Will $10 million movie budgets be the new normal? Plus Manus AI & Mac Studio Ultra Upgrades

0:00In this episode of the DeNoise podcast, we're going to recap the Oscars and talk about the big win for indie film. introducing Manus, another AI agent. And we're gonna talk about the updates to the Mac studio. Let's get into it.

0:15Welcome. We're back. We're back. Even though we have been publishing episodes, but as we noted, we did pre-record them. And that's also why we weren't able to talk about the Oscars because they hadn't happened yet. Such a bummer because I would have loved to talk about the Oscars right after, but here we are. I know. Overall, the Oscar show itself, I felt like Conan was a great host. I really enjoyed watching him. I am someone who's like a mid Conan person, i'm not like there's a lot of people who are like i'm diehard conan fan me oh you're not a fan i'm like not a diehard conan fan but i thought he did a great job okay really enjoyed it yeah i mean he's like having fun and it's like nice to see him just having fun yeah tons of great dad like cringy funny dad jokes but he somehow pulls them off what's the big joke cinema streams cinema streams yeah so that's actually one of the takeaways too where i felt like it was a unexpected big night for a movie theater cinema streams is is great sketch too what a good concept right yeah can you explain the concept?

1:03We play the movie. It was like an SNL fake commercial that was basically advertising as an ad as if it was a new streaming service. What if the cinema is in the box? What if we taped 6 ,000 iPhones together into one big screen? Love it. But how do you play the movie? We play it for you. See, only somebody like Conan could really deliver that with the seriousness and with the comedy. Yeah, that was a big push for like, go back to movie theaters. But then also Sean Baker are probably the biggest winner of the night four time Academy Award winner. The only other person to do that since Walt Disney, which is crazy.

1:35Really? The single person to win four Academy Awards in a single night and in a single night. That's last person was Walt Disney. Yeah, Sean Baker, who won for Best Picture, Anora, Best Director, Best Screenwriter, Best Editor for a$6 million movie. Joey, we are living in the future, my friend. Yeah. So let's talk about big night for indie film. So Anora won pretty much swept for most of the awards$6 million budget. yeah shot on film punched way above its weight did a phenomenal job it did recently come out though they did spend about 18 million dollars promoting the film or for the oscar campaign and the marketing budget but still even after i just saw now after the oscar bump they i brought in i don't know another six or seven million dollars in theaters just from the huge awareness of like this movie winning everything and then being like what is this movie i don't know if you remember when we did the pre-oscar prediction episode i did say anora had the chance because it was pointing into the future of Hollywood, sort of smaller, nimbler budget, young filmmaker, very distinct creative vision.

2:35But what I didn't say was three times the marketing budget. Yeah. I mean, so it did have a big marketing budget, but you could argue that, I mean, they only put the money in there once they realized like it was gaining traction and that they had something there. Like, I don't know what point they decided to start pushing all the money into it. I feel like it was a strategy from the get go. It's just like, How do we flip the model upside on its head? I mean, the legacy way to do it would be to put all of it into production and then whatever remains into distribution, marketing, and whatnot. Traditionally, I mean, even with bigger films, it's usually like, isn't it roughly like half is going to your production budget, half is going to your marketing budget?

3:11Sure, yeah. Yeah, so 50-50, but not like three to... Well, but I mean, also, the numbers are kind of warped because it's such a small budget to make this film. Six million dollars is pretty low. But yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that stood out to you is, I mean, he did this for six million, But then I kind of forgot, but one of his earlier films was Tangerine, which came out in 2015. And that was notable because it was like the first kind of feature film that got distribution that was shot on the iPhone. I think it was the 5S. He's no stranger to using cheap gear to make an amazing film.

3:37Yeah, and they made that for$100 ,000. That was like a key case of just like a story that like no studio is really going to touch and pick up. And made this kind of really energetic, entertaining film with the iPhone. And I think that to tie this into AI, I feel like that ties into it's doable to do these low budget films, but they're contemporary, you know, they take place on location. They, you know, are contemporary stories. Taking the AI to the next thing, it's like, what if you could do these movies at the same budget, but then start doing genre films? Like you never see genre films, a sci-fi, a Western.

4:05Right. At six million dollars. Yeah. Yeah. That's the next leap where it's like, okay, you can go beyond doing a contemporary film and start doing genre films at lower budgets. I think that's right around the corner. If you think about it, if you don't replace the human performer, but just augment with VFX and AI, I don't see why it couldn't be possible with today's AI technology. Yeah, or where it's going to be. If you start a production today, where the AI is going to be by the time you finish in six months, eight months from now, it's going to be way better anyway. Just peak additions, everything.

4:34Yeah, just keep waiting for new stuff to drop. It's like, ah, that solves the problem I was looking for. Exactly. Other huge winner, Flo, animated film, one for Latvia and$3.7 million budget, all made in Blender. They thanked Blender in their speech. Amazing. I love it. The software mentioned in the thank you speeches. And yeah, another film example of relatively low budget. I mean, compared to Wild Robot and Inside Out 2, who were kind of the two favorites, but also, I don't know the budgets offhand, but over$100 million each. Yeah. Wild Robot was, I think, under 100 uh 87 for production but you know this this happens so much i remember working on dream works and being upset every time an oscar would get nabbed from the big two or big three by an independent maker like out of all of the categories i think animation stands to be the one that has the most reach into an independent filmmaker yeah because you could take a tool that is accessible like blender yeah and make something of that quality and studio quality and do it for with a small enough team because if you think about it's only 90 minutes of animated content it is doable yeah and so i mean they did it i don't remember i mean a small team i don't remember how small it was but 3.7 million dollar budget i believe 20 people 20 yeah so that's crazy small it did take them about five years to make it between script funding producing it buying nvidia gpus for rendering yeah i mean so they did also mention they use are you familiar with uh evie A little bit, yeah.

6:02Okay, so that, can you explain what it is? Yeah, Eevee is a built-in renderer within Blender, and it gives you a pretty close to real-time, it has a great denoiser on it. I think it's used a lot for 2D animation rather than 3D animation, because it has stylized looks and stuff to it. They achieved the look that they wanted without spending anything, really, on the tools. I mean, I think they're running this on their own computers, it wasn't like that a massive server farm like Pixar does. That's incredible. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, that's also just to show the power of the power of the tool and the power of like how far the hardware has come to.

6:35Yeah. And this to me, this is like the Blair Witch Project moment a little bit where a small team with very limited budget, very limited resource can just come in and just compete with the big guys. Good story, good artistry. That's it. Yeah. To expand upon this for the AI future. It did take them five years. It took them four million dollars. I mean, I see this as I remember seeing some tweets where it's like, look, we don't need AI. We have we could do this. And it's like, no, you could do this with the same talent, the same creative people behind it, but for a million dollars and in a year or two.

7:05And cut down the budget, cut down the time, do it faster, do it for less money, but don't take away anything from the artistry or the creativity that goes into making this film. AI has the biggest potential to impact feature animation more than any other genre. Yeah, we're probably seeing that in me. It's the first one to adapt. The only thing holding back, I think, the Oscars next year is the AI clauses and all of the disclosures. If they have to disclose, right. And we're still not even sure what, if they have to disclose, if that disqualifies you or not, or just you have to disclose it and for people to be aware and what that even means.

7:36Yeah. That's still up in the air. So does it mean if you tell the Academy that you used AI in your project, are you still qualified at that point? And they just put a little asterisk on their project? Right. Who knows? Yeah. So just info for the voting members to be aware of. And speaking of AI and one of our earlier talks, The Brutalist and Adrian Brody and Respeacher, he did win for Best Actor. So the - Such a well-deserved one. Respeacher. Yeah. I mean, it was great. Regardless of what you thought about Act 3, the performance throughout the film was just top-notch by Adrian Brody. Yeah. For someone who could hold my attention for three hours, I think that you deserve the Academy Award.

8:14Yeah. And the, yeah, the Respeacher thing never took away from any of that. I mean, he's so convincing at being Laszlo. Like it didn't feel like an actor was portraying Laszlo. It felt like that really is this guy from the 1960s. Yeah. It's so crazy to me too. Cause it's like, if they went the traditional route and brought in a voice actor to read the letter in Hungarian, no one would bat an eye. I'd be like, yeah, that's a part of the movie process. And it's like, okay, well they took it a step further and used his actual voice and performance and used a tool to help carve it, but keep his original voice and performance, which seems more authentic than if you were to ADR this with another actor.

8:50Yeah. And no one would like. I agree. Bat an eye at that. So yeah, worthy performance. Maybe not the greatest acceptance speech. Oh, I did not see that. Did you not see anything about it? No. He took the record for the longest acceptance speech ever. Even with the music playing off? He had the power to have them stop playing. Oh, I mean, he's no stranger to memorable acceptance speeches. It is memorable, but not for the. Remember the Halle Berry one? What did she say? No, when he. Oh, when he won the first time? Yeah. I don't remember when he won. I think Halle Berry was presenting and he made out with her on stage.

9:26I don't remember that. Yeah. No, he had this like rambling speech, but it didn't really say anything. And it was just kind of a list off of people. And then he got more time. And then it was like, you didn't really know what to do with the extra time that he got. Oh. So yeah, somehow broke the award for longest speech and was also not the most memorable, but for the wrong reasons. But yeah, I'm still happy he won the best actor. I thought that was deserved. Well deserved. Yeah. Unexpected theme, which we talked about before, save the movie theater, cinema streams, but then also Sean Baker in his third acceptance speech when he won his third award, which I also appreciated that he had a third speech prepared.

10:03And it was more of a plea for like, go to the movies, like go see movies in movie theaters. Great. So I'm glad he took advantage of winning the awards to like, I already thanked everyone. Now let me like use this platform to like push additional things. Yeah. I think that needed to be said. Yeah. Yeah. And I've been trying to go back to the movie theaters more often. Okay. We did make some predictions on a few categories. And so let's tally it up. So our first prediction, we had best visual effects. You predicted Dune Part 2. I said Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Dune Part 2 won. Congratulations.

10:32Oh, yay. Best cinematography. We both predicted Dune Part 2. The Brutalist won. No worries. Greg Frazier will win sooner or later. Yeah. But also, when I'm not upset, like The Brutalist equally. They're all great films. Equally deserving. I remember what I said. Looks amazing. The reason Dune won or would have won is because it's such a trendsetting VFX movie. Like all the other VFX movies want to replicate the Dune look because of the way they just made VFX disappear. And Best Picture, I picked Anora, you picked The Brutalist and Anora won. Of course. Yes. So, tie. Won one. we have a tie so yeah we should have predicted on the two other categories obviously feature animated film and then best international feature that's also a really exciting category for me animated feature i would have i would have picked wild robot yeah i felt like that was gonna be i love that film i know yeah but i also have not seen flow and i want to see flow now same i don't think i don't think i saw any of the uh the best international foreign uh films did you see any of them no i i'm wondering who won so yeah the best one the best foreign language film that won was I'm Still Here.

11:38It was also nominated for Best Picture, too, but it was the best international feature film. Oh, Flo was nominated for international feature as well. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And Girl with the Needle, Emilia Perez. So, Zoe Saldana won for Best Supporting Actress. Yeah. It was a good show. I mean, it was a bit of a weird year. There wasn't like a huge front runner and big budget runaway film like Oppenheimer last year. But I feel like, yeah, big night for a new film and indicator of a trend of like, you could do a lot with a small film. Also, somebody pointed out on X that this is the first year where you had the most number of independently financed features.

12:12Is that true? Yeah. Six major above the line categories. So, well, I mean, it does like help that half of them are from Anora and Sean Baker. Director, best film, best actor. I don't remember the actor and supporting actors offhand. Oh, yeah. I mean, Kieran Culkin. Yes. For that one movie in Poland. Yeah. With Jesse Eisenberg. Yes. That he directed. Yes. All of those won. International feature. documentary feature and animated feature all independent i mean if this isn't writing on the wall i don't know what is right like the current hollywood model is just not working yeah and also not making the films that are getting nominated for best picture because they're too busy making sequels marvel films and star wars films yeah the money's going did you see there was some buzz going around about michael bay uh where he came out and said oh you can't get funding anymore You can't get anything greenlit anymore?

13:02Yeah. You combine that sentiment with the fact that so many independent films are winning Oscars and not the established studios. Like, clearly, there is a big need for a reset on how films get greenlit and funded in the first place. Yeah. And you have these smaller studios like Neon or A24 that are putting these original things out there and doing it for a smaller budget. It's like we're lacking the Miramax, the Focus Features, the Sony classics that sort of dominated this yeah this this 10 20 years ago this fear of like i mean these are relatively low budget films but like we don't really have those like 20 to 50 million dollar budget films yeah you know are still way less than a marvel film but could break out into yeah i think keith sam said it the best when he was on the podcast you know he said something about the middle is completely hollowed out so you have movies that are under 10 million that are completely funded by, you know, self-financed or whatever.

13:56And then you don't even have a 10 to 90 million market anymore. It's just a hundred million plus. Right. So that's gotta be some established IP or something. Exactly. Like they're not taking chances. And he said it the best. He was like, at that price range, it's vote by committee. Everything is vote by committee. And when you make a film that's supposed to be a very distinct piece of art with a very distinct voice, texture, feel. You can't vote by committee to make that film. It just has to be made by somebody who has the vision. Yeah. And so we're not going to see$100 million plus movies that are artistic, that are different.

14:34Because it's... Unless, I mean, there's only two people that come to mind who could command that budget and full control. Christopher Nolan. Jon Favreau, maybe. Maybe Jon Favreau. Yeah. And James Cameron. Yeah. And they're almost grandfathered in a little bit. Because the studios are just like, okay, give them the money. and then just let them free reign. And probably Spielberg, he could still probably do whatever he wants. But for the rest of the ecosystem at that price range, it's kind of, it needs a recalibration. Or AI. Oh! Yeah, no, I mean, I don't want to keep bringing it back to it, but I feel like this is like the first step of the indicator of like, okay, well, if the budget's, if like, in order to get$100 million plus budget, even if you're Michael Bay and you can't get a budget like that, the alternative is like, okay, well, how can we do the crazy cool stuff that we're used to doing, but do it for less?

15:19Breathe on this a little bit. you've been bringing this up as we were talking about the Oscars. What is your opinion on the future of filmmaking and AI and low budget? Tie those three things together. Making genre films or just making kind of more visually interesting films that would be cost prohibitive at the whatever, 500 ,000 to$5 million range. And you do you think that the AI technology of today is already there it's getting there i think if you're trying to do something that's straight up animated or like go lean into animation i think you could definitely do yes pull off something like that yeah today like a flow and combining a flow right and i'm not saying yeah and again this goes back to my whole thing where it's like we need to have better language around ai i'm not saying like let me go type into a sore prompt and spit out a film i'm saying i don't think it's there use artistry yeah to create like we're talking about before the in-betweeners like make the like characters make the shots use like a combo of traditional like artists who are driving this but doing it for less yeah it's like the equivalent of promise studios like somebody like that that understands how to build a pipeline stringing a bunch of ai tools together to get to the end result but it's not text to image text to video into an oscar submission yeah they're one of the more promise we've talked about another one that uh we'll talk about in the future but staircase K Studios came out with an article or announcement where they're acquiring a bunch of scripts, optioning scripts, kind of going.

16:44It's a studio AI focused studio, but founded by traditional Hollywood executives. Oh, cool. And going the like sticking with the unions, like optioning scripts based on like WGA rates, hiring actors for voices, I believe. Okay. But producing these films for like half a million dollars,$500 ,000 and trying to just take films that no one else was picking up. Right. and that were too cost prohibitive to do traditionally yeah and use they're saying they're saying that like a proprietary ai pipeline i mean there's no shortage of good ideas and good scripts out there and it's just hard like you know especially if it was a genre script or it has like vfx or that you know it's not like it like something that you could shoot on a beach or in a room or in a building it's all the stuff to do the development teams at netflix amazon disney wherever uh have sat on for years and there's just piled piles of scripts that are just not feasible with a traditional pipeline yeah and that's also why there's a whole blacklist thing that exists the like the system of uh scripts that you know people are like oh this is great script but like no one picked it up and produced it there's no way i can make this for 10 million dollars unproduced scripts yeah right oh yeah amazing so maybe we should do a spotlight on staircase yeah so i think we'll talk about in the future too but i think that seeing stuff like that pop up recently and then seeing what happened in the academy awards i'm like see like it just feels like, okay, this is like step one, step two, like where things are going, smaller budgets, and being able to pull off more with AI and still keep people and artisans in the pipeline.

18:04It's just a different workflow and a different tool set. Okay, next story. Another new AI startup that has been kind of blowing up the web bit. Manus, another company from a Chinese startup called Monika. They're calling it the first general AI agent. And this is continuing the trend of agentic AI that kind of kicked off the year with the NVIDIA keynote. Is it going to take over my computer and just do things for me? Not there yet. So basically, it looks like a very good turbocharged version of things we've talked about in the past, like chat GPT operator, chat GPT, deep research still currently looks like it is a sandbox version where you give it a prompt of like the thing you want it to do.

18:41But it apparently does it way better. Like it'll go across the web. It's still a sandbox version of like, it's not controlling your computer. It's in a sandbox, like computer on the web. Got it. But as far as doing, like I've seen examples, I've seen a lot of programming and gaming examples, but I've seen other examples of Bill Lawal posted a good video breaking out some things he tried out where it was like, I needed to find a good spot of like drone operating locations in Austin. And it like, first it builds out a checklist of what it needs to do. And then it starts running through the checklist.

19:08And it's like looking at maps, looking at FAA, like flight charts, like what's cleared. Yeah, like going to Google Maps and looking up like visuals. And just doing a bunch of tasks, but way better than ChatGPT operators doing. Way better than ChatGPT. Yeah, apparently it's been way better than ChatGPT operator. That's amazing. People have said it looks like, so we also, this came up recently too, but ChatGPT announced that they might be launching a$20 ,000 a month membership. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The whole point of AI is to save money. I mean, if you're paying someone$100 ,000 a month for whatever this thing can do, and it's$20 ,000, I don't know.

19:44I guess maybe that's how they do the math. Yeah, that part was a little fuzzy. It seems like it was geared very much towards like high end research or medical research or whatever this agent was that they were going to launch. But people are saying, oh, man, this is basically that. But there's no pricing yet, but not$20 ,000. But it's kind of like the Hypebeast AI model, right? Tell me a little bit about the wait list and what's going on. So right now it is like you have to have an access code. It's like early beta. And apparently some people are reselling. There's such a demand for it that people are reselling their codes for thousands of dollars.

20:14That's like rare Jordans. I'm in. You know, anything with scarcity that really just like... What if you like join the wait list and then you don't get in and then you like pay a thousand bucks for someone's code and then the next day you get the invite code from them. Like, oh, hey, we're giving you access now. And you're like, I just spent a thousand bucks for nothing. I feel like the people who are spending money on the access codes have disposable income. I think they do. Yeah, if you're a very early adopter who's going to throw a bunch of money at this. Yeah, it feels like another big leap of...

20:46Their website's really well thought out. A lot of things coming together. Yeah. And doing like another big step of like, oh, this is like doing kind of crazy useful stuff. Yeah. With minimal input. The AI companies know that people want substance and people want value. And the hype cycle is only going to give them so much momentum. So this is a good indication as to the near future of how AI will impact a lot of people's lives. Yeah, and I think it's going to get wild once this stuff can start just doing things on your computer. You know, like when it can control Resolve or Photoshop or actually do things in the tools that we use and be like, oh, hey, go tag these clips or go make a string out.

21:27Moment of truth will be, you know, somebody like you or me who hire freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork time to time. Can we do a couple of things with Manus that maybe a Fiverr talent would be able to do? and if it's a little bit less money, can we have five or six minus accounts and are we more productive? Yeah, possibly. It also depends on the task. I mean, yeah, I've done things where it's like, oh, I need to like kind of scrape a bunch of data that I'm not like a data scraper. And it's like, yeah, like get something on Fiverr. But I think AI, that's a lot of people like one of the first things where you can just tell an AI agent like, oh, go to this website and like create a database, you know, with all of this data that I need from here for research and it'll go off and do that.

22:05Yeah, and to me, like a lot of the use cases, they feel like very much number crunching, data crunching, kind of like deep research territory, but there is nothing that is creative driven. So I'll give an example. You know, when we made the show and we were going back and forth on the title screen and the title animation stuff, like we knew what we wanted and we could list it out, but there is no such agent that can take the helm and give us 10 or 15 different versions of it. No, like a video animation kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. We're not there yet. So I think for now, a lot of creative industries can kind of just breathe a little bit because nobody's coming for those jobs.

22:47No. And it's like, I mean, as we talked about before, I think in a lot of cases, it's like good enough for some people. Like, yes, there are ways where you could maybe go to a store or something and be like, oh, give me an animated tile that says Zenoised. And it'll probably give you something. And for a handful of people, that'll probably be like good enough. Yeah, not us. Not good enough for us. But yeah, or the in-betweener exercise that we kind of talked about, too, where it's like, well, you know, if you have a graphic designer, but they can't, you're not an animator, but they can design, you know, start first frame, last frame.

23:15Yeah. And then we, you know, use AI to animate that. Yep. What was the solution you sent me the other day that has the first frame, last frame? Which one? That was another Pika update. Okay. We didn't cover that Pika update because I think it came out literally after we published the episode. but okay they've been on a roll but they published another update that was their version of you can give it first frame last frame but that's not new i mean cling runway a bunch of these um video generator tools have that where you give it an image of the first frame image of the last frame and it makes the video yeah in the demos that i saw looked pretty good especially if you were like trying to do some cool kind of like if your first frame and last frame are completely different and you're trying to do some kind of cool like transition effect their outputs looked uh really cool so i wanted to mess around with it a bit yeah it feels like it's ready for all the hip pop music videos.

23:58I'm sure we're going to see a lot of that. Yeah. All the music videos. Awesome. Yeah. So, man, I'm curious to see more of, yeah, just where this goes and once it can start doing computer stuff. But I'm also curious about the pricing because I remember when I messed around with Claude computer control, which you could only run through their API, it was expensive. It was like$1 or$2, like a minute. Wow. Running on the computer. So, I don't know what their - Because it's like AWS or whatever hosted computer of a VM. I mean that in itself is expensive yeah I mean because in that case I think it's like you know it's taking a screenshot of the computer screen and like figuring out what it's looking at and then controlling you know it's probably 10 computers 10 VMs running underneath with one computer being the one you access like it probably is very compute intensive I mean maybe that's why they haven't rolled it out prime time I mean this stuff's only going to get cheaper and eventually just run it on your own computer going back to what you said this is a Chinese manufacturer Yes, a Chinese company.

24:55So yeah, I've seen people compare this to another kind of DeepSeek moment. Sure. I don't know if it's as big as DeepSeek, but it's definitely, it's another Chinese company that built like one of the most useful looking general AI agents that can access a bunch of different tools. I think a DeepSeek moment will come when they launch the price and we compare that to OpenAI. Yeah. And then also see, does OpenAI's$20 ,000 a month plan suddenly drop down to, oh, we're going to give it to you with Pro. And like, because there's such a, this like competition going on between all the different companies of what they're offering.

25:24And one is like, we're going to offer this super top level thing. The other one's like, we'll give it to you for free. And then the other one's like, well, we'll drastically drop our price then. Yeah. I mean, I don't understand how well tied these Chinese companies are to the state. A lot of things in China happen to have very deep ties into the government and they get funding in all types of ways that is not quote unquote funding. And they don't really have a prerogative to make any money in a lot of cases. Right, just get the adoption out there and get people using it. Get the adoption, land grab, do it before the Americans.

25:58So there is some geopolitical stuff happening under the hood, I'm sure. Yeah, I would not be surprised. But yeah, I mean, as you saw the website, very slick, much more user friendly if you can get access to it than like a deep secret. You had to kind of be a bit more technically minded to like launch the model yourself. Yep. Yeah, so yeah, we'll see where that goes. And then also speaking of computers and things that can run. You got a hardware update for me? We've got a hardware update. Yes. Apple announced new updates to the Mac Studio, which I believe it hasn't really been updated since they introduced it in 2022.

26:30So now they've got new versions that will run the M4 Max chip and the M3 Ultra chip, which actually the M3 Ultra, I believe is more powerful than the M4 Max. Oh, oh, wow. Even though the numbers are counterintuitive. I think it's like not a low power version. like the m3 m4s uh generally going to max and they are designed to run on batteries uh for this like for these for these uh yeah exactly bad boys right here yeah so from a form factor wise it looks like a chunky taller brother of the mac mini so still kind of small kind of manageable oh the studio yeah yeah the studios are great yeah yeah everything that i could tell from the outside of the studio is the same it's beefier chips and then you could max it out with up to 512 gigabytes of unified memory that's insane which bumps the price up to 14 000 the starting price is 2 000 for an m4 max model with the base specs you can max it out to 14 000 it wasn't like um from aesthetic and design standpoint it doesn't have the skateboard wheels and the cheese grater none of that no it's not new it's not new have you seen the They stretched out a Mac mini.