611: RAM Christmas

27:07The system has been exercised pretty well by all the people who have bought gift memberships in non-holiday season. But it is the perfect holiday gift. As for all the rest of the stuff, we have a lineup of M4 shirts. m4 m4 pro and m4 max we made these shirts before these chips were even announced we were speculating that they would probably make an m4 pro and m4 max based on the rumors and guess what they did so success um there are no chips on the back of these shirts it's just the logos on the front partially because for two-thirds of them we had no idea what the chips would look like but in general we've been avoiding the chips in the back to lower costs and because some people don't like them there so there you go you know what the shirts look like if you've seen the m1 two or three shirts.

27:45It's M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. There is no M4 Ultra shirt or anything like that, because we don't know what they're going to make with that. If they make a really cool M4 Ultra, M4 Extreme, you can bet we'll have shirts. But right now, only shirts for stuff that Apple has announced slash shipped. M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. In all these things, the new thing that we have is all these shirts are available in t-shirt, sweatshirt, tank top, long sleeve t-shirt. like we're just we're really trying to make as many varieties as possible so if you're like it's the winter why do we want a t-shirt get a sweatshirt get a long sleeve uh t-shirt uh many options of course we have the m4 monochrome which is a cheaper version that doesn't have the rainbow stripes it just has the all white m4 thing same deal and variable in t-shirts and sweatshirts and yes even tank tops even though it's the winter um then we have all our atp logo merch for the first time we have added pullover hoodies.

28:36They are shown separately on the store page, you know, as opposed to a zip hoodie. This is a pullover hoodie, no zipper, you have to pull it over yourself. With the rainbow ATP logo or the white ATP logo, those are actually just new styles available on those respective shirts, like the plain old ATP logo shirt is available in t-shirt, long sleeve, sweatshirt, and now pullover hoodie and same for the other one. But we've shown them separately on the store page, just so you know, so don't get confused by that. ATP Pixels is back. We've only sold this shirt once and people seem to like it. It's the ATP logo rendered in tiny pixels, which was extremely difficult to figure out how to print.

29:10But it seems like the last run of these shirts worked out well and people like them. So it's back. And guess what? Now it's available on sweatshirt as well. Again, another tricky printing problem. But I saw the proofs of how it came out with our test print and it seems to look as good as the t-shirts did. So ATP pixels is back if you want that. And like I said, we've got our plain ATP logo stuff available. We've still got the zip hoodie if you want the zip hoodie, which is amazing. That is still available with the embroidered rainbow ATP logo on it. The ATP polo is there with the new gray color.

29:37ATP mugs are back. It is the cobalt one, the white mug with sort of cobalt blue logo on it. The mugs are the only item on this entire sale that are limited quantity because we had to pre-buy them. So if you want a mug, order now because they may sell out. And when they sell out, that's it. And then finally, we have the ATP hat with the embroidered logo on it. That's all our holiday stuff. Yeah, so there you go. And again, remember those gift certificates. it's if people say i never know what to buy you uh even if you're only vaguely interested in atp membership send the link say hey buy me this thing it's a thing i wouldn't buy for them myself but it'll be cool to check out the umpteen member specials all the overtime segments you missed the bootleg the ad-free version of the show all that good stuff yeah you can uh listen to us come to the near end of atp on the most recent tier list and so uh you wonder what we're talking about with that episode there's not just one tier list episode there are many of them so you could go back in time to the beginning and see how it is when we all still liked each other i kid i kid but uh but no seriously uh please check out atp.fm store again up until the very end of november 17th new york time uh so please go ahead and put in your orders uh i don't know this for sure this is just my gut but i think generally speaking cotton bureau will ship in roughly the order they receive these things so you should you know get all of these if you're an american Anyway, you should get these comfortably before the Christmas holiday.

31:00However, if you wanted to be quick on the trigger, so to speak, you might get it a little before everyone else. You could be the first person tooting at us saying, hey, look at my new M4 shirt. And again, to reiterate, new pullover hoodies. The backs of all the M4 shirts are blank, which I was very on board with the chip designs at the beginning. And now I think I'm on team blank back. And so this was both because we didn't know what to put on the back and also because it worked out well. So, yeah. So, please check it out, atp.fm.com. All right. As per the rules, even though there wasn't a single keynote, there was enough action going on over the last three days that we are skipping follow-up.

31:42I have been told by the person in my ear that we need to skip follow-up, and so we are going to jump into the last three days of activity. For context, it is almost exactly noon our time on Wednesday the 30th. And we're going to get there in a second. And the MacBook Pro announcement just happened less than an hour ago. So when we get to the MacBook Pro stuff, excuse me, we might be a little off on some of the details. Please give us grace because this all just happened. But what didn't just happen, or not to the same context, is what happened on Monday. And on Monday, we got a new iMac, several new iMacs even.

32:17We've got a ton of new iMacs insofar as there are seven vibrant colors. And they really do look good from what I can tell. So there's green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. And we've got an M4. And this was the first time the M4 was in a computer. Before I move on to the colors, if that list of colors sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking it's exactly the same colors as the iMac was available in before. And I think the names are the same, but the actual colors are different. If you look at the new colors along with the old ones, you will see that generally what they've done is made the backs less dark.

32:51because it used to be there was like a really dark saturated color on the back and then a much paler color on the front. Now the backs are not as dark as they were. Some of the colors have shifted in tone, like the green is much more green and less teal. The pink on the back no longer looks red. It looks pink on the back. In general, I think they've improved all the colors. I kind of like the old colors, like they were sort of very dramatic and, you know, very saturated versus very under saturated. Now they're more evened out. So if you wanted a pink iMac and you're like, but they sold a pink one.

33:21That pink one from the back totally looked red. Now this thing looks pink from all angles. The green looks greenier. The yellow looks yellower. I think I endorsed the new colors. Every single one of the colors, I believe, except for silver is new. So check them out the next time you're in an Apple store. Indeed. So yeah, so we've got all these new colors and we've got more information about the M4. And I think this is the first time it was in a computer computer, not an iPad. So these all come in the iMac with a 10 core CPU. There's four performance cores and six efficiency cores. And so there's various flavors of iMac, or you could build them in various ways.

33:58There's the two-port iMac, which has an eight-core CPU and an eight-core GPU. It comes with 16 gigs of RAM. And this is the first time that I'm aware of that an Apple computer, or certainly first time in many, many years, that an Apple computer starts with 16 gigs of RAM, which means what, John? It's not. yeah look at the title of the graph we always have to qualify so people say what about this model this is this is a david shobbs graph of apple consumer all-in-one base ram very specific and you know the imac the consumer all-in-one thing uh and that chart is the depressing chart that seems to go up and up and up until you get to around whatever that is uh 2012-ish when it stops going up forever and just stays flat until 2024 now the imac comes with 16 gigs base ram and By the way, that name, I'm not sure if it's the official name, but it's iMac parentheses M4 comma two ports.

34:51I love when they name them with ports on them. And it does, in fact, have two ports, as we'll get to in a second. Your choices for RAM are 16, which is the base RAM, and 24. It is finally safe, entirely safe, to recommend every person in your life that it's okay to get the base amount of RAM in an iMac. We will see this trend continue. Say it together, everyone. Thank you, Apple Intelligence. Yeah, seriously. I was going to say, finally. the only thing that has dragged Apple. I mean, presumably they would have increased it eventually anyway. It's not going to be 2275 or whatever, and they're still shipping 8 gigs of RAM.

35:23They would have increased it eventually, but I think it got a nudge from Apple Intelligence. So hallelujah, 16 gigs of RAM as base, even on the cheapest, the cheapest of cheap, the basest of basiest model iMac, 16 gigs of RAM. That's very good. I'm very, very happy about that. I know we all are. Time for some bad news. ssds yes guess what they start at still 256 i mean at least they're so close to actual you know nvme ssd pricing right oh yeah the prices are insane and ridiculous uh sometimes being like what like six times or eight times the cost of this actual hardware that all the margin is buried in the storage now the ram upgrades by the way are still insane which is why it's so important for 16 to be the base because you're like oh what if it's not the base i'll just i'll just bump it up.

36:12You'll bump it up for astronomically inflated prices, right? So now you don't have to do that anymore. You can get someone a 16 gig. It's the base model, right? You don't have to pay the extra$200 or whatever it is, right? SSDs. Now, arguably, SSDs is not as bad. People can use cloud storage. Not everybody needs a lot of space. RAM is harder to get around because it's kind of like, you know, the programs you own dictate the RAM, but the amount of stuff you have dictates the SSD. You can also attach external disks. There's more workarounds. You can't expand the ram you can expand the storage i get it but 250 this is the new thing this is what happens with any kind of if you've ever like optimized a program and you found a bottleneck you're like this is the slowest part of my program and i improved it by 10 times guess what now there's a new bottleneck there's always the next thing that is the worst part of your program or your specs or whatever and on the iMac the worst thing about it has now moved from the base ram to the base ssd previously this was second place for the worst thing but now it's strong first place 256 gigs base ssd it's absurd in this day and age they should offer more they don't upgrading to 512 or one terabyte costs way too much money uh remember that you can attach external drives to this if you really need to so it's not as bad as the ram situation but it's bad but just fyi your choices on the base model two port m4 are 256 512 and one terabyte and we continue on a gigabit ethernet is a 30 option and it's still in the uh power brick right yeah like that's why it's an option because the port is not on the computer that 30 option you're just getting like a power brick with ethernet cord on which i still think is kind of interesting and clever and it's a side effect of them making the thing too thin see our long ago discussion of the original uh m1 or was it m1 yeah original m1 iMac uh yeah i believe so uh so yeah the you can get gigabit ethernet for 30 bucks there's a new 12 megapixel center stage camera with support for desk view uh i don't have in front of me what the old camera was but apparently it was not that yeah well so desk view is the thing where it can it's like a wide the whole point is it's center stage camera saying it's super wide angle like the one in the mac studio it being super wide angle they have a way where it can show you what is on the desk in front of the imac by taking the super wide angle and like de-warping it so that's cool and center stage means it will follow you 12 megapixel i can't i think that's an increase in resolution i don't know if it's exactly the same camera it's in the mac studio is it better than the ones in the mac studio is it worse i would assume it's probably the same um it's confusing because everyone says the old camera was 1080 but this one is 12 megapixel but they also say this one does 1080 video so anyway it's it's a very wide angle camera when you say mac studio you mean the studio display yes sorry studio display that is what i mean sorry all right uh continuing along there are two thunderbolt or usb4 ports uh this means the the eight core iMac can support one external display with up to 6k resolution at 60 hertz the 10 core iMac can do up to two external displays with up to 6k resolution at 60 hertz or one external display with up to 8k resolution at 60 hertz and those core counts were the core counts for the gpu so here's a case where uh if you pick a uh an un a binned or unbinned soc you look at the number of cores in the gpu and that dictates what you can run as an external display so the binned one has an eight core gpu the unbinned one has a 10-core GPU, and the 10-core GPU lets you run more, better external displays.

39:36And then, apparently, Apple's website briefly said that the 10-core could also support one external display with up to 8K resolution at 120Hz. And John has provided a YouTube link with a timestamp that we'll put in the show notes. But the website was updated very shortly after that to say, no, just kidding, 60Hz. Whoopsie-diff. We'll see some little bit more confusion about the display capabilities, but I I believe that was an accidental over-specification for this particular model. So we also get Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, and that is no different than the prior model, I don't think. Even if it's not different, Wi-Fi 6E is not the latest Wi-Fi standard.

40:18Wi-Fi 7 is. And there is a Bluetooth 5.4. I'm not sure if it's out yet. But, you know, so this is the lowest-end model. It's kind of disappointing to see them bumping a bunch of other stuff but not going to Wi-Fi 7, because especially for these type of things where people don't buy new computers that frequently if you're getting like a base iMac or something. But yeah, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, those specs may sound familiar. So even though the SoC is massively updated, the wireless stuff is not. We are brought to you this episode by 1Password Extended Access Management. Quick question. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps?

40:58Yeah, I didn't think so. So my next question is, how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has an answer to this question, extended access management. 1Password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device because it solves the kind of problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. Check it out at 1Password.com slash ATP. That's 1Password.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to 1Password Extended Access Management for sponsoring our show.

41:36Possibly my favorite news of this week, and this is not hyperbole, is we finally have a new USB-C powered keyboard and mouse and trackpad. And I am deeply excited about this. I'm going to tell a story for the listeners. You two are not allowed to comment. About a week or two ago, I might have spilled a whole bunch of orange-flavored water onto my existing keyboard and mouse. Excuse me, no commentary. Where was this drink at the time? Excuse me. I'm not talking to you. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to listeners. Oh, my God. And the worst part of that moment was realizing I'm going to need to go buy a new keyboard, and I'm going to have to get a new lightning keyboard.

42:15This was, again, like two weeks ago. So thankfully, the water ingress protection on the keyboard, the big keyboard with the inverted T and Touch ID was excellent. And so I'm still using it right now. And it's not sticky either, which is a double bonus. But yeah, I promised myself I wouldn't tell you two that. So that's why I'm just talking to the listeners. But yeah, now if I do it again, then I can buy and I'm thinking about doing it again. So I could buy a USB-C keyboard and mouse, which is excellent news. However, the internet was very perturbed. John, why was the internet perturbed? The turtle is still harpooned.

42:50We are referring to the Apple Magic Mouse, which has its charging port on the bottom. So you have to turn it over on its little hard turtle back. And as it wobbles around, you get a little wire in there to charge it and you can't use it while it's charging. That remains true. Basically what they did with the peripherals, kind of like they just changed the lighting port to USB-C, but not entirely. And we'll get to that in a second. But yeah, if you're wondering if they redesigned the mouse to be different or to move the charging port they did not so get used to that one of the things that i saw in the little specs is the way apple refers to their cheaper keyboard that doesn't have touch id it does have a key where the touch id thing is in the upper right hand corner but apple calls it quote magic keyboard with lock key and i was like is that new what the hell is a lock key but they just mean the key that's in the upper right that has a lock icon on it that it presumably locks your computer that drives people uh you know a little bit batty because they accidentally hit it when they reach for the delete key and it locks their screen so you can use like carabiner or something to disable that key but anyway the cheap keyboard still has no touch id in it it just has a lock key we have some semi-breaking news that i didn't have time to uh confirm but it looks legit from jamie cream x's uh pointing out that there is a change to the keyboard that that casey spilled his drink into he's like oh i could just buy another one well if you did buy another one if you bought the apple extended keyboard with numeric keypad whatever the one with the inverted T arrow keys.

44:11Apparently the new USB-C models put the little globe icon, the FN globe icon in the lower left. And that took about half the space that used to be used by the control key. So if you're used to having the Apple extended keyboard and reaching all the way down to the lower left corner with your pinky to hit the very big double wide control key, guess what? It's not there anymore. Now there's a single wide control key and all the way in the corner is not the control key. It's the globe thing. The theory is that that's because the globe key is used for like the window tiling and everything like that so that's not great because i really like the double y control key in the corner there but i also like the apple keyboard so i will just be very careful and not spill drinks into mine which is very unlikely to happen because my drink is actually not on a level such that water spilled could get to my keyboard because my water is below the level of my keyboards unless the water leaps out of my glass and jumps up onto my keyboard i don't have that problem but casey who seemingly cannot take the advice of his uh olders and betters continues You should put his drink in a place where it can spill onto his keyboard.

45:08And so you should be lucky that it still works, because I assume you would also frown upon the globe key hogging the lower left corner. In principle, yes. I certainly am not keen on that. And when I saw this fly by just a few minutes before recording, I was like, wait, what? I think this is something I could probably get used to, but it's certainly not something I'm seeking out. However, the window tiling thing I do really enjoy. and actually this is an aside, but I watched a video from a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson, and I will try to remember to put this one in the show notes, but he was going through some interesting macOS system tweaks that you can make or something along those lines.

45:50I forget exactly what the shtick of the video was. Here we go. Hidden pro tips in macOS Sequoia. And I've never been more excited to go into system preferences because one of the things, there were two keys to window tiling that Quinn brought to my attention, neither of which I knew were available. First of all, if you're dragging a window around and I believe it's you hold the option key, then instead of just dragging it willy-nilly, it will try to slot it into one of those like buckets, like half the screen, quarter of the screen, et cetera, rather than just free form dragging your window around, which was an incredible improvement in my quality of life.

46:25And then the other thing was, it's been driving me bananas that there's a gap in between the windows and around the outside of the windows when you tile them? Like, why? No, I don't need, they don't need to be cushioned. They're fine. They can touch each other. It's not like cars where there's no touching. That's like my favorite feature of this feature that I don't use. Love the margins. I wish they were adjustable, but it's fine. I don't use this feature, so it's not a big deal, but it's good that the options there because Casey, apparently you hate the margins. I hate the margins. And so you can go somewhere in system preferences.

46:53I don't recall exactly where it is, but again, we'll put a link to the video in the show notes where you can see how do you turn off the margins, which I've done, and it's amazing. We mentioned this on the very show that you are a co-host of, so it's interesting that you had to wait for Quinn's video to learn this. Oh, Jesus. All right, before we leave the topic of the USB peripherals, because it's got a lot of play, and I think a lot of the people who criticize, especially the Magic Mouse, don't see many people who use the Magic Mouse. I use one as my regular mouse, and I have used it for, geez, 10 years?

47:26I mean, it's been out for a long time, you know, because I used to use the AA powered version, which didn't have the charging port problem. It had different problems. That's true. You know, so anyway, I've used this mouse for a long time as my only mouse. You know, the only other mice I use in my life are on gaming PCs because it's a terrible gaming mouse. But otherwise, you know, it's this is this is it. And I really don't like the charging port location being on the bottom. it's awful but it's not that bad like there are ways they can improve it like i wish the low battery notice would come on a little earlier like some of the reviews have pointed out like i think it comes on at something like less than 10 charge um and i think if it would come on at you know 25 charge that would be a lot better or you know something like that you know just a little you know a little a little more aggressive on the reminder so that i don't as easily forget to charge it uh but i think most of the people who who choose not to use the magic mouse are choosing not to because they want a bigger mouse not because of the charging port location i do think it would be better if it was in a better location that would allow usage of the mouse during it like the top center which i think would be you know the way that where every other top center that's your choice yeah like on the front you know the front center i mean oh you don't mean like the top like the harpoon the back of the turtle no i mean like where i mean where every wire you mean our regular mouse cord yes i mean where every wired mouse connects its wire and by the way the reason it doesn't connect there is because it wouldn't look as pretty so this is absolutely a case of form over function well it would change the height of the front and so and i i've been thinking like it wouldn't change you you'd cut out a little notch for it it'd be exactly the same height well i've been thinking like if they actually did that they would have to probably make it a two button really a two button mouse like because i i think the way they would have to do that it would it would dramatically increase the front height to fit the port there so it could be done i mean obviously we look at every other mouse that does it so obviously it could be done but it would be a non-trivial change to the shape and it would probably force the mouse to become something like what everyone actually says they want like a taller because i think the whole thing would have to get taller it's you just need a usbc for it on the front you could not change the profile at all except for one little like like horizontal bump out for the usbc it would be ugly and that's why they didn't do it I don't think you'd have to change the profile at all, nor would you have to make it an actual split two button.

49:49It's just that the one big smooth top button would now have a little flattened part in the front where the thing plugs in. And if you don't want it to be raised at all, you'd cut a notch into the front of it, like a little like toe into it or whatever. Like, I don't think the charging port, the reason people are snarking about it is because how it's still the same place it was, which is not optimal. But here's the thing. They didn't redesign their peripherals, right? It's just like with the AirPods Max or any of the other things. this is not a redesign they just added usbc right if they had totally redesigned their mouse and the new mouse whatever the new mouse looked like and the new mouse also had the charging port at the very bottom then i would be very upset but i'm not too upset about this because they didn't redesign it it's the same mouse as it was before they just changed the port right and you can be upset that they didn't redesign it but like good luck because they do not redesign their peripherals very often right it's a long time between designs of these things um so yeah i'm not particularly upset about it because I don't use that mouse and it's not a redesign, right?

50:46Presumably when they do a redesign someday, who knows when at this point, when they do a redesign, then it will be time to say, what have they learned about the charging port location, right? And have they decided to change this from a very low profile mouse to a taller one or whatever? And I'm not sure everybody wants a taller one. Some people want a taller one. Some people like the low profile one. I don't know what the ratio is or whatever, but that is one of the compromises of the low profile one they've always done. It is selecting beautiful form over this one aspect of function, which may or may not bother you at all.

51:16Most of the people, like you said, Marco, who don't use it, it's because of the shape of the mouse. That has nothing to do with the charging port. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm disappointed in this update for sure. It will continue to be the mouse that I use because honestly, frankly, what I am hooked on in this mouse is the scrolling because you can swipe your finger on the top and it scrolls like Apple's trackpads do. That to me is the reason I use it. I'm not choosing a stupid battery design. I'm not choosing a low shape. I'm choosing that. And as far as I know, no other mice on the market are able to do that.

51:47So, you know, as long as that continues to be the case, I'm going to keep using this mouse because the scrolling to me is everything. And so, you know, and I'm fine with the rest of it. But yeah, it could have been made a lot better and they just didn't do it. And, you know, sometimes Apple does these kind of like, you know, cynical updates almost where it's like, we so don't care about this product, but we have some reason we need to update it, that we're going to do just the absolute bare minimum. You see also the iPad mini update. We're going to do the absolute bare minimum here. And just like, it's like the Unix touch command, just touch the product.

52:25Change as little as possible. Like we're new. We updated it. USB-C, that's what you guys wanted, right? You know, crickets. You know, that's... I don't know if they're on a schedule for updating their peripherals or their monitors for that matter. They're definitely not. In practice, it's just many, many, many, many years between. And it's just like it's not the time for them to update the peripherals. But they do want to keep them from being embarrassingly out of date with Lightning. So they just swap the port. When it comes time for them to make new peripherals at some point in the future, be careful what you wish for.

52:56Maybe they'll have a totally new idea about what they want to do. And the thing that you loved about it, like the touch scrolling, will be gone. and by the way third parties could do touch scrolling just like apple does they just choose not to because the market for such a mouse i guess manufacturers think it would be very small because that's not what people want so they want 15 actual physical buttons all over the thing or they want gamer mice or what i don't you know the whole peripheral market is is weird but so there could be third parties that do a mouse that has a a great touch service on it in fact a better one because if you look at the touch services inside the magic mouse it's not that sophisticated or high resolution so they could even improve that but apparently no one feels like doing it so it's the apple mouse or nothing and someday when they change it uh who knows maybe you'll need to hoard these little sushi mice because the new ones will be not to your liking i mean given that they for years came with desktop max and everyone has like a box of it in their closet somewhere who's ever bought a desktop mac and not wanted to use it i've got some totally unopened ones in my attic right like i'm sure there will never be a time where these are going to be hard to find if you want one well maybe the batteries will be dead and won't accept the charge well then those double a battery ones would be really compelling gotta bring those back no i mean and the thing is like they there is so much more they could have done to this mouse to update it like for instance maybe move to a better bluetooth standard you know the modern bluetooth standards are even more you know efficient and faster and everything maybe add multi-device pairing that would be great i would love multi-mac pairing on them on the magic mouse and they used to have that by the way i think the original magic keyboards had multi-mac pairing but the modern ones do not which is like a regression which is not great haptic haptic feedback in the mouse might be cool sample rate resolution of the sensor stuff that they haven't really been aggressive in updating yet but it's not but like i said it's apparently not time for that mouse to be updated someday they'll do it but the day is not today so whatever you get this is not a redesign that being said it was it was very tempting for me to buy a new trackpad and mouse because the only they are the only thing left on my desk that I routinely use that uses lightning and so I have this dumb little lightning adapter that sits on top of my desk all the time just to charge up these keyboards this trackpad and mouse that I have here and I'm like I don't want to spend $250 to get rid of this one tiny thing off my desk but god is it tempting I had the exact same thought and you don't have to worry about the weird globe key because you don't use that keyboard right I had the exact same thought and I could get black ones which at the time I bought these there were no black externals that had Touch ID, and now I could.

55:28Very tempted. Holidays are coming, y 'all. Holidays are coming. I'm just saying. That's another thing, by the way, about the iMacs. Of course, all the iMacs, like they always have, come with color match peripherals. I don't know if the color match peripherals have changed color. I assume they have to match the new colors. Like the new green mouse looks different than the old green mouse, but you get a color match cords, color match mouse, and keyboard with whatever color of iMac you pick, and you cannot buy those colored peripherals separately. So if you just have a random Mac and you're like, I would love to have a pink keyboard, tough luck.

55:56Apparently Apple will not sell you one, which makes me wonder if your keyboard breaks and you like, you know, need want to get a new one or like it has a failure and you want to get a new one under warranty. Presumably Apple has the ability to get you a new pink keyboard for your pink iMac and they will do so. But it's weird that they don't sell them. Maybe it's just an inventory issue and it'd be tough to keep all those colors in stock. But be aware you cannot buy one of the colorful ones of any of these things. Well, I mean, first of all, Apple does typically have a mechanism by which if you give them the serial number of the Mac and you say, I broke my keyboard, please sell me a new one.

56:31They will usually sell you one through some kind. But, you know, you have to go to the genius people in the store and have them work it out for you and stuff. But there is a mechanism for that usually. And second of all, as mentioned, a lot of people who buy these computers that come with these peripherals don't end up using those peripherals. there is a healthy volume usually on ebay of any color you want of iMac keyboard mouse and trackpad so if you if you ever want like you know the orange mouse just go to ebay you can usually find it for about list price it's kind of weird though they don't have them as like for example just for mail order like just i mean maybe if there's a weight because stock whatever but they i feel like they should just be something that you can either have some limited amount of stock on the shelf in an apple store or just buy it through the apple store online but instead of going to eBay or having to either legitimately or pretend you have one of the colored iMacs.

57:17One thing I'm a little sad about is they did not, and as, you know, same story with the Harpoon Turtle, they didn't change the design of the smaller Touch ID keyboard. I have the, what is it, 100-whatever-key, big keyboard that has a numeric keypad on it, and I did that expressly because I wanted the inverted T arrow buttons. And I don't really need the numeric keypad. And I do use it since it's here, but I would much prefer not to have it if I could. But I'm not going back to the weirdo, you know, up down half height buttons on the little keyboard. And they didn't redesign that either. And that bums me out.

57:55But here we are. Going back a half step, Marco, do you, I'm sure we've talked about this at some point in the past. Hi, John. Marco, So do you ever use a Magic trackpad at your desk? Like, is that just not your cup of tea? He just said he did like three minutes ago. Oh, I missed that. I'm sorry. I totally missed. It's not even in a previous episode. Fair enough. Wow, did we get sidetracked? I think that's in no small part my fault. So coming back to the actual news. Yeah, I know, right? The iMac, I think we've covered everything except the starting price is still$1 ,500. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, we already did the keyboard stuff.

58:29All right. Let me take this. you tell the story yeah right returning to the imac with their weird parenthesized names this is the imac parentheses m4 comma four ports uh what is different when you get the one with four ports obviously it has four parts we'll get to that in a second but if you get the the four port one uh you get a 10 core cpu and a 10 core gpu as opposed to the bin diversions of them and you get a ram that goes up to 32 gigs you can get 16 24 or 32 which is a thing you don't get an option for on the two-port version your ssd still starts at 256 even though this is the fancy iMac and it's 256 512 one terabyte and now you can get a two terabyte option gigabit internet is standard on the power brick thingy on the four-port version there's an option for nanotexture glass i don't know if this is the same nanotexture as the ipad or the same nanotexture as the xdr because those are two different nanotexture processes i don't know which one this is but it's a$200 option and you get a polishing cloth.

59:29You obviously get four ports, four Thunderbolt four ports. On the M3 and earlier versions, it was two Thunderbolt and two USB. So like on the old iMacs with four ports, there was two Thunderbolt and two USB. Now all four ports are Thunderbolt. That's because the M4 has four Thunderbolt controllers versus two in the M3 and earlier. And obviously all these things have headphone jacks on the side because it doesn't fit because on the back because it's too skinny. You get a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID. And now Casey seems to want to talk about pricing. Indeed. Wow. So the M4 with two ports is$1 ,300.

1:00:08And the M4, did I say M2? My goodness. The iMac with two ports, whatever I just said. The iMac with two ports is$1 ,300. The iMac with four ports is$1 ,500. That's the starting price, obviously. As soon as you touch anything having to do with an option, the price balloons very rapidly and makes you really question what it is you're doing. But thankfully, you don't have to touch that RAM setting anymore unless you really want it. We've gone through this too many times, so I don't want to go over it again, but the prices for their upgrades, that's where all the margin is. Yeah, very much so. But the good news is there's target...

1:00:41Oh, no, no, no, never mind. There's no target display mode. I was wrong. Yeah, I mean, so this is target display mode for people who don't remember. Back in the day, Apple would give these all-in-one Macs with a big screen. It's all-in-one iMacs with a big screen. and they would say, hey, if you ever don't want to use this as a computer anymore, you can use it as a monitor because it's got a really big monitor that's built into it. So if the Mac part of it becomes like old and just like too slow for you or whatever, but the monitor still looks as good as it did the day you bought it, now you can just buy like a Mac mini or something, connect it to your iMac and use the iMac as a monitor.

1:01:11Because sometimes, especially in the days of the 5K iMac, those monitors were really good. And Apple took away that feature years and years ago, and everyone keeps waiting for it to come back on the all-in-ones. This is not that time. um it's getting more, it's getting kind of like less excusable not to have this feature because these days these macs have thunderbolt ports on the back of them that is what is used to drive monitors it's not like the case where oh you couldn't even run the 5k because it only works internally with the tool display controllers and there's no external bus no there's external buses now that could drive this monitor this is only a 24 inch monitor it's got a thunderbolt 4 port on the back of it like it's it's really small and thin it doesn't take up a lot of room it would be a perfect monitor and the other angle is the environment uh it's creating more e-waste when an iMac gets old and it's a little bit old and slow or maybe you bought it with only eight gigs of RAM because you got the base model and now it's kind of chugging and it can't do Apple intelligence instead of like throwing it out or trying to give it away to someone who might want an old junky computer you could keep using it keep it in your house you could prevent you from buying another display because hey you've already got a really nice display and it would prevent you from throwing it out reducing e-waste now in the grand scheme I think so few iMacs are purchased that it probably doesn't really matter but the lack of target display mode is getting worse and not better as the iMac becomes more and more like a monitor, has even better potential ports to drive it, and as Apple's environmental efforts get more and more urgent as 2030 approaches.

1:02:41And so speaking of environment, the new iMac with M4 is designed with the environment in mind, with 100 % recycled aluminum in the stand and 100 % recycled gold plating, tin soldering, and copper in multiple printed circuit boards. iMac meets Apple's high standards for energy efficiency and is free of mercury, brominated, flame retardants, and PVC. New this year, the packaging of iMac is entirely fiber-based, bringing Apple closer to its goal to remove plastic from its packaging by 2025. You can pre-order it right now and could as of Monday. It ships sometime next week, I think Friday. I don't know if that's 100 % confirmed, but I believe it's Friday.

1:03:16I'm not sure why they didn't say that in the videos and whatnot, but here we are. So the iMac, before we move on from the next thing, the iMac has always the colored iMacs have always been really good computers uh they remain really good computers if you bought an m3 iMac the week before this one came out as long as you got it with enough RAM you're fine these this is a good update they updated like when they update the the lowest end in a product line it's hard to get too mad they're like well it should have wi-fi 7 and has wi-fi 6e and you know like it's it's a low-end product you want you want it to be inexpensive and honestly nobody needs or cares about the particular wi-fi standard on just a basic iMac the fact that they come with 16 gigs of ram makes us potentially the best iMac update in years the m4 is the m3 was already more than fast enough to do what most people are going to do with the iMac the m4 is incredibly fast reminder of this this chip came in the ipad the single core performance of the m4 is ridiculously good that's what matters for a lot of this sort of plain boring single core single task type operations that someone's going to do like rendering web pages or just doing individual stuff that's not like massively parallel the colors are great i think this is with a really good iMac upgrade and i know i complained about the ssd that's just because that's the new bottleneck that is the thing we'll be complaining about from now on but everything else i think they've pretty much done an amazing job on uh if you if you want to buy an all-one computer for someone in your life show them a bunch of iMacs let them pick the color they'll love it.

1:04:42Yeah, it's a great overall computer. And even though John mentioned that the spec up pricing is really rough, especially when you look at the storage pricing, dear God. But that being said, if you were the kind of person who would spec up the RAM before, it's effectively a price drop now because the base has gone from 8 to 16. So if you were otherwise upgrading from 8 to 16, that was$200 before. So now it's kind of like having a$200 price drop on your total configuration if you were going to get anything more than 8 gigs of RAM. So, you know, overall, like, yeah, you know, you win some, you lose some with Apple.

1:05:18I wouldn't expect the storage to be anywhere close to what it costs on the market because it never is, even though I would expect it to get cheaper over time, Apple. But regardless, we didn't win anything on the storage this time, but we did make a pretty big gain on the RAM. We were sponsored this episode by Tip Top. There's a new kind of sustainable payment method that lets you pay for the stuff you want by trading in things you already own. It's called Tip Top. You can think of it kind of like Apple's trade-in program, but for any product on other websites. So the way it works is incredibly easy.

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1:07:28by five inches, I believe. It is also taller than it used to be, which is not a bad thing. And in fact, we'll talk about why it's a good thing, but it's two inches high, five inches wide, five inches deep. The M2 Mac Mini, by comparison, was a little bit less than an inch and a half high, so half an inch shorter, but it was seven and three quarters inches wide and deep. So that makes a difference of 0.59 inches in the height dimension and 2.75 inches in the width and depth dimension. Yeah, it ends up being something like two-thirds the volume total of the old one, which is actually not as much minier than the rumors were suggesting.

1:08:08You know, people were expecting like an Apple TV size thing. It's nowhere near that. It is not that much smaller, but it is noticeably smaller. Yeah. And speaking of the Apple TV, that is 1.3 inches high as compared to 2 and 3.66 inches wide and deep as compared to 5. So the Apple TV is just a little bit less than three quarters of an inch squatter and about one and a third inches less wide and less deep. The M4 Mac Mini is one and a half pounds for the M4 or interestingly, one point six pounds for the M4 Pro. The M2 Mac Mini, by comparison, was two point six to two point eight pounds. So a difference of one point one to one point two pounds.

1:08:48The Apple TV, meanwhile, is under half a pound no matter how you slice it. So about a third is heavy. so as for the case like yeah the rumors of it being apple tv it's pretty squarely between the apple tv and the old mac mini and remember the old mac mini those that case dimension has lasted 14 years all the way back to ones that had an optical drive slit in it to know how old that case is so it's long in the tooth but what they've essentially made is it is not a like mac apple tv it is a very small mac studio proportion wise appearance wise it looks like they took a mac studio and hit it with a shrink ray uh and now it is smaller and so that is clearly like the proportions they're going for and i think it looks good uh it would have been cool if it came in like space black or something and then it would have looked even more like an apple tv but uh thumbs up for the case design uh having not seen one in person i think they did something smart by by it enhances the family resemblance of the mac family because before the mac mini was kind of like the odd one out it's like none of the other macs look anything like this but now it just looks like a small Mac studio which is cool.

1:09:48Yeah, the only thing I would say about the physical design of it is if using it in server racks or server environments is as common as some people might think or assume, I actually have no idea how common that is, but if it's common to use them as servers this design probably is worse on a few fronts for that for instance, the old design would fit into one rack unit, one U of height and this one does not but you mean flat though but everyone anywhere who racks the old mac minis put them on their side though didn't they i think but yeah so we'll see anyway there you could get a one u mount that held like you know two of them next to each other or something like that if you didn't need that many of them um so you know that there's obviously you know custom things for having a whole bunch of them but if you only have like one or two um the old design is probably better for that um the new design also because they moved the power button to the back left bottom of it that's going to make it fairly difficult to reach uh if it's mounted in in pretty much anywhere you got to be able to fit your finger in there and about that power button right so that's that's where it is it is literally on the bottom in the corner um i think i understand why they put it there and i think it has mostly to do with cost um the mac studio that this is the shrunken version of has one of those like uh practical joke uh hidden power buttons that no one can ever find unless you already know where it is uh it's on like the back left corner and it's so carefully precisely machined into the case with just a slight indent that is actually hard to find even by feel even when you know where it is uh but that that buttons like that add cost first of all you got to punch a hole in the case and uh i don't know if this is in the notes but like this new mac minis case is made by some like uh less expensive extruding process that saves aluminum for environmental reasons right if you had to take all these cases and incredibly precisely machine out a little thing for the power button and then incredibly precisely machine the aluminum power button that's going to go in that place that adds a lot of cost to what is supposed to be an expensive computer right so if you're not going to do it like the mac studio your other choice is okay it could just be on the front back or sides uh not unlike is that the one on the mac studio it's on like the curve or it's like it's not just like straight on circle it's weird you could do it on the sides and make it a straight on circle which would be a little bit less expensive but you're still machining a hole in the case you're still machining the aluminum button or whatever well hold on though that's exactly how the old mac mini did it though right but this is cheaper and why is it cheaper because on the bottom it's a hole in plastic which is way cheaper and it's a plastic button i think it's plastic if that's if that's black aluminum then it's not for price reasons but i'm assuming the bottom the bottom is plastic at the very least it's straight on and yeah so that's that's where they put the power button i think the power button on the mac studio to you is also kind of annoying as someone who has to reach under my desk to get it there.

1:12:38Power button on the front would be uglier, but a little bit more functional. But my guess is that for a computer this small, their saving costs, and also if you look at the like, I mean, you'll see it in the iFixit teardown, but even look at Apple's like internals showing what is inside this case. It's pretty tightly packed in there. You could get a power button pretty much on any surface if you wanted to, but the bottom is probably the most convenient. So as someone who never shuts down their computers, I don't really care about this, but you're right marco that the rack especially if they're on their sides in the rack or even if especially if they're on the they're not on their sides getting to that power button requires you to either like pull the things out so you can get at them or if they're on their sides to leave a big enough gap for your finger to go in yeah or even if you know if it's in like a cabinet somewhere like in part of your tv console or you know just anywhere that you might have one of these things not on a desk it's going to be really tough to get to that power button in a lot of those cases by the way it's real time follow-up thanks to zm nox in the chat uh the old mac mini the power button was on a curved surface but it was that that black plastic section of the back so it was curved in plastic not in metal yeah i mean like it's a smaller computer like this is a compromise uh and i kind of understand why that again this is not this is their cheapest standalone like non-monitor desktop thing so i give them a lot of pass on this um the airflow for this case according to apple's little diagram it's all through the bottom right so there's no vents on the front, on the back, on the top, on any place like that.

1:14:01It's just that circular vent on the bottom. And they are, according to Apple's diagrams, it pulls cold air in from the front of the circle, swirls it around going across all the internals and pushes hot air out of the back of the circle. So you could still kind of use it in a rack on its side with the cold in the front and the hot in the back. But it's weird that it's just a single circular thing. They do the same design they do with the Apple TV, where it's got the logic board. And then on top of the logic board is the analog circuit board for the power supply and everything. So the heat from that hopefully rises away from the logic board, right?

1:14:35But if you have it outside, I guess that doesn't really help. Anyway, that's their cooling design. I hope it's quiet. The Apple TVs that had a fan were so quiet that I literally could not hear them with my old man ears. I believe the new Apple TV does not actually have a fan, which is why thermal throttles all the time. This one does have a fan and hopefully it is quiet. I do worry a little bit about this airflow design. I think it is very likely to be quiet because there are no openings on the sides or tops. So I think it's very likely to be quiet. What I worry about is its thermal cooling capacity.

1:15:06I think it's very likely not to have a huge amount of cooling capacity. And this, I think, is more likely to throttle than a more open air design like the Mac Studio is. I mean, considering what this comes with, which we'll get to the processors in a second, this is very much like take what's in our lower end laptops, not our very highest end laptop, and put it in a case that's way thicker than a laptop, you think that would give them enough room to do cooling that's at least as good as a laptop. And I hope that's what they achieved. Obviously, if they decided, well, this is supposed to be a performance-oriented computer, they would just do what performance-oriented computers do, which is you put a bunch of holes in the front to take the air in and a bunch of holes in the back to push the hot air out and have everything go straight through the case.

1:15:46That is not what they did. That's not what this computer is for. I really do hope, though, that it has at least as good cooling as the MacBook Pros that have these same chips in them because it's so much thicker than them. Obviously, those ones have more room to spread out stuff like the power supply. Well, actually, they don't need to do with that because it's not a power brick, but they have more room to spread stuff out. So we'll see how these work. But considering how they've done with the Apple TV and all the past Mac minis and the low power of the M series chips, I'm pretty optimistic that unless they do like a M1 Mac Studio style fan that makes some obnoxious noise, that this one should be fine i bet you could get it to thermal throttle but probably i'm hoping no more than you could get the equivalent macbook pro's thermal throttle all right so it has an m4 10 core cpu 10 core gpu or no bin ones yep no bin ones just the that one or you can get you can opt into the m4 pro and i believe this was the debut of the m4 pro uh 273 gigabits per gigabits not bytes right gigabytes gigabytes my thank you for the clarification yep you're right no you're right I messed up.

1:16:52273 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth, which is 75 % higher than the M3 Pro. My word, the M3 Pro had 150 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. That is bananas. And Apple will emphasize to you, if you mention this at all to them, that's really good for AI, they will tell you. In general, the increasing memory bandwidth is good for, well, it's good for everything. But like, remember that these things use sort of unified memory for the GPU and the CPU. In the olden days at Apple where things were split, very often the video card would have tremendous bandwidth to its video memory, and then the CPU would have lower bandwidth and narrower buses to its main memory.

1:17:33But combining them both here means that there is a good reason to keep cranking up that memory bandwidth, even if only for the GPU stuff. But guess what? That's the exact same bus that the CPU gets its memory as well. So this is a rising tide that races all boats. And it is a big jump over the M3 Pro, which was no slouch. So thumbs up on this. Yeah, yeah. So the CPU situation for the M4 Pro Mac Mini, there's a 14-core CPU. And then I guess you can option a binned version. Is that right? That's 12-core? 12-core binned. Then there's 10 performance cores on the 14-core CPU and four efficiency cores.

1:18:13or, you know, again, there's eight performance cores on the BIN version, four efficiency cores. The M3 Pro has a 120, is that right? That's a 12 core CPU. What is it? Goodbye, San Diego. It's a 12 core CPU, six performance cores, six efficiency cores on the M3. Remember the M3 Pro was a weird one because they had done something different. The 6-6 split between performance and efficiency was more efficiency cores and it was kind of a strange arrangement the m3 pro was very different from like the predecessors used to be they would just take the max chip and like remove some stuff from it but the m3 pro was totally its own chip and they went with six and six and apparently for whatever reasons they decided that arrangement was not what they want to keep going with so now the the m4 pro is 10 and four back to sort of very heavily biased towards performance right the six efficiency cores sacrificing some of those transistors for more efficiency cores and fewer performance cores that's not what they want to do with the M4 Pro.

1:19:12So the M4 Pro memory bandwidth is hugely increased and it is a 10-4 arrangement instead of 6-6. Yep. And then the 20-core GPU or the 16-core for the BIN version, that is up from 18 cores and 14 cores in the M3 Pro. Then 16-core neural engine, same as the M3 Pro. So yeah, there's a lot going on here. And this is a lot for a little baby computer. Yeah, they keep putting in these little spec things next to the cpu and i can't tell if they're giving new information about like the the width of the instruction decode or improved branch prediction or larger reorder buffers i don't know if that's new information now uh most for the most part it doesn't matter as we saw like i said with the m4 when we're benchmarking that in the ipad just incredible single core performance numbers presumably that same m4 in a mac mini will do even better because i'm guessing it's clock tire and has better cooling on it and the m4 pro we don't have any benchmarks uh at this point although probably they're being published as we're talking right now this chip looks good uh if you if you thought the m3 pro is like ah it's not as good as the m2 and m1 pro it's kind of like wimpy or whatever i think they have reversed that and now the m4 pro is really earning that uh pro suffix yeah it really does jump up quite a bit and and i would even you know jumping ahead a little bit if you look at the what the max is that was released today um i think the pro stands up pretty well against it and is substantially cheaper which we'll get to in a little bit but But yeah.

1:20:41John, what's the SSD situation? Grim. It's grim. It's the Mac Mini. It's their lowest end desktop. And it starts at 256 gig SSD, which you may think, well, maybe people don't need a lot of storage. Who cares what it starts at? You care because getting anything bigger costs so much money. It just costs so much. It's ridiculous. So I really wish they had bumped the base, but they didn't. Your choices are 256, 512, 1 terabyte, 2 terabyte, 4 terabyte, and 8 terabyte. And if you get an 8 terabyte, you might as well like buy a new car with your mac mini it's ridiculous yeah the pricing of the ssd options has not changed it's still like a 2200 option to go eight terabytes on most of which is not how much i mean like just look at the one terabyte like it's just it's it's insane i don't the pricing is insane so ssd is bad situation hopefully you can get by with the base remember unlike ram with the ssd you do have the option to just buy an external ssd connected with to a thunderbolt port and expand your storage that way it is slightly less convenient but at least you have that option uh so it's good that the ram situation is ta-da 16 base on all of the mac minis which is great thumbs up love it your choices are 16 24 32 48 and 64 a wide range of options all which are priced insanely except for the base 16 which should be enough for most uses for a mac mini yeah this the mac mini has never been a good value when you spec it up just like many apple computers um you know it the value gets eroded very quickly once you spec up anything but and this that's why the base model is so important again just like the other computers that used to start at eight that now start at 16 it's almost like getting a 200 price drop if you were going to upgrade to 16 anyway so bravo for the 16 thumbs down on the storage you know we'll get to that some other time thank you apple intelligence indeed uh the port situation on the front like the Mac Studio.

1:22:33There are two USB-C ports. They are USB 3 or 10 gigabits per second. There's a headphone port and a power indicator light. On the back, you've got power, Ethernet, HDMI, and three Thunderbolt ports. But what flavor of Thunderbolt, you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. On the M4 Mac Mini, there are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, which are 40 gigabits per second symmetrical send-receive. On the M4 Pro, we have the introduction in Apple world of the Thunderbolt 5 port, which allows for 80, that's twice as much, gigabits per second symmetrical send or receive. Or you can optionally, or your devices can optionally ask for 120 gigabits per second send out of the computer and 40 gigabits per second receive back into the computer.

1:23:19John, why would one want to do this? To drive displays at insane resolutions at insane refresh rates, which gets back to the thing of like, all right, now we've got a Mac with Thunderbolt 5. What kind of display could this thing drive? And Apple, I think, is being conservative in its specs based on like what macOS supports. But 120 gigabits per second with display screen compression could drive a very huge single display at very high refresh rates. It's awesome to see that even if you can't technically do it right now because macOS doesn't support it. Thunderbolt 5 is amazing. Thunderbolt 1, 2, 3, 4.

1:23:54We've kind of been stuck at 4 gigabits per second. 3 to 4 didn't change the speed at all. 5 doubles the speed. 5 more than doubles the speed because you can go asymmetrical for displays. Thunderbolt 5 is amazing. I love to see it on the Mac mini. It's a reason to get the one with the M4 Pro in it. I know it's weird that they tie the SoC to Thunderbolt 5. I think it actually has to do with the chip. Remember, the M4 is great because it's got four Thunderbolt controllers, but there are four Thunderbolt 4 controllers. The M4 Pro supports Thunderbolt 5, as you'll see with the rest of the computers a lot of the with all the soc things what the computer has is very often dictated by what's in the soc so m4 pro supports thunderbolt 5 it's great it's very future-proof compared to thunderbolt 4 highly endorsed yeah yeah that's really cool and you get gigabit ethernet oh i'm skipping something i'm sorry if you wanted a thunderbolt 5 cable how would you get how would you go about doing that john you can get it from apple and i'm shocked to learn that it looks like it costs the same amount as the thunderbolt 4 cables did it's the 70 because they have chips and the connectors and everything and it's pretty thick and beefy looking but yeah you can get a one meter long thunderbolt 5 cable for 70 bucks from apple or cheaper elsewhere thunderbolt 5 is awesome i am very excited for it that's really not bad yeah i mean it's a lot of money but given what's in it wasn't there the was it mythbusters that went through this or or uh no it was just adam savage that went through this like a year ago and looked at okay why is the apple cable so expensive and it turns out for good reason who knew they're active cables other people sell them as well but active cable means there's chips in the connectors that are doing stuff as opposed to just being metal wires that connect to conductors yeah and it's not like it's the same as a five dollar usb cable like any high high data rate thunderbolt cable that's one meter long is going to be probably at least 30 to 40 bucks so for the apple version to be 70 really is not that crazy for you know the apple standard markups and quality of differences yep uh networking uh gigabit ethernet is standard you can get 10 gigabit ethernet for 100 bucks which is cool for like the mini the really cheap desktop that you even have that option and by the way when you get 10 gig ethernet you also get uh 2.55 like you get the standards that are in between there as well so you can make you know to mark his early point for a huge amount of money you can make an amazing very small server m4 pro 10 gigabit ethernet assuming the cooling is good if you spend the money on the huge amount of storage this is a very small premium package for a very high price that has just incredible performance and connectivity so uh despite the fact that the minis as always are just way more expensive than you you think they should be they are great little computers yep uh the rest of the networking though same story as before wi-fi 6e bluetooth 5.3 still rhymes yeah oh well all right display support.

1:26:39So you've got HDMI video output, which supports one display with up to 8K resolution at 60 Hertz or 4K resolution at 240 Hertz. That's applicable to both the M4 and the M4 Pro. For the M4 and only the M4, you can do DisplayPort 1.4 over USB-C. That means up to three displays, two displays up to 6K resolution at 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt, and one display with up 5k resolution at 60 hertz over thunderbolt or uh uh 4k resolution at 60 hertz over hdmi that didn't sound right to me did i do that right does that is that right to you this is the way they word these things it's so like what they're trying to say is like what combinations of displays you can use this is copy pasted literally from apple's website and it's so freaking confusing i wish they would just like have a diagram of like here are things that we can support but i think you read it right it's just a very confusing sentence uh the point is uh with what you're hearing here uh It's DisplayPort 1.4, which dictates a lot of what kind of output formats are supported.

1:27:36And as we noted before with the iMac, where they said 120 hertz at 8K, that stat is also not present here. You see stuff like with the next one with two displays. They say you can do this giant sentence. One display with up to 5K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz or 4K resolution at 240 hertz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. right so you can get up to 240 hertz on 4k but if you're looking for 8k 120 or 8k 240 or whatever that's not happening on the m41 it's display port 1.4 only it's thunderbolt 4 only uh that's not what you're getting with the m4 which is fine for the the base model thing and again it's great that the m4 supports this because uh the m4 if you look at the controller will also eventually save us from the macbook air that uh only supports one external display the m4 solves that problem by having more display drivers and the mac mini shows that it's capable of that all right and then the m4 pro has display port 2.1 instead of 1.4 that's very important because if you go look at the wikipedia page for display port 2.1 you say what resolutions and refresh rates does display port 2.1 support it's a big expansion in capability do these macs support all the potential capabilities it seems like the answer is no but this is future proofing i think it's just an os issue at this point you You get a Mac with Thunderbolt 5 and it supports DisplayPort 2.1.

1:28:53Presumably, if not today, then eventually you will have access to all of the resolutions and refresh rates that are supported by the hardware. Yeah. So that means up to three displays with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. You can also do up to two displays, one at 6K at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt and one with up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz or 4K resolution at 240 hertz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. it's pretty cool i've only apple sold some external monitors that refresh at the higher 60 hertz imagine that imagine that uh and then tell me about dependencies john yeah this is you know so what i didn't go through every possible configuration here but like when you go to apple's configurators sometimes features are tied to particular models for a reason you can't get thunderbolt 5 on an m4 it doesn't support it it's only in the m4 pro so that makes sense but there get the m4 mac mini your maximum is 32 gigs of ram and your maximum is two terabytes of ssd just because apple says so right there's the ram maybe that's a limitation based on the soc on which ones they want to manufacture uh but the the ssd doesn't make any sense and the m4 pro imagine this it starts at 24 gigabytes of ram can you imagine can you imagine how is this even happening it starts at 20 the base ram on the m4 pro model is 24 gigs that's like it's just it's ram christmas around here it's ridiculous unfortunately the only other choices are 48 and 64 they skip over 32 so if you had your heart set on 32 to try to save some money on the ridiculous ram upgrades tough luck you got to go all the way up to 48 or 64 and it also starts at 512 gigs ssd wow i mean obviously the m4 pro mac mini starts to get real expensive real fast but base ram is higher and base ssd is higher still small but higher so thumbs up to that loving the the mac mini uh base bumps they didn't have to do that they could have started the m4 pro at 16 they could have started in 256 i don't know why they did this it doesn't make any sense to me what's going on over there at apple but thumbs up all right and double thumbs up to environment stuff because this is the first carbon neutral mac 100 of the expected customer use electricity use is matched with low carbon electricity 100 of manufacturing electricity for the mac mini is sourced from renewable energy 50 or more of the shipping is non-air uh more than 50 of it is recycled content uh of the stuff that's 100 recycled there's aluminum in the enclosure and thermal thermal module stage there's copper in the multiple pcbs multiple thermal module components ac inlet prongs and multiple small parts there's 100 recycled gold in the plating of all the apple designed pcbs There's tin in the solder of multiple PCBs.

1:31:39Rare earth elements in all magnets are all 100 % recycled. And zinc in the AC inlet prongs and multiple small parts. 80 % recycled steel in multiple components. 20 % or more recycled plastic in 25 components. 100 % fiber-based packaging. 42 % recycled content in the fiber packaging. And no established final assembly sites generate waste sent to a landfill as part of Apple's Zero Waste program. That is extremely freaking cool. no sarcasm yeah this is what it takes to make a carbon neutral mac like they've been doing carbon neutral products they've been moving up the scale you're doing a watch how much energy is that going to use over its life or whatever cranking up to a mac it's a small mac to start but this is the first carbon neutral mac and they've had to do a lot to make that happen and to review with their carbon neutral claims what they're saying is this thing will be carbon neutral over the expected lifetime of you using it that means all the electricity it uses for all the time it's plugged in your in your house in addition to all the manufacturing and everything um obviously they're buying carbon offsets to do some of this and carbon offsets are not the greatest thing in the world but you can look at the effort they're putting in they are trying they are and because they've got that 2030 goal of carbon neutrality and everything and so here's the first mac and it's the mac mini so you know they're they continue to make progress steady progress with every new product release and this one notably doesn't have a screens i wonder like if they are including the power usage of the expected monitor situation i i can't imagine they would because i don't know what monitor you're going to use with it so yeah i mean it's easy it's it's the easiest one to do it doesn't come with a screen it doesn't even come with a keyboard and a mouse it's just the mac mini and a power plug but you know this is this is big progress and and you know you're right carbon offside credits are not you know amazing um but that's why apple is also doing a lot of other stuff like i i believe their carbon offside credits are only a small part of what they're doing with making things carbon neutral.

1:33:27They're actually going and buying renewable energy resources and stuff like that. It's very different. So overall, this is a great thing. They're continuing to move this forward, and this matters a lot, and it's hard. So I'm glad they're doing it. We are sponsored this episode by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with incredible hand-picked gifts from Uncommon Goods. They make your holiday shopping stress-free by scouring the globe for original, handmade, and absolutely remarkable things for everyone on your list. These gifts spark joy, wonder, and delight, and that's exactly what I wanted feeling.

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1:35:41Wednesday which is today and as we said a little while ago it was like two, three hours ago something like that we got a very brief a little bit of information about the existing MacBook Airs which was a bit unexpected but it's RAM Christmas it's RAM Christmas baby you could see this writing on the wall once the week started M2 and M3 MacBook Airs now start at 16 gigs RAM heck yeah alright that's huge when is the last time Apple has done this take an existing Macs that they've been selling and change literally anything about them ever let alone saying hey we but the m2 and the m3 to the two past models of macbook airs that they continue to sell they went back and they said you know what drop the 8 gig model make the 16 gig model i think it's the same price as the 8 gig model once i didn't get a chance to look yeah everything starts at the same prices again it's like a 200 price drop if you were going to upgrade the RAM.

1:36:31It's just now you get that. You get the 16 gigs for the base price. You still get 256 storage, but you get the 16 gigs. That's great. And especially for a low-end product, a low-end, high-volume product like the MacBook Air, that is significant. And that is very impactful. So I'm very happy to see that. And the Tim Cook way of like, let's just keep selling a product until people don't want to buy it anymore. Like they're still selling the M2 MacBook Air in case you didn't know. But I think in this case, For a MacBook Air class machine, like I'm still using an M1 and MacBook Air, right? The M2 MacBook Air is so good as a low-end laptop.

1:37:09Like the M2 is not like holding it back because it's too slow or it's missing some features. Like it's fine. The only thing that might be holding back an M2 is, oh, you didn't buy it with enough RAM and an Apple intelligence is choking your Mac or whatever. And so then bumping it and continuing to sell it is very Tim Cook is like, we should keep selling that M2 one. It's cheap for us to manufacture. We've been making it for years. People like it. the only thing that's bad about it is the ssd storage and the ram and they fixed the ram situation a 16 gig m2 macbook air is an amazing machine for someone to take off to school or use for their work you could do full-fledged xcode development on it no problem like don't think like oh you can't do high-end things you can just a little bit slower right but it will do all of them i can tell you like i so my my like you know lightweight travel laptop is an m2 macbook air and with 16 gigs of RAM, I have been able to do all of, you know, overcast development.

1:38:00I can do it on there. I don't, you know, when I'm at my big laptop, I'd rather use that because it's faster, but if I'm like, you know, on a trip or something, I can and do use the M2 MacBook Air, no problem. It is, you know, again, it's slower, but it's fast enough and I can get a lot of work done on it and certainly if I was, you know, on a budget trying to get started with iOS development, no question I would say, get the MacBook Air. It's great and you can totally do it. I just I just can't believe this. Like the Apple intelligence. That must be the Apple intelligence. Ram fairy just wandering through Apple with its magic wand saying even Max, we've been selling for years.

1:38:33You get more RAM, too, and no increase in price. Everybody gets more RAM. And like I know like on the iOS devices, it's like they need a minimum of they need minimum of eight gigs of RAM. And you're like, well, why can't Mac OS use minimum of eight gigs of RAM? The RAM situation on Mac OS is very different than on iOS and iPad OS. There is no out of memory killer wandering around hitting things with hammers and killing them off or whatever. There is a potentially aggressive use of swap, although they added that to, I believe, iPadOS and later releases. But anyway, there's it's the situation on the Macs is more of a free for all.

1:39:06Applications are free to use more RAM than they are allowed to use on those other more constrained platforms. That's why Macs probably need more than eight when an iPad only, quote unquote, needs eight. Obviously, all these systems you could use more. but yeah because like you might have 19 windows on your screen on the mac and if those windows are on your screen the os cannot just kill those apps in the background because they are there you are using them and also on the mac you have things like chrome chrome has a new lower memory mode for its tab things i i guess i shouldn't be defending chrome because i have 96 gigs of ram and don't think about anymore but if you don't have 96 gigs of ram maybe use safari yeah and also you know and just you know things like electron apps like you like desktop apps now use so much ram slack look at the ram usage of slack oh my god yeah slack discord like all those all the various like you know electron or similar framework to apps they your desktop apps use way more ram than you think they should so yeah yeah max need a lot of ram and the os is not gonna like marco's point the os is not going to kill them off when they're not visible which is the thing that happens all the time on even on ipad os and ipad os generally makes so you can't actually even see that many apps or that many windows at the same time so there's so much more constraints there but yeah that's why they're bumping even the macbookers they should have bumped them years ago yes but it's just it's amazing they're doing this they should either stop selling them and introduce an m4 macbook air at 16 gigs which is not out yet uh spoiler alert or do what they did which is we're going to keep selling them because we love tim cook but 16 gigs ring base everywhere the the reason whatever the reason this is great and yes it is years overdue but it at least it happened So that is great.

1:40:43And they doubled it. They didn't just do like, now you get, you know, nine or 10. They could have done that incremental bump years ago. But if you're going to increase it now, 16 is the new floor. So enjoy the few brief years where the base RAM is going to be satisfactory on Apple's computers. It's a wild, amazing time, y 'all. So we've got MacBook Pros. That was the big announcement for today. And the final big announcement, we've got Space Black and Silver are the only colors because they're professional or something. No Space Gray, though. Space Gray was professional. I guess so. RAM situation.

1:41:18So you've got three different tiers. You've got that like, not really entirely a MacBook Pro, but I guess it's a MacBook Pro, which is an M4, no adjective, that can offer 16, 24, 32 gigs of RAM. What I consider to be the base of the MacBook Pros, the M4 Pro models have 24, 36, 48, 64, and 128 as options. Starting at 24, just like the Mac mini m4 pro starts at 24 that's the base ram is 24 what is going on it's amazing it's a miracle triple channel memory is what's going on but yes go on yes i know and m4 max 36 48 64 or 128 baby that's the thing you would think they would always do is they charge you so much for the m4 max models that can't you just bump the base ram the base ram is 36 on the m4 max amazing what what a time to be alive and uh for storage the m4 is a half a terabyte or one terabyte the m4 are they allowed to do that are they allowed to sell a base model macbook pro with more than 256 gigs of ssd does tim cook know about this what is happening nobody knows base storage is 512 on an m4 which is still too little it's the base should have been a terabyte like five years ago but whatever it's the the numbers are going up after not going up for so long the numbers are going up love it i think maybe they had done that with the m3 as well but i'm just excited about all these the base numbers going up yeah it really is incredible uh so for the m4 pro half a terabyte one terabyte two terabytes four terabytes m4 max one two four and eight those are your options m4 max starts at one terabyte that's where the m4 max should start it's also where the m4 pro should start it's also where the m4 should start but anyway yes any mac that includes pro in the name should start at one terabyte and all the rest should start at 512 especially because of how How inexpensive one terabyte of the particular SSD chips they're buying, how inexpensive that is.

1:43:07And like, how much cheaper is it than a 256 and a 512? It's like they're pinching so many pennies they should. But anyway, yeah. And again, why do we care about this? Because A, this is a portable computer and attaching an external drive is much more of a hassle than it is on an iMac or a Mac mini that you have on a desk. and B, if you want any of these upgrades, they charge you fantasy prices that just eight times the real cost of them or six times or whatever it is. It's ridiculous. So yeah, that's where all the money goes with these models. But yeah, we've got all these great options and the RAM situation is looking better.

1:43:42Yep, yep. It's really incredible. The display has a nanotexture display option. This is the first time in years that I'm aware of a MacBook Pro having any sort of like anti-glare display. I definitely checked that tech box. Wow, let me try that again. I definitely ticked that check box. There we go. Several years ago, many years ago, probably almost 10 years ago now. Yeah, I believe it's been since the Retina came out because the Retina never had an anti-glare option. The last matte screen option on the MacBook Pro was, you know, like 2014-ish, or no, 2011-ish before the Retinas came out. Although Apple would tell you that all their displays are anti-glare, but I know what you mean.

1:44:22Matte finish versus anti-glare is different. There's anti-glare coating that they can put on screens when they're still glossy versus making the screens essentially textured, so it's more of a matte finish. Yeah, and this is the first one to appear in an Apple laptop since then, because it isn't like it was in the MacBook Airs or anything like, no, it was not available in any Apple laptop for 13 years or whatever, and now it's back, which, you know, it makes sense because they just added it to the iPad Pro as well when that was last updated a couple of months ago. And the iMacs got it, so they would have to put it in here.

1:44:54And again, we don't know if this is the same nanotexture process as the XDR or the one that's on the iPad. We do know those are two different processes. I would assume they're using the one on the iPad, but we'll find out when someone gets these under the microscope and or gets an Apple person to answer their question. I mean, you know, since the XDR one costs$1 ,000. And it's very delicate. Yeah, and the MacBook Pro one costs$150. I'm guessing it's the cheaper one on the MacBook Pro. Well, it's a smaller screen. i mean the iMac one is 200 so for a 24 inch screen and for a 32 inch screen well everything about the xdr is priced true you know ridiculously so but yeah i'm assuming the the xdr one is more expensive and more fragile than the ones they would put on the consumer displays i am personally glad that i don't prefer nanotexture so i never have to pay for this option but for people who do it's great to have it as an option and a pretty reasonably priced option you can't get a ram upgrade for those prices i'll tell you that yeah the one the one thing i'm curious about is like and maybe this will only be known over time um you know one of the challenges in macbook screen management over time is trying to prevent or clean off the keyboard imprint that you get on the screen i am i'm a little wary because normally i would think this would be a great option to order for me because what most of the time i'm using my laptop closed in clamshell mode with a monitor at my desk so i don't care about like the you know the color and sharpness loss when i'm at my desk most of the time.

1:46:11But then when I go out into the world with it, then I would love to have this option. So it seems like a no brainer, except I am a little concerned that maybe those keyboard imprints might get harder to clean off or become permanent more easily. Yeah, the keyboard imprints, you may be thinking to yourself, why does Apple still have this problem where the keyboard puts your greasy finger grease on the screen? Why don't they just leave a gap between the keycaps and the screen? And the answer is backpacks. They do leave a gap. Yes. But that is a huge expanse of very thin metal and screen and when you put any kind of pressure on a laptop it's in the sandwich closing force as marco would say yep uh you press the screen into the keyboard if you want to avoid it try not to squish your your macbook that's hard to do it's hard to put it in any kind of bag where it's not squished at all but that's the problem they're facing there's no you know unobtainium metal that they can put at a huge 16 inch expanse of extremely thin screen that doesn't flex it all in the middle um i i think i'm assuming that they're using the more durable nanotexture from the ipad which literally lets you swipe your fingers and a pencil across it i'm assuming they're using that and i think it won't be that bad yeah yeah that might probably make sense and by the way there is a way to avoid that problem completely which is use one of those like pieces of cloth that you stick on your keyboard when you close it up like that does avoid the problem it's just a pain in the butt um but that does avoid it but otherwise you got to make sure you put the cloth in the right direction because if you turn it around now you're pushing the grease against the thing and it doesn't let your thing close all the way and it's it's you know it's just it's another reason not to buy laptops yeah and i was wondering i was worried like if there's like a little wrinkle in it is that going to be just enough stress to crack the screen closes i think the risk profile is a little bit higher with those yeah yeah the tolerances on these computers are very tight yeah indeed uh no i'm very enthusiastic i am not in the market we'll probably get to this at the end but i'll cut ahead i'm i'm not looking to buy any of these computers.

1:47:57I want a new MacBook Pro, but I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro. There's no reason for me to upgrade. And I also want a Mac Mini as my, you know, Plex and Channels workstation. But again, no need to upgrade. But if I were to upgrade, you bet your bottom I would tick the nanotexture display option because I occasionally use my computer outdoors and I don't do it often enough that it's an egregious problem. But I would love to have an anti-glare screen. That sounds great and speaking of outdoors up to 1000 nits in sdr uh so in in standard um what's the dr i just had a brain dynamic range yeah thank you thank you and that's up from what 800 was the last one right yeah i mean like like this is the thing about these displays like they're so they're it's still hdr max of 1600 nits which has been for years which is well also what the xdr is right but the user interface is not an hdr the user interface is in quote unquote sdr standard dynamic range and it's just essentially a choice a power saving and potentially image retention choice of when you're not in hdr mode how bright should you get and they've slowly been cranking up the how bright you're allowed to put it in sdr which obviously costs battery and obviously has to be safe for the screen with image retention and stuff like that uh and but because they're not also raising the high dynamic range ceiling they're narrowing the gap so now there's a 600 nit difference between sdr and quote unquote hdr whereas before i think they started at like 500 then 600 and now it's a thousand but it's important if you're outdoors with a laptop and it's bright sun you can't even see your screen you just want to you know lean on that brightness button and you're going to be sacrificing battery life but it's worth it to be able to actually see your screen and work in it and there have been utilities uh you know third-party utilities for all these macs that have 1600 nits screens where it's like do you want to run your mac ui at 1600 nits you can uh you know apple is not going that far but built into the os now if you lean on that brightness button you'll get up to a thousand nits i will say that um i've and i think we've talked about at least pieces of the story before i've gotten into getting usbc power cables that have like a little watt meter on them i don't need this information and it's the sort of thing that in one side of my mouth i will tell you the people who have battery percentages on are monsters and then in the other side of my mouth i'll tell you i want to know exactly how many watts are going into my devices.

1:50:14It's very, very contradictory and silly, but here we are. And I will say that there's been a handful of times that I have been using my MacBook Pro while connected via one of those cables and not a MagSafe cable. And I will turn the brightness way down. And I don't remember numbers offhand, but I'll watch the wattage that it's using when it's idle go to like, I don't know, call it 10 watts. That might be twice what it is. It might be a third what it is, but you know, just for the sake of discussion, it'll go down to 12 or 10 watts then i'll go bloop bloop bloop bloop bloop and bring the brightness all the way up and suddenly it's like 50 watts or something like that like and you're only going up to you're only going over to 600 nits yeah exactly well whatever the the m3 max will do but yeah you get the idea it's it's a stark and surprising difference that brightness makes on how much power the the device is using it's very surprising um the camera is also way better we were privately talking about this before we got on the air um we're not entirely sure what the prior situation was we didn't have time to go look it up but they are saying that the new camera is 12 megapixel and it is center stage supported i could have sworn that was the case already but it seems not uh but but center stage is the thing where it'll like pan and zoom and whatnot in order to get you and whoever else is in front of the camera in the frame uh and so apparently that's a whole lot better well i see i would i would issue caution on this because when you know what we saw with the studio display i mean you know and the those what was the was the first product to have the center stage camera was one of the iPads, right?

1:51:39The one that turned landscape? I believe that's right. The problem is the way center stage works is it has an ultra wide camera and then it basically crops in a region of it that it detects that you are in. So it is a crop from a wide angle camera that you are seeing the output of. And the problem with that is that you lose a ton of resolution when you do that because obviously you're cropping a wide angle camera. So what you get then is a blurrier picture and typically you also get much more aggressive denoising in medium and low light so it ends up being a far worse picture quality so i would you you know until we until these things are actually in people's hands and being reviewed i don't know that this is going to be a meaningful upgrade in camera quality it might just be they had to make the camera optics better just to give it enough you know headroom to crop it down for center stage mode and have it not look really bad like those first center stage cameras did yeah apple's not good about like making it clear when the camera hardware has improved they just want to tell you what it has and the way they phrase it is like 12 mp center stage which is like code you know center stage you know is this branded thing with the wide angle and the cropping and 12 megapixels tells you something but you're like what was it 12 megapixels before is it different 12 megapixel sensor is the sensor bigger like they don't really want to give you lots of technical details about the camera so the we'll find out when people get these in their hands and start testing them and do a side-by-side with the previous macbook pro cameras um i don't think they advertise desk view with this like they did with the imac the imac again i think they did like did they for this as well because i was wondering like because then you gotta figure like what's the angle of the screen like gonna be yeah like like is it showing your keyboard or i guess it's shooting past your keyboard because the imac one it seems like it's like i wonder where the angle is because you would want desk view to show the desk not the trackpad right but some will some will try and find out i guess yeah but yeah basically i do not order this assuming the camera is better you know order it and order it now if you don't care if the camera is better because that first batch of center stage cameras were terrible so hopefully these are at least as good as the outgoing non-center stage ones after the cropping has has occurred but honestly i i i don't i don't think that's i don't think that's super likely yeah zmox in the chat says it was 1080p before the problem with that is i think these cameras are also advertising as supporting 1080p video right because the output the cropped output the cropped output is 1080 right but and the sensor is 12 yeah but we're basically getting there is a sensor size shrink right because you're you're taking the the inner crop of what's probably about the same size camera sensor so that's probably going to mean more noise and more aggressive noise reduction which was the biggest problem with that first batch of interstage cameras to begin with apparently desk view is right at the top of the web page which i hadn't seen because again these these computers came out just as we started recording so forgive us for not being on top of everything but we're we went as fast as we could yeah so 24 hours of battery life i presume that's just for the m4 not the m4 pro and m4 max but again i'm not 100 clear that was just in there press release i'm sure there's on the tech spec page you'll see much more granular breakdowns but the point is they're advertising really good battery life they're not what they're not doing is saying hey we got all these new great m4 cpus but sorry you're gonna have to sacrifice a ton of battery life that's not what they're saying at all they're yeah they're actually quoting very similar battery life between the cpus on the compare page it's like you know the in the 14 inch that has the base m4 that's 24 hours and then the m4 pro version of that same computer is 22 two hours.

1:55:17So they're quoting, you know, 10 % difference between the two. And that might be all it is in practice. I guess we'll see. I mean, as usual with, you know, any kind of modern computer battery life claim, it depends a lot on what you're doing with it. So it's not super useful to try to compare absolute numbers. It's more of a relative thing. So yeah, maybe you can assume maybe the higher end chips might get 10 % less battery life overall doing, you know, more idle things. But once you crank it up, I'm sure they can burn through the battery way faster. Yeah, I always assume with Apple's numbers in these modern years, just assume those numbers would be you using your computer in pretty much the most casual way, email, web browsing, and that's it.

1:56:01No video conferencing, no compiling an Xcode, no, you know, audio or video editing, right? The number is for just casual, like office style. You can be in a word processor, you could be in a spreadsheet you could be browsing the web uh and that's what those numbers are kind of based on so and the more hardware they put in these we've talked about this many times the more hardware they put in the socs the more cores the more gpu things the more anything that's in there when that stuff is sitting idle it doesn't take as much power but when you crank all of those things up it will destroy your battery right and that's what you wanted to do you wanted to use the energy that's there to get your work done faster and what it means is that you can you know would you rather have fewer cores and it take longer to to compile your thing or would you rather have it use way more power for a shorter period of time um and in general it's better to use way more power for a shorter period of time because a it gets your job done faster and b sometimes that actually saves more energy so i you know it's again don't don't assume if you buy this you only have to charge your laptop once per day that may be true on your average normal day but if you have a very intensive day with lots of zoom meetings even uh that can really eat into that battery life so although i think maybe zoom uses enough hardware acceleration that it's not that bad maybe it's actually just the electron app that zoom is built on that i assume will eat all your battery life but anyway battery life still looks good and these are remember these are not we haven't talked about it yet we didn't mention anything about it but i'm assuming based on what i saw on the website they didn't change the case it is not a redesign case it is not a thinner case it is the same one the previous M3 and M2 and M1 MacBook Pros were in, as far as I can tell.

1:57:38As far as I know, that is correct. Connectivity. M4 gets Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 1.4. The M4 Pro and M4 Max gets Thunderbolt 5 and DisplayPort 2.1. And it still rhymes, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. And here's where I say, okay, all the previous models, the iMac, the Mac Mini, fine. The MacBook Pro, I would have liked to have seen Wi-Fi 7. and Bluetooth. And I don't know what dictates this. This is just a Broadcom chip. I don't think this stuff is in the SoC. So it's just like, they're just this generation, this round of revisions, the M4 ones, they're just not, this is not the year that they go to Wi-Fi 7 everywhere, right?

1:58:18Even though Wi-Fi 7 has been out for a while. And the only machines I'm disappointed on are the MacBook Pros, especially the high-end MacBook Pros, because that's where you'd want to see the stuff. Doesn't matter for the other ones here, a little disappointment. But remember, Thunderbolt 4 versus 5, if you use those ports, if you want to drive a big display at high refresh rate or you want to have super fast storage of some kind of like ray-to-ray of SSDs or something, go to the M4 Pro because they're not holding it back from you. The M4 literally only supports Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 1.4.

1:58:49So if you want Thunderbolt 5 and DisplayPort 2.1, M4 Pro or M4 Max, it's part of the SoC. You should definitely do it. It's a big upgrade if you care about those things. All right, let's talk about display support for the M4 Max. There are up to four external displays, up to three displays with 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI. A secondary option you can choose is up to three external displays, up to two external displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one with up to 8K at 60Hz, or one with 4K at 240Hz over HDMI.

1:59:26They really need a chart. I know you said that a few minutes ago. They need a darn chart. And the M4 and the M4 Pro, I didn't put them in here because they're just the same as you heard before. Like basically the external display support is dictated by the SoC. So the only one you haven't heard about before is the M4 Max. For the M4 and the M4 Pro, it's the same as it was in the Mac Mini, I believe. All right. M4 Pro is a 14-core CPU or 12-core if you elect for the binned one. And 16-core GPU or 14-core in the binned one. And one thing with the binned ones is I'm assuming, obviously the binned ones are cheaper.

1:59:57and you know they charged you a lot for the upgrade and we really have no no basis for judging their uh the margins on the upgrade of the cores except to say that they're probably uh really expensive but who knows anyway um my assumption is that one of one of the advantages of the core uh the binned ones aside from being cheaper is that i assume they also use less power at maximum because you can't crank up 14 cpu cores because you literally only have 12 that work and that may be something to consider to console you if you're like oh i don't do i want to pay the extra whatever hundred dollars to get the one with all the cores that work uh do you care about that are you how what difference is it going to make in your life are you doing jobs to take an hour now they're going to take 40 minutes instead are you doing jobs to take three minutes now they're going to take take uh three minutes and five seconds like get the cheaper one with fewer cores to save you from burning your battery if you don't care about having a maximum power the m4 max gets 546 gigabyte per second memory uh which is compared to the to 410 gigabytes per second on the m3 max this is actually the thing i think that makes me most jealous about these but that's neither here nor there it's not as big a jump in the m the the m4 pro of the m3 pro i didn't know the percentages someone can do the math in the chat room but it's not a 75 jump but it is a jump yep 16 core cpu or 14 core binned uh 12 uh performance cores we're assuming 10 performance cores in the binned version uh four efficiency cores and apple claims a plus 20 percent multi-threaded performance over m3 max seems like four efficiency cores is what apple thinks is sufficient for just right because the efficiency cores are doing like the stuff that's not very intensive low priority stuff in the background just if apple's efficiency cores are actually fairly powerful these days and they gave you six of them at one point but now with the with the pro and the max chips it's four efficiency cores for both of them and all they just keep doing is give you more and more of those power cores and yeah so this one has 12 power cores 12 performance cores or 10 in the bin version that's a lot of very powerful cores this is a big chip yep and then 40 core gpu or 32 core in the bin version and again about 20 percent GPU improvement, performance improvement over the M3 Max.

2:02:15You can pre-order today. They ship November 8. Environment, 100 % recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100 % recycled rare earth elements in all the magnets, 100 % recycled tin, soldering, gold plating, and copper in multiple printed circuit boards. And the packaging for the 14-inch MacBook Pro is now entirely fiber-based, joining the 16-inch MacBook Pro in bringing Apple closer to its goal to remove plastic from its packaging by 2025. I hope there's not anything we missed on these MacBook Pros. Again, they were released like as we started recording so the timing wasn't perfect for us um but overall i you know I it's hard for me not to get distracted by the 16 gigs of RAM on the MacBook Air because selfishly from my perspective it makes my life so much easier when recommending a computer for someone to buy because the answer is always they probably want a laptop they should just get the macbook air and now i don't have to give them a speech about why it's really important for them to spend 200 on another eight gigs of ram i could just tell them to get the base maybe check in with them about how much stuff they have right but again with cloud storage and everything a lot of people can actually get by with 256 especially on a low-end thing and then the macbook pros clean upgrade.

2:03:20They took the M3 ones, they put M4 in them, and guess what? The M4 SoCs, the M4 line is good. We heard the rumors months ago that Apple is going to put every one of its Macs on the M4, which may not sound exciting. I'm like, don't they always do that? The answer is no, they don't always do that. Sometimes Macs get left behind. The poor Mac Studio and Mac Pro still have the M2 in them. The MacBook Air still has the M3 in them, but eventually there will come a time when the top end products that Apple sells in all of its categories will have M4 something in them. The plain M4 is an amazing chip, amazing single core performance.

2:03:57It made up for a lot of the problems of the M3, especially the dual displays and support and everything. M4 Pro takes a different approach than the M3 Pro. Seems like a huge jump. Great chip. And the M4 Max is exactly what you would think it would be. It is not the same as the M4 Pro. As far as I know, we'll look at the die shots to see if the Pro and the Max are just shrunken versions of each other. But anyway, the m4 max has got more stuff pro starting at higher base ram than the m4 and the max starting at higher base ram still is great this is a great update to a bunch of uh max that the rumors are they might be introducing new slim versions of these and there'll be other potential you know it's it's there's uncertainty in the future of this when they go to the m4 or the m5 or the m6 maybe they'll redesign the cases maybe they'll take different choices maybe they'll take away the sd card this is not that this is the macbook pros that you've known and loved with what i think is the best obviously it's the best m series set of chips they've made but i think the trade-offs from looking at the how they've arranged these things the trade-offs are great for these and i really do think the fact that this is the year thunderbolt 5 starts rolling out really makes the m4 pro and m4 max max very attractive to people who care at all about external peripheral speed or future proofing for really high resolution really high refresh rate monitors yeah but overall all, I love this lineup now.

2:05:13This is so solid because, as John said, you don't have to try to steer people away from the 8-gig base models anymore. The only thing I would strongly recommend pushing people to 512. Now that it's only a$200 upgrade that I'm pushing for instead of a$400 upgrade that it used to be, maybe it'll be a little bit easier. To me, if you're going to do any kind of substantial power usage at all on one of these laptops, the one to get I think is either at the low end, get the MacBook Air, but they have another tier up that has $16,$512 for$1 ,300. Get that one. That's the new budget model for people who care about computers.

2:05:56$1 ,300, MacBook Air with$512. And then honestly, if you want the MacBook Pro features and experience, John's right that if you care about things like display, future-proofing and everything, Thunderbolt 5 is a big deal. For most of us, that's not usually the case. One of the best deals typically in Apple's lineup in terms of bang for the buck that you get has historically always been the base model of the biggest laptop. So it used to be the old 15-inch MacBook Pro and PowerBook. Now it's the 16-inch MacBook Pro. And the base model 16 inch has for$2 ,500, which is around where it has been for quite some time,$2 ,500, you get the best screen, you get the best speakers, you get the best microphones, like all that other stuff that is the best in the MacBook Pro.

2:06:46You get all that. And then that's the M4 Pro with 24 gigs now and 512 gigs as the base. That's a really great all around computer that can do pretty much everything most people need to do now yes if you spec it up you can get more ram you can get more disc whatever you can always do that this can you can go up to seven thousand dollars easily with this thing but if what you're looking for is like best bang for the buck i think it's the air and the base model 16 inch and this is also the last one or two years where we can uh not yell at the macbook air for not having an hdr screen and that's allowing for apple being behind it's the the thing that people i think underestimate about the pros is that that screen the screen on the macbook pros has been great having hdr i think is just it's increasingly important in the apple world because all their phones take hdr pictures right you really want to see them in full hdr on your screen yeah uh and the laptop screens are great macbook air who knows maybe the important macbook air will have an hdr screen we'll find out but right now they don't and so people wonder hey, should I get a really specced up MacBook Air or should I get the base model M4 MacBook Pro?

2:07:55What's the difference? Do I care about the Pro? And I was like, the main thing that you will probably care about is the screen. You will notice the screen. When you look at your pictures on the screen, you will notice. Most of the time, people don't notice anything about the screen. Like, oh, viewing angles, color saturation, no one is ever going to notice that. But when they pull up a picture they took on their iPhone in HDR, it looks different in a way that people will notice, not even just side by side just bring up the photos app and bring up an HDR picture and people go whoa in their eyes it makes a difference so I hope just like this year we have all risen up to 16 gigs RAM base in the Apple world someday the promised land where every Mac will have an HDR capable screen with 120Hz refresh rate we're a long way from there but we can get there I believe and you're not going to give an i believe speech martin luther king i believe speech that we can get every apple device i mean rumor is the iphone 17 is going to be 120 hertz across the whole like even the non-pro models and everything so the phones will probably get there first because the screens are smaller uh but right now xdr 60 hertz studio display 60 hertz all of the non-macbook pros are in 60 hertz like the imac screen 60 hertz no hdr like we need to get there that's that's another mountain we have to climb but for right now Now, the MacBook Pros have it.

2:09:14They've always had it. Those screens are great. That is a reason to consider even the basest of base model MacBook Pro if you care about HDR at all. Yeah, and also when you go up to the ones that have the Pro or Mac chips, you also get more ports. You get ports on both sides. You get the SD card. You get all these upgrades to the MacBook Pro that are just kind of better for convenience or connectivity or just quality of life. so yeah if you can swing the MacBook Pro it's a great buy and now the MacBook Air is also a great buy again just get 512 please for the love of god especially if you think like oh I need something for Xcode you definitely want a lot of storage if you're going to be using Xcode just you know do not get the 256 I don't care if you're like a young person you're like I want to get into coding but I don't need storage you know I have like I stream all my music I have my cloud photos trust me Xcode eats disk space like crazy you need the 512 if you're doing any kind of xcode work at all um but yeah these are great products all around i'm very happy to see them yeah and in terms of eating space like i said with with a iMac or a Mac mini you can just attach a very fast ssd to one of those thunderbolt ports and give yourself more storage it's the advantage of having a desktop with a laptop you are not going to want to do that you're not going to want to do the varco thing where you velcro and ssd to the back like you can but it's very awkward and when you run out of space a mac os gets very angry and B, you will get very angry because you'll feel like my computer is full.

2:10:40Do I need a new computer now? It's not that easy to deal with that. What should I delete? Should I delete anything? Am I making a mistake by deleting precious memories of my children to fit within the stupid 256 gig SSD? Or like, should I delete some SDKs that I'm not using? Or did I just screw up my build? Or I shouldn't have deleted that one or I need to redownload it? Like when you fill your disk, it's a bad situation on portable computers or devices on your phone or your laptop. And yeah, so maybe you can fit within 256, like, look into your heart, look at your actual computer, see how much storage you're actually using, see what you actually can fit within.

2:11:13But this is the next bottleneck. So every time you remove a bottleneck, the next one just rises to the surface as the number one. Number one new bottleneck on base model Macs, 256 gig SSD. Yeah, but don't let us poo-poo this entire week of incredible releases. Like, this is an incredible, and we've said this consistently for years, it's an incredible time to be a fan of the Mac. And it just keeps getting better and better. And I'm really, really pleased that I suffered through the dark ages of the late teens in order to reap the rewards here in the early 20s. It's been an incredible, phenomenal time to be a fan of the Mac.

2:11:48And I hope it continues. I mean, Apple is – it's not perfect, but darned if they're not firing on almost every cylinder. So really, really good work this week. This is an above average year for upgrades. Above average, easily. And these were already great computers. like their laptops were already really good and this is an above if you're wondering we're always saying like when is the right time to buy when are they the good computers these again we're not going to say right now because people haven't tested them for all we know they thermally throttle and blow up and catch fire or something but they probably don't right but wait read see the actual reviews of people who get these in their hands wait for marco to buy one have you tell you about it right um this isn't a from looking at the specs this is an above average year of updates in terms of how much better they are than the ones before and the ones before were already really good.

2:12:31All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week. Tip Top Uncommon Goods and 1Password Extended Access Manager. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at ATB.fm slash join. One of the perks of ATB membership is overtime in addition to our cool merch discount, which we mentioned earlier. So you might want to join just for that. But you also get overtime. This is our bonus topic every week. This week, overtime is about the recent news on the security research that's been done with Apple's private cloud compute that they are debuting now. So there's been some security research updates and we're going to talk about those in overtime.

2:13:06Thank you so much everybody for listening and we'll talk to you next week. Now 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 Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I caved. I got a Mac Mini.

2:14:16You couldn't even make it through the recording. Jesus. No, I... What the hell for? I thought I got it yesterday. They're adorable. That's why. No, I told you last week. Have you heard the show, Casey? I told you last week I was buying one. And why? I'm buying it to replace my one ancient and my other recent but broken Synologies. Yes. Sorry. I blocked it from my memory because I was so sad at the anti-Synology snark. But here we are. No, yes. Oh, I'm glad. What did you get then? I got close to the base. The only thing I touched was I went to 512 and I went to the 10 gig ethernet. Do you have 10 gig ethernet in the house or is that just future proofing?

2:14:56I have 10 gig wiring in the walls now and I'm starting like I have some of the ports I think on my big router are 10 gig compatible but I think only the WAN ports or something. So I'm starting to lay the groundwork for that and I intend to keep this thing for a long time and it was only like 100 bucks or something, 150 bucks. So I'm like, all right, I'll upgrade that. And then that gives me a reason to start maybe look at upgrading my Thunderbolt dock that I have for my MacBook Pro. Maybe that would be easy to get a 10 gig Ethernet situation going on there. It isn't as far as I'm aware. Like you can get 10 gig Ethernet adapters.

2:15:33But to my knowledge, there are no like docking station style things that have 10 gig Ethernet. So like my beloved CalDigit TS4 has two and a half gig as an example. Thunderbolt 5 docking stations probably will. Oh, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah, I should clarify. I would even just going to 2.5 would be a substantial upgrade from what I have now. And so and since I'm since I'm planning on using this Mac mini basically as a fancy NAS for the most part, I do want to start experimenting on it with things like, you know, running background jobs for overcast. So if I wanted to like, you know, start trying to transcribe podcasts in mass, obviously the way to do that correctly is in a data center.

2:16:10But I can start experimenting with it in my house and then, you know, see. Or one Mac Mini. Yeah, it's either a data center full of M2 Ultras or one Mac Mini in a closet. Where's this one going to be, by the way? Directly under a waterfall outside. Oh, it's like me. Or on Casey's desk. Yeah, either one. It's equally dangerous. At least the waterfall is not sticky. Also fair. also fair uh yeah yeah well i'm excited for your purchase what does it come on friday then as far as you know yeah like next year yeah i'm sorry a week from yeah yeah yeah day one the reason i asked where you're gonna put it is because i'm wondering if you'd have an assessment of the fan noise but if it's in a closet you probably won't notice it's actually it's probably gonna be in my garage i i have i have a it's not an outdoor computer well the garage is our our new garage is semi-conditioned um it is it is fully insulated and it has a split unit to keep it from reaching temperature extremes um in either direction so it is semi conditioned and and mostly fine so i'm gonna i'm gonna try it there about your kink it's fine mark oh my god he likes to put electronic equipment outdoors it's not outdoors semi outdoors we're just gonna move right along uh why did you put a mini split in the garage like what what were you trying to guard so it would be semi conditioned well no i understand it actually was yeah so it was because it was okay the way long Island works.

2:17:32Everyone knows a guy. And when you ask a contractor, hey, can we install a split in this room? Sometimes what happens is he comes back and he's like, hey, I got a unit. It's no more money, but there's one that has two heads. Do you want it? And like, it's no more money, really? Yeah, I got it. It's ready to go right now. Okay, sure. We can put the second head in the garage. That's what happened. There was a room next to the garage, a regular room that needed a split installed in it so we put one there and they were like we could do it right here for no extra money we'll get put one in the garage too and i said fine whatever they're independently controlled you can't afford not to put one there right exactly yeah so i don't like you know like in the summertime we were running it in dehumidify mode you know like it's just it's kind of nice to have certain options like that so it's fine i don't intend to ever use it aggressively but it's nice for uh extremes well now you needed to keep your mac mini comfortable yeah exactly uh no i actually i'm in full support to this idea.

2:18:25So my parents in their house, which Marco briefly saw many years ago now, but they have a three-bay garage that the ceiling is like 20 feet in it or something like that. It's an absurd amount of space. And when our kids were much littler, they wanted to have like an extended family thing. Like it was Christmas or Hanukkah or something. I forget exactly what it was specifically. But they realized that, well, this is going to be tough because the very young kids are going to wake up if they hear us all hooping and hollering and whatnot. And it's wintertime, so we can't exactly just go outside. Hooping and hollering and whatnot might be the most Southern thing you've ever said.

2:19:05Well, you never know what y 'all get into. But anyways, one way or another, what Dad ended up doing was putting a single mini split in this very, very large garage. And that's where he would set up, you know, like just folding tables and, you know, like chairs and whatnot in there. and mom and dad, me and my brothers and family and whatnot would all chill in there. And it was great because we were far enough removed from the interior of the house that the hootenanny wasn't heard inside and we could still live in there, not live, but be in a conditioned space. So I've been wanting to find a reason to do it in my house, but we are never in the garage for any long duration of time.

2:19:45So I haven't done it because there's no need for it whatsoever but i kind of want to just in principle well your cars are in there right you keep your cars cooler so when you get in i guess you can turn them on remotely and cool them off but still like i just feel like cars especially in the south are places that are really hot where just stuff bit the interior of your car baking at like over 100 degrees or 120 degrees it's not oh no it's it's not bad because it's not in the sun so it's or the hood might be in the sun because we back into the garage because that's who we are um so the you know the hood might be in the sun but not the passenger component.

2:20:18I guess it's not in direct sunlight, but still, like, if it's not a conditioned space, it's an enclosed space in the summer, I can imagine that getting... I mean, they're designed for that. Yeah, it's not as bad as you think. It's actually worse. Yeah, I know they're designed for it. I just feel bad for the car. It's much worse in the winter. It's for the people. For the people, yeah. I mean, like, yeah, all those glues and materials that are made to withstand 170 degrees without degrading too much. We've all seen old cars where those dashboards, they put up a good fight, but, you know, a decade in, they start to fall apart.

2:20:46And if you keep them, if you don't expose them to extremes of temperature, they will be nicer for longer. That is very true. But no, it's not nearly as bad as you think around where we are anyway. The worst part, at least for people anyway, is during the winter because it will still be properly cold out there in the mornings. And so Aaron's car, I can run on electricity if it's plugged into the house it'll it'll warm itself up over the span of a half an hour if i want it to um or i can actually start the gasoline engine as long as the garage door is open and warm it up that way this is the garage where your water heater is yes so you're worried it's getting so cold in there it seems like it's probably not getting that cold it's no i mean compared to what you two are your water heater is in there compared to what you two are used to it's not that bad but well actually so i have a heat pump hybrid water heater now oh that's so what it does is it steals heat from the garage to heat the water, which means it air conditions the garage.

2:21:45So I actually have to be careful, you know, whatever choices I make with the split unit that I'm not basically just undoing my energy savings. That's funny. That's wild. But yeah, so I can run Aaron's car if it's plugged in for, you know, like 20, 30 minutes and warm it up. However, you and I suffer from the same problem with our cars insofar as if I were to turn on my car remotely, it would drive itself through the front of the garage. So that's not a possibility. Unless you don't park your cars in gear, John, in which case we have a whole new world of things to discuss. I don't park my car in the garage.

2:22:18That's what the problem is. Well, fair enough. You guys need EVs. This totally solves this problem. Cars not in gear would be rolling into the street is what it would be doing.