapon in the war against it i would think forehead would be more but okay well but the nose like it sticks out right so they what they put a nose like they rubbed they just rubbed it on their nose you want to get a good old nose line i as as the as the uh producer and owner of copious amounts of nose grease i have to tell you that is the ultimate torture test because it is a constant in a concentrated area so you're gonna see it uh and and this person did the nose swipe on the laptop and yes indeed if you rub your nose in a little line on the space black macbook pro what you'll see is a kind of greasy streak but it does much better than the midnight one if you do that same test on a midnight one it will show up much darker so i think i'm in the jason snell camp which is that this coding is an improvement but it is not magic and also don't rub your nose on your laptop i mean that's not really a common usage pattern that laptops tend to need to accommodate yeah it's only for the apple watch right yes exactly that's exactly and occasionally a phone maybe i don't know um i went to the apple store earlier today knowing full well that we were going to talk about this stuff and i looked at the new macbook pro and oh it looks good it looks real good uh and i flipped if you will i ran back and forth um from one side of the table to the other to the uh space gray macbook air which if i had seen that before i do not recall having seen it before but i went and looked at it and it is blue earth than i would have expected especially you mean the midnight one yes sorry that's correct Yes.

1:33:25It is bluer in the extraordinary lights of an Apple store than I would have expected. I mean, I knew people were saying it was blue, but it was still somewhat surprising to see it. But I played with the Space Black MacBook Pro for a little while. I touched it a lot, of course, and I used the trackpad. I didn't notice that that was more fingerprint-laden than anything else. Not to say you're wrong, Marco, which is I didn't notice it for what it's worth. but then I went over to the MacBook Air put my finger on the area to the left of the trackpad and immediately it was night and day difference between the Air and the MacBook Pro.

1:34:03You could if you really tried see some fingerprints on the MacBook Pro but it is not the sort of thing I would notice generally speaking. I immediately noticed it on the MacBook Air. It stood out like a sore thumb. I didn't even mean that joke but anyways. Oh I'm sorry we're not being funny anymore. My apologies. Nope. No more jokes. Retard quota. No. you got you made that joke on this episode now you just can't make it in the next one i'm gonna need a flow chart uh so anyways so yeah the new laptops they look incredible i didn't do any sort of like tests or anything i just wanted to see what it looked like um for what it's worth i did order one i ordered mine several days later than i presume marco did um and so mine isn't coming in for another two or so weeks which is killing me but it was a problem my own creation well and by the way just to give you some hope mine came in like a week and a half early oh well there you go that'd be nice um so we'll see what happens uh mine is due somewhere between the 20th and 22nd as we sit here now um what i had done i'm curious to hear what marco has done what i had done is i took my laptop that i have now which is the m1 macbook pro 64 gigs uh it's m1 max excuse me 64 gigs four terabytes i looked at my situation decided i don't think i need more RAM, it's extraordinarily unusual for me to bump up to anything that even seems to be a RAM-related issue.

1:35:20I think money, no object, I might have gone 96 gigs, but it just really didn't seem like for my use it was worth it. And instead, I decided, well, I'm starting to feel ever so slightly constrained on four terabytes, so yeah, let's go to eight. Why wouldn't we? I did have someone get me a friends and family discount on this, for the record, so that's why I could justify getting eight terabytes, which I'm super excited for. Since everyone seems to always ask how on God's green earth could you possibly use anything near four terabytes, it turns out when you have a one to one and a half terabyte photo library, that'll do it.

1:35:57And also if you have more than like one Xcode simulator and or version of Xcode on your computer, that will also make this problem bad. And so I decided I'm going to solve this problem at least for the next two to three years. I'm going to do it now, and I'm going to hate my wallet. My wallet's going to hate me, but it will be one fewer thing, one less thing, whatever the right word is, one fewer thing to worry about, and I'm super looking forward to this. And of course I got Space Black, and like I said, 14 inches, and an M3 Max. That's what I bought. Marco, what's sitting next to you? I maxed it out, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

1:36:32I'm a computer professional. This is my computer. That's it. This is my job. This is my life. I got the big one. Speaking of bumping up to 8 terabytes, which you both seem to have done, that, of course, the reason I'm always wary about doing that is because when you do that, A, you know you're going to eventually fill it, and B, that cascades to all of your backups. So now whatever drive you're using to clone, it can't be 4 terabytes anymore. Your backups, your time machine backups. Well, the good thing is they're really cheap. Turns out 8 terabyte SSDs are really cheap. I know, I know. I just like, oh, they're not that cheap, right?

1:37:07compared to apple's pricing they they are that cheap yeah apple's prices are ridiculous but yes but they're they're still expensive so just keep that in mind like i i bumped up to four with uh my mac pro in 2019 and i failed it so but but yeah i had to i had to bump everything else up in my whole chain of backups uh i would love to go to eight uh but with my next computer we'll see what the prices look like at that time apple's prices of course will be exactly the same because why would they ever change like a four terabyte external ssd is like 200 bucks right now like they're they're so inexpensive i bought one well and actually building on that so i am a devout camel camel camel user and i don't remember how i landed on this particular ssd but i long ago and i don't even know why i put an eight terabyte ssd in here but for some reason i did like months ago i put in a samsung 870 qvo uh you know two and a half inch eight terabyte ssd and i swear to you I'm getting like daily, sometimes hourly emails from Camel, Camel, Camel saying, oh, this is below your threshold.

1:38:09Oh, this is below your threshold. Oh, this is below your threshold. You're going to lower your threshold. Yeah, of course. But my point is just that these prices are absolutely coming down. And if you look at the graph of some of these SSDs, I'm sure this isn't true always, but this same drive, I don't know, this is like two or three years ago, I guess it was mid-2020, which admittedly everything was weird, mid-2020. But nevertheless, mid-2020, the same drive,$900. Right now, according to Camel, Camel, Camel,$347. That's 8 terabytes for$347. I assure you, even with a slight discount, and thank you to the very kind person who I will not name that got me said discount, even with the discount, I paid a heck of a lot more than$347 for an extra 8 terabytes or an extra whatever terabytes, 7.5 terabytes.

1:38:57It's only like four times as much, right? Yeah, something like that. I don't even want to think about it. But yeah, so I am super looking forward to my laptop, which again should hopefully be here in a couple of weeks. I don't currently have a buyer for my existing one. I thought I might have had somebody locally that wanted to buy it, but I'm not sure if that's going to work out. So if you're interested in a very, very well loved, and I don't mean it's destroyed, quite the opposite. I just freaking love this computer. If you're interested in an old laptop, let me know. Minus Spoken 4, by the way, which is part of the reason I'm upgrading.

1:39:27we should wrap things up soon but we have to we have to take notice of something that never happens no we don't have time for this we gotta go to ask ATP there's nothing urgent in ask ATP save it for next week because we're too far into the show and it'll still be the top post next week you think don't worry it's not gonna get pushed off the homepage alright well let the record show that John has blogged and I am not allowed I'm not allowed to make jokes, and I'm not allowed to talk about John's blog post. You're learning bad lessons from Merlin now. Apparently what I am allowed to talk about, though, is Ask ATP.

1:40:05And Stephen writes, you often discuss various digital photo management and backup solutions, but what is a good strategy for dealing with physical photos? I have hundreds, or maybe thousands, of 5x7s from when I was a kid, and none of them are digitized, so they're hard to look through, and they're just one flood, fire, or theft away from being gone forever. I know there are services you can ship your photos to to have them digitized. Is this something you would recommend? I have a flatbed scanner, but it will really only scan one picture at a time, and I genuinely do not have the tens or hundreds of hours it would take to scan and crop them all down to reasonable digital photos.

1:40:36Is there a scanner that would work better for this that you would recommend? I have absolutely no advice for this whatsoever. Marco, I'm assuming you probably don't either, and then we'll go to John for the answer. Well, I do a little. So John's going to tell you the right answer, but I'll tell you my answer, which is already, again, what I said earlier. We always think we're like one piece of gear away from solving a problem. And I know I do the same thing. That's why I'm constantly buying crap I don't necessarily need because I think it'll solve some problem in my life because I like buying gear.

1:41:05In this case, yes, there are scanners that can bulk scan photos. But no, you should not be doing this. Use the services. And we use one. I haven't done photos because I'm not really the photo possessor in my family. but we did have some family videos from a million years ago that we digitized with one of these services because back then like i i did i did the thing this was this was back in back when i still had like a windows pc at like this was like maybe mid-2000s i bought a video capture card i tried it and it was horrendous it was it was a disaster um i the audio couldn't sync up right uh the software situation was very difficult the hardware situation was very difficult the quality was not as good as I wanted it to be.

1:41:52And ultimately, like I ended up having these kind of like half ass DVDs at the end of it that were not good. And anyway, later on, we just sent those to a service and they were perfect. It was fine. Like, and so one concern I had that I think is natural is you're going to ship off your like precious family heirloom videos. What if they get lost or damaged in the mail. We decided at that time to take that risk and it was fine. I personally haven't heard of anybody having that happen to them, but maybe to reduce the impact of that kind of risk, maybe what I would do is not send them all in one batch.

1:42:30Slice them up into blocks of, you know, maybe like a handful of different batches, send them separately. You know, send one batch first for service and see how you like the service before you then, you know, send your, you know, hundreds or thousands of pictures to all at once. But this kind of thing is really not worth doing yourself, not only because you don't have the time, but because the places that do this in bulk professionally tend to have better equipment that is better. Not only can you get better quality from it, but it's also usually better set up to handle the realities of people's family photos, you know, like dust and stuff like that.

1:43:09they will do a totally fine job that you won't have to do yourself and it'll take almost no effort it'll take a little bit of money but probably way less money than it would cost to buy your own you know awesome photo scanner and you don't want to be doing this yourself you want to digitize these asap and that's the way to do it yeah so there is a there's a flip side to everything that margo said but first i'll tell you some of my experiences here um i was in a similar situation where uh we for our wedding uh we paid some ungodly amount of money to get the negatives for our wedding photos which was back in the day with film cameras was not a thing most wedding photographers would offer you but so they wanted you to do is buy prints from them it's some of those open and think but anyway if you paid them enough money you could get the negatives so we have the negatives from our wedding um and i wanted to get those photos obviously we have tons of prints and everything too but i wanted to get the wedding photos into digital form and we're faced with the same problem marco just said do i really want to send the one and only uh set of wedding photo negatives in the mail right because there's not that many of them like you're going to do it in in you know with this again with film cameras they didn't give you 7 000 pictures right there was just a small number of pictures most of which were good uh i'm not going to do it in five batches so we did send our negatives through the mail to a company to get digital versions and here's the first problem with doing this no matter how you do it service or yourself uh despite what you may think by looking at apple's ram configurations technology marches on we got our wedding negatives scanned like i don't know in the the late 90s early 2000s right shortly after we were married the technology they had at that time even the very best technology the very best commercial place for scanning negatives uh is not that great compared to what we have today that's always going to be the case whenever you decide to do this uh at some point in the future 10 20 years in the future you're going to look at those things that you either paid for or made yourself and they're going to look like potatoes because you're like why are these so ugly why are they so low resolution why this why that why isn't it not ai super resolution blah blah you know like there's always going to be some way to take a second run at it and you can if you want you can take a second run at it later by doing the same thing spending time or money to deal with it um second thing is paying a service to do it obviously that saves you a lot of time the service will probably have better equipment than you because you're not a photo scanner scanning service and it'll definitely have more expertise but the service won't have a couple things that you have one no one's going to care more about how your photos look than you do including the service right they just they're just doing a job they're going to do a job hopefully do it competently but they're not going to care as much as you do and two if you wanted to chances are very very good that through the application of tremendous amounts of money and time you can purchase better equipment than they have because they're not buying their equipment every single year they bought their equipment some number of years in the past and they're just making money with it.

1:46:16So their equipment is quote unquote, old compared to what you could buy today right now with tons of money. I wouldn't advise doing that. But you can get better results than most places that you pay to scan your photos, if you're willing to spend a lot of money on a thing, and also then spend time not just time scanning the photos, but time learning how to use the equipment you just bought in a way that takes advantage of the expensive equipment you just bought that's a lot of effort but i will say having done it a bunch of different ways i've paid for services to scan things and i've done a bunch of them myself doing it yourself you can get better results but man it's like the reason we tell you to use a service is like okay how many hours are you going to put this i'm still working through a bunch of my photos you know and i'm i'm not even using i i talk myself off the ledge of buying the better equipment than the companies have because it's so much money like what am i gonna do start a business scanning photos no i'm not so i talk myself all that ledge but just using the equipment i have plus the application of modern technology that's good at like denoising and upping resolution and getting rid of scratches and everything the things that i'm making are better than any service i've ever paid for because the ones i paid for were years in the past and now i can do better at home uh the way i do it is i put them on a flatbed scanner because i'm just i'm doing prints i don't have the negative so i'm i put them on a flatbed scanner and i put multiple pictures at once because otherwise i would be here forever and then i manually slice the individual photos out of the scan why because apparently no flatbed this is this is a you know not this is a big market but if someone wanted to make this if you have an app that scans things like you know like the equivalent of image capture have a mode where it slices up all the pictures and straightens them it's just a bunch of rectangles in between them there's empty space and here i am manually doing it right i think um it's kind of amazing that like that that the the process of flatbed scanning for photos like this it seems to have totally stopped advancing around 1998 and just has not gone anywhere since then like this is so this is such an obvious thing and you're right nothing does it well so uh you know david shop in the chat were saying that image capture does it uh also view scan uh report i think a couple of apps report do it let me tell you they do a bad job yep or rather they do a worse job than i do manually i don't know why it's like it's just like we have these amazing ai things and they can't find the edges of photos like they're all rectangles like they should never be trapezoids right just it's there just trust me like learn that they're rectangles and rotate them to 90 degrees they're just they're all rectangles they're all standard sizes or anyway maybe they get confused some of them have rounded corners on the older photos anyway if you do that if you put a bunch of photos on a flatbed scanner scan them all slice them up rotate them fix them up or whatever you can get good results but it takes so long and that's why I went through, I went through like, we have like 20 albums, like numbered albums, so those photos, I think I'm up to like 10 or something, and I just got exhausted, and I'm going to take another run at it later, and maybe it'll come out better then, so my advice is, use a service, because, and no, I don't have any recommendations as a good service, it is hard to find a good service, and if you have, if you have tons of photos, just send one batch to a service, and see how they go, send the photos you don't care about, so if they get lost, you're not sad, mostly because, look, you just won't do it if you have too many photos you just want like even me like with my photos and my i like it's not even that many and i'm still on this multi-year pause because i just burned out on it it's so boring and so tedious and so just mind-numbing let a service do it they're not going to be as good a quality as you could do yourself if you spend a huge amount of money they're not going to care as much as you do and they might lose all your photos but it's still better than the alternative and on the flip side is if you do want to do it like if you have like six photos like your favorite photos do those yourself do them on your plane flatbed scanner use some ai super resolution thing like hand perfectly you know because there's probably certain pictures you care about way more than the others yes you may have albums full of photos but like i mean at this point i'm what my strategy for this going through the new one is i'm not scanning every photo because i would never make it i'm scanning the photos that i like and care about and you can narrow that down further and further to have a whole three inch thick photo album find the five photos that you care about most scan them yourself do it like a ridiculous dpi on your flatbed scanner use your favorite ai program to enhance them you know get rid of dust and scratches denoise them like if you can find the negatives like if you can get it like a a negative scanner or rent one or something like do it for the pictures you care the most about like you know we paid as much as we could for our wedding photos and now they're like the worst looking scans that we have and those came from the negatives why because they were done 20 years ago we still have the negatives so we can take another run at it if we want but anyway uh yeah it's more important to have them in digital and to actually have a good backup system or use marco's thousand-year optical disc or something it's more important to get over that hump because when you know merlin's water leaks into his garage and and uh you know fuses his giant block of foes into one big thing they're gone forever whereas at least you have them digital you can do the thing where you just push the digital data from place to place as it slowly bit rots but it's more resilient than a bunch of photos in a shoebox yeah and most importantly like what john said earlier the reality is you won't do it you'll start doing it maybe if you're lucky you'll start doing it if you're unlucky you'll buy the skin i'm gonna do this this weekend and then life gets in the way and then you know it doesn't happen oh it's not a weekend thing forget oh no it's a year thing yeah no and yeah the reality is like when it comes to this kind of thing look you can do it but first send it to a service and then see what you get back and then decide do i really need to also do this myself because I guarantee you, first of all, you won't.

1:52:00And second of all, you probably won't need to either. Jack Johnson writes, what is the practical significance of the M3 chips supporting AV1 decoding? Is that the future of all streaming video, including Apple TV Plus? How is it better? So my understanding of this, which maybe I might have some details wrong and gentlemen jump in and correct me, but my understanding is that Netflix, YouTube, I believe Facebook all are using AV1, which is a not patent encumbered uh hold on it's not royalty encumbered uh supposedly yes um it's a it's a patent mess like every other codec they're all patent messes everyone thinks it'll be not patent encumbered but the reality of software patents is they hit everything because they shouldn't exist and they're stupid and they're damaging to the entire world like most patents uh but it's a mess And so you can't do anything in software without inadvertently stepping on some dumb software patent.

1:53:00So there are like patent pools and licensing requirements for it, just like everything else. But you're right that the I believe the intention of creating it was to make a a less patent income board or at least, you know, low royalty or no royalty. They got all the people who have the patents to all pool together and agree. We're going to let people use this, right? Well, they think, and then others come up in these weird submarine patents. Yeah, someone else says, well, you didn't realize it, but you violated my patent for moving pictures or whatever the hell patent's on. Yeah. The more important thing is that this is a video codec that is being widely used.

1:53:37And so the reason why we build in hardware support, usually into GPUs or something near GPU, for decoding modern complex video formats is because watching video is a thing that people do a lot on their modern devices and they do it for hours at a time. And so battery life matters a lot. Efficiency matters a lot when watching video. Modern video codecs are very complicated. So if you can use specialized hardware acceleration to speed up a lot of that decoding stuff, you can make a significant increase in efficiency. Almost every H.265, H.264, like almost all these like modern and complicated video formats usually are at least accelerated for decoding on modern device chips.

1:54:22Some of them are accelerated for encoding as well. It's not for AV1 for the M3. It does not include encoding support, but decoding it does. And it's great. And so that's it. Again, this is mainly to improve efficiency and battery life when you're watching netflix and stuff yeah and without this to be clear you could still watch av1 stuff but it would be decoded on the cpu and the energy use is just massively higher so that's why this is significant people were already watching av1 video on their macs they were just burning way more battery to do it so now having dedicated hardware to do this it's just gonna save so much power that's why you get like oh i can watch how long can you watch a video for like 28 hours because because it's all being decoded in a little dedicated part of the chip that does this job.

1:55:08And so now if you watch a lot of video sources that have been using AV1, you will save on battery. So like the impact on you, if you have a desktop and it's plugged in all the time, it's probably not that big a deal. But for laptop folks and soon to be iPad folks, it's going to make a big difference. Christian Healy writes, how do you convince your family members to upgrade to a new device? I just listened to a recent segment about people not wanting to buy or use computers. My partner, a teacher, owns an iPhone 13 and does not want to give it up, even when I offered to pay for it for my tech budget.

1:55:40An iPad Air and an M1 MacBook Air. When it comes to research, writing an email, or other everyday computing tasks, she will sit at her desk with an open MacBook and type away on her phone. I have observed that tendency a lot in my wider non-tech family. They are comfortable with their phones or iPads and don't want to have to use a complicated device that requires updates, typing in passwords, etc. I get where Christian's coming from here. And if their partner is a primarily phone person, it stands to reason that getting them a newer and better phone would be great for them, for the partner. But if the partner doesn't want a new device, then okay.

1:56:18I think I'm failing to see what the harm is there. And I think that's all right. I mean, you can pitch it and you can say, oh, the pictures will be better and it'll be faster and so on and so forth, but, and the battery will be better. But ultimately, if they don't want it, then that's, that's okay. Yeah. I think you, again, going back to, um, some of the problems when nerds like us try to, uh, either tell people about their technology or have some kind of input as to what their technology is. Oftentimes our partners or our family or our friends, um, it's, it's a minefield out there and it's mostly our fault.

1:56:54so you gotta be careful you gotta realize like you know if you gotta think about it from the perspective of other people in your family especially if they're not nerds and you are a nerd they might just not want to mess with stuff because last time or some other time in the past that stuff was messed with it interfered with their life in a negative way maybe there was maybe like you or someone forced them to go through with a change or something that you viewed as an upgrade but that in some way was worse for them And so they didn't view it that way. Maybe, you know, and a lot of people, this could be as simple as like a software update and that it changes something in some way that breaks something for them or makes it worse or they just don't like as much.

1:57:34And it goes all the way up to hardware changes. Like, you know, if you like, you know, if you one time, you know, replaced your partner's laptop that they loved with a new one that was better tech spec wise, but maybe it was a different size or a different shape or it needed different ports or whatever, like that can mess with people's lives and workflows in ways that you know maybe you as the nerd respect the the tech side and you're like well yeah now you need this dongle but it's so much better in this other way and they might to them they might be like i don't care about it being better in that way now you just added a dongle in my life and took away something i loved so i think the the you know the path to happiness here is uh let people in your family be their own people as much as possible.

1:58:18Let them make their own tech decisions. And you can be available to them if they want to ask you questions or advice. But for the most part, let them be their own tech person because they're their own person in life. And let other people make their own tech decisions. And even if they're different decisions than you would make, if it was your gear, that's fine. That's them. And let them decide what they use. You don't necessarily have to wear the same shoes as your partners or family members. You wear different clothes. You might watch different TV shows or listen to different music. They can have different tech choices and priorities.

1:58:57And if someone's not wanting an upgrade yet or if they don't make the same choices you would make, that's not really your problem. Let people live and let people make their own tech decisions. I mean, it's not like your partner is listening to fish. I mean, that's a problem you need to have an intervention about. But this, this is no big deal. I mean, there's nuances to this question. So like the simple answer is how do I cancel a family upgrade? Don't. Like, don't. Why would you do that? Because you're just asking in trouble. But the thing is, at a certain point, that does flip. Like, you know, depending on how close the person is, if it's your spouse and if they're using a super old thing.

1:59:36And if the super old thing is causing them problems because it's old, at a certain point, it is kind of your duty to say, look. I can help you with these problems that you're having and they have to be receptive to the help so you can't there's no way you can like force them to do it if someone's you know if you see their computer super slow and because it's super old and if they're complaining about it and it's bothering them yeah you can say hey just so you know if you ever want to upgrade to a new one the new ones are faster you know and then leave it and you know let them let them deal or the new ones get better battery life or they're smaller or they're lighter or whatever but you're gonna to know this because like if you're the tech nerd like and again the closer they are to you the more likely they're already asking you or complaining to you why does x do y or why is my thing so slow why is it not working or can you make this thing work or whatever and still they may be like i refuse to use your newer thing that you keep offering me but i'm going to complain about the old one i just want it to work like it used to but now it doesn't work as well anymore and then you have to explain it with you my own battery aging and like software updates and like you you'll know when you're already on the hook to deal with this like when is this partially your problem is partially your problem if the person is very close to you and they're already essentially demanding that you fix their tech life or even just like they're demanding that you be the sounding board for their tech complaints at a certain point when you know like when is it going to be time to finally retire the intel mac right you know now it's 10 years from now or whatever they're still using it and it's not working right and the fans are going and it's filled with cat hair and the batteries doesn't work anymore and you have to leave it plugged like as the tech nerd that is already their personal tech support who knows that you can do better it is your duty to help them to guide them to the better life that awaits them but if someone using iphone 13 that's not that old right like let's get into specifics here like i know you think oh why are they using their phone they should be using their macbook an iphone 13 is fine like if they're using an iPhone 4, yes, it's time for you to help them, right?

2:01:32But even then, it depends. How close are you to them? Is it causing them problems or whatever? iPhone 13, just let it lie. You want to be seen as a helpful thing, not as someone who's trying to coerce them into something that both of you end up regretting. They regret it because all of a sudden their world changed and they don't like it. You regret it because now they're mad at you for making their world change. Don't be in that situation. Thanks to our sponsors this week. Squarespace, Collide, and Hatch. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

2:02:09Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental It was accidental Accidental And you 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 And T-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse, it's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So breaking news as we sat down to record tonight. Apparently The Verge has gotten, I think it was David Pierce at The Verge?

2:03:16I hope I had that right. Yes. Yes. David Pierce of the Verge has an exclusive leak, and basically it's the TLDR on Humane's AI pin. So if you recall, this was a couple of Apple, I don't know if you would call them executives, but mucky mucks to some degree, that have gone on to create this company, Humane, which is trying to allegedly rethink mobile devices. and they've been extremely good at talking about how amazing they are and extremely bad at justifying that talk in any way, shape, or form. That's a great way to put it. But here we are. It seems to me that there's a lot of fart smelling going on over there, but who knows?

2:03:57Maybe they're right. I'm not sure. But yeah, so apparently this has been leaked and the short, short version is it's$700. It has integration with OpenAI. you need to have a$24 a month subscription to T-Mobile. Well, I guess they're like an MVNO for T-Mobile in order to get data on it. No screen. It has a couple of batteries. So this actually is clever. I guess the way it's mounted, if you will, or stuck to your clothes is it's a, not a pin, but one of those things where there's a magnet on the device and you slip the other side of the magnet under your shirt or jacket or what have you. It's like a YouTuber level ear mic.

2:04:39Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's how it attaches itself. But I guess it's also inductively powered. I'm not saying that with any particular confidence, but that seems to be what's going on. And so there's a couple of different backs to the pin to the device so that you can have basically a couple of different batteries. I don't know. I have a hard time, like even if even if you can see that there's something wrong with our addiction to phones which okay so far so good I have a hard time thinking of a device that the only way to operate it is with voice or I guess there's some gestures but the primary means of interaction is voice and a speaker like I don't want that in my life Don't forget the cool projected laser onto your hand thing.

2:05:31Oh, that's true. Which, I mean, I can get behind that, I guess. But one of my favorite things about having an Apple Watch is that I never hear my phone. As we've talked about before we got the iPhone 15 or whatever we're on now, 15, I don't need a mute switch because my phones have been muted since 2014, 100 % of the time since 2014 when the Apple Watch came out. So I don't want something that's talking to me. thank you but no freaking thank you like this maybe we'll see what happens like allegedly they're launching tomorrow as we record this uh which will probably be uh a day or two ago by the time you listen to this but i i don't know like as impressive as the tech seems to be this does not seem to be solving a series of problems that i feel like i have and i think you know i want to um you know i don't want to talk a lot about this because they haven't you know we haven't heard their side of the story yet totally you know we haven't heard like what how are they pitching it What are the features?

2:06:29What makes it compelling? And when you look at what The Verge has, it's basically like, look, we have pricing information. $700 and it needs a$24 a month service that uses T-Mobile as a backend. Okay, that's fine. If this is compelling, the pricing is not a problem. If this is a compelling product, this will find its market even with those prices. um i just this this product seems to be intended to replace a lot of phone interaction and maybe and you know we can look and you brought up the apple watch the apple watch also replaces a lot of phone interaction it does that by providing a lot of other value and if the humane ai pin does that um and it provides a lot of other value in some other way maybe with the ai based features or whatever, maybe there's a market for that.

2:07:21I don't see it. I think if there is a world in which this product makes sense, I don't live in that world. And maybe there is one and it's just not that big, or maybe I'm the weird one. I wouldn't rule out all those possibilities. But first of all, as I always say, don't bet against the smartphone. people love their smartphones. The smartphone is awesome. And it will continue to be awesome for lots of good reasons, both technical and physical and just habitual. It will continue to be awesome for most people for the foreseeable future. Nothing is coming along to replace a smartphone anytime soon.

2:08:08And it might never happen based on like, you know, we have to hold things in our hands and our hands are a certain size and batteries are a certain size and things like. So the smartphone general idea and form factor, I think, are going to be with us for a very long time. But there is space in the market for other devices. That's, again, the Apple Watch. Great example. It's another mobile device that can optionally have cellular service and can do some of the same things as the AI pin, the human AI pin. So clearly there is space in the market for other things, some of which cost hundreds of dollars and have monthly service fees.

2:08:46So there is potential here. The reason we're paying so much attention to this particular startup is, as Casey mentioned, there's a lot of ex-Apple talent working here or having worked here. And that's, you know, when a bunch of Apple people go do something on the side, it's usually worth paying attention to. Oftentimes those become very good or at least very interesting startups or products. so I think it is worthy of the of the of the attention of like hey you know what whatever they release I'm gonna pay attention to it I'm gonna look at I'm gonna I'm gonna look you know I'm gonna watch their whatever their event is if they have a keynote or a video or whatever I'm gonna watch it but I do not see the motivation for this device most of the things that I would that that this purports to do a phone would be way better at now again you could say the same thing about the apple watch but most people when they're using their apple watch are also using their phone like and the apple watch is providing lots of other benefits like the health monitoring like notifications like the workouts like there's so much more in the watch that that's a reason to buy it and i would also suggest i bet most watches sold are not cellular and just use the phone's connection and therefore have no monthly fees and cost less less than this by a good amount so it's kind of a different category also just physically speaking i don't usually wear clothes where it would make sense for me to clip on a lapel button like this so far like you know all the the demos we've seen and the press photo that the verge got their hands on it's people wearing jackets like okay like suit jackets okay look a lot of people wear suits every day i don't think that's necessarily the common case anymore and there's a whole lot of people who don't wear suit jackets every day.

2:10:37So again, I mean, how big is the market? I don't know. The fact that the Verge says it comes with two batteries, that's not a good sign for battery life. If a device ships with two batteries, that's never a good thing. That tells you right there, battery life, maybe not very good. And there's features built in, there's a camera-based feature as well is that the right angle for the camera maybe like there's so many like physical questions i have about this device it's gonna be i think uh not fashionable if i had to guess um how how it'll be received by the world fashion wise i think it's not going to succeed fashionably so i i just think there's a lot working against it you know yeah the pricing is gonna is gonna work against it to some degree um even being having t-mobile be their network t-mobile sucks like it t-mobile is cheaper in many cases and that's why they have good business because a lot of people want that and if you happen to be in an area where t-mobile has good service that's great for you uh that's not most people most people t-mobile does not have great service in their area so they like they have a lot working against them here and for this product and i i don't see it succeeding but again we haven't heard their version of the story yet so time will tell i think it has some interesting ideas behind it this could be you know a product like in in a movie like a like a fake product in a movie or a concept that would be shown at a trade show and you'd never hear about it again i i don't i don't see this going well i don't think i need to hear their story i don't think their story is going to change anything about this product uh the thing i think about is like what um like what is their innovation what are they bringing to the party here um they're using ai stuff that they didn't make right or at least an invent or whatever or that is mostly commonplace right so it is it is a gateway into uh you know large language model stuff that is ubiquitous these days right various companies have it they're all working out they're improving all the time but that's not what this company is doing they're just using stuff that other people did uh hardware they have a thing that you can talk into that will relay that information to one of these large language models so are they bringing innovation on the hardware front can they make a small low-powered device that's able to listen to you really well and translate what you say into text and feed it to a large language model and give you the response and do all that stuff once you start looking at that part of the innovation equation like oh this is what they're doing this is this is you know this is the value add they're bringing um it looks a lot like they're you know making a phone essentially like oh you need a processor and an operating system and it has to know about like who you are and all your contacts and communication and networking and the internet and it's like all right well so you're just making a tiny screenless phone are you going to be better at that than apple probably not um so to me it looks a lot like taking a bunch of things that already exist batteries microphones large language models hardware and software uh and putting them together into this device and so it's like how could they how could how could they be bringing any value when all the pieces they're making out of their essentially off the shelf even though yes they're making their own custom hardware and even by off the shelf it's like all these things have existed before uh and a good counter example of that is the iphone you know cellular phones have existed before even ones with screens and operating systems and web browsers have existed and it's like this what are you bringing here great you know you already had a web browser on the mac or whatever like that's not new and phones with screens that's not new and smartphones that's not new uh but there was something to the combination oh well well, I've browsed the web before and I've had a phone before, but have you ever browsed the web from a phone?

2:14:18It's like, oh, you're just combining two things that already existed. People already have phones. People have already browsed the web. What's the point? It's like, oh, actually, there is something that is sort of more than the sum of its part when you can do a quote unquote real web browsing from a phone. That was one of the hugest wins we've ever seen in a product that is essentially cobbling together existing things. And they combine to form this amazing thing that you didn't even know that you wanted, right? that's what i'm sure this company is hoping they have on their hands like yeah we didn't make the large language models we didn't make the operating system and our hardware is not great although apple had that going for them that their hardware actually was pretty great from from the start but let me just tell you when you combine them in this way and clip them to your lapel it's going to be an iphone like moment and no story they can tell is going to change that of course they're going to say that but what is going to happen is people are going to try this and it's either going to be like the first time that you realize you could browse the web while waiting online for the grocery store or have like a twitter app like experience or whatever or some it's going to be either be like that or it's not i'm voting for not right now but i'm not willing to entirely discount this concept because there are many cases where combining a bunch of off the shelf shelf stuff in a new way uh really does break through and sometimes there really is just one or two companies with this type of idea and like no one else is doing it because they all think it's dumb and someone does it and shows the entire world it's not dumb and you never thought about the lapel pin thing but actually that's the next big thing and you know like like mark was saying in the way of the apple watch not in the way that it's going to wipe the slate clean and it will all be wearing lapel pins instead of having smartphones right but in the way of like this is a cool thing that's actually useful and you might use it i don't think it's a cool thing i don't think it's going to be useful i think uh i think it's like uh you know it's more like a combination of alexa and uh and a watch right which like we kind of already have with the apple watch but a little bit dumber because it's siri um i don't want to talk to something i don't care if it's on my lapel or not uh i don't want to project anything onto my hand uh i don't think this is the answer um i applaud the idea of trying some new approaches but i always wonder with companies like this that surely smart people who are in the company some if this isn't if this isn't going to be a big hit some people who work there already know this isn't going to be it because they've been using it they've been trying it they've been working on it yes when you're when you're working on it you can get the tunnel vision and you think this but this has got to be hit i love it so much and i put so much hard work into it but in their heart of hearts if you really know you get that sense of like yeah this isn't it right in the same way that i imagine the people who are working the iphone got the sense this is it because they were the first people who got to have a cell phone that you could you know you do real web browsing from and use apps and stuff like that uh and if they tried to explain it they're like my nokia phone does that i don't know what the heck you're talking about like no you don't understand this this even like it's like the nokia phone with the top but it's and you know and they know because they're using it i think the people who work at this company some of them probably know in their heart of hearts this isn't it or maybe they're too early kind of like you know the newton or uh or uh what is it called uh magic cap not magic cap general magic right many companies have had ideas that turned out to essentially be the right idea but it wasn't time yet and most charitably this looks like one of those less charitably this looks like an idea that is never going to have time because it's a bad idea