681: The Price of Your Nightmares

17:25John Siracusa:The SoC in this is the A19, which is different than the A13. We'll be talking about the A19 later. It is still$1 ,600 with standard glass. It's$2 ,000 when you get the height-adjustable stand or$1 ,900 with nanotexture, which that's a$300 Delta, and thus$2 ,300 with a height-adjustable stand and nanotexture.

17:50Casey Liss:$400 for that height-adjustable stand is really hurting. yeah this is uh we had a good throwback uh snarky uh toot from jack wellborn that used our uh uh bluish new banner on an angle it used to actually be the logo for the show it was the fav icon for atp.fm website a long time early on in the in atp we all attended a wwdc where they updated the mac pro with the mac pro that they said was new but it wasn't really new they i forget what they did to it i didn't even think it was a speed bump just like they like raised the

18:18Marco Arment:minimum spec like like to a higher tier yeah like they got rid of the low-end model i think like

18:22Casey Liss:because intel got rid of the processor yeah here's a new mac pro like that's not a new mac pro well this the snark is less uh i think less powerful now that we know that it comes with the a19 because

18:33Marco Arment:it's not literally the same yeah they actually changed the hardware they didn't change it a lot but they did change the hardware they didn't change the screen part of the hardware and when

18:43Casey Liss:you're talking about displays the screen part of the hardware is a really important part now i'm i'm not complaining like by all means it's under update the thunderbolt 5 put an aa19 in it for whatever that does right that's good daisy chaining is a cool feature but the bottom line is this is like exactly the same specs as the old studio display which i believe was from 2022 is it all display it's 600 nits it's 60 hertz it's exactly the same resolution it's exactly the same size it is exactly the same price which is insane because the price did not make any sense that's what we've been harping on the past you know several years like here are the specs it's a nice display but sixteen hundred dollars without a height adjustable stand and four hundred dollars to add the height adjustable stand those numbers do not make sense for these specs and they didn't change the screen specs the thing you look at with your eyeball so is extremely frustrating product now i think they should still make this product and i'm sad that the price hasn't changed and good luck for them selling it in an increasingly competitive market where there are many many options with similar or better specs for way less money even if they come in cases that don't quite look at night as nice but this product like if they had changed the price i would have been fine with this but keeping the price the same is just just a like a it's like a finger in the eye or i don't know i don't know what the the right disrespectful expression is but it is it is disrespectful and i just i like they did update the internals that has an a19s thunderbolt 5 but like not changing the screen is just very upsetting to me so this you know i continue to not be in

20:11Marco Arment:enthusiastic about the base model studio display i wonder like who is this product for besides casey oh hold on a second like who because it seems like if you want a nice monitor that is not the best monitor you can get there are so many better options that like in the world of pc monitors now i mean i guess they still we still often have like you know lack of integration with apple's features

20:37Casey Liss:and their cases aren't as nice or whatever like but but it's like but here's but the price i just feel like you can't keep the same price without changing the screen part of the monitor it's just

20:46John Siracusa:it's it's insulting you can if you're apple yeah but we'll see we'll see how they sell like that's

20:50Casey Liss:their i feel like they're they very often travel with their displays in a mac pro like trajectory where they make bad product decisions and say well see look no one's buying it it's like what are you doing like you're not like it's not like as we'll see in a second it's not like there aren't ways to continue charging ridiculous margins on monitors you just kind of make a really fancy really nice one and then you know you get your margins but like trying to be like like as someone pointed out i forgot who it was i'm sorry but like someone was saying it's just such a shame that apple does not make any basic monitors as we'll see when we discuss later products apple is getting better at making just the basic version of a lot of its products but monitors it's like no there's no such thing as a basic monitor from apple you have to buy it from a third party and That's terrible.

21:31Casey Liss:Like, yes, by all means, make these fancy monitors, right? But there should be, you know, Studio Display Neo. You know what I mean? Like, there should be a basic monitor for people who just wanted a monitor. Why won't you sell it to them Apple? Yes, the margins will be a little bit lower. But like, anyway, this thing is a dud.

21:48Marco Arment:The first minor update to the Retina iMac was the late 2015 model. about 10 years ago. That panel in the late 2015, 27-inch Retina iMac was a 27-inch, 5K, P3, wide color, 500-nit panel 10 and a half years ago. Now, John, remind me, what are the specs on this? Was it 600 nits? 600 nits, yeah. Is that the only

22:17Casey Liss:significant difference? I would guess so. Maybe the viewing angle is a little better. Maybe the image retention isn't quite, but it's ridiculous.

22:23Marco Arment:So, yeah, It just tells you like it's this is not cutting edge technology going into this panel.

22:28Casey Liss:Oh, and this monitor has a faster CPU than that iMac. Fair.

22:33Marco Arment:But like, OK, at this incredibly premium price point, what you are getting is a very, very, very similar panel and monitor and general image quality and specs to the 10 and a half year old iMac panel. I think it's a little weird to not be pushing this a little further or at least to not be lowering the price yeah I mean I don't argue yeah like if they had made this the basic panel

23:02Casey Liss:and lowered it to$999 or something like that we'd all been singing its praises like finally if you just want a basic monitor you have a mac laptop you want to get an apple monitor to match it you don't care about fancy specs this is the one for you but they did not change the price Apple does not sell any basic monitors.

23:17John Siracusa:Yeah, I mean, I'm in support of them revving it. I think, generally speaking, I'm not actually that disappointed with this when you ignore the price tag. But I concur with both of you, particularly, John, that once you look at the price tag, it's like, come on. Really? Really? You can't lower it any? And the nanotexture is still hundreds of dollars. The tilt-adjustable, or height-adjustable stand, rather, is hundreds of dollars. Like, really? But if you're Apple, you can do it. But then it's okay because you two have a positively ancient monitor sitting in front of you. And there's a new version.

23:54John Siracusa:And it's better than ever-ish.

23:57Marco Arment:There's not a new version. That's the thing. So our monitors, the Pro Display XDRs, have been killed. They're discontinued. They are gone. Apple has released a new monitor that is an expensive desktop monitor with XDR in the name, but it is not a replacement for the Pro Display XDR because the Pro Display XDR is a 6K 30-inch, 32-inch monitor. 32-inch. Yeah. They did not release a 6K 32-inch monitor today. They killed their 6K 32-inch monitor and replaced it with a better 27-inch 5K monitor. Oh, what were the resolution and screen size of that 10 and a half year old iMac? Oh, that's right. 27 inch 5K.

24:43Casey Liss:It's kind of, it's weird because now there's so many more third party 6K monitors, like Apple was kind of first to the party with like a big fancy 6K monitor and eventually third parties started releasing them too. And Apple's like, you know what? Nevermind. 5K, 27 inch.

24:55Marco Arment:That, it's very sad. Like, you know, Apple has gone in and out of making very large monitors over their history. And they've always been really good. And like when there's a span where Apple's not making the biggest monitor size, everyone's kind of like, oh, I guess I'll get the third party one. But oh, man. What they did release with this XDR 27 inch looks pretty good for a 27 inch monitor. But once you are accustomed to a certain lifestyle, it's really hard to go back.

25:28Casey Liss:Yeah, it is hard to go back real estate wise. Like that's, that's the whole thing with mono sizes. Like in general, the trend across the entire industry, including Apple's product lines, to be honest, has mostly been upward. Like Apple did make the 30 inch non-retina cinema display. And then there was a while, there was a while in the wilderness where they didn't make anything that big again, but then eventually they came back with a 32. So maybe we're going through that cycle. Let me find the language. I think, what did they say that? Like, um, I think they said something to the effect of, um, the studio display XDR replaces the pro display XDR.

25:58Casey Liss:So it's not like, oh, we're just surmising this because they stopped selling the Pro Display XDR, which they have. They stopped selling it. But they literally said the Studio Display XDR replaces the Pro Display XDR. So if you read that, you're like, oh, well, that's a clear signal that they're not going to come out with the rumored Pro Display XDR successor. Right. I would mostly agree that that is like if I had to put money on something, that's what I would put it on. but if apple was going to come out with a pro display xdr successor in a year or a wwc in the summer they would say the exact same damn thing they would say the studio display xdr replaces because it does it does replace it they stopped selling the pro display xdr they started selling studio display it replaces it and then you know wc comes along they're like a pro display xdr2 uh you know that did replace it but now here's this they're never going to say like oh don't save your money because we might introduce a new bigger one so my fingers are still crossed uh you know keep hope alive yada yada there were rumors of a pro display xdr successor this one is not called pro display xdr it's called studio display xdr so the name is still available but right now this replaces it maybe you can find uh used ones cheap or increasingly cheap but like as we'll get to in a second with the specs on this the pro display xdr is starting to become the like oh i don't care about image quality i just want a lot of pixels you know because as the as the image quality improves across the entire industry.

27:18Casey Liss:The Pro Display XDR specs look less impressive, but the number of pixels you get stays just as impressive because there's a lot of them and the screen is big. So I'm glad I've still got my monitor. I hope it never breaks. I would not want to replace it with one of these, despite the fact that it has better picture quality in a lot of ways.

27:35John Siracusa:Righto. So the Studio Display XDR, as you guys said, 5K, 27-inch, same resolution. There is mini LED for the backlight with 2 ,304 dimming zones. John, do you happen to remember if that's more or less or otherwise?

27:49Casey Liss:Pro Display XDR has 576 or something. 2 ,300 dimming zones is pretty good. It's not the best in the world, but it's pretty, pretty good.

27:58Marco Arment:It's also more dense because it's a significantly smaller monitor.

28:01Casey Liss:Yes, exactly. Right.

28:02John Siracusa:So much sadness for Marco. There is up to 1 ,000 nits brightness in SDR and 2 ,000 nits peak brightness in HDR.

28:08Casey Liss:Those are big numbers, by the way, because first of all, you do not want to, well, maybe Marco does, but most people don't want to blind themselves, would want to put it at 1 ,000 nits SDR. That means like your white windows would be 1 ,000 nits. Unless it's a really sunny room, that's very bright. And 2 ,000 nits peak is higher than the XDR because the XDR was 1 ,600 nits peak. So good specs.

28:29John Siracusa:And most importantly, I would argue, is that this is Apple's first entry as far as I'm aware is a 120 hertz external display. There have been 120 hertz internal displays. This is the first time we've seen it on the outside. And we've been theorizing that this was coming. We had heard some rumors that maybe 90 hertz would be the peak. But no, apparently 120 hertz refresh rate and adaptive sync, which allows it to vary the refresh rate between 47 hertz and all the way up to, of course, 120 hertz. That's great. This is what peaked my interest. This is what's making me wonder, should I buy one of these?

29:02John Siracusa:Because even though I don't need 120 hertz, I certainly don't need mini LED. I don't need all that brightness.

29:06Casey Liss:but i kind of want it yeah this this is a better monitor than the studio display as the name would imply it is a better monitor uh specs wise than the protospx dr it's just not as big

29:19Marco Arment:if i if i had never tasted the forbidden fruit of 6k i would be tempted by this monitor unfortunately i have and so i'm not yeah so that's the thing right but the color reproduction

29:30John Siracusa:It has Adobe RGB color gamut support in addition to P3 wide color. And both of them are available from the same default preset.

29:38Casey Liss:But that's nice. So you don't have to like switch modes. I mean, I guess that's just standard, but they called it out specifically. So I'm assuming as a default mode and you get Adobe RGB and P3. If you look at the little triangles on the color area, they're not quite the same, but they're similar.

29:53John Siracusa:Additionally, it has 80 % of the Rec 2020 coverage. and they also leaned into, whatever, I don't remember where I read this, but they leaned into somewhere that it has DICOM medical imaging presets and the medical imaging calibrator to enable the use in diagnostic radiology. That's D-I-C-O-M. The medical imaging calibrator on macOS is pending FDA clearance, but is expected to be available soon in the U.S. So that's something that's different and I don't recall having ever seen before an Apple documentation.

30:22Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, it's a high-end monitor. It has good color support. that is well calibrated and they're just trying to get a certification that allows it to be used in this particular way because who else is going to buy this monitor at the prices that we're about to see?

30:34John Siracusa:12 megapixel center stage camera with desk view which your Pro Display XDR does not have a six speaker system with force cancelling woofers and wow I don't think I realized that force cancelling woofers that's pretty cool.

30:45Casey Liss:That's not new that's the old to do display has that as well.

30:47John Siracusa:Does it? Yeah.

30:48Casey Liss:The only difference in the speaker setups is 30 % deeper bass.

30:52John Siracusa:Okay fair enough. And so that's the same as the new non-XDR studio display. Now, I'm not snarking. Your display is only the display, right? No speakers, or does it have speakers? No speakers. Okay. The same, or similar story, if not the same story, oh no, similar story with the two Thunderbolt 5 ports up to 120 gigs a second, gigabits per second. One is for the host, which allows up to 140 watt charging up from 96 on the non-XDR version. And then, again, you can the other one is for downstream with additional

31:24Casey Liss:daisy chaining possible they distinguish the ports by putting like a dot like a little like bullet next to the one that is the the charging port essentially and the other one is the daisy chain like the upstream port has a dot on it so i mean i there's four forts four ports in the back so two have lightning bolts or thunderbolts or whatever the two with little lightning bolt symbols are the thunderbolt ports the one that has a lightning bolt and also a dot that is the charging upstream one and the other one is the daisy chaining one all right and then this of

31:54John Siracusa:course also has an a19 pro as per mac rumors also there's a day one software update which is kind of

32:00Casey Liss:funny yeah and it's and by the way it's the differentiated that as well because remember the other one has an a19 this one has an a19 pro i i'm not entirely sure why it needs the a19 pro maybe to handle the dynamic backlighting stuff because it's the same number of pixels same you know everything but maybe it's a uh controlling the backlight displays but that is a difference

32:17John Siracusa:And then there was a big question from me about what is the story with regard to Mac support? Because they had said, oh, it's a Thunderbolt 5 port. So I think we had talked about at some point in the past, well, is there enough bandwidth in any flavor of Thunderbolt to do 120 hertz at 5K? And I honestly don't remember what we concluded. I think we thought that there was, but only just.

32:41Casey Liss:There is, especially with display stream compression. But as you're about to read, the compatibility specs for this are not entirely based on hardware features. Right.

32:51John Siracusa:So I had read, I was nervous at first because I'm kind of lusting after this thing. I was nervous that my lowly M3 Macs wouldn't be supported because it's only Thunderbolt 4, not Thunderbolt 5. And I had assumed initially that, oh, you're going to need Thunderbolt 5 to support 120 hertz. As it turns out, that's incorrect. There is some information about what Macs are supported. studio display xdr is compatible with following mac models with apple silicon sorry john and mac

33:16Casey Liss:os tahoe 26.3.1 or later sorry anyone who doesn't want to update the tahoe this monitor requires tahoe presumably because of display drivers that are only part of tahoe but that's a that's a software choice by apple and only supporting apple silicon is probably hardware based because i imagine the intel ones might not be able to handle the adaptive sync stuff or whatever they just didn't write drivers for it but anyway these are not ridiculous requirements the os one is a little bit ridiculous like you need the latest latest latest operating system to use a monitor really that's kind of silly but it's the truth and apple silicon like whatever like that's most macs anyway

33:48John Siracusa:so it's fine so basically it's macbook pros with asterisks 2020 or later macbook airs 2023 or i'm sorry 2020 or later in some cases uh the mac studio mac mini mac pro 2023 and later see you john or the 24-inch iMac. Then what's interesting is they say that they note that, well, let me just read it. Mac models with M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2, and M3 support the studio display XDR at up to 60 hertz. All other studio display XDR features are supported. So that implies that to get 120 hertz, you need an M2 Pro Max or Ultra. You need an M3 Pro Max or Ultra. Woohoo! M4 Pro or Max, M5 Plain,

34:31Casey Liss:m5 pro or m5 max yeah it's confusing but like do read the things because you don't want to spend the money for this monitor and only be able to drive it at 60 hertz like if you have like an m1 ultra and you're like a really fancy computer that you bought you know max studio m1 ultra ages ago you're like i'm gonna get this fancy new monitor and i'm gonna get 120 hertz you're not right it's

34:49John Siracusa:a bummer but that is what it is uh yeah so with the environment 100 recycled aluminum standard glass display contains 80 recycled glass 100 fiber-based box has been extensively redesigned for collapsibility, allowing it to be broken down into smaller pieces. It'll fit in most household recycling bins.

35:05Casey Liss:That's the YouTube video I want to see. I want to see someone getting the box. Because what does that mean? Do you not have to use a box cutter to break it up? Does it come apart with Velcro? Some YouTuber, please make this video. I want to see this box.

35:16John Siracusa:Quinn, get on it. All right. So you can pre-order them today as we record. They're available March 11. We said the Pro Display XDR is not for sale. John, these are going to be incredibly affordable,

35:27Casey Liss:right i mean so here's the thing the pricing it replaces the protosplay xdr and thank god it doesn't cost what the protosplay xdr did but it costs a lot so but but there i think all right so here's the price 3300 with the standard glass 3600 with nanotexture that's it you get the adjustable stand as a no cost option can you imagine that on a three thousand dollar monitor

35:50John Siracusa:that it might come with a stand amazing unthinkable it's a miracle how generous of them however i am very very crabby about this if you decide to opt for the visa mount which is what i would do because i have you know my own stands you save nothing okay sir it's like it's like

36:08Casey Liss:when you get like an automatic or a stick shift and they're both no cost options like well they can't possibly cost the same amount nope uh but that's yes if you can get a stand or you can get no stand and there is no savings for that uh i'm so mad yeah and so here's the thing with this price first of all i think it is somewhat unconscionable to have this price and not have like an iphone quality like good back camera as the camera because as far as i can tell it has the same camera as the studio display which granted is supposedly improved but it's still 12 megapixel whatever but like a three thousand dollar monitor i believe there should be room in the margins to put in a like a good camera from an iphone not a really gruddy one but whatever maybe it's hard to get those wide angle ones like they're really into center stage because they're not going to have a little motor moving the camera so they want a wide angle one like i don't know what the issues involved are but it just seems like a little bit of a shame that the camera isn't significantly better i mean hey this has got the a19 pro instead of the a19 why couldn't they bump the camera as well um and the price although it is somewhat offensive this is the best big monitor you can buy from apple and it is a very good big monitor by the standards of the entire industry it's not price competitive you can get other monitors with the similar specs for less money but it's not as if that there are other monitors out there that are a million times better than this like these specs of this a thousand that's sustained two thousand at's peak two thousand dimming zones really good calibration nice case there's not a lot of monitors out there that are actually better than this monitor there are only ones that are about the same for less money and we call that a win in the world of apple monitors we call that a win because you're paying the premium but you're getting a premium monitor that looks really good and has modern specs modern ish specs like again 120 hertz there are ones with higher rates than that but this is not a gaming monitor like over 120 hertz is kind of wasted on you scrolling your windows for most of the times you're not playing a video game where you want 144 or whatever or like you know 340 or whatever so like for its purposes as a color accurate uh high quality well-made mac native monitor the features of this are good and i give a thumbs up the price is not so good but what do you expect is the highest of the high end and i say again it is still less egregious than the xdr was and certainly less egregious than the xdr was two days ago when it was still for sale with the same specs from like six years ago so the xdr needed to be discontinued like to be clear like it needed to either be price reduced which is not a thing that apple's super into or discontinued and so it was discontinued i don't hold a grudge on that i do continue to hope that someday apple will release like bring it back at the same price like a higher end monitor that is essentially like this but XDR sized and just do it at XDR.

38:47Casey Liss:Like, look at the price. This is 3 ,600 bucks, 5 ,000, $6 ,000 for an XDR with these specs. That is, that's in line with these prices. Like it's not, it's not out of step with, with this technology. So I really hope they do that someday, but Apple statements is them trying to say, we're not going to do that. Just buy this monitor.

39:05John Siracusa:So should I buy this monitor? I don't think I have any justifiable reason for it, but I kind of want it really badly.

39:11Casey Liss:I think you would enjoy it. Cause you, you are a 5k monitor enjoyer. And this is a better 5K monitor than all your other monitors, but it's probably too much money for somebody who's already got three perfectly serviceable 5K monitors. So, you know, I'm not saying wait and the price will go down because it won't. Nope, nope. In two years, the specs on this will still be pretty good because this is, again, not in the gaming realm. 120 hertz and these brightness figures are going to be competitive for several years in the realm of somebody who's looking at windows on their computer screen and pictures that they take.

39:45Casey Liss:You know what I mean? Outside of the gaming realm, there's not this big race to crank these specs up. The brightness is going to continue to increase and it's going to fall behind the competition probably, but it's going to be competitive for several years. So I don't think you need to have a run out and get this one. You can wait two or three years and it will still be a good monitor in two or three years and it'll be the same price.

40:06Marco Arment:Yeah, I think also you'd have to be concerned. you know you're a many monitors person and this would be like the the promotion especially would be such that this monitor would make your other ones look bad so this does this might not be in

40:22John Siracusa:the middle well that's that's the thing is the the current studio displays in the middle and my lg ultra masses are on either side and so i would do a similar trickle down with as i would with the apple tv where this would go in the center and the what the current studio display or the old now studio display would go to one side and then i would be down to one lg ultra meh uh but i'm not gonna lie for a fleeting moment i thought to myself should i get three of these and the answer

40:46Marco Arment:was immediately absolutely not you're like i just saved myself from buying a car i mean this that

40:51Casey Liss:thought was my second thought marco yeah i'm just not sure this is i i would i mean you know we'll

40:57Marco Arment:get to this probably in a little while but like i would maybe bank some of this for a new macbook pro in a few maybe like six months you know like that kind of like when the old ones yeah like when if that if those rumors are correct that those are coming you know sooner than normal for an upgrade cycle after the ones that just came out yeah that is probably something that you're going to want to spend a bunch of money on too and so if you're if you're like you know in this budget mindset of like all right i just saved myself from buying a car why don't you take your family on a vacation and then in you know eight months when there's an amazing macbook pros out go get

41:32John Siracusa:one of those yeah yeah all right so i feel like there was more to talk about here i mean how are you two feeling i know you're grumbly about this but like what are you going to do if you ever have

41:41Casey Liss:to update your monitor never do mostly just feeling protective of my xdr and in fear of the red line designs that underscore has because if it dies my options are now try to find the used one on ebay that isn't doesn't have the same problems or like downsizing monitors and that's just not that's just not a thing computer nerds are used to like getting like over time again computer nerds are used to their monitor is getting bigger like i you know i started out with a nine inch screen now i have 32 inch it's basically been a progression only upwards i don't think i've ever regressed because once you get to used to more screen real estate it's hard to go back and because i am a one monitor person not a multi-monitor person it's just been my one monitor getting bigger and bigger i would not want to go back to 27 inch so i'm just i just sending good vibes to my xdr say just hang in there keep going for probably only one more decade when apple will

42:34Marco Arment:release a new monitor that's bigger than 32 inches yeah that's that's the thing like i what when you are a a user of something that gets discontinued you know see also the mac pro probably pretty soon god willing it's never a good feeling when the only company that makes the product that you use or can use or want to use stops making it because that tells you like your needs don't matter also your needs can no longer be satisfied with new products so like that's never a good place to be it's never a good place to feel and it's never a good place to to have your needs be because what are you going to do?

43:11Marco Arment:So in this case, like, you know, the XDR, it's not going to be easy to find a used XDR or a new one in any kind of reasonable condition within a year because this was never a high volume product to begin with. It's not like this was super popular and you'll be, you know, if you wanted like a mint brand new in box, you know, MacBook Air from a few years ago, you'll find them because they make a ton of MacBook Airs and they sell a ton of MacBook Airs and people stock them. that's not the case for something like the like the pro display xdr this is never a high stocked high volume product especially after six years of being out um and so if you want an xdr and you don't already have one it's going to be hard to get one you know maybe you might be able to get one this week maybe but like otherwise it's going to become difficult and so if your xdr breaks in two years what the hell are you gonna do like what what are you gonna do so the end the answer is I guess either get one of the third party ones, which as an Apple user is always going to provide an inferior experience and an uglier case and an uglier situation or downsize to this one.

44:20Marco Arment:So spend$3 ,500 to have what you will perceive as a monitor that is better in some ways, but worse than some pretty significant ones. And that's not a good feeling either. so i i just i hope my xdrs stick around and last and you know if i eventually have to replace them i would probably with a heavy heart get this monitor uh but i hope i don't need to anytime

44:45Casey Liss:soon yeah and it would look good and everything it's just less pixels he just wants to get used to the room screen space is really nice yeah if you had bought a uh a pro display xdr last week the one you got was probably manufactured three and a half years ago right i think they stopped making these ages ago because because the volumes were just so low and i think they were just draining them out slowly but surely and the used market is like it's tough because i think a lot of the ones you would find would be like things that were used in like video editing studios or vfx houses or like other things like that that have essentially been used in a professional environment that get kind of beat up you know things that have been in and out of a pelican case a lot because those are the ones that are going to end up going on the market people individual people are going to keep them until they die and then they're going to you know get recycled or whatever who's selling working XDRs.

45:28Casey Liss:It's like, oh, well, you know, some Hollywood studio had a whole bunch of these and they just swapped in a bunch of new monitors. And so these are now, but those are always beat to hell because they're not, they're not treated gently. Like it's not like, you know, old lady just drove a church on Sundays. It's really worked hard. And so yeah, finding, and especially if they have some kind of flaw in them, like the red line happens after X number of years, if that's been sitting in a box in a warehouse for three and a half years and you buy it quote unquote new, it could have the exact same you know problem with the red line or whatever other components are going to fail me i don't want to say anything too loud like mine is mine is fine has been problem free but like please hang it hang in there xdr so if you had to if your xdrs both of you

46:09John Siracusa:died today marcos you said you would hold your nose and get a new xdr john what would you do

46:14Casey Liss:i would thoroughly research the 6k options and see if there are any of them that i could tolerate the appearance of probably and if there wasn't i would get the studio spikes there yeah i would

46:24Marco Arment:i would wait a week see what john found out about the other 6k options and then figure something

46:31Casey Liss:out like because i i don't doubt that there are 6k monitors out there that are really good it's just a question of me like do i think the case is ugly and that may seem silly to you but that's

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48:29John Siracusa:All right, M5 MacBook Air. The CPU is 10-core, which is four performance, six efficiency. All of the cores are working. The GPU is eight or 10-core, 10 cores with all the cores working. RAM, 16, 24, 32 gigs. SSD starts at 512. There's no more 256 option. One terabyte, two terabyte, or four terabytes, which is new. It also has the N1. It supports up to two external displays, each of which can be either 6k at 60 hertz like your ancient pro display xdr or 4k at 144 hertz or you could go one display up to 8k at 60 hertz 5k at 120 hertz or 4k at 240 hertz uh the environment story is same as the uh m4 we talked about earlier we what was that the ipad the same as the macbook air m4 oh i'm sorry thank you um uh and so anyways uh and then new with the environments environmental stuff is that it's manufactured with 50 renewable electricity pricing one thousand one hundred dollars for 16 gigs ram half terabyte ssd a core gpu which is down 100 from the m4 with a half terabyte ssd which is stunning uh and up 100 from the m4 with 256 gig ssd yeah i mean so

49:48Casey Liss:this this pricing is like as we'll see when we get to the neo obviously this was released the day before the neo but it's like this is definitely leaving room for a lower priced uh computer below it so it is cheaper to get into a 512 but you could get into any macbook air for a hundred dollars less you just got the crappy 256 so i think it's a reasonable move at the bottom of the pricing and then i'm we're not going to go into this much pricing detail with the other computers because i feel like once you get up into higher amounts of pricing it's it gets it gets more difficult but this is the low end well other than the neo this is a lower priced item and what counts the most is like what does it take for me to get into one of these what is the base price is the base config good and this base config is 1100 16 gigs rang 512 gig ssd that's a pretty good base config and it's 100 less than that same config with an m4 so you're getting a better a better soc all the other specs are the same and it's 100 less so i think that's a good deal even if it is there is no more like one thousand dollar nine nine nine uh pricing option for this computer

50:46John Siracusa:right and then ram upgrades seem to be priced the same as before to go from 16 to 24 is an additional 200 to go from 24 to 32 is an additional 200 yep they held the ram upgrades their normal

50:59Casey Liss:ridiculous prices all now that ram is ridiculously increasing they're not as ridiculous as they were um as i said when we discussed this ages ago like apple we don't know the details of apple's deals but very often they have made deals where they lock in a price for a certain volume of components for a certain period of time. And it is plausible that every computer that we're talking about today still benefits from a price they locked in before RAM prices went crazy. But that's not going to be true forever. They will have to eventually negotiate new deals for new periods of time for new RAM at new prices.

51:31Casey Liss:And if the prices haven't dropped by then, I would expect some changes. Not necessarily those changes to be reflected in the RAM upgrade prices, but for Apple to shift around other things to make sure that they try to maintain margins. um you'll hear that on their earning calls we don't talk about their earning calls but they always talk about what their margins are but of course they talk about their like overall margins they don't break it down and services are incredibly high margin uh hardware is less so so when they say oh our margins were like 50 or whatever it doesn't mean they have 50 margins on their hardware or all their hardware or any specific hardware it just means overall across the entire things they sell phones services you know apple care warranties like everything our overall margins were 50%.

52:13Casey Liss:I'm sure some products have margins that are higher than that. I'm sure some products have lower ones. And of course, services, I'm sure their margins are really high. So it's hard to back solve to see what they are. But I would imagine that if, you know, next year at this time, if RAM prices have not come back to sanity, we're going to be looking at products and trying to figure out where Apple buried the massively increased RAM costs. Right now, I'm not even sure Apple is experiencing massively increased RAM costs because of their long-term deals and because of when these might have been manufactured.

52:43Casey Liss:So, you know, looking, looking at the MacBook Air M5, it looks a lot like the MacBook Air M4 updated for with it, with the M5 and with some new specs. And it's nice to get to the N1 because again, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. It looks just like a straight up good upgrade. The iPhone, the iPhone, MacBook Air M4 was a great computer. The MacBook Air M5 is also a great computer and the price is reasonable.

53:07John Siracusa:All right. They've also announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The M5 Pro and M5 Max are built using a new Apple-designed fusion architecture. The innovative design combines two dies into a single system on a chip, which includes a powerful CPU, scalable GPU, media engine, unified memory controller, neural engine, and Thunderbolt 5 capabilities. The M5 Pro and Max feature a new 18-core CPU architecture. It includes six of the highest-performing core design, now called Super Cores, that are the world's fastest CPU core. Alongside those cores are 12 all-new performance cores optimized for power-efficient multi-threaded workloads.

53:43Marco Arment:Can you please... So, okay. So, performance cores are now super cores, and efficient cores are now performance cores, basically? What? Why? Come on!

53:53John Siracusa:The industry-leading super core was first introduced as performance cores in M5.

53:58Casey Liss:We didn't even know it!

54:00John Siracusa:Mm-hmm. Which also adopts the SuperCore name for all M5-based products. So they've retconned the plain-jane M5.

54:07Marco Arment:So they've just renamed the slow cores fast cores.

54:13Casey Liss:No, they didn't, though. So here, first of all, just this clarification from Andrew Cunningham from Ars Technica, who says that Apple's spec pages still draw a distinction between the efficiency cores in the M5 and the non-super performance cores in the M5 Pro, M5 Max. So basically, there's three kinds of cores from Apple's marketing perspective. There are SuperCores, which are essentially the most powerful cores in the m5 line those are called super cores that's i mean that's just a marketing thing you could have just called them power cores there whatever the most powerful cores are inside a line of chips apple now calls them super cores in the m5 line and it's true across the entire line then apple says that they have a new kind of core which is the performance core so in some m5 chips there's the super core and then there's a new kind of core called the performance core, which is not the same as the efficiency cores in the plain Jane M5.

55:06Casey Liss:So every chip has two kinds of cores, big ones and little ones. It's actually called big little in our parlance, right? The big ones are called super cores in the M5, but the little ones have two different names. Now, does that mean that the little cores in the M5 are different than the little cores in the M5 Pro and M5 Max? Probably, yeah. Probably they're actually different cores. So having two different names for them makes sense. The names themselves don't make any sense, But having these three names, super, efficiency, and performance, those three names refer to three actual different hardware things.

55:40Casey Liss:And I think the reason they're different is, as we noted when we talked about the M5 chip, the M5 is not made using what Apple is calling their fusion architecture. We were talking about it in TSMC terms as a SOICMH siliconon. I forget what it stands for. It was like hyphen molding horizontal. Anyway, TSMC has a tech where you can take multiple dies and put it onto a thing and make a chip out of it. And we're talking about how that's better because you can make a bunch of littler dies and stick them together instead of trying to make one big one. The M5 doesn't do that. The M5 is all one die. It does not use this chiplet, you know, Apple Fusion architecture.

56:15Casey Liss:So the M5 one is different, like physically different, manufactured in a different way than the M5 Pro and M5 Max. So there is a bifurcation in the line. whole m5 line has these super cores which fine is a renaming of the of the most powerful cores but the m5 has the efficiency cores that presumably are similar to the efficiency cores in the m4 line and the m5 pro and m5 max have essentially better efficiency cores which are bigger and more powerful and they're called performance cores it's apple they really messed up the naming but what they're going for is name different things differently now there is an argument to be made that across the m1 m2 and m3 they kept calling them efficiency cores obviously the efficiency cores change their the m1 efficiency core is not the same as the m4 efficiency core we just kept calling them efficiency cores but we always understood within the context of the m whatever line these are the efficiency cores now with the m5 generation there's two different kinds of efficiency cores and as jason snell pointed out every time you talk to an apple executive for years and at wwdc they would say this like i've heard people say this to me in person literally uh you know the sufficiency cores are actually pretty good it's like apple you name them efficiency cores if you don't like people calling them that because they were like oh i want to be on the power cores like in every wwc session where that shows you how do you use like core affinity and stuff like that they're like and don't be afraid to use the efficiency cores they're actually really powerful and people like well no of course my code is important so it needs to be on the power cores like i get where apple is coming from but it's like we didn't choose the names apple you you could have called them but again the arm uh nomenclature for the first chips it is big little where big is an all lowercase and little is in all caps i think which is also funny yeah but like it's it's a marketing thing with the tech behind it because they don't want people to feel like they're having lesser course and we'll as we'll see when we start looking what's in these chips the renaming also makes sense in the context of what they how they design them but this is actually one of the most interesting years for the m chips in a long time not because the m5 line is you know super amazing and everything it's good like it's better than the m4 but like the pro and max are just plain manufactured differently and having the cpu and gpu as like separate dies i yeah apple didn't release pictures of what this looks like but as soon as someone gets these and slices it open i'll love to see what's going on inside there a it opens up the possibility of something even cooler for the m5 ultra so we'll see if that ever materializes or even anything beyond that but b it is a split line plain m5 is essentially built differently than the Pro and the Max.

58:42Marco Arment:Yeah, and what's really interesting to me, and this is why I don't think we have benchmarks of these yet, do we?

58:48Casey Liss:We do. Well, no, not for the Pro and the Max.

58:51Marco Arment:Yeah, I really am curious to see those once those start coming out on Geekbench and stuff because what they have done is a dramatic drop in the number of performance cores on the big chips. No, that's not what they're called anymore. Jesus. Yeah, anyway, so the number of the big cores.

59:08Casey Liss:Well, it's actually, you can read Apple's base, like, overall performance claims before we get to the specs. So this is what they're saying, like, for the line of chips.

59:16John Siracusa:All right. So CPU, up to 30 % faster, quote, for pro workloads. And the M5 Max has 15 % higher multithreaded performance. The GPUs, up to four times the peak GPU compute for AI compared to the previous generation, and up to 35 % faster, quote, for apps using ray tracing.

59:34Casey Liss:That 4X1 is the biggest number they've thrown at. because otherwise like 30 percent 15 percent like it's a generation you know the m5 is faster than the m4 and the usual amount which is good like 30 percent 15 percent those are those are fine numbers for a generation four times that is a big thing presumably due to improvements in the uh i forget what they call it like the the neural whatever crap that they put into their gpu cores

59:56Marco Arment:and in the previous generation something like what they called it yeah they put some processing

1:00:01Casey Liss:stuff in each gpu core that is useful for doing like machine learning uh ai stuff and i'm and i guess they improved that in or i don't know if they improved it or have more of them but anyway apple is making big claims about the gpu compute performance compare and when they say previous generation they mean like i'm assuming they mean like the m5 max versus m4 max so that's a big number and that is significant because if you think about where what kind of cpu or you know what kind of GPU bound workloads are people doing these days? AI is right up there, local, you know, on machine AI. So, I mean, we'll have to see what the benchmarks bear out and how realistic that 4X number is, but it is the standout number in everything here.

1:00:41Marco Arment:Yeah, for the most part, like the regular base model M4 to the regular base model M5, it was a very similar thing of like, yeah, about 15 % faster CPUs and GPUs got better depending on what you're doing with them with these different accelerators and so we're seeing roughly the same claims here about 15 faster multi-thread cpu performance okay let's see i mean again like the the the core arrangement is radically different um you know the the number of performance cores sorry excuse me the number of large cores has has gone substantially down in these higher chips and the number of smaller cores has gone substantially up so it's it's a it's kind of like a flatter design, so to speak, of like, you know, the difference between the two cores probably has been greatly reduced.

1:01:32Marco Arment:Only benchmarks and use will be able to tell us, like, if that makes a significant difference in either direction, but it is curious that, like, it's a radically different balance of power, so to speak.

1:01:43John Siracusa:All right, so the M5 Pro, the CPU is 15 core, which is five, what Marco? Super cores. And 10 performance cores versus the M4 Pro, which was eight performance. So now there's five super. I hate all these bend counts.

1:02:00Marco Arment:It's driving me nuts.

1:02:01Casey Liss:Yeah, that's how they sell them. But here's what it comes down to, is what Marco was saying. The old M4 was eight and four, eight big, four little. The new arrangement is five and 10. So it's pretty much flipped. It used to be double the number of really good ones to the not as good ones. Now it's the opposite. It went from eight, four to five, 10. so you know it's really it's just total inversion and that's why the naming makes sense because look when we talk about like power cores versus efficiency cores like what do we actually mean on the m series chip what is it about the p cores that makes them powerful how are they different than the e cores and all the other lines of chips well if you look at the die shot you can say well first of all i can see that the p cores are literally bigger like they're a bigger square on the chip why are they bigger what is in that thing that makes them more powerful and there's a bunch of answers to that there could be and probably is more execution units how many parts of the chip can add numbers together you can have two adders three adders four orders how many units are there for floating multiplication like you can literally put more execution units more things that can munge numbers you can add more of them because it's parallel dispatch like it's not just one line through so that's a way you can make them bigger another way you can make them bigger is you can add more cash more l1 cash and stuff like that that takes up die space that's what makes the power cores bigger you can have a more sophisticated branch predictor you can have all sorts of stuff that makes it make up take up more room on the chip and more power and more transistors and more parts that makes it a power core and then the efficiency cores they have less of that stuff they take up less room they take up less power but the question always is for a given workload So when you're sending something through like a power core, what if you're not don't have that many floating point multiplications?

1:03:47Casey Liss:Those extra floating point multiplication units are just sitting there not being used because most of the workloads you're doing aren't doing lots of floating point stuff. So they're not doing anything useful. And at that point, if you had sent that same load through a quote unquote efficiency core, it would have been just as fast or maybe even faster. Maybe the pipeline is shallower or something like that. Right. So you never quite know what the tradeoffs are of like, should I send this to the bigger core and waste it? time winding through that machinery if it's not going to take advantage of most of the stuff that's there and what it looks to me like is in the m5 pro and we'll see in the m5 max as well i think what they did is made the smaller cores bigger enough so that it makes more sense to have twice as many of them as the power cores before it was twice as many of the big cores as the little now it's twice as many of the little as the big i think the way they did that and we'll have to wait for a die shot to see if this theory bears out is that they made the little cores big enough to essentially be the best choice for almost everything you do and only really really specialize the bigger cores for jobs that are actually going to use all the machinery they have that need the more sophisticated branch prediction they need the deeper pipeline that need the extra execution units that need the more l1 cache and there's five of them it's not like there's just one of them or something there's five of them there's plenty but i i mean and apple knows this i bet Apple looks at like workloads of like, what do people actually do with Macs and how can we make that more efficient?

1:05:11Casey Liss:And so we'll see, like, especially we'll see what like the performance, the power numbers, the battery usage and stuff. If they were able to flip this arrangement going from twice as many big to little to twice as many little to big and still get a performance increase that I think says to me that they have made the correct trade-off because they are presumably probably using less space they're they're getting more cores like so you know 15 is more than 12 right so they got three extra cores similar power envelope i would hope uh and better performance so i'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt now and say this total inversion of big to little was a smart move and it is suitable it fits what people do with max like because that's the whole thing they have the app store they know how people use they have the os they make the hardware they They make the silicon.

1:06:02Casey Liss:Their whole deal is we can figure out how best to serve the workloads that people actually use our Macs for and then make a chip that does that better than the previous one.

1:06:09Marco Arment:I think my major concern here, assuming that they have kept performance good when you need it, which the benchmarks or as the quoted metrics suggest that they probably have. We'll see what happens with the benchmarks. But there was a side effect that I'm not sure was intentional, but there was a side effect of having the low power cores be very low power. And that is that if you recall back in the days of everyone having these Intel Mac laptops, you would sometimes get one core at being used 100 % by some background process. whether it was, you know, MD worker indexing, Dropbox, like, you know, whatever, you know, Chrome's weird updating things, like whatever it was, like you would often get a case where some kind of common app on the Mac or common background service would use 100 % CPU like forever.

1:07:04Marco Arment:And back on those old laptops, what that would do is make your laptop run hot, have crappy battery life and have the fans kind of running all the time because it's one thing in the background was using a bunch of CPU and keeping one of the cores really hot. When we moved to Apple Silicon and we had these small low power cores as one of the options on the chip, macOS was very smart about how to dispatch things to them. And one of the things that macOS did was, as I think, everything running in the background would run only on the low power cores. A side effect of that is that when you would have one of those runaway 100 % CPUs, which background processes, it was only running on these low power cores and they just didn't they were so small on low power that even if you were maxing one out forever it would have almost no noticeable effect on battery life heat or fan noise if they make the smaller cores bigger i hope they've somehow accounted to keep that still be the effect like maybe background processes still get you know lower maximum thermal use.

1:08:08Marco Arment:Maybe the background processes still get their wattage limit or CPU usage over time. Maybe they're running at a lower clock speed when they're in the background. Who knows? There's all sorts of advanced things they can do with power management now, but I hope that that effect of limiting the damage done to the user experience by runaway background processes, I hope that is maintained now that the smaller cores have gotten bigger.

1:08:35Casey Liss:I think they've gotten bigger maybe in terms of transistor count but remember this is a shrink as well so they might not have gotten physically

1:08:42Marco Arment:bigger i this is not a shrink the m the next generation to shrink oh i versus the uh the m3

1:08:47Casey Liss:i guess um this i forget if this one well we don't know because the this is this is the new uh i don't know if the process is the same n3 whatever as the m5 because it is the chiplet thing is it just the packaging different or are they actually on i don't i don't actually know i don't know if there if there is like an n3 letter that i don't know that it applies to the chiplet thing but anyway

1:09:06Marco Arment:we'll see when they cut the die uh thing off them but yeah i i think the the the process shrink isn't coming until the m6 generation uh not not like to two nanometer obviously these are all three

1:09:17Casey Liss:nanometer i'm just saying is it n n3p versus right whatever um but we'll see because they do they didn't go from four to ten of these so i bet they're still pretty small um and who knows if my theory about them being bulked up to to be good for the majority of tests is correct it could be that they were already best for the majority of tests and they just learned that by like low you know seeing real world usage on the m4s again we'll see when they someone slices these chips open and we'll they'll map out like here all the different cores and we can just physically measure them do they look about the same size as the old efficiency cores are they a little bigger how much bigger also there may be improvements in parts of the efficiency cores that can be turned off as you said there's clock throttling and everything but like you know as we see the specs say the performance is better the battery specs say that this performs about the same as the m41 so i'm optimistic that i mean it's not gonna it's not gonna be a big impressive thing this is just like a transitional phase of like we have a new tech for building chips uh can we do that tech transition at the same time as maintaining our normal year-over-year improvements while also doing this complete inversion of the ratio of our big cores to our little cores and according to everything apple has released they're basically saying they've done it we'll wait to see what the benchmarks are all right the gpu is either actually you skip the 18 core one because this is the interesting these come in 15 and 18 core um and the 18 core is just with everything enabled direct it's six super and 12 performance and so instead of being like the m4 was 10 big four little and this is six big 12 little again total inversion but the 18 cores are the ones with everything working

1:10:50John Siracusa:gpu 16 core or 20 core with enhanced shader core with second generation dynamic caching and hardware accelerated mesh shading. There is 307 gigabits per second memory bandwidth. This will become relevant soon. This is up 12.5 % over the M4 Pro's 273 gigabits per second. For external displays, you can do three, each of which can be 6K at 60Hz or 4K at 144Hz, or you can do two in a variety of different combinations I'm not going to read out. And it supports up to three external displays over a single

1:11:25Casey Liss:thunderbolt port your three six k displays if only apple can still sold one of those

1:11:29John Siracusa:if only that would be like what twenty thousand dollars worth of displays yeah i guess even my

1:11:34Casey Liss:third party ones but yeah but the display support continues to be really good and that and the two display support is weird because you have to pick like one of these monitors and then one of these other set of monitors so it's like mixing but the bandwidth is what it is you're just slicing and dicing how much bandwidth do you have with display stream compression to just but the point is this is what we're reading you now is the m5 pro remember really good uh display support because the m5 pro as as we noted before when apple said the m5 pro and the m5 max feature a new 18 core architecture guess what the m5 pro and the m5 max are basically the same except for gpu core so it's going back to the m1 and m2 generation when the pro and the max the pro was just the max with some gpu core lopped off now this is not i don't think it's a lopping off thing we'll have to see what you know again because the whole architecture is different with separate dies inside the package and stuff but that's the upshot that the pro this is a good pro year if you don't care about gpu the pro has all the same goods as the max essentially uh modulo binning uh and you just

1:12:35Marco Arment:have fewer gpus inside there yeah that's this is a great like i mean geez i've been really been uh eating some crow on this on my pro opinions the last couple of weeks but like this is actually This is a great year for the pro buyers. And in fact, like, I think if I were buying today and if the amount of RAM I wanted was available in the pro, I would buy the pro. No question.

1:12:58John Siracusa:How much RAM do you want?

1:13:00Marco Arment:Well, all of it.

1:13:01Casey Liss:We'll get to that when we get to the computers. We're still just doing the SOCs. But anyway, the Max, it only comes in 18 core. So that's just market segmentation. They could make it with the 15 core in it, but they don't. So you get the M5 Max, you get it with everything working. so again it's six big cores 12 little ones there's no wondering which one you're going to get all the maxes have everything working you do get a choice in the gpu you can get the uh even bigger that is that the pro has a 20 core 16 core or 20 core gpu the max has 32 or 40 those are your two choices so the big the big gpu thing has twice as many cores as the pro again if you don't care about gpu the cpu parts are the same if you get them like not the non-binned ones um so yeah good year uh uh memory bandwidth memory bandwidth interestingly varies based on the number of gpu cores i don't know if it's related to the gpu gpu cores it might be but because they need to be fed but it might just be a segmentation but anyway the m5 max all the cpu cores always work but when you pick how many working gpu cores what you want if you get the 32 gpu core one you get 460 gigabytes per second which is 12.2 percent increase over the similarly been 32 core m4 max's gpu and if you get the 40 core gpu you get 614 gigabytes which is again 12.5 percent over the 40 core m4 maxis gpu so be aware of those differences there and the display support is just ridiculously good um this this is the only one that says just native display port 2.1 speeds i don't think they said display port stuff for the other ones but anyway um four displays you can do four 6k displays if apple sold them um or you know two displays varying right it's a huge amount of display bandwidth you won't have any problem with this supports up to four external displays over a single thunderbolt port uh it's pretty amazing it's a pretty beefy gpu for what will as we will see is a laptop gpu uh good chip yeah this is really impressive uh i'm not in the market for

1:14:58John Siracusa:a new macbook pro and let me tell you i priced one and it was over six thousand dollars the way I would probably build it, which is a lot. But the thing that I'm very curious about, and we don't necessarily need to cover this now, but I wonder if I would want to pick a Max, which is what I've had. I had an M1 Max, an M3 Max right now. Would I want to pick the Max for the increased memory bandwidth? And I don't, maybe not. No, not for what you do with it.

1:15:22Casey Liss:Absolutely not. Oh, fair.

1:15:23John Siracusa:All right. Well, that answers that. Well, that's why it's a good year

1:15:25Casey Liss:for people who do not care about GPU. This is the year to get the Pro because it's back at the old days where all you're giving up if you don't get the binned one is you're giving up GPU that you aren't going to use anyway. Hey, that's less heat and everything. So it's a win.

1:15:37Marco Arment:I mean, the real question with picking, I guess we'll get to this maybe a little bit later, but the real question with picking these is like, how much will this matter for AI stuff in the near future? Like during the lifetime of this laptop, how much will it matter for AI stuff? Because that's obviously like a major thing going on right now. Sorry, everybody. Yes, I'm talking about it. And so, you know, there's a question of like, well, what if I wanted to run local models? what we have seen so far is that while we can run local models on some of the higher end macs if we shove enough ram into them for a million dollars that's not really a mainstream thing that's not really a thing that most of us need to do or will do or will be able to do in a way that is competitive with what the what the big server-side models are able to do for us will that change over the course of owning your next laptop if you're looking to buy one of these i don't think anybody can really say uh but like how much are you willing to throw down you know thousands of dollars for really high specs that you might end up barely using because what you're mostly using your big grunt cpu power is like happening in data centers somewhere yeah i would bet against

1:16:47Casey Liss:it i mean there is a possibility because these companies are highly motivated to reduce the cost of inference so basically can we get away to run models with less power like less cpu power that would they're they're highly motivated to do that because it saves them a lot of money right if there is a breakthrough in that area if they say oh we've found a way to run models that work like our current ones but use half the ram or something like that is the only way that you should that you will be get the benefits of like future benefits of running local because right now unless you already know that you want to run if you're you know if you're not already running local models don't buy a machine for the purposes of running local models because if you buy this machine today, right now models are just getting bigger and bigger and harder and harder to run locally.

1:17:33Casey Liss:If you're talking about the lead bleeding edge models, if you care about the bleeding edge models, don't run them on your laptop, right? And you have to run them in a server because you just a lot of them, you just literally can't run because you're not gonna have enough memory, right? So unless there's a breakthrough in that, or unless you're very interested in running small local models, again, you're probably already doing that. So if you're not currently running local models do not buy an m5 mac pro based on your ability to run local models because if you're not already doing it in the future it's you're just going to be less likely to do it because the models are just going to get bigger and more demanding and honestly if you know most people probably should be using the bigger models because they're just more capable and you don't want to run them yourself like they're so demanding like there's a reason those you know those gpus that they're running them on costs like 60 grand or whatever and there's multiple ones you don't want to be doing that yourself unless you're already doing it because if you're already doing it then you know and what you should probably do is get like an m5 pro mac mini or something someday because that's what you want it's like maximum bang for small amount of buck or whatever so yeah i wouldn't like it's just i just feel like we're it's such early stages is like okay maybe you can run like some local model today but in three years that local model is going to be

1:18:45John Siracusa:garbage like what do you care yeah all right the m5 pro and the m5 max both support uh memory integrity enforcement which we've talked about on and off over the last yeah that was introduced

1:18:55Casey Liss:with the a19 series and the m5 and just clarifying all the whole m5 family supports it and and the

1:19:01John Siracusa:everything before that in the m family does not all right the m5 pro and m5 max macbook pros 14 16 inches just as before. The M5 Pro, you can get the 15-core CPU, 16-core GPU with 24 or 48 gigs of RAM. You can get the 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU at 24, 48 or 64 gigs RAM, which is new. That was what forced my hand on the Macs in the past, is that I always wanted 64 gigs RAM. And now, I wouldn't have to, to both of your points earlier. John Gruber pointed out, this means the price for a MacBook Pro with 64 gigs of RAM, if that's your main concern, hello, dropped by over by$800 year over year. Last year, you needed to buy one of the high end M4 Max chips to get the 64 gigs.

1:19:46John Siracusa:That's very good news. However, it comes with an SSD of one, two or four terabytes, no half terabyte option, which means for me and my fancy lad eight terabytes, I'm back in the M5 Max.

1:19:58Casey Liss:Yeah, I mean, this is the thing like Apple does have to sort of segment these like, you know, again doing 24 and 48 like all right 24 48 and 64 like the segmentation makes some sense but like the ssd is really not particularly related to the soc in a way that explains the lack of an

1:20:16John Siracusa:8 terabyte it's just market segmentation and then the m5 max you can do with the 32 core do you get 36 gigs of ram and you will like it for the 40 core you can do 48 64 or 128 gigs of ram um ssd in two four or eight terabytes and then between the two of them all of them share the same screen which is unchanged for the m4 pro and max uh thousand nits uh up to 1600 uh peak on hdr 120 hertz nano textures 150 bucks has the n1 with wi-fi 7 and bluetooth 6 uh size and weight is unchanged ports unchanged uh battery is largely unchanged although slightly different uh amounts of video streaming and wireless web which is their you know ridiculous uh metrics yeah and mostly

1:21:02Casey Liss:like so the the m5 pro gives you two more hours of video streaming so that's i mean that's a measurable increase over the m4 pro right so that's that's reasonable m5 max is down an hour with wireless web and down an hour with video streaming so that's interesting um and the the battery sizes are unchanged on these models the 14 inch is still 72.4 watt hour for both of them i believe so it seems like basically a wash but again i want these these the numbers apple always gives you with battery is like we don't know how you perform these tests what the heck is wireless web like what are you doing so as usual battery testing well i'm sure will be all over the place but uh it will be instructive to see how these new uh we keep saying chiplet architecture it's probably the wrong term but it's it's a nice way to visualize more than one die inside the package How will they behave in terms of thermals, battery life, to Marco's point?

1:21:52Casey Liss:How does the change in ratios of big to little cores affect things? You're not going to tell from looking at these battery numbers. We'll have to wait for people to test them.

1:21:59John Siracusa:All right. And then the microphone quotes voice isolation and wide spectrum microphone modes for enhanced voice clarity in audio and video calls.

1:22:07Casey Liss:Oh, you skipped over the 16-inch battery. It's interesting that the 16-inch battery is exactly the same for the M5 Pro, but the 16 inch battery is plus two hours on wireless web and plus one hour on video streaming for the max i don't understand like they didn't change the battery size at all so why does the max and the 14 inch go down an hour and the max and the 16 inch goes up an hour like it's it's very weird i just i don't quite understand if they had changed the battery sizes this would make sense to me but i mean it's the same it's the same chip in a 14 inch and a 16 inch laptop and it seems to get different performance.

1:22:40All right.

1:22:40John Siracusa:The environment story is basically, most largely the same as the M4 Pro and Max. However, new is that it's made with 45 % recycled content and manufactured again with 50 % renewable electricity. The price for the M5 Pro and M5 Max starts at$1 ,700 for the 14 inch and$2 ,700 for the 16 inch.

1:22:58Casey Liss:I had to set check that like three times. I'm like, this has to be wrong. I must have the wrong windows open. How can the starting price for the M5 Pro and M5 Max be exactly the same and the answer is i think that they're just like it's not apples to apples because they're you know different number of cores are disabled different amount of ram like the base configs are different but i believe i mean triple check me they both if you they both start at 1700 whichever chip you pick pro or max that does seem a little bananas to me on the 16

1:23:27Marco Arment:inch maybe on the 14 inch are you sure because i'm seeing it triple check me it might be wrong I'm seeing it say M5 Pro is from$23.49. M5 Max is from$37.49. Yeah, it's$37. The M5 Max dramatically ramps up everything. Let me see.

1:23:45Casey Liss:All right, maybe I did it wrong. That's why I doubted myself I'm going to double check it right now.

1:23:48Marco Arment:Yeah, I think it's like$1 ,300 more for the Max. All right, shop.

1:23:55Casey Liss:I'm going to go 14-inch.

1:23:57Marco Arment:As Casey was saying earlier, like they really have restricted a lot of the high memory and ssd configurations to the max chip even like if you want the eight terabyte ssd you can't just get a max you have to get like the highest like it's just everything is like you you have to really max out the processor to get the

1:24:19Casey Liss:most ram or s yeah maybe i was just clicking on the wrong things all right set that aside that's

1:24:23John Siracusa:not true all right well do we do we want to reboot this whole thing then no you can leave in my

1:24:27Casey Liss:mistake like i swear i checked it like three times you know what it is they've changed the product configurator there was a story about this a while of like how you don't pick like good better best you just basically go into the configurator but the way they've made like the clicking of like you know you have to like pick a color first so we won't let you pick anything else now pick a screen it won't let you pick anything else when you get down to the chip section they have these sort of collapsing set of round racks and i think they've bamboozled me because when you click on the chip like it there's another rectangle that appears where you have to pick like the number of cores and stuff and i just think i got confused my bad anyway that's why we that's why i double check correct in real time the max is super duper expensive sorry about that all right so yeah so

1:25:03John Siracusa:basically they're the max is as you said super duper expensive uh but the ram upgrades seem to be priced same as before same basic story as before we don't need to enumerate them but you know all the pricing doesn't really change like like when you go to a higher ram level you're

1:25:17Casey Liss:paying the same ridiculous prices you were always paying they just seem less ridiculous now because RAM prices are really high everywhere. But the point is Apple didn't actually increase their RAM upgrade prices. They were so ridiculous they were able to absorb the changes or they locked in their prices before and they're getting exactly the same margins they always did.

1:25:34Marco Arment:And I think what's interesting about this too is like, you know, Apple historically does not change these prices during the lifetime of that product. So what they, you know, by keeping the prices the same, what they are communicating is not only probably is this a comparable buy now than it was before, and relative to the rest of the market, it's becoming a better buy, but also Apple seems most likely to expect that they will not have to change this price at all, at least until the next MacBook Pro comes out. That's impressive, given the current environment. We always hear that Apple establishes long-term relationships with suppliers and they guarantee themselves a certain amount of stock and certain good price terms and everything.

1:26:21Marco Arment:We've also been hearing recently, and I think this is probably true, that Apple is no longer the darling customer of some of the big chip fabs and memory suppliers and things because all of these component orders coming in from all the AI companies, they're all of a sudden the new good customer for TSMC and And like, you know, like NVIDIA is buying a whole bunch of chips from TSMC and, you know, everybody making their own AI accelerators. Like they're all buying a bunch of chips from TSMC. Everyone's buying a bunch of memory from the memory companies besides Apple now. So like Apple is no longer necessarily like the only or the biggest significant customer to the fabs and the component suppliers.

1:27:02Marco Arment:So you would think, based on all of that, you would think that Apple would not be able to get as good of terms from everybody for their supplies and their pricing and their availability and everything as they are accustomed to getting. So either they still are getting great terms or they just think we'll be able to weather whatever temporary blip there is and then in a few years when things are more calm, maybe we will absorb it. But none of that is what we expected. We all expected memory prices would go up with the new generation.

1:27:35Casey Liss:I didn't expect that. I would have bet with Gruber on this.

1:27:38Marco Arment:Good job.

1:27:39Casey Liss:Because, again, the long-term contracts, the fact that these products are still well within a reasonable window of a long-term contract. And if any company on earth has room in its RAM margins to absorb a RAM increase, it's Apple. Because their prices have been – we did the math on it a while ago. It was like 6.5 times market prices or something. They had room. They had room in there. And, you know, I just think these products, this generator, even though they're being released now, these have been in the pipeline for a while. I just think these don't, these are, we don't see a reflection of the changes that you just described, Marco, in these products.

1:28:18Casey Liss:And if they do need to, like, again, with, like, the OLED models, if they do need to absorb that cost somewhere, I feel like they'll shave the cost somewhere else and leave their RAM prices somewhere. We'll see. And this is another slightly baffling one. the storage prices have gone down a little bit which is only baffling because we're in the weird world of apple like everywhere else in the industry of course storage prices go down year over year because you can get bigger ssds for less money over time because that's how technology progresses right not in apple land they just keep the same prices forever and ever the only reason the prices changes like eventually one of the sizes falls off the end because it becomes too embarrassing even for apple to ship and that did happen like they dropped some of the lower configs but here on the macbook pro m5 pro and m5 mac macbook pros a config with a one terabyte ssd is now $100 cheaper than it used to be.

1:29:00Casey Liss:And going from one to two is$200 cheaper than it used to be. And going from two to four is$200 cheaper than it used to be. And this is also true for the M5 MacBook Pro, not just the M5 Pro one. I think they adjusted the storage prices as well. So storage prices went down slightly. Again, their storage prices are also ridiculous. And like, you know, going from one terabyte to two terabytes is not a$200 increase in most scenarios. But you know uh we we accept those prices because it's the only we have no other choice and it's nice to see them go down so as as casey found if you spend a while in that configurator clicking on these round racks and watching things collapse and whatever and build the computer of your dreams it will cost the price of your nightmares i guess it's not going to work out well for you especially since apple does i mean they have to have some reasonable number of configs they drive you towards stuff like again if you get the m5 max no there's no bind option for you you get the one with everything enabled and you pay for it and you have no choice and if you want a larger amount of ram tough luck you can't get the lower power cpu if you want that extra amount of ram you gotta you know so that's just the way it is and honestly i think the configurability of in particular the m5 pro and m5 max macbook pros is pretty okay there are a lot of options but no there's not infinite options you can't you know as we surmise like oh if there's a chiplet architecture they can mix and match the cpus and gpus yeah apple can mix and match them but it's not like it's going to be a configurator where you pick how many cores and they manufacture it on demand for you or something they just picked a bunch of configs they think fit the lineup and they spread them out and i think it is reasonable maybe the most egregious thing is like limiting of the ram on the on the the chips with less gpu but they kind of always do that but in the grand scheme of things it is a better year than normal because the pro chip has the same cpu as the max chip as long as you don't need that extra RAM.

1:30:51John Siracusa:Yeah, so if you need or desire an 8-terabyte drive, you are looking at$6 ,250. Fun. My goodness. Yeah, with 64 gigs RAM for what it's worth. But yikes. I mean, and to be clear, like,

1:31:08Marco Arment:this is like top-of-the-line performance, top-of-the-line everything. Like, you know, this is a laptop, but this is exactly the kind of thing I use a laptop as a desktop for. I have a high-specced MacBook Pro. Mine's the M3 generation, so two years older than this, or two generations older than this, rather. But if you are trying to have a Mac Pro, so to speak, this is a really good way to do it for most people. And so that's what we're talking about. When you look at what did it cost to spec out an iMac Pro or other Mac Pros before they were whatever the heck the monster there is now. It was always in like, if you wanted the highest RAM config, the highest processor config, the highest storage config, you were always like$5 ,000 to$7 ,000.

1:32:02Marco Arment:That's always roughly where that got you. So for what this is getting us, I don't think this pricing is unprecedented and necessarily even unreasonable. it's just this is a very high-end product and we're talking about very high-end resource levels for for what it is we are sponsored this episode by delete me delete me makes it easy quick and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable so data brokers are those sites that when you like do a web search for somebody's name you see like all these sites advertising, get their home address, get their phone number, their contact info.

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1:34:17John Siracusa:And then finally, we have what we all were expecting, the low-cost MacBook, with a name that we weren't expecting until yesterday when it was leaked. But that's okay. it was leaked yesterday like I said there's an article at MacRumors which we'll link also Buck points out that Cupertino and Apple have kind of sort of stolen a name of a Surface, the Surface Neo is an unreleased dual touchscreen 2-in-1 PC that was unveiled by Microsoft on October 2nd of 2019 whoopsie doopsie

1:34:52Marco Arment:I think at this point I think they're allowed to steal a name that's 7 years old from something that never came out it's usually you see like apple you know for better or for worse mostly for setting naming

1:35:05Casey Liss:trends like pro and max which suddenly appeared on every other thing in the universe app or apple started using not because they're good names but just because apple essentially made them have good values associated with them by naming their products so then yeah but in this case they're bringing neo is you know has been in product names for ages even yes even before the matrix um and it is again but uh if this trend catches on and people start calling their products neo i think people will attribute it to apple but other people have been out there first it's just a question of like when apple does it it seems cool and people copy it all right so what

1:35:37John Siracusa:do we got a18 pro the cpu is six cores two performance but not super right because it's

1:35:44Casey Liss:only in the m5 yep they're you know and everything except for the m5 pro and max the old names still

1:35:50John Siracusa:play all right so two performance for efficiency that is not binned the gpu is five core which six core would be unbinned there is no fan john uh the benchmarks with the iphone 16 pro max as a stand-in uh pretty good i mean john how would you like there's a lot of numbers in our show notes

1:36:09Casey Liss:here but so like the iphone 16 pro is the max is the stand-in because it's got the same thing it's got an 18 pro and i picked the pro max instead of the pro figuring like it's the biggest so it's the closest analog to a laptop because i don't know there's more room inside it or whatever so we'll have to see what the actual benchmarks are because for all we know it is clocked higher it has better cooling and that we don't know we don't but the using just a phone pro max is a stand-in which i think is a reasonable kind of like conservative estimate of how this chip is going to perform in a laptop scenario assuming they didn't really screw up the cooling uh here's what it looks like single core cpu is 19 slower than an m5 30 faster than an m1 and 90 faster than the m2 ultra and the mac pro oh so not even your mac pro no this is the current mac pro it is 19 faster in single core than the current seven thousand dollar mac pro that you can buy right now at apple.com this the the macbook pro neo has 19 faster single core performance that's amazing and it is it is 2.5 times faster than the single performance of my mac pro because i know you want to know that just fyi multi-core it is one percent faster than the m1 or one percent slower again this the caveat with a geekbench source if you look them up geekbench has like a leaderboard and i like pulled from that but if you look at individual results they vary all over the place because i don't know people are putting their things on ice packs or like who knows like the numbers always vary by a few percent so don't like when i say one percent faster just assume it's like it's a wash but these are the numbers that i pulled out of the top charts right so i have the exact numbers here in the document but you know who knows how exactly they are because again it varies um it's two times slower in multi-core than the m5 it's 2.5 times slower than the m2 ultra and the mac pro so the seven thousand dollar mac pro is 2.5 times as fast in multi-core than apple's

1:38:01Marco Arment:cheapest phone chip powered laptop costs about as much as one wheel on the mac pro yeah and my

1:38:07Casey Liss:mac pro is 20 faster than multi-core so go my mac pro uh it's ridiculous uh gpu wise it is 2.2 slower than the m1 so i would call that a wash it is 2.3 times slower than the m5 seven times slower than the m2 ultra and the current mac pro and four times slower than my uh radeon pro vega 2 so jason snell has some has some charts that will link you can see his numbers are slightly different than mine because again when you look up geekbench stuff there's lots of individual because you you run the geekbench app and you upload your results to the website and tons of people doing that you get wildly varying numbers depending on what was going on in their system what temperature things were all sorts of variables that are not under your control but geekbench does publish like i don't know how they do it they average it or something they publish like top charts or you know organized by machine and cpu and that's where i was pulling mine from and i don't know if jason's numbers are slightly different but here's what it boils down to this thing for single core is actually better than the m1 and for multi-core and gpu it's about the same as the m1 so if you want to characterize what is it going to be like to use a mac with the a18 pro the specs say from geekbench which again is just a benchmark or whatever the specs say that it should be roughly like using an m1 that is a little bit peppier in single core and single core does make a difference for people just doing you know dorking around on their computer and doing stuff because the you know the main thread in your application the thing you're interacting with that's probably that that one single thread is probably going to be in a power core because it's an interactive thread and all this other stuff and the you know that core single core performance is faster in the 18 pro than it is in the m1 by by a significant amount 19 is not like within the range of variability of geekbench scores so that's good now there are some unknowns as we get to more of the specs of here like okay but there's more to an soc's performance than just cpu gpu single core multi-core like there's more to it than that there's more of the whole system performance so we'll have to wait until somebody gets one of these and starts actually benchmarking it to know because the phone is not a good stand-in in other ways but just pure cpu benchmarks that's how i would characterize the a18 pro is it's m1 ish um ram is eight gigs there's no choice no other option it's just eight gigs is eight gigs uh you gotta save money somewhere but like i imagine that the main reason it's eight gigs is i don't think the a18 pro can handle more than 18 in eight gigs i don't think it's ever shipped with more than eight gigs i don't i guess they didn't modify it like so i'm guessing i mean not saying they wouldn't have gone a gig anyway but they did just bump everybody up to 16 including the m1 macbook air uh they bumped up that configuration as well not the walmart one but um this has eight gigs and i don't think they're trying to do it to be stingy i just think like you can't do more than that with the 18 pro the a19 pro i think can do 12 yes so i suspect if you do see a bump in this like next year or the year after whatever next time they make a new macbook neo with an a19 pro in it i bet it will have 12 and not 16 but we'll see but like if you're disappointed about the ram i think it is a side effect of apple deciding to make a low-cost macbook and essentially being forced to use one of the chips that already exists and that chip was never really designed to be a mac chip so either doesn't support more than eight gigs or it's difficult to get it to support more than eight gigs and that topic will come up in a little bit when we talk more things memory bandwidth 60 gigs per second which is one tenth as fast as the top spec in five max to characterize that but it is 12.5 uh slower than the m1 so it is again ballpark how much memory bandwidth does this have it has m1 ish memory bandwidth a little bit less a little bit less um ssds is a real wild card for me and benchmarks yeah so it comes to a 256 or 512 with some important differences we'll get through in a second i don't know what the ssd speeds are going to be like because honestly i don't know what the ssd speeds are like in phones and i imagine the a18 pros interface to storage is the bottleneck here like however fast an a18 pro can talk to storage that's how fast this is going to go even though max like any of the m chips are probably designed with faster storage especially like the modern ones are designed with faster and faster access to storage whether it's higher clock speed or wider buses or both we'll have to see what the SSD performance is like on the A18 Pro because I don't know how to handicap that.

1:42:42Casey Liss:So if your workload depends a lot on big sequential reads of high bandwidth stuff, maybe it won't perform like an M1 for you. But if it doesn't need to do that and it's just like CPU bound, it should perform kind of like an M1 to you.

1:42:57Marco Arment:I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you know what RAM is, if you know what memory bandwidth is, and if you know what SSD performance is, this is probably not a computer that's really targeted at you and that's fine. Like when you look at like, you know, this is an iPhone chip performing very competitively, like in certain ways, very competitively and in certain ways, of course, it's restricted and lower, but that really says a lot about the iPhone. It's like the iPhone can do a lot here. Like if the power that we're carrying in our pockets every day is enough to run like a a somewhat competitive like entire laptop that's amazing it's also kind of amazing to think like if you like you know build and run from xcode on this computer to an iphone 17 pro the phone that you're running it on is going to be faster than the computer you're building it with well keep in mind that if you buy one of

1:44:01Casey Liss:the new displays either one it has a more powerful so because the studio display has an a19 and the studio display xdr has an a19 pro and this is an a18 pro so yes if you buy this and attach it to one of those external monitors which it will drive um yeah your monitor has a better soc i wonder if

1:44:20Marco Arment:it has more ram too yeah but you could buy like seven of these for the cost of one of those

1:44:24Casey Liss:monitors yes that that is definitely true all right so size wise if you were hoping for the return of the macbook one and yes many people point out the macbook neo is an anagram of macbook one uh a this doesn't have one port which we'll get to in a little bit but b this is not a ridiculously skinny laptop it is essentially macbook air sized it is actually 1.5 millimeters thicker than the macbook air and it is six millimeters less wide and eight millimeters less deep but it is actually thicker so it is not a skinny little thing it is not a wedge it is not smaller than mac just again think of this as essentially macbook air sized a little bit smaller um the weight is exactly the same as the macbook air so if you wanted a two pound thing this ain't it it's 2.7 pounds okay

1:45:07Marco Arment:i have some questions about the weight because okay this is roughly the same size computer as the macbook air it's a little bit smaller yeah a little bit but barely smaller it is thicker yeah So it's roughly a MacBook Air 13-inch sized computer. It is exactly the same weight as the MacBook Air. It has many of the same types of things in it as a MacBook Air, except it has a much smaller battery. And batteries are heavy. Why is it the same weight?

1:45:41Casey Liss:My guess, here's my guess. One of the rumors that they talked about this, Apple alluded to it vaguely in their video, is that they have come up with a less expensive way to make a aluminum unibody chassis. And it's possible that less expensive way does not remove all the material that could be removed for the most efficient weight. That's my guess.

1:46:02Marco Arment:Oh, so like thicker aluminum, basically.

1:46:04Casey Liss:Yeah, because like when you're the more expensive one, like, you know, there's a bunch of aluminum there that's not serving a role structurally and removing every ounce of that may require more machining and precision and so on and so forth. and whatever the new technique is that i don't remember the details of the rumors or this is just rumors of like they've found a way to make a unibody aluminum construction for less money than like the m1 macbook air that's my only guess because you're right the battery is less that's a pretty good guess um the the display no notch which i like like i feel like that's an advantage over the macbook air i mean it's because they have big bezels around the screen like that's what it comes down to but you know no notch if you didn't like the notch just don't have one um it's a 13 inch IPS LCD uh as opposed I think the MacBook Air is 13.6 inches uh the resolution it's 219 pixels the resolution is actually less than the MacBook Air it's 2408 by 1506 versus 2560 by 1664 it is also by the way significantly less than the iPhone 16 Pro Max that this SOC came from the iPhone 16 Pro is remember the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 3x instead of 2x the iPhone 116 Pro Max is 2868 by 1320 at 460 ppi.

1:47:12Casey Liss:So if you're worried, like, how is this phone chip going to drive the display? It has so many pixels. Don't worry about it. The phone that it came from has more pixels. That's awesome. It's 500 nits. It's only sRGB, so no P3. No true tone, no ambient light sensor. The ports. This is where the A18 Pro comes in again. It has one USB 3 that does 10 gigabits per second for charging and display port, but it can do one display at four i guess it can't do a 6k it's one external display at 4k at 60 so it couldn't do the 6k display but it can do the 4k display it can't do the 5k display either which is a bummer anyway and then the other port thank god it has more than one so it is not a macbook one the other port which is also usbc is usb 2 at 480 megabits per second and why why the hell does it have a usb 3 port and a usb 2 port because that i think is what the a18 pro can support i I think Gruber mentioned this in one of his things.

1:48:08Casey Liss:I've or someone.

1:48:08Marco Arment:He said in his piece that he actually asked somebody in Apple PR and they basically said like it was really hard to even get that port in there.

1:48:16Casey Liss:They could like, in other words, saying like normally they expect to have one port as a phone chip. So you have one port in the phone, right? Just to get the second USB port at all. I think they probably had to add like another USB controller somewhere to the board and wire it in. And that was a pain. And so, yes, Apple did this themselves. but like again when the a18 pro was made there i don't think there was any expectation that this ship would appear in a mac it is ill-suited to be in a mac based on the peripheral stuff and so it is disappointing i mean come on usb 2 like what century is this it's ridiculous but would you rather only have one port i sure as hell wouldn't so there is the good port the quote-unquote good port which is again only only usb 3 at 10 gigabits and then there is the horrendously slow port but it's still better to have two ports because there is no mag safe these two ports are it what you know charge in one of them connect a peripheral in another when the a19 or a20 or whatever powered version of the macbook neo comes out i'll bet these changes are less bad or i'm hoping in the future apple says okay if this product is a hit we need to make chips that we know will work in this this is a disappointing technical thing but it's not because apple is being mean to you or being cheap i just think they didn't have a way to do this because this was never designed to be a mac chip and people think that manifests like oh it's never designed to be mac chip it's performance really bad it's not the performance it's stuff like this like how many ports can you support how many external displays because those are not important things for a phone that has one hole in the bottom of it and generally doesn't spend a lot of time hooked up to external displays so it is what it is uh headphone port it does have that uh doesn't support high impedance headphones like the MacBook Air does.

1:49:57Casey Liss:Again, no MagSafe.

1:49:58Marco Arment:Also, the headphone port placement is a little odd. It's really far down. Like, it's very close to your wrists.

1:50:05Casey Liss:Yeah, I want to see what the inside of this thing looks like. I mean, the speakers are weird, too. The speakers are side-firing, and they're towards the front.

1:50:11Marco Arment:Yeah, they're also, yeah, they're right there, too. Yeah, so I really, I think what we are seeing here with some of these decisions is, like, you know, Apple went all out designing this from scratch to be significantly less money. and there's all this stuff like you know like case design that we don't even really think about as like possible ways to save weight because we don't know how to manufacture this kind of stuff but there's all sorts of little details like this that are like different or missing or a little bit a little bit off and you know it all adds up yeah i wonder if the side firing speakers like

1:50:44Casey Liss:like because if you're gonna like if you're gonna save money on the speakers maybe use fewer speakers lower quality speakers but having them be side firing and towards you to like sort of bounce off the surface like i like i feel like the placement is very intentional to essentially make the speakers sound better like for if we're going to use these speakers and we're going to put them in this laptop actually shooting them out of the sides from the front is the best way to do it because if we had put them like facing up and bouncing off the screen or whatever they wouldn't sound as good like i'm i'm guessing this is very intentional and is actually the best place to put these speakers which are presumably less expensive and fewer speakers yeah i mean we'll see because

1:51:20Marco Arment:I got out my old M2 MacBook Air here, and I'm pretty sure it fires speakers at the screen hinge, right? Like out of the screen hinge towards the screen? Yeah, I think so. But one of the major differences between the MacBook Air and the 14-inch MacBook Pro is the much better speakers you get in the MacBook Pro. It's such a difference. And I wonder, from the reviewers that were there at Apple's event today...

1:51:46Casey Liss:You can't hear anything in that room.

1:51:47Marco Arment:yeah but so far the impression is the speakers are decent you know like for what they are yeah

1:51:51Casey Liss:i think the comparison is like compared to the speakers you would get in a similarly placed pc

1:51:55Marco Arment:laptop they're better you know i wonder if maybe because like if you think about the the um the arrangement inside of these maybe that maybe that's one of the things they were able to do with a smaller battery is move the speakers into the wrist rest because before like the battery would be under that entire palm rest area i know the batteries are pretty the speakers are pretty skinny

1:52:14Casey Liss:like in the iFixit teardowns like even the macbook pro they're skinny i don't want to wait to see when people tear this down but i'm what i'm guessing is like again because i don't think there's the room is that tight in there because they did make the battery smaller i'm i'm guessing this layout is very intentional and other positions would be worse but um again external displays is just one at 4k display part 1.4 um and gruber says if you plug in an external display and you put it in the wrong usb port you get a software notification telling you to plug into the other one because basically say you've got a 4k display and you're going to plug it in the two ports are not the same you cannot plug a 4k display into a usb 2.0 port right so if you do plug it in there the os says yeah that's not the right one put it in the other one i don't think they're labeled in any way they just they look identical it's just one of them is the fast one one of them is the slow one um connectivity this does not get the n1 it has wi-fi 6e and bluetooth 6 so that the standards are you know fine it's not wi-fi 7 but whatever but it is bluetooth 6 i would i think they use like a media tech chip or something it's not apple's n1 in there again saving money because whatever that whatever chip they use is presumably cheaper than the m1 the camera is 1080 no center stage or desk view also no indicator light on the camera it's a little green light that you know turns on next to the camera when the camera is recording instead they're just relying entirely on the software thing the little you know facetime ish icon that appears in your menu bar when it's going on that's a weird one to cut i don't know what the security implications of that because the apple used to brag about how there's no way in software you can disable the green light obviously there's definitely a way in software where you can disable the thing in the menu bar i would presume although maybe system integrity protection and all sorts of stuff tries to stop that but we'll see um sound again dual speakers dual mic array instead of three mics from the macbook air does not support spatial audio with dynamic head tracking and air pods

1:54:02Marco Arment:which is fine with me because i hate that feature yeah i was gonna say can i turn that off like universally across all of my devices yeah i wish i always turn it off um the battery as marco said

1:54:11Casey Liss:is 36.5 which is 32 smaller than the macbook airs 53.8 so that is a big read because again this is the same size computer and there's essentially a third less battery in it so that is big and why is there a third less battery in it a because it seems like they could for power and b smaller batteries cost us money i mean that's what it comes like that's what it comes down and and if

1:54:32Marco Arment:if the theory about like a thicker case is correct maybe they actually just didn't have

1:54:36Casey Liss:room for a bigger battery yeah we'll see i mean if it's thicker it could be like millimeters but we'll see we'll see what it looks like when they tear it down um up to 16 hours video streaming which 11 less than the macbook air and up to 11 hours of wireless web which is 26 less than the macbook air so it does take a battery life hit in exchange for that one third smaller battery but the battery life still seems acceptable so 16 hours for video streaming and 11 hours for wireless web it is fine but again if you were hoping this was going to be either an ultra thin laptop or a laptop that had insane battery life because it uses a phone chip neither one of those things are true what is true is it costs doesn't cost a lot of money which we'll get to in a bit uh charging it comes with a 20 watt charger which should tell you don't expect fast charging of this because it doesn't support it so that 20 watt charger will supply i'm assuming will supply power to this thing as fast as it is willing to take it so don't bother trying to get a higher wattage charger it seems like it's not going to charge it any faster again cost savings no keyboard backlight no touch id on the model of the base model if you want touch id you have to check the only option you have aside from color which we'll get to in a little bit which is 512 gig ssd so if you get the 250 the base model 256 gig ssd no touch id and as apple says lock and wake your screen and power your laptop on and off with the lock key you know where the touch id key is on the keyboard now there's just a regular key there with a lock on it and as many people pointed out if you're buying these for schools for example touch id is pointless in schools for the most part unless it's a one-to-one program and even then i don't think the kids are going to register their fingerprints or whatever so it is not unreasonable to lock touch id as someone who's sitting in front of a computer that right now that does not have touch id i tell you it is possible to use a mac without touch id it does work yeah it's miserable though well you know anyway for if you want the bassist of base models the 256 gig version of of this macbook neo you do not get touch id why because it saves money uh the trackpad it is not a haptic trackpad the trackpad actually moves so we're going back in time uh it'll just be a little over here.

1:56:40Casey Liss:You can still supposedly, according to Apple, click anywhere on its surface. I'm not sure how that works. I've seen video of people pressing it. It does indeed move like like in the olden days when the trackpad used to move when you press them. And like on a lot of PC laptops, they still move. Does it just does it move like a diving board? Does it move like a trampoline? Does it move like an elevator? I don't know how it moves. We'll have to wait for people to get these to, you know, review them. I've seen people say that it also doesn't support force touch. I'm not sure what they mean. do they just mean that it is a physically moving trackpad or do they mean like the thing where you press hard and it knows that you're pressing harder yeah i think that's what they mean is

1:57:17John Siracusa:that you can't press through you know how uh well you're not a trackpad but you can still do that

1:57:21Marco Arment:mac i thought that ended years ago i thought they got rid of that no i'm not sure no no no no no no

1:57:26John Siracusa:on a mac that's absolutely still possible it's like where you get what are you what is that bound

1:57:29Casey Liss:to by default is like dictionary lookup or something on words it's a dictionary lookup i

1:57:33John Siracusa:forget what it is in other places but yes i'm doing it right now you know well anyway this

1:57:38Casey Liss:don't have it.

1:57:40John Siracusa:All right. So the colors, silver, blush, citrus, indigo, their color coordinated keyboard and feet. Jason, who is, by his own admission, relatively colorblind, says bluish, excuse me, blush is pink enough that even I, a person who has a hard time seeing pinks, can tell you it's pink. Indigo, sort of like the MacBook Air's midnight color, lightened up a few notches, and citrus is a bright yellow gold that nobody's going to mistake for some other Apple laptop.

1:58:05Marco Arment:yeah i think this is a pretty nice looking color setup for this like it's not super bold it's not super varied um i think they should have been even more like made an even bigger statement and not even offered it in silver okay i think it should have just been only colors you gotta offer a silver

1:58:25Casey Liss:one do you like i think they i think what they missed out on is there's no green that's my disappointment but you know uh the colors are visible to the naked eye even from a colorblind person so we have to say thumbs up on that it is kind of funny like if you configure the like if

1:58:41Marco Arment:you go into like the macbook compare specs page on their on their website and you set up like a macbook neo a macbook pro and a macbook air as the three like you know it like and you put them in in price order it almost looks like you have them in the reverse order for how nice these computers are. It's like, you know, if you look at like cars, you know, the really, really cheap car model of a model line is like only available in white. Right. And then like, you know, you go a little bit higher and it's like, OK, you can get a few more colors here. And like you go to like the luxury cars, you get a lot of color options there.

1:59:15Marco Arment:The MacBook lineup is the opposite. Like the nicer the Mac computer is, the fewer color options you have.

1:59:23Casey Liss:Yeah, maybe they'll learn the the iphone 16 pro orange lesson but not for these because that was it would be too late to learn for these but yeah and the color coordinated keyboards and feet like it's kind of hard to sell tell in the pictures because as people point out like white balance adjusting of your eyes wise you're like well all the keyboards are white aren't they they're not the pink laptop has a pink keyboard the the citrus or yellowish citrus laptop has a citrus keyboard it's easier to tell on the indigo one because that's very dark and you can see that it has a darker keyboard but and also the rubber feet that are on the bottom they're not black all the rubber feet on the macbook aeros and and the macbook pros are black these are color coordinated so they match so that's a nice touch that's where some of the money went and as jason snell points out the apple logo on the back of the screen is not a shiny logo but it's like embossed like inset and the the uh the shiny logos the way those are done and apple talks about this a lot uh in their videos i believe even for the macbook air are they cut out an apple logo shape and then they sort of inset like wood inlay a different material that shiny thing is inlaid into there and they have to make it obviously like a wood inlay you have to exactly match this the hole to the thing you're putting in the hole so it's seamless so you don't see a gap around any part of it oh my god and that's hard to do

2:00:34John Siracusa:and they do it that's how they make that yeah i don't know if i knew that um i i don't know if

2:00:39Casey Liss:they do that in all the models or just some of them but i remember they had a video about it because what they have to do like they're you know obviously when you manufacture things there variances so what they do is they punch out the apple logo shaped holes and then they have the shiny apple logos that are going to them and there's variability and they essentially have to match up pairs like okay this hole exactly matches this particular logo you know like because that's that's what you have to do because there are tolerances and they want them to fit exactly and it's not like you know so you just have you get a very but you get a distribution curve of the holes and you get a distribution curve of the inserts and then you just match them up and that is time consuming and expensive you want to save money on a laptop don't do that just carve away a little bit of material and there's your apple logo and that's why these are not shiny but are instead inset i would assume that is a cost saving measure and not so much the cost of the shiny insert but the cost of like the time and labor to do that expensive and it's computer control like the matching it's not humans like holding it up and trying to put it in or whatever but like that's expensive so that's where they save some money here i wanted to quickly note that the

2:01:42John Siracusa:four minute announcement video for this i thought was really fun and really well done uh it's worth four minutes of your time to watch i'll put a link in the show notes uh and it's it shows all the different colors really well and the way they like edited it with the vfx and stuff i thought it was really cool so you should check it out

2:01:57Casey Liss:yeah an environment on this one 60 recycled content the highest percentage of any apple product 90 recycled aluminum 100 recycled cobalt in the battery 45 renewable energy across the supply chain and as we alluded to before price 599 for the 256 no touch id model or 499 for education and for the one with touch id and a 512 gig ssd it's 699 uh those prices are lower than some people expected but like when we have that big long session of like where can you remove price from this thing they removed it every possible place they could in the place we didn't even think of like did you think removing the indicator light from the from the camera apparently that saves money because you don't have to deal with that circuitry you don't have another light uh removing touch id but only from some of the models i don't think we would have guessed that but in hindsight it makes some sense because in some contexts you don't need touch id or you don't want it or it's not important um yeah they just removed it everywhere like no backlight on the keyboards like just everything they could you know just they didn't just get it from one big place because again the like the soc like how much cheaper are we talking about this or how much cheaper is an 18 pro than an m1 i don't know 30 bucks cheaper like it's not it's not that much cheaper you need to get the cost from everywhere and they got it from everywhere and i think unlike the 16e the cost they removed here i think they did a good job of spreading that around such that there is no one aspect of this that where you say like this makes it a garbage laptop the closest I would come to say is the one that may be regretful is the uh the trackpad and maybe that saved them a lot of money but that really feels like Apple probably was like oh I wish we didn't have to do this because you know that the niceness of the trackpads is one of the defining characteristics of an Apple laptop it just feels so nice it works so well and it's not like the you know they haven't always had haptic ones but this is kind of like the 32 to 27 inch regression it's like we're going to go back in time a little bit to a day when we didn't have haptic trackpads which means that again when you click on it it opens up a little gap and maybe a crumb from your scone falls onto the trackpad and it goes like you know what i mean like having it not move is a actually a pretty big boon i'm you know i do wonder how many people are going to be taking these apart and finding crumbs in that part of the computer i mean i bet they're used to finding them under the keyboard but now they're going to be under the trackpad too because it opens up a little crack when you click it or whatever that's the only thing i can really fault these things on and obviously the limitations inherent in the a18 pro which i'm not going to say isn't apple's fault because they made this computer but it's not apple making poor decisions about what to put into a product it's apple of the past not having the foresight to realize they needed a chip to go into a low-end laptop right but that it is what it is so be aware that some of the limitations of this are are to blame on the a18 pro and there's nothing apple could really do about it short of not rolling out this computer until it has an A19 or A20 or something with fewer limitations.

2:04:54Casey Liss:But I think this is pretty good. But I don't know. What do you guys think?

2:04:58John Siracusa:Yeah, I think this is a really solid computer for people who don't care about computers. And I think that comes across very dismissive. And I don't mean it that way at all. For us, for the three of us, and for probably anyone listening to the show, we care a lot about computers. We want nice computers. We want fast computers. And this is not those things, and that's okay. And I think, like you had said, John, most of the trade-offs I made, I think, make a lot of sense. It would bum me out to have this computer as a primary computer, but I tell you what, as a downstairs computer, which is currently an M2 iPad Pro for me, this would fit the bill pretty nicely.

2:05:41John Siracusa:And And if you price out a modern iPad Pro with keyboard, because for me, I would want that, it's like two or three times the price. Well, I guess you wouldn't have to have...

2:05:50Casey Liss:You could have one of these in each room.

2:05:52John Siracusa:Right. I mean, you wouldn't have to have an iPad Pro, to be fair. But to have an iPad with a nice keyboard, with a cantilevered keyboard, the keyboard alone is like$400. Somebody said this on Mastodon.

2:06:01Marco Arment:Yeah,$350, I think. Something like that. It's ridiculous. It's like, yeah, an iPad keyboard is$350, and this... Whole-ass computer is$600. box i mean my goodness yeah i believe that it was i think it was at the bottom of gruber's post too like just like the what you get for this shows how bad of a value the ipad pro and magic keyboard

2:06:21Casey Liss:are by comparison yeah well the ipad pro is actually not that bad of a deal because it has a really good it's just over provisioned has a really good screen has a powerful eyes okay fair

2:06:29Marco Arment:less less so on the ipad pro much more so on the magic keyboard like like the magic keyboard the

2:06:34Casey Liss:keyboard is definitely like yeah that's hard to justify i think that i do wonder why those cost so much maybe it's like low volumes or whatever but yeah that doesn't have a lot of computing power in the keyboard and it's just a plastic and then it's not even like they're super durable because at various times the ipad keyboards have like fallen apart after several years so that's a tough product so here's here's the the real comparison to to think about this because the apple is rolling out this line of low-cost laptops and fun colors they're trying to go down market we can we feel like we can feel the laptop at a lower price that is still a good product and here it is uh it's called the neo what about the neo versus the walmart m1 macbook air which they have been selling for many years now it's the macbook air they sell through walmart for 650 and it's just the m1 macbook air as it existed they just you know they gave it to walmart to sell when they stopped sort of selling it themselves um here are some comparisons here are the ways in which the neo is better than the m1 macbook air it is 30 faster in single core and about the same in multi-core and gpu it has a hundred nit brighter screen it has one hour better battery life it has iphone's wi-fi 6e instead of six it has bluetooth 6 instead of 5 its camera is 1080 instead of 720 it is 50 cheaper than the walmart one for the 256 gig model and you can actually buy it and it's in stock those are the neo advantages what are the m1 macbook air

2:07:56Marco Arment:advantages also i'd say you can buy the neo anywhere because apple will sell it directly to

2:08:00Casey Liss:you yeah you don't have to buy it at walmart but like even at walmart sometimes it's not always in stock so i don't i don't like i don't know what the future of the m1 macbook air is i think maybe they're just going to sell through them because walmart will be selling the neo so i

2:08:11Marco Arment:can't imagine the m1 macbook air sticks around after this yeah maybe they just sell through

2:08:14Casey Liss:them but anyway here are the m1 macbook air advantages over the neo and one macbook air has touch id on every model it supports p3 color it has true tone with an ambient light sensor its screen is 0.3 inches bigger diagonally and it has about a half a million more pixels than the Neo. It has two Thunderbolt 4 USB 4 ports because it is indeed a Mac. It has a three microarray instead of two. It has a little light on the camera. It has a haptic trackpad and has a backlit keyboard. So you really see that like the MacBook Air was never designed to be the Walmart bargain basement model. It's just that they took what was essentially the best MacBook Air that they had ever introduced when the M1 came out and they just kept selling it forever because it was just so darn good but like it's like when casey goes shopping for used cars if you want to buy a new car for 45 000 it's not going to have all the same features as a massively depreciated ev for the multiple years old and you tell you can tell like when you look at the m1 macbook air like oh this wasn't a bargain computer when it was new it just is now and it was always designed to be a mac again the biggest thing is like two Thunderbolt 4 ports versus USB 3 and USB 2, that is a big difference in terms of bandwidth and usability if you care about the ports.

2:09:35Casey Liss:P3, why would this have P3 Color? Is it a Walmart laptop? Well, it wasn't always a Walmart laptop. When it was introduced, having P3 Color was table stakes for what was then the highest end MacBook Air ever made. Same thing with Touch ID. It's across all the models. But time marches on. That's why the Neo has a better camera than this thing does, right and the neo is 50 cheaper if you care about that neo has better wi-fi and bluetooth the neo has better battery life or brighter screen faster single core soc so like it's not a slam dunk in either direction it depends on what of those things you care about oh and by the way i should list this as a pro in the neo it comes in fun colors and the macbook air does not also i

2:10:10Marco Arment:think one thing to not underestimate is when the macbook air went from the m1 to the m2 generation it had a case redesign yeah that's right and the macbook air m2 and forward case feels fantastic it is delightful to pick up and hold i think it is a huge tactile upgrade from an aesthetic upgrade

2:10:31Casey Liss:from the m1 family i kind of like the wedge like i see arguments for both because i do have i have you know we have m we have the new uh i have uh my son has an m2 macbook air my daughter has an m4 so i'm very familiar with the new case but i also have an m1 macbook air sitting here it's like Like, I don't know if I would put it as a pro in either one. If you like one case better than another, then be aware that there is that difference. But I do kind of like the wedge in some ways.

2:10:53Marco Arment:And to be clear, and, you know, the Neo is not identical to the MacBook Air case. It is a little bit thicker, you know.

2:10:57Casey Liss:Yeah, it's a little bit different. But it's roughly, it's similar. The biggest difference is, like, it's 13-inch screen versus 13.6. So if you can imagine what difference that would make in a case, like, it is, you know, it is slightly thicker, but not as long and not as wide.

2:11:09Marco Arment:Yeah, but, like, but I do think, like, the M1 MacBook Air, it looked old. It felt old. It was old. And I always had that kind of question in my mind of like, how long, first of all, how long are they going to be selling this? And then second of all, like, could you tell someone, go buy this five-year-old computer? What if they like stopped supporting the OS next year on it? Like, I was always worried about that kind of thing. Where like, this is now a current production model. It's a new model.

2:11:37Casey Liss:Well, that's a thing that people worry about with the 18 Pro as well. Like, obviously, it's a concern with the N1, especially since the n1 doesn't have like all like the uh the more advanced neural engines and various other things in the gpu cores and crap like that but people are worried already about the a team pro they're like how long will mac os support the a team pro because even though it is a newly introduced computer it is an older chip and it's not really designed to be a mac chips like what does the longevity look like like not that it's going to ever get too slow but like is there going to be like two versions of mac os for now from now they're going to be like oh yeah you can't you know you can't use the a18 pro with that like i don't know that's kind of up to apple how long they want to support this but it is also a concern on the m1 so the reason i think it's not a slam dunk because like i said the the m1 is your used your used luxury car it's massively depreciated it's super old it's no longer state-of-the-art but when it was new it had more nice stuff and it still does have more stuff i i was kind of shocked when i looked this up that the neo has one hour better battery life because i always think of the m1 as having amazing battery life but these are these are just by apple's measures i don't know how accurate they are um well the m1's also again it's a five-year-old chip it's a five-year-old process several processes all what is it seven nanometer if i forget yeah whatever it is it's it's not it's

2:12:48Marco Arment:not the latest and greatest in that way and so and of course you've had many efficiency gains and in both the physical design of the chip and also like the the like you know cleverness of the chip like you know like the the efficiency of the cores is is higher now too um so honestly i think it's awesome. Even though this is not for me. And I think, by the way, for anybody out there thinking, should I get this instead of a MacBook Air for my messing around computer? The only thing I would say is there's a lot of little lacks of niceties that I think you might notice if you are accustomed to other Macs.

2:13:25Marco Arment:This is definitely a slam dunk for people who are coming from PCs. But if you're coming from other Macs, the lack of certain things like if you've always had backlit keyboards and you suddenly don't like that kind of thing but honestly i think one of the most significant like kind of paper cuts that you might face in real life is the lack of the ambient light sensor because what that means you open this thing up no matter where you are and boom it blasts you with like whatever your screen setting was when you were in a brighter light when you know so like i think that you're going to be constantly like riding that screen brightness thing that actually might be the the the biggest paper cut for people in real use.

2:14:02Marco Arment:But I think overall, when you compare this to PCs in the similar price range, people keep saying this is Apple trying to take on Chromebooks. I don't think that's significant.

2:14:13Casey Liss:Chromebooks don't cost$600.

2:14:15Marco Arment:No. And if you're going to try to tackle Chromebooks in schools, those are like$200 computers. They're garbage. They're disposable. And the appeal of schools getting Chromebooks is largely about cost. but there's also other factors like management integration with google's classroom crap yeah like there there's a lot of other factors that schools like and rely on and are very compelling for them that apple is never going to match so it is partly about cost not entirely about cost

2:14:44Casey Liss:and apple to be fair apple is not mentioning education in the marketing for this product anywhere that i've seen like they have education pricing for all their computers like just because they mentioned it's 500 to education like this they're at their videos are not like we see a children everyone every child will have one of these no they're just trying to sell it to consumers

2:15:01Marco Arment:yeah exactly like they're they're going to sell it to students like you know directly like or to their parents like you know they're the people who go to school will will buy this or have this bought for them but not by the school the school is going to keep doing whatever the school was doing before um so you know i'm sure you know like like when when our kid was um when we were living on fire island uh year round during during some of the covid lockdowns um the fire island school was very well funded and so every kid there got a MacBook Air. So if you were the kind of school that was already buying Macs for students, I'm sure many of those will switch to these because they're a lot cheaper.

2:15:38Marco Arment:That's great. But for schools that were already buying the$200 Chromebooks, they're not going to these. But anyway, overall, I think this looks like, I think this is going to be very significant. this will significantly expand the max market share over time you know the the walmart m1 was an experiment i think and as we've discussed like that was never designed to be a super cheap that was designed to be a medium cheap computer that was never designed to be a super cheap computer this is now designed for that it's you know very much like the approach this is a total shifts in strategy. This is very much like the approach Apple took with the iPhone 17e versus the old SEs, which were like regular iPhones that were kind of cut down after the fact with medium-aged and medium-sophistication parts.

2:16:31Marco Arment:And then when the 16e came out, that was like the first iPhone that was designed from scratch to be less expensive.

2:16:40Casey Liss:5C would like to raise its hand. The 5C, that was barely

2:16:44Marco Arment:a change from the base model. you know uh five so this is yeah wasn't it just a five with a plastic case like that was the only

2:16:52Casey Liss:it wasn't just a five of the plastic case but the plastic case is the whole phone like they really

2:16:55Marco Arment:it really was significant redesigned for a cheaper phone okay anyway so this is a significant strategy shift this is a significant product that like they really they didn't they weren't just like we're gonna make this thing a few hundred bucks cheaper than they are because you know We were all, all of us, you know, pundits and people, we were like, well, we want it to be like$500 or$600, but there's no way it'll be that cheap. It'll be$700 or$800. And no, it's$600. Like, that's great. And that's, you know,$500 through the educational discount like that. And over time, I'm sure we'll see these like get, you know, put on sale here and there,$50 off.

2:17:34Marco Arment:Oh, this weekend Costco has it for$100 off. Like, you know, we're going to see that kind of stuff. That's amazing. and this is going to expand the market share of Macs. And for people who would never have considered a Mac when it was$1 ,100, many more of them will consider it at$600 or on sale on Black Friday at$500. That's going to be a real thing over time. And this right now, this is probably the most expensive it will ever start. Over time, I guess inflation will eventually push this price up. But like right now it's$600 to start. Over time, we'll probably see this, see them like push a little further down.

2:18:16Marco Arment:This is what we've seen on the low end iPad as well. Like, you know, it starts out at a certain price and like it fluctuates here and there with updates. But over time, it tends to be pushed a little bit downward. And this is great news for people like us who love the Mac because this means they're going to sell a lot more Macs. especially when you compare this to what we were saying earlier like an ipad with a keyboard it's a no-brainer this is a way better option for most people most of the time this is what many people will choose so this is and and the walmart one was kind of like apple kind of like dumping old stock quietly through some other brand like they did like they didn't want to touch it like brand wise they didn't want people to know about it really they just were kind of quietly dumping the stuff over here.

2:19:04Marco Arment:Well, now Apple's owning it. Whatever the sales of the Walmart M1 MacBook Air were, which were probably not terrible, but whatever those sales were, it's going to be much more now because now it's going to be available through every Apple retailer, like all their resellers, all of the Apple's own stores and direct channels, their website, like they're going to be promoting it. The M1 MacBook Air, the Apple never promoted. Apple wanted that as quiet as possible. This they are loudly promoting. So a lot of people are going to see this. They're making a splash. The colors are making a splash. I might pick a few different ones, but hey, you know what?

2:19:46Marco Arment:I'm proud of them for doing colors on the Mac that you can actually see. So this is great news. I'm very happy to see this. i think this is the start of something very very good for the loan to the mac line the only other thing i'll say is i wish they would do a mac mini like this

2:20:04Casey Liss:like a really really cheap mac mini that is not quite as mainstream a product like as a lot of jason has been pointing this out like the mac mini had previously held the crown for the cheapest mac in terms of absolute dollar numbers not if not adjusted for inflation that apple has ever sold but the mac mini if you buy it you can't actually use it you have to buy it doesn't even come with a mouse and a keyboard let alone a screen like it is not a complete system so even though the mac mini was the champ i think it was like 499 was the lowest it ever was just selfishly

2:20:33Marco Arment:like you know so many people buy mac minis for you know roles like file servers or you know more recently running ai agents or whatever but like there's a lot of people who like if if your mac mini ran an iphone chip it'd be fine do you want it to come in colors too yes why not give me

2:20:50Casey Liss:weird mustard colored mac mini because people put their mac minis where they're not even visible right exactly i feel like the the neo in apple stores um i feel like the impression that it's going to give is first of all i believe it will be perceived as the smallest laptop because people don't notice a thickness change of one and a half millimeters but they do notice length and width wise and i know we're like oh it's a smaller screen 13 inch versus 13.6 but that makes the laptop physically smaller and if you're the one the type of person who's like i don't want a laptop to take up a lot of space in my life like you're in the market for something like the neo anyway because you're like i'm not a computer person i want something small that fits in my backpack oh and they come in fun colors it'll it will so clearly be the most attractive to you product in the store because you're like why would anybody buy these other computers they're bigger they're uglier and god have you seen the prices doesn't make any sense why would anyone buy one it's like going into a car lot and seeing a cute pink convertible and that one costs less than all the other cars and all the other cars are giant silver four-door sedans you're like why would anyone buy one of those like it's a cute pink convertible and like well you don't understand the cute pink convertible has a crappy engine and like it doesn't have a lot of space in the trunk it's like what are you talking about i don't know what any of that stuff means it's just me and like my backpack and i want to go off to school and this is half the price of i guess it should it be a giant silver SUV or something or whatever?

2:22:12Casey Liss:Like for the people who are in the market for this, it's not like they're like, oh, I guess I have to guess this one because it's cheap. It's the it's going to be the one they want the most anyway, because it fits their desires the most. Like that's the thing that, you know, computers don't understand is like, can you imagine someone not only not caring about computer specs, but finding them a detriment and not understanding what anyone would ever pay for that? Like it's I just want it to be small and cute and do the stuff that i needed to do and if you sit there and explain to them like the differences we just went through like here here are the uh the things that are different between the neo and the m4 macbook air and you went through all those things that their eyes would just glaze over like especially if as you said marco if they're coming from the pc that's like they don't like even though there is a difference with the haptic trackpad and like the ambient light sensor if they're not used to having a haptic trackpad and an apple quality haptic trackpad and ambient light sensor on their pc laptops they don't know what they're missing and so you explaining it to them is not going to be convincing.

2:23:08Casey Liss:Now, I do feel like if they eventually, you know, this is the great thing about the Neo and the great thing about Chromebooks for Google. If you get kids using a Neo when they're younger, as they become older professionals and maybe like, you know, this is my third Apple laptop. Maybe I'll try one of those MacBook Airs. They're going to notice, oh, no, this trackpad is actually a little bit nicer. And they won't know what an ambient light sensor is, but like, oh, this one doesn't blast my eyes out. Like, just like getting a bigger screen you will be you become more accustomed to the better thing but people could spend years just using the neo and be perfectly satisfied with it until and unless their needs change or their budgets change so i think this is going to be an extremely successful product assuming there are no you know no gates i guess like trackpad gate where all the trackpads break because apple's not used to making ones that move or like some crap like that like that's always a wild card out there but like you know going down like i think the m1 macbook air walmart has probably been really successful with Apple, which sort of verified their like desire to do this.

2:24:07Casey Liss:Like, okay, we can actually sell this. Let's do it. Let's, as you said, Marco, let's own it. And they are, and I think this will be, I think it will sell incredibly well. And people are asking like, who is this? Who can use this? I think pretty much any student can use this unless as part of your like college major or whatever, you need to run demanding local stuff. I was thinking about this for my kids. My daughter could use this in her school. She hasn't actually picked a major yet but she's probably going to be some major that wouldn't require lots of computing power my son was a computer science major and as part of his classes he had to run vms on his local machine and with an 8 gig machine if you're running like a linux vm plus running a bunch of python stuff locally maybe you're pushing it maybe not maybe it would be fine but like him having an m2 macbook air i think with more ram i think did benefit him in his major i'm saying he couldn't use it, but I'm saying the M4, M2 MacBook Air was a better fit for his needs.

2:25:02Casey Liss:But that's only because he was a computer science major doing computer science crap on his computer. Pretty much anyone else, can you write four years worth of papers on this? Yes. Can you browse the web forever on this? Yes. Can you do all your email? Like, it will do all those things. Because you remember, when you're thinking about this, don't think of it as like, oh, it's a laptop with a phone chip. Just thinking of it as the M1 MacBook Air, which used to be the best, most powerful MacBook Air available and people bought it and loved it and are still buying it today all these years later. So think of it like that.

2:25:30Casey Liss:Don't think of it like, oh, how can I ever use a laptop with a phone chip? Like I think, you know, and this is, this is the beauty of this. You know, when you see those cost curves, like how much things cost over the past, like several decades, it's usually shown to show you the healthcare line. Like it's inflation adjusted dollars, like percentage of your annual income. Like how, what is, how is the relative price of these things change college and health care in our stupid country are going straight up like a rocket it's terrible like not again not in absolute values but in terms of like how much does the cost relative to how much people make but the cost of tvs has gone through this floor because back when my parents were young buying a tv was like buying a new car and now it's like whatever like i'll get one i'll impulse buy one at costco because you can get a you can get a pretty big flat screen tv for a couple hundred bucks right and computing power is like that and apple has been slow slow and reluctant to leverage that but what's happening slowly but surely is and we've seen it with smartphones is that the amount of compute needed to do basic web browsing and word processing has just been getting cheaper and cheaper because the demands of basic web browsing and word processing although especially by browsing has has increased it has not increased as fast as computing power has increased and i would argue for like basic word processing and like even like image editing that is kind of like flatlined and that most people never need to do any more sophisticated image editing setting aside ai stuff which is a whole other thing uh then they can do on on any recent laptop and the same thing we're texting like you're typing and spell checking that's not really changing that much despite software being sloppier right so it behooves apple and any company to say you know as gruber was pointing out they apple used to claim and i think they were correct they could not make a laptop that met their quality standards at a price point that was competitive with the lowest end of the PC market.

2:27:20Casey Liss:They still can't, but the low end of the PC market has gone so far down that there is now room below the MacBook Air for another computer. And I would say that, you know, the Apple of old that was more premium might say, oh, the Neo doesn't quite meet our quality standards. But like you could see someone arguing saying, yeah, but it's really close, right? And it's still nicer with a PC laptop, so we should ship it. And so there's no one there to say, no, I'm never going to ship a mac without an ambient light sensor and a haptic trackpad now that those things exist but i mean if whoever that was who was doing that whether it was steve jobs or somebody else they're no longer at apple current today's apple is is correctly i think deciding to take advantage of essentially the dividend of computing power outpacing a lot of common tasks and go down market with the mac and i think they're going to sell a lot of them i think it's a good idea i think even beyond that

2:28:08Marco Arment:like you know the framing of it as like you know can people get away with just a phone chip uh for their computer like i think the the world has changed a lot in recent years and one of the realities that many many people like us maybe maybe fail to see or appreciate fully is that for most people their phone is their main computer or their primary you know or their best computer

2:28:29Casey Liss:or their most used computer and might have more pixels than this computer right and and so like

2:28:34Marco Arment:what what computing has become these days is basically what can people do on their phones and instead of thinking about this as like a cut down computer you know with settling for a phone chip think of it as like it's a phone with a keyboard trackpad and big screen and that's great and a giant battery yeah exactly and that's and that's going to be wonderful like that because that actually is what most people need and use and then also with things moving so much into like cloud-based ai computing powering all the like where the cutting edge stuff is right now we're back in the era of thin clients we're back in the era of like the local computing power being a lot less relevant than than it used to be or at least maybe like where like the where the exciting things are in computing right now are not happening with a lot of local resource processing because

2:29:27Casey Liss:because no one has a local computer with that much ram like you know you can't have like hundreds of gigs of ram or whatever like that just the the compute needed to do the current hot thing which as ai that just doesn't exist doesn't exist on a desktop doesn't exist in a laptop certainly doesn't like it's just not it's just not feasible that's you know there are lots of useful local models and apple does run them and they do useful things but the bleeding edge is so outside the realm of of a battery-powered laptop currently that it's all server-side and your point about think clients is true although i did see a thread recently of someone describing how the clawed a terminal command line application works and showing the usage the the um the resource usage of it in theory there's no reason that a thin client that uses a terminal input that just does a text you know cursive style text display that should be able to be incredibly thin because it's just like i send text to the server i get text back if the server's doing all the work i should be both fast and low resource usage but the stats they showed were not low because they had found this very convoluted way to do a command line application no they're not using the uh well maybe they are using the cursus library but they're like they're running a react app behind the scene and rendering to a 2d backing buffer and pixel pixel diffing it and then like sending like you know a terminal escape sequences to like anyway the point is they were showing like gigs of memory usage for what is essentially a node.js app or whatever language it's written in that just sends HTTP requests to a server and gets responses and spits them because you we've all used it like it's a text it it it's a terminal application it is not a GUI and yet it uses huge resources so while in theory and technically you are correct I'm not sure current software practices are taking full advantage of the thinness of the client right now well but you know but what most people's

2:31:14Marco Arment:experience with AI is a web browser yeah you know they're they're going to chatgpt.com and or you know, or using their other, you know, other browser-based things. Yeah, they're not using coding agents or whatever. Yeah, and, or they're, like, you know, even people who will be using coding agents, oh, by the way, Xcode's coding agent support does not work with 8 gigs of RAM, as Steve Tratton-Smith pointed out today.

2:31:35Casey Liss:But the command line, Claude Executable or Codex Executable does.

2:31:38Marco Arment:Yeah, you can run the Codex app also. Codex has a GUI app, which I've actually been using. And it's, it does pretty much what the Xcode thing does, but I think, honestly, a little bit better um anyway uh so i think this is this is great and i it is not the 12 inch macbook replacement that nerds like us were kind of wishing for but also that was never really rumored for this release this was always rumored to be a lower cost 13 inch macbook of some kind and they delivered possibly you know none of us have this thing yet but it sure looks like they delivered really well on that product brief and i think it's gonna be good for mac one more thing

2:32:21Casey Liss:um so this is also a cost saving thing obviously um because you know everything is about costing with this thing but there's there's two options 256 or 512 like those are your only choice and color there's color and 256 or 512 and obviously that saves cost because you don't need to make lots of varieties although apple has does have to make the colors and whatever ratios they have to kind of guess about that. But the really important thing about that is someone who doesn't care about computer specs now does not have a million decisions to make to buy this. They just pick the color they want. And then there's the cheap one and the expensive one.

2:32:55Casey Liss:Even if they don't know the differences between the cheap one and the expensive one, if they don't care, they're going to get the cheap one. Like there's literally one choice besides color. And that choice is $100 difference. And I think people can just pick that based like, oh, if they say, why is this one $100 more, you start talking about and they're like, oh, never mind, I'll just have the other the one or they're like oh i like the touch thing i guess i have to get the marks but that's it those are the only options on this computer which is incredibly smart even if apple didn't do it for these reasons and they just did it for cost it is going to make this computer the easiest mac to buy

2:33:25John Siracusa:because you have to make fewer decisions uh you put together the 600 family of iphone device or excuse me of apple devices the iphone 17 is 600 the ipad air with m4 is 600 and the mac macbook Neo is$600.

2:33:41Casey Liss:And that is a tiny phone, a medium sized tablet, and a kind of small laptop all cost the same price. And, and as a testament to Apple's, uh, you know, sort of spreading their products across the entire range of shapes and sizes of costs. And also a testament to Apple finally bringing the Mac down, not to the lowest of the low, cause the plain iPad is cheaper than the iPad air, obviously. And the iPhone 17 E I don't think is the cheapest phone cause you can still buy like older models for less maybe but like if you have 600 to spend you can get a phone an ipad or a mac and all those products that we've listed here are all new newly released this week

2:34:17Marco Arment:and are all pretty good thanks to our sponsors this episode factor delete me and master class and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of ATP membership is Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. Every week, we have one additional bonus topic. It runs about 15-20 minutes. Sorry, John. It's extra topics, extra things that we couldn't get to in our regular outline. This week in Overtime, we're talking about Apple's new video podcast support in Apple Podcasts, which is, I think, pretty interesting for those of us in the podcast business or people who listen to podcasts or watch podcasts, which is probably most of you.

2:35:00Marco Arment:So you can tune in, hb.fm slash join to hear over time and get all of our other membership perks. Thank you so much for listening, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:35:13Marco Arment:Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.

2:35:20John Siracusa:Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research.

2:35:26Marco Arment:Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental 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 And T-Marco are meant S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast.

2:36:10Casey Liss:So long. So this was late breaking right before we recorded. I had a post break containment. Do you know what that phrase means? Like go viral?

2:36:22John Siracusa:well get outside your like normal audience would be is be how i would take it yeah so there's there's

2:36:29Casey Liss:two phrases here one is break containment which is what casey basically said which is like so you're on social media or a blog or whatever it's some kind of uh platform where you publish things that are visible to the world and breaking containment means you publish something a blog post uh to it on mastodon whatever and it got passed around outside the normal circle of people who watch your stuff so if you're on social media like a mastodon you have people who follow you and they they see the things that you toot breaking containment means enough people retuted it or whatever that now people who have no idea who you are and do not follow you and don't know anything about you start to see this post because it was popular enough and doesn't take much like this wasn't a very popular post it was like barely more popular than my average post but it was just popular enough like it's if you did the graph of this it's like breaking containment yeah you ever see those graphs of like who's connected to who in a social network there's like these little clusters like little cities where it's like well here's all these people and they're mostly connected to each other but then there are these bridges to these other circles to like you know i don't know what mass don't look like but like the linux people over here and the apple people over here and like whatever like whatever groups they're divided up into the people in the u.s here and then the europeans here and then like the soccer fans here and then like just all these different little circles and it only takes like the right few people to like retweet something to cross from one of those clusters to another that all of a sudden a bunch of people who don't normally see your stuff are seeing your stuff and then the second phrase is context collapse which will link to the wikipedia page with the specifically the definition in social media which is um i gotta look at the wikipedia but my my definition of it is like it's kind of like the same as breaking containment in that you're writing something with the expectation that the audience that's seeing it like you you think you know what audience you're speaking to but when something breaks containment it's not actually true um let's see what we can see from the wikipedia page um yeah their definition is not great anyway we'll link to it and you can look it up but basically what it comes down to is people are seeing your stuff and they don't have the context that the normal people who follow you do for example they don't know who you are they don't know that you're on a podcast where you just talked about the thing that you tooted about or whatever they don't know that you're an apple fan they don't know that you live in the united states they don't know your political persuasion or whatever all they see is the thing that you wrote that arrives into their world and so i experienced both of these just before we came to the show and it was for this toot that i did i mean i i mostly spend my time in mastodon but i do occasionally also post things to blue sky just to see what the difference is and often i usually have to edit it because blue sky's limit is slower than my mastodon server so i have to squish things down a little bit but like the post was what i just said in the program that was uh the a18 pro and the macbook neo is 19 faster than the m2 ultra and the mac pro in single core performance a macbook neo is 600 bucks the mac pro which is still for sale is seven thousand dollars um anyone who listens to the show or knows me gets that toot which is like isn't it absurd they're still selling the mac pro with an m2 ultra in it but they're still selling it for seven thousand dollars when the macbook neo the super duper low cost cheapest mac blah blah blah is 19 faster in single core than the mac pro this is a this is a post of me slamming them what i'm trying to do is shame apple into canceling the mac pro because it's embarrassing at this point like oh is that what you want yes stops like they need to poop or get off the pot as they say like it says are we doing this or are we not because the law it's like it's like when the trash can was still there it's like i do want a new mac pro but at a certain point it's just embarrassing you got to stop selling the trash can for the same price they've always sold it for and their apple's like nope we're gonna we're gonna sell it to the day it gets replaced or something else happens so anyway you know my audience saw this and was like oh john complaining about the mac pro again it is kind of embarrassing that it's still got the m2 ultra and it is you know i'm usually what i'm making fun of my intel mac pro which is you know horrendously slow by modern standards but this is the current mac pro that you can buy at apple.com today they're still selling it with a straight face and the macbook neo is statistically significantly faster in single core now as i said in the specs of the show it is smaller it's slower in multi-core than the m2 ultra gpu it is way slower than the m2 ultra the m2 ultra has way more memory bandwidth the m2 mac pro can be filled with way more ram yada yada yada but any like i don't have to explain this to quote unquote my audience on mastodon because they all know my attitude towards the mac pro they all know what the point of this post was they all know it's meant in jest eyes and this funny is absurd to think about these type of things no one who follows me uh you know they're aware of the the situation with the mac pro and my opinion on it and if to the extent that they care about the mac pro at all it's probably only as a proxy through me because they never think about it otherwise because why would they um so that's the two but when something breaks containment and has context collapse people start responding to it in ways that you will find puzzling first one that i found puzzling that i for a while i was like did i make a mistake or something i've got a couple people replying telling me oh you got the price wrong it's 1700 what what and like the first time someone did it i'm like i just sent them the link to the macbook neo page it was like the product just came out they don't you know you're not if you're not like a mac person you don't know that the macbook neo came out today why would you right but like i did say macbook neo i'm like did i spell it incorrectly no i spelled it correctly in the post it's in there two times but like if you read fast you see macbook three-letter word you think macbook pro so and then it happened again and someone said uh the macbook pro is 1700 dude look you got the price totally wrong i don't know what you're talking about like

2:42:25Marco Arment:like macbook neo people just think that macbook neo was like you just saying like the new macbook

2:42:30Casey Liss:yeah i don't i don't know like is it just you know it's an anagram of macbook one but it looks a lot like pro it's got a tall letter case letter so there's that so then you're like that's how you

2:42:41Marco Arment:can tell something is broken containment could it be like a translation thing like if like if something auto translated it as the new macbook these were also english speakers as far as but

2:42:50Casey Liss:like that's breaking containment like people who follow me probably knew the macbook neo came out today people who have no idea who i am or anything about apple or anything don't have no idea what the macbook neo came out an hour ago how would they know right second thing is context collapse where a bunch of people were real angry thinking that what i was saying is you should buy a macbook neo instead of a mac pro because it's more powerful like as if this post was like bragging about how powerful the macbook neo is it's the opposite i'm using the macbook neo to show how pathetic the mac pro is that i mean again you both get this like that's the point of the post is it's the macbook pro is embarrassing what i'm not saying is the macbook neo just came out and it's more powerful than the apple's most powerful computer a apple's most powerful computer is not the mac pro and b no way in hell am i saying that but context collapses you need a lot of context to take this post in the way that i meant it you need to know my deal that i'm on an apple podcast you need to know my mac pro enthusiasm which you would never guess because who is a mac pro enthusiast right you need to know so much about me before you can interpret this toot the right way um and lots of people were complaining about both of these things both breaking containment which is a little bit more modern phrasing context collapse in the old in the good old bad old days of twitter because it was a problem for people who actually had popular posts like mine was not popular got like you know you know what is it like i don't know a hundred retuits but the people will get like a hundred thousand retuits and that basically destroy we used to destroy twitter for you because once people who have no idea who you are seeing it and there's thousands of them everyone's going to be mad about everything so in this case like the number of people who were so mad about this first of all people would not believe that it's 19 percent faster than single core but then they would say like well it's certainly uh you know got to be slower in multi-core i made the mistake of responding to one person and saying that it is actually similar to the m1 in multi-core and they got super angry about that too it's like whatever like but that's not the i'm not you know that's not the point of the post so anyway i thought this was a good short instructive after show to just let people you know people who are not familiar with this phenomenon which is probably young people like this is a thing that can happen to anybody if something you write online or post online some instagram thing or whatever breaks containment out of your little circle you'll know it because you'll start to get replies from people that are different than what you've been seeing not necessarily worse or more hostile but just like that that seem confusing to you because they evidence a misunderstanding of your deal and it's because they don't know what your deal is because they don't have any context um yeah and so that that's the thing that still happens i'm so not used to it happening to me like this is why i talk about the cross posting to mastodon blue side the reason i do that is i try to gauge like where do i get where do i get more like people actually responding to my stuff like where is my audience actually i prefer mastodon i primarily use mastodon it's the horse i'm backing i like it the best i like the clients the best i like everything about it but i'm always like well blue sky is like 10 bazillion times bigger and lots of people seem to like it over there and i do read stuff over there what is it like if i post over there and i can tell you for my tiny weird audience mastodon is still where my people are i get the most engagement from mastodon i get the most good info from mastodon i get the most replies people understand my deal on mastodon it's where my people are but mastodon is a tiny little backboard compared to this other blue sky or threads or obviously x which i'm not going near um but yeah i do post it over there just just just to check and just to see and just to see if people are going to engage with things and what kind of things are you know work in different places but yeah breaking containment it's still it's still a danger it's still a thing that can happen and it's still for for me usually not particularly fun but it's also not particularly dangerous that would have been much worse for me if I was anyone other than, you know, an old white dude in tech, because breaking a name for me is just people making snarky replies versus people like coming to my house to kill me or whatever.

2:46:44Casey Liss:So, uh, thank goodness for that. But, uh, yeah, that was my afternoon and it was, uh, a reminder that, uh, internet going to internet.