611: RAM Christmas

I did my Apple homework. I finally watched submerged and I did the hearing test with the AirPods Pro. Oh, I have not done the hearing test. Lucky you, I would love to do the hearing test, but I can't.

Because you don't have the right airpods. Oh, it's right you, because you can't use the any-your-ones. No, it's not, well, it's not that I can't use them. I would gladly borrow my wife's any-your-ones and use them, but I can't use hers either. I believe it is only AirPods Pro 2, which makes no sense to me.

Yeah, I believe that's correct. Which is just-I can understand them saying maybe AirPods Pro only, although honestly all those hearing test apps that I use worked fine with my open-air ones, but like whatever I get it, you want to be more accurate, seal the ear fine, but AirPods Pro 1 really can't do the hearing test apple. Pretty crappy.

I'm sure there's a reason. I'm sure there's a reason as well. But here we are. No, but I don't really care about that. So with respect, tell me all about submerged. I don't even care that much about your hearing test. I kind of do, but I really want to know about submerged. My hearing test was fine. It's very uninteresting. All right. So submerged was really fun. I'm glad that you convinced me that it was worth watching.

Good. Good. So this is-as a reminder, this is the quick immersive video that was made for Vision Pro. It's like an original-it's like 12 minutes long or something. It's not very long at all, but it's a-it's kind of like a little mini play, basically. I went a while back. I went in Manhattan. There was a-there was a-there was-I don't think it's still going there. There's a performance art kind of play called Sleep No More, which is-I don't forgive me. I don't know anything about theater really.

I believe it's called immersive theater where like you're just-you as the audience members are just like walking around the act like the building in which the play is happening in all different rooms. And so the actors are just walking through the audience doing their thing and the audience can just like walk up right to the actors and just hover right behind them like a creep or like get in their way.

So it's kind of weird because you feel like you are in a play being performed. And at some-and like-I only went there once. It seems like this is kind of a thing people do a lot where the more experienced people who have done this kind of thing before would like really get uncomfortably close to the actors.

And I'm like standing off to the side like I don't want to get in the way. I don't want to do anything wrong. I don't want to get yelled at. And you know, and of course nothing was wrong. Everyone was fine. But like the people who were comfortable with it were getting very, very close like standing right behind someone.

And there were parts of submerged that felt a lot like that immersive theater experience parts of it that felt very much like, oh, I am way too close to this guy right now. I am really in his personal space like this. I should not be here. This is kind of creepy.

But ultimately it did feel a lot like watching an immersive theater performance. And so it was very interesting from that point of view. And I think I-it can be more than ever. You mentioned the theater angle when you first talked about it, Casey. But it this can be more than ever that the right format for immersive video is long shots really paste and staged a lot like a play with very little camera movement.

Like you can occasionally change cameras like change to a different shot completely, but the camera in my opinion should not move much at all during this. But it really did feel like I was in a play at first, especially like you know it starts out in like a scene just like in a submarine like in in like the bunks. And so you're just like watching these two guys talk to each other in the bunks of a submarine. And that felt so theater like to me.

It was a great thing to see overall. I yes, I had some technical issues. I didn't have motion sickness. I did have a lot of issues with like you know the wrong thing being in focus. I do think a more you know kind of infinite focus wide angle theater like staging is the best move that we know of so far for this. But ultimately I hope we see more of it. You know just like everything else in the vision pro it was a nice sample of something that we might have more of someday.

Who not like it was 12 minutes long. Okay, that's great. You know after almost a year that's okay. I can't wait to see more if it ever comes sometime maybe please. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I thought it was a lot of fun. I think it's one of those things like I said previously whether or not you have any interest in submarine films, whether or not you have any interest in short films.

I think just as an exploration of a new new to me anyway kind of art. I thought it was really cool and as with all things vision pro it shows so much potential. We'll see if it's ever really realized and in a lot of ways it is realized because like this 15 or whatever 12 15 17 minute short film is realizing that potential.

But I still was left wanting more I want either more of them or just a longer film of this of this note and so I just I don't I don't want to be down on the vision pro because I think it is such an incredible piece of technology and so incredibly cool. And yet as we've said at nozuma since February you know we want more give us more you have infinite money apple you don't know you don't have infinite time you know takes time to make these things happen but you have infinite money.

Do something please please do something in this and this is a great example of it so more yet more please I'll take seconds and thirds and fourths I'll take more please. And I know this does not fit their sensibilities I'm sure like I'm sure apple wants to do everything original and custom for this and as a result we have almost nothing. What I would love is just take existing experiences and bring them to us here you know similar to what the talk show live did.

I don't know if you see this year where like they had a 3d stream of the talk show that was just like having a front row seat in the theater it was a fixed camera and a thing was happening on stage in front of it that was great is that the only thing this head said can do no of course not but it does it and it does it really well like make deals give me a front row seat to great theater productions give me a front row seat to concerts or sporting events or whatever like sporting events would be so I mean I know that's not your kind of thing.

And sporting events have unique challenges with like live broadcast bandwidth and stuff like I get that but concerts and theater productions don't pre record make a deal go pre record a great performance of some theater and some concerts and just put it on the vision pro sell it.

I mean people paid almost for grand for this thing you can sell those things for 30 bucks and people will buy them like just get something on it because like this show is like just the pure 3d experience of sitting in front of a performance can be really great and really immersive and really compelling for this device and we already produce events out in the world that if merely captured from a good perspective with 3d cameras.

And had nothing else done to them would make great vision pro content so I hope someone in that I hope there. At least thinking of it or trying it or lay in the groundwork for it because in the meantime while we wait for 12 more minutes of original content to be made we can get hours and hours of great stuff on there with some deals and some fairly simple production.

Yeah I can agree more to get ahead of feedback there are some apps some third party apps in the vision pro I don't remember what the list I want to say it's like access concerts or something like that we have so much to talk about I'll probably forget to go back in the show notes and.

But there are things that exist in the vision pro I've heard a lot of people say that the I think national geographic or something like that app also offers maybe not immersive video but certainly like I'm a sized video so there are third party ways you can do some of this stuff but that doesn't negate what you're saying Marco and I agree wholeheartedly and again I absolutely concur that theater or equivalent sorts of things would be phenomenal like for those of us who.

For those of us who never saw or really didn't pay that much attention to Hamilton up until it was released I think was July 4th or there about 2020 I lost my mind I mean you to the front row seats to me losing my mind about Hamilton five years after everyone else did and you bet I would pay 20 30 40 bucks to be able to watch that in immersive in an immersive video in the vision pro and I would absolutely kill for that and sporting events all by word that would be just incredible and.

You know there there's so many ways that people are trying to make sporting events that aren't happening literally in front of you more and more interesting we've had a handful people send us links again I'll forget to put in the show notes but links to this thing that's kind of in the spirit of the Vegas sphere but the idea is is it makes you feel like you're sitting in the stands of sporting event and then what's presented on the inside of the sphere is the sporting event you know what I mean so you've got all these people around you like that concert the fish concert you went to.

Which makes you feel like you're doing this as a collective group endeavor and yet you're watching this not immersive but like it just all around you so I guess quote unquote immersive not literally immersive or maybe vice versa who knows anyways you got the idea so you got it all around you and it's my understanding from those who tried it is that it's truly incredible and so yeah again I know we're a broken record and I apologize for it but in the off chance of anyone with authority apples listening more please it's so incredible.

Please give us more we are so thirsty for more and I know again sports is not really your thing Marco but like it is worth the four minutes to watch the NBA all star weekend thing because I think these are each literally four minutes there's an NBA all star thing there's a super bowl thing now granted these are all coming out months after the fact but still there's so cool and it shows so much potential and I agree wholeheartedly that maybe streaming this is a non starter but oh man even if it was like a few hours delayed I I would really think about delaying watching the game.

Delaying watching a sporting event so I could see it in immersive video rather than watching it live it's that freaking cool so yeah like just don't don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good like don't wait until you can have like custom everything multi shot you know fancy edited like just a fixed camera in front of a great event yeah that alone could be extremely compelling and we are already producing in the world lots of great theater and

day shows and concerts and like magic shows like there's so many things like this could work for comedy shows that there's so much out there that this could work for anything performed on a stage basically like you can just put a camera in a really good spot and capture it and sell that and it would be great and you know but I it just it strikes me that apples probably just waiting for like only the really high end content but like I I please apple consider the consider the alternative here give us more of regular stuff

because that could be really great. Very quickly we have a little bit of housekeeping to achieve and accomplish first of all if you are an American we are recording just barely less than a week before election day we're not going to

be able to do that today we're not going to labor this hopefully but I know I speak for all of us and saying please go vote if you're an American and I'm probably speaking for all of us and saying if you want our opinion about it we really endorse Kamala Harris and Tim Walls and generally speaking the Democratic party.

The Republican party seems to be intent on being racist and fascist and so on and so forth you can see the recent Madison Square Garden rally which was distasteful on a trillion different levels if that's what you're into cool I guess not really but whatever but if you want people who are looking to govern rather than just do what they

need to do to make themselves even more rich then I strongly encourage you to vote in specifically to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walls and Democrats across the board generally speaking wherever possible there's of course you know exceptions here and there but generally speaking a vote for them is what we encourage there are issues with all of the candidates.

Naturally we haven't really spoken about what's going on overseas no long time but that's really deplorable what's going on in Gaza and there's definitely some associations with the current administration for sure.

And that is gross and I don't want to minimize that but ultimately no political candidate is perfect and for me anyway and now I will speak only for myself for me I would much rather have a Kamala Harris who has some questionable very questionable thoughts about Gaza but seems to at least domestically want what's best for damn near everyone and I will take that over a man who is mostly lost as marbles has demonstrated that he's a monster as a president.

And his intent and his party are intent on taking away the rights of all of the women in my life it's just gross top to bottom I can't endorse that I can't stand for it I would love very much for my wife and my daughter to have control over their own bodies so for me that means

I'm going to be a little more firm about it case he was polite about it there's a couple of angles here number one is you know whether you go vote at all so if you are eligible to vote in the United States elections these days are one and lost mostly based on democratic turnout Republicans tend to turn out pretty consistently and if you're out there and you're like I think I want to vote for Trump most likely you are going to go show up.

It's the people who are on the left politically typically that have much more variable turnout rates and elections tend to be decided based on how many liberal leading people actually get out there and go vote for the democratic candidate now this system that we have sucks there's the voting system we have is horrendous the party system we have is horrendous it sucks yes it does but it's the system we have and look the handling of Israel and Gaza is messed up on so many.

And I don't know almost any American who fully agrees with everything we've done with with our handling of that the thing is though you only have one choice right now your only choice is do I want Harris or Trump that's it that's the only choice you have you don't have at this point in the election there is no option that says I'm going to send a message or I'm going to throw my vote away or I'm going to support some third party candidate or I can't I just can't just want to be a little more careful.

I can't I just can't support you know Harris because I object to it because you know what first of all if you're concerned about situation in Gaza. Trump is by all accounts by his own words by every possible analyst by experts in the subject by people over there way worse than Harris so if you care at all about that situation or about Ukraine or about any of the wars that are currently going on in the world.

universally people who know what they're talking about way more than us say Trump is far worse to handle those situations than Harris so you out there might be thinking I can't stomach what you know the Biden administration and probably Harris are going to choose to do over there you might think that and I feel you.

But Trump will be far worse so if you go if you don't vote odds are you are probably more liberal than average if you don't vote what you're saying is I'm okay with Trump because that's what will happen like if liberals don't turn out what will happen is we'll get Trump.

So I urge you even though we never have a perfect selection of candidates at this stage that's not what this vote is in the future if we have a more diverse political party situation if we have a different voting system besides first pass the post or anything else if we have other voting dynamics that allow us to make you know more nuanced choices then great that'll be a great time and we would love to push for that change to happen but right now that's not the option on the table right now the option on the table is you either go vote for Harris or.

Or we get Trump and if you care about any of those issues I assure you Trump is worse and I know we have some conservative listeners left and there's not many of you because we've turned many of you away over the years with comments like this but I if you are planning on going to vote for Trump I urge you to consider that almost everyone who actually has worked with him or near him or governed with him or served in his cabinet or commanded the military under his name.

And so I think the military under his rule almost all those people have since come out and said for the love of God do not put him back in office so whatever you think will happen look at what did happen what actually happened is he burned a lot of people he made a lot of mistakes a lot of people who have worked with him are now in jail for being criminals he is also a convicted felon on many many counts in addition to all of his other shortcomings and he has specifically seen.

He has specifically said that he basically doesn't care about some pretty fundamental things about America like democracy now in my opinion anything that undermines democracy is the most un-American thing you can possibly do if you say you won't trust the results of an election if you say certain people shouldn't be allowed to vote if you say you know slogans like taking the country back what that tells me is you don't believe in America you believe in dictatorship.

I am not the only person saying this this is not this is not hyperbole this is like look around at people who know what they're talking about because obviously we don't but look around people who know what they're talking about and they're all saying the same thing this is not vague he's not being subtle he's not hinting he's directly saying he does not want freedom and democracy he wants to be the dictator.

And what we saw when he was in the office last time is that there's a lot of potential for that that our system is more fragile than we think so I strongly urge you if you consider yourself an American patriot there is one candidate in this election who is promising and has demonstrated the willpower and ability to undermine the fundamentals of our democracy and there's another candidate who's pretty decent.

I don't care if Harris is not perfect for your politics Trump is the most anti American choice you could possibly make and in my opinion I know this is going to piss off a lot of people I don't think you can fly the American flag and call yourself an American patriot if you support a candidate who wants to clearly undermine the fundamentals of our democracy.

The Trumpists for you this is tribal this is religious you don't give a crap about anything except your team winning go do whatever you're going to do the liberals out there I urge you everyone else I urge you go show up if you show up and we have good voter turnout we will crush Trump it's not even going to be close. But it's all about turnout we have to turn out even if Harris is not perfect for you she's better than Trump and that's the only choice we have right now.

Now it's a little bit late to register to vote if you haven't already some states do have same day registration though however we will put links in the show notes if you're wondering I would love to vote I've never done it I have no idea how I have no idea what to do vote dot org I will vote dot com vote dot go all these things will be in the show notes they will help you find where you are.

And even if you are very knowledgeable and saying none of the supplies to me because I don't live in a swing state and all the matters is people who live in a swing state.

Shop and vote for your local elections for your state elections that stuff matters a huge amount especially as a bull walk against potential another Trump administration you want to vote even if you're in a state that quote unquote doesn't count and by the way what we traditionally think of as swing states you know whatever Pennsylvania Michigan.

Wisconsin maybe Arizona right. For all we know your state could become a swing state either now or in the future don't give up if you're in Texas and think there's no point in me voting vote show up and vote and again even if you think you're it doesn't matter for the presidential election vote for all your local state elections and while you're there check the tech check the Harris check box I think I co host have explained why it's super duper important please let us make the next time we record a podcast not be super sad.

Yes for the love of God again going off of the swing state thing like you might think it's not that important for me to vote my state always goes super super right or super blue well what if this is very close in the popular vote you know that if you know that many times the popular vote has gone to the Democratic candidate but the Republican candidate has won that's weird especially recently huh that's unusual maybe we should change the system if it goes the other direction if it's even close to go.

Close to going the other direction if the electoral college votes in a Democrat but the popular vote is very slightly Republican or even close and by the way many votes are going to be thrown away or switched because of all the crazy machinations that have happened since the last election in like election boards and local government and stuff like that if it's close they will take it they will cheat they will use their judges they've installed over the years like they will take it.

It can't be close we have to win by a lot for it to actually count if it is at all close they will steal it I assure you and the system is way more fragile and you think it can't be close for us to win we have to win by a lot or we won't actually win so even if you think your vote doesn't matter I assure you it does go out there please for the love of God please vote.

If you have anyone in your life that you care about that is not a white guy please come here's Tim also please do it for us even the white guys I got news for you Trump doesn't care about you that's true to you about you he doesn't care I assure you anyone who thinks Trump is working for them look at what he has actually said and done people can promise all sorts of stuff when they are campaigning but if you look at what they actually do it's usually a much smaller set of things they've achieved and.

And a smaller set of people they've helped you know unless you are very very small group of very rich men he's not doing anything for you he doesn't care about you he cares about himself and making himself richer and keeping himself maybe possibly out of jail

nothing he doesn't care about you at all he says bullsh** convince you Trump is a paranoid narcissist it's very easy for anyone who's ever had a parodid narcissist in their family or their life to identify these traits they're pretty good at convincing people on a shallow level to kind of be on their team to fight for them because they make you feel really good in a certain way for a time then they turn on you and I assure you if you if you haven't had somebody

that doesn't your life you're very lucky I unfortunately have. They can always bring in new supporters then eventually they burn them and they have to bring in more that's why they have to develop the skill to keep bringing new supporters because they burn the people who are close to them constantly that's why you see this guy burning everyone close to him and why he leaves a trail of.

I'm a trail of imprisoned people and criminals and people behind him who he first holds close and then burns if you think he's working at all for you you're being duped I'm sorry you're not he's not working for you at all and if you don't want to believe me that's fine you will eventually and I hope that time comes sooner rather than later and I'm sorry when that happens to you because it's not a good feeling but he's he's doping everyone who who thinks he's supporting them because he's not so get out that I'm not going to be a good guy.

So get out there everyone please for the love of God vote.

We have something happier to talk about though and that is that all of us but really mostly and almost entirely John have been doing a lot of work to bring back the ATP holiday store maybe it's that time so here we will do the annual reminder that you can go to ATP dot FM slash store you can pull the car over after signaling you can get to the side of the sidewalk or do whatever you need to do to go to ATP dot FM slash store or visualize where you are.

Visualize where you're going to and imagine as you get to your desk at work about how you must go to ATP dot FM slash store because we have quite the array of holiday well they're not really holiday options there just options around the holidays but here we are we have quite the array of things to to hopefully entice your wincy and fancy john would you mind taking us through it please.

And now it's not even Halloween as we record this and you'd be like what do you mean holiday store everything getting earlier and earlier this is intentional we are trying to continue to increase the chances that if you order something it will arrive in time for whatever holiday you celebrate that's why we're starting so early so you know forgive us for jumping the gun a little bit on this but it is indeed the holiday store.

The sale ends on Sunday November 17th so that is your deadline but yeah just do it now a reminder if you are an ATP member you have a special promo code on your member page good for 15% off so please use that we've tried as in last year to make all if you are logged into ATP dot FM when you go to go to ATP dot FM store we've tried to incorporate that discount code and all the links so you don't have to even remember to put it in but what if you're not logged in or what if something goes wrong get your code it's on your member page copy and past it during the checkout process.

15% off if you want to become a member to get the discount you can very easily get a discount big enough to more than account for the cost of your membership ATP dot FM slash join what do we have for sale this year this is the first holiday season where we actually have ATP gift memberships ready we have them we rolled them out a little while ago but we missed last holiday season this is the holiday season when they are available.

You can give someone else the gift of ATP membership maybe you know someone you think might like the show maybe you know someone who listens but they don't care enough about the show to pay for membership themselves give them a membership gift you can buy them just one month you can buy them a year you can buy them seven months unfortunately by buying them seven individual one month memberships but it'll work it'll work fine yeah well you know the system's not perfect but the whole point is when you buy a membership gift for anybody whether they're already a member have never been a member doesn't matter it only just a few months ago.

It only just adds to their membership if you if you are a member and someone buys you give membership just redeem it immediately will just tack on time to the end of your membership that's how the system works if you want someone to buy you a membership right even if you're already a member but either way if you want someone to buy you member you don't want to pay for your next year membership or you never want to be a member but it's a perfect gift idea for you because it's something you wouldn't buy for yourself but it's a gift idea for somebody else there is a link that you can give them both on your member page and on the store page that will help them it's just ATP dot FM slash gift and then.

A query string that puts your email address and all it is is prefilling a form with your email but the email part is important you can read the fact so you know because the email address is how you get your membership it's assigned to your account based on your email address anyway we have the fact linked we have the if you're logged in when you go to ATP to FM store you will see the link for someone buying you a gift membership there you go that's gift

membership this system has been exercised pretty well by all the people who have bought gift memberships in non holidays season but it is the perfect holiday gift as for all the rest of the stuff we have a lineup of M4 shirts M4 M4 pro and M4 max we made these shirts before these chips

were even announced we were speculating that they would probably make an M4 pro and M4 max based on the rumors and guess what they did so success there are no chips on the back of these shirts is just the logos on the front

partially because for two thirds of them we had no idea what the chips would look like but in general we've been avoiding the chips in the back to lower costs and biggest some people don't like them there so there you go you know what the shirts look like if you've seen the M12 or three shirts it's M4 M4 pro and M4 max there is no M4 ultra shirt or anything like that because we don't know what they're going to make with that if they make a really cool M4 ultra M4 extreme you can bet will have shirts but right now only shirts for stuff that Apple has announced less shipped M4 M4 pro and M4 max in all these things the new thing that we have is all these shirts are available for M4 and M4 max is the same for M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 Max in all these shirts are available for M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 Max in all these shirts are available for M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M4 M

For M4 M4 options and M4 seats are available in t shirt sweatshirt tank top long sleeve t shirt like we're just we're really trying to make as many varieties as possible if you like the winter what do we want a t shirts get a sweatshirt log Get a Then we have all our ATP logo merch. For the first time, we have added pullover hoodies. They are shown separately on the store page, as opposed to a zip hoodie. This is a pullover hoodie.

No zipper you have to pull it over yourself with the Rainbow ATP logo or the white ATP logo. Those are actually just new styles available on those respective shirts, like the plain old ATP logo shirt is available on T-shirt, long sleeve sweatshirt, and now pullover hoodie and same for the other one. But we've showing them separately on the store page so you don't get confused by that. ATP pixels is back. We've only shown sold this shirt once and people seem to like it.

It's the ATP logo rendered in tiny pixels, which was extremely difficult to figure out how to print. But it seems like the last run of these shirts worked out well and people like them, so it's back. And guess what? Now it's available on sweatshirt as well. Again, another tricky printing problem, but I saw the proofs of how it came out with our test print and it seems to look as good as the T-shirts did. So ATP pixels is back if you want that.

And like I said, we've got our plain ATP logo stuff available. We've still got the zip hoodie if you want the zip hoodie, which is amazing. That is still available with the embroidered a rainbow ATP logo on it. The ATP polo is there within gray color. ATP mugs are back. It is the cobalt one, the white mug with sort of cobalt blue logo on it. The mugs are the only item on this entire sale that are limited quantity because we had to pre-buy them.

So if you want a mug, order now because they may sell out and when they sell out, that's it. And then finally, we have the ATP hat with the embroidered logo on it. That's all our holiday stuff. Yeah, so there you go. And again, remember those gift certificates if people say, I never know what to buy you. Even if you're only vaguely interested in ATP membership, send them the links. I say, hey, buy me this thing.

It's a thing I wouldn't buy for them myself, but it'll be cool to check out the umpteen member specials, all the overtime segments you missed, the bootleg, the ad-free version of the show, all that good stuff. Yeah, you can listen to us come to the near end of ATP on the most recent tier list. You wonder what we're talking about that episode? There's not just one tier list episode. There are many of them. So you could go back in time to the beginning and see how it is.

When we all still like each other. I can't, I can't. But seriously, please check out ATP.fm-slash-store. Again, up until the very end of November 17th, New York time. So please go ahead and put in your orders. I don't know this for sure. This is just my gut. But I think generally speaking, cotton bureau will ship in roughly the order. They receive these things. So you should get all of these, if you're an American anyway, you should get these comfortably before the Christmas holiday.

However, if you were wanted to be a quick on the trigger, so to speak, you might get it a little before everyone else. You could be the first person to nat us saying, hey, look at my new M4 shirt. And again, to reiterate, new pullover hoodies, the backs of all the M4 shirts are blank, which I was very on board with the chip designs at the beginning. And now I think I'm on team blank back. And so this was both because we didn't know what to put on the back. And also because it worked out well.

So please check it out at p.fm-slash-store. All right. As per the rules, even though there wasn't a single keynote, there was enough action going on over the last three days that we are skipping follow-up. I have been told by the person in my ear that we need to skip follow-up. And so we are going to jump into the last three days of activity. For context, it is almost exactly noon our time on Wednesday the 30th.

The, when we're going to get there in a second, the MacBook Pro announcement just happened less than an hour ago. So when we get to the MacBook Pro stuff, excuse me, we might be a little off on some of the details. Please give us grace because this all just happened. But what didn't just happen or not the same context is what happened on Monday. And on Monday, we got a new iMac, several new iMacs even. We've got a ton of new iMacs in so far as there are seven vibrant colors.

And they really do look good, what I can tell. There's green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. And we've got an M4. And this was the first time the M4 was in a computer. We've already moved on to the colors. If those list of colors sounds familiar to you, you may be thinking it's exactly the same colors as the iMac was available in before. And I think the names are the same, but the actual colors are different.

If you look at the new color as along with the old ones, you will see that generally what they've done is made the backs less dark. Because it used to be there was like a really dark saturated color on the back and then a much paler color on the front. Now the backs are not as dark as they were. Some of the colors have shifted in tone. Like the green is much more green and less teal. The pink on the back no longer looks red. It looks pink on the back.

In general, I think they even proved all the colors. I kind of like the old colors. Like they were sort of very dramatic. And the very saturated versus very undress saturated. Now they're more even doubt. So if you wanted a pink iMac and you're like, but they sold a pink one, that pink one from the back totally looked red. Now this thing looks pink from all angles. The green looks greenier, the yellow looks yellow. Where I think I endorse the new colors.

Every single one of the colors I believe except for silver is new. So check them out next time you're in an Apple store. Indeed. So yeah, so we've got all these new colors. And we've got more information about the M4 and for, and I think this the first time is in a computer computer, not an iPad. So these all come in the iMac with a 10 core CPU. There's four performance cores and six efficiency cores. And so there's various flavors of iMac or you could build them in various ways.

There's the two port iMac, which has an eight core CPU and an eight core GPU. It comes with 16 gigs of RAM. And this is the first time that I'm aware of that in Apple computer or certainly first time many, many years, that Apple computer starts with 16 gigs of RAM, which means what John? It's not. Yeah, look at the title of the graph. We're always at the qualifiers with people say, what about this model? This is a David Chobb's graph of Apple consumer all on one base RAM. Very specific.

And you know, the iMac, the consumer all on one thing. And that chart is the depressing chart that seems to go up and up and up until you get to around whatever that is, 2012-ish when it stops going up forever and just stays flat until 2024. Now, the iMac comes with 16 gigs of base RAM. And by the way, that name, I'm not sure if it's the official name, but it's iMac, parentheses, m4, comma, two ports. I love when they name them with ports on them.

And it does, in fact, have two ports as we get to in a second. Your choices for RAM are 16, which is the base RAM and 24. It is finally safe, entirely safe to recommend every person in your life that it's okay to get the base amount of RAM in an iMac. We will see this trend continue. Say it together, everyone. Thank you, Apple Intelligence. Yeah, seriously.

I was going to say, finally, the only thing that has dragged Apple, it's not the only, I mean, presumably they would have increased it eventually anyway. They're not, it's not going to be 22, 75 or whatever. And they're still shipping eight gigs of RAM. They would have increased it eventually, but it's, I think, it got a nudge from Apple Intelligence. So how will you 16 gigs of RAM as base, even on the cheapest, the cheapest of cheap, the basis of the bassiest model iMac 16 gigs of RAM?

It's very good. I'm very, very happy about that. I know we all are. Time for some bad news. SSDs. Yes. Guess what they start at? Still 256. I mean, at least they're so close to actual NVMe SSD pricing, right? Oh, that way. The prices are insane and ridiculous. Sometimes being like, well, like six times or eight times the cost of this actual hardware that all the margin is buried in the storage.

Now, the RAM upgrades, by the way, are still insane, which is why it's so important for 16 to be the base. So you're like, oh, what if it's not the base? I'll just bump it up. You'll bump it up for astronomically inflated prices, right? So now you don't have to do that anymore. You can get someone a 16 gig. It's the base model, right? You don't have to pay that extra $200 or whatever. SSDs. Now, arguably, SSDs is not as bad. People can use cloud storage. But everybody needs a lot of space.

RAM is harder to get around because it's kind of like, you know, the programs you own dictate the RAM, but the amount of stuff you have dictates the SSD. You can also attach external disks. There's more work runs. You can't expand the RAM. You can't expand the storage. I get it. But this is the new thing. This is what happens with any kind of, if you ever like, optimized a program and you found a bottleneck, you're like, this is the slowest part of my program. And I improved it by 10 times.

Guess what? Now, there's a new bottleneck. There's always the next thing that is the worst part of your program or your specs or whatever. And on the iMac, the worst thing about it has now moved from the base RAM to the base SSD. Previously, this was second place for the worst thing. But now it's strong first place. Two to six gigs base SSD. It's absurd in this day and age. They should offer more. They don't upgrading to 512 or one terabyte cost. Way too much money.

Remember that you can attach external drives to this if you really need to. So it's not as bad as the RAM situation, but it's bad. But just FYI, your choice is on the base model. You poured M4 R256 512 and one terabyte. And we continue on. Gigabit Ethernet is a $30 option and it's still in the power brick, right? Yeah, like that's why it's an option because the port is not on the computer.

That $30 option, you're just getting a power brick with Ethernet cord on it, which I still think is kind of interesting in clever. And it's a side effect of them making the thing too thin. See our long ago discussion of the original M1. Was it M1? Yeah, original M1 iMac. Yeah, I believe so. So yeah, you can get Gigabit Ethernet for $30. There's a new 12 megapixel center stage camera with support for desk view. I don't have in front of me what the old camera was, but apparently it was not that.

Yeah, well, so desk view is the thing where it can, it's like a wide, the whole thing is it's center stage camera saying it's super wide angle, like the one in the Mac studio. I'm it being super wide angle. They have a way where it can show you what is on the desk in front of the iMac by taking the super wide angle and like dewarping it. So that's cool and center stage means it will follow you 12 megapixel. I can't, I think that's an increase in resolution.

I don't know if it's exactly the same camera is in the next studio. Is it better than the one that's in the next studio? Is it worse? I would assume it's probably the same. It's confusing because everyone says the old camera was 1080, but this one is 12 megapixel. But they also say this one does 1080 video. So anyway, it's, it's a very wide angle camera. When you say Mac studio, you mean the studio display? Yes, sorry. That's what I mean. All right.

Continuing along, there are two Thunderbolt or USB 4 ports. This means the eight core iMac can support one external display with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz. The 10 core iMac can do up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz or one external display with up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz. And those core counts were the core counts for the GPU.

So here's the case where if you pick an unbind or unbind SOC, you look at the number of cores in the GPU and that dictates what you can run as an external display. So the Bind one has an eight core GPU, the unbind one has the 10 core GPU and the 10 core GPU lets you run more better external displays. And then apparently Apple's website briefly said that the 10 core could also support one external display with up to 8K resolution at 120 hertz.

And John has provided a YouTube link with a timestamp that we'll put in the show notes. But the website was updated very shortly after that to say no, just kidding. 60 hertz. Oops. Oops. We'll see some a little bit more confusion about the display capabilities, but I believe that was an accidental over specification for this particular model. So we also get Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 and that is no different than the prior model I don't think.

Even if it's not different, Wi-Fi 6E is not the latest Wi-Fi standard. Wi-Fi 7 is. And there is a Bluetooth 5.4, I'm not sure if it's out yet, but you know, so this is the lowest end model. It's kind of disappointing to see them bumping a bunch of other stuff but not going to Wi-Fi 7 because especially for these type of things where people don't buy new computers that frequently if you're getting like a base iMac or something. But yeah, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, those specs may sound familiar.

So even though the SOC is massively updated, the wireless stuff is not. We are brought to you this episode by OnePassword Extended Access Management. Quick question, do your end users always, and I mean always, without exception. Work on company-owned devices and IT-approved apps? Yeah, I didn't think so. So my next question is how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices?

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Possibly my favorite news of this week, and this is not hyperbole, is we finally have a new USB-C powered keyboard and mouse, and trackpad. And I am deeply excited about this. I'm going to tell a story for the listeners. You two are not allowed to comment about a week or two ago. I might have spilled a whole bunch of orange flavored water onto my existing keyboard and mouse. Excuse me, no comment here. Where was this drink? Excuse me. I'm not talking to you. I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to listeners. The worst part of that moment was realizing I'm going to need to go by a new keyboard. And I'm going to have to get a new lightning keyboard. This was again, like two weeks ago. Thankfully the water ingress protection on the keyboard, the big keyboard with the inverted T and touch ID was excellent. So I'm still using it right now. It's not sticky either, which is a double bonus.

But yeah, I promise myself I wouldn't tell you to that, so that's why I'm just talking to the listeners. But yeah, now if I do it again, then I can buy, and I'm thinking about to eat again, so I can buy a USB-C keyboard in mouse, which is excellent news. However, the internet was very perturbed. John, why was the internet perturbed? The turtle is still harpooned. We are referring to the Apple Magic Mouse, which has its charging port on the bottom.

So you have to turn it over on its little hard turtle back. And as it wobbles around, you get a little wire in there to charge it, and you can't use it while it's charging. That remains true, basically what they did with the peripherals. Kind of like they just changed the lighting port to USB-C, but not entirely, and we'll get to that in a second. But yeah, if you're wondering if they redesigned the mouse to be different or to move the charge in port, they did not. So I get used to that.

One of the things that I saw in the little specs is the way Apple refers to their cheaper keyboard that doesn't have touch ID. It does have a key where the touch ID thing is in the upper right hand corner, but Apple calls it, quote, Magic Keyboard with Lock Key. And I was like, is that new? What the hell is a lock key?

But they just mean the key that's in the upper right that has a lock icon on it, that it presumably locks your computer that drives people a little bit badty because they accidentally hit it when they reach for the delete key and locks their screen. So you can use like Caribbean or something to disable that key. But anyway, the cheap keyboard still has no touch ID and it just has a lock key.

We have some semi-breaking news that I didn't have time to confirm, but it looks legit from Jamie Creme X's pointing out that there is a change to the keyboard that Casey spilled and was drinking to. He's like, oh, I can just buy another one. Well, if you did buy another one, if you bought the Apple extended keyboard with numeric keypad, whatever, the one with the inverted T arrow keys, apparently the new USB-C models put the little globe icon, the FN globe icon in the lower left.

And that took about half the space that used to be used by the control key. So if you're used to having the Apple extended keyboard and reaching all the way down to the lower left corner with your pinky to hit the very big double wide control key, guess what? It's not there anymore. The control key and all the way in the corner is not the control key. It's the globe thing. The theory is that that's because the globe keys used for like the window tiling and everything like that.

So that's not great because I really like the double wide control key in the corner there, but I also like the Apple keyboard. So I will just be very careful and not spill drinks into mine, which is very unlikely to happen because my drink is actually not on a level such that water spilled could get to my keyboard because my water is below the level of my keyboards.

Unless the water leaps out of my glass and jumps up onto my keyboard, I don't have that problem, but Casey, who seemingly cannot take the advice of his older's and better's continued to play in the glass where he can spill onto his keyboard. And so you should be lucky that it still works because I assume you would also frown upon the globe key, hogging the lower left corner. In principle, yes, I think I certainly am not keen on that.

And when I saw this fly by just a few minutes before recording, I was like, wait, what? I think this is something I could probably get used to, but this is, it's certainly not something I'm seeping out. However, the window tiling thing I do really enjoy. And actually this is an aside, but I watched a video from a friend of the show, Quinn Nelson.

And I will try to remember to put this one in the show notes, but he was going through some like interesting macOS system tweaks that you can make or something along those lines. I forget exactly what the stick of the video was. Here we go. Hidden pro tips in macOS Sequoia. And I have never been more excited to go into system preferences because one of the thing, there were two keys to window tiling that Quinn brought to my attention, neither which I knew were available.

First of all, if you're dragging window around and I believe it to hold the option key, then instead of just dragging it willy nilly, it will try to slot it into one of those like buckets, like half the screen, quarter the screen, et cetera, rather than just freeform or dragging your window around, which is an incredible improvement in my quality of life.

And then the other thing was, it's been driving me bananas that there's a gap in between the windows and around the outside of the windows when you tile them. Like why? No, I don't need, they don't need to be cushioned. They're fine. They can touch each other. It's not like cars where there's no touch. That's like my favorite feature of this feature that I don't use. Love the margins. I wish they were adjustable, but it's fine.

I don't use this feature if it was not a big deal, but it's good to the options there because Casey apparently you hate the margins. I hate the margins. And so you can go somewhere in system preferences. I don't recall exactly where it is, but again, we'll put a link to the video in the show notes where you can see how do you turn off the margins, which I've done, and it's amazing.

We mentioned this on the very show that you are a co-host of, so it's interesting that you had to wait for a Quinn's video to learn this. Jesus. All right, before we leave the topic of the USB peripherals, because it's got a lot of play. And I think a lot of the people who criticize, especially the magic mouse, don't seem to be people who use the magic mouse, I use one as my regular mouse, and I have used it for, geez, 10 years.

I mean, it's been out for a long time because I used to use the AA powered version. Look, didn't have the charging port problem. It had different problems. That's true. Anyway, I've used this mouse for a long time as my only mouse. The only other mice I use in my life are on gaming PCs because it's a terrible gaming mouse. But otherwise, this is it. And I really don't like the charging port location being on the bottom. It's awful, but it's not that bad. There are ways they can improve it.

I wish the low battery notice would come on a little earlier. Some of the reviews have pointed out, I think it comes on at something like less than 10% charge. And I think if it would come on at 25% charge, that would be a lot better, or something like that. Just a little more aggressive on the reminder so that I don't as easily forget to charge it.

But I think most of the people who choose not to use the magic mouse are choosing not to because they want a bigger mouse, not because of the charging port location. I do think it would be better if it was in a better location that would allow usage of the mouse during it like the top center, which I think would be the way where every other port center, that's your choice. On the front, the front center, I mean. You don't mean like the top like the harpoon, the back of the turtle.

No, I mean like where every one of you are a regular mouse cord. Yes, I mean where every wired mouse connects its wire. And by the way, the reason it doesn't connect there is because it wouldn't look as pretty. So this is absolutely a case of form over function. Well, it would change the height of the front. And so I've been thinking like, it wouldn't change. You'd cut out a little notch for it. Exactly the same height.

Well, I've been thinking like if they actually did that, they would have to probably make it a two button, really a two button mouse. Like because I think the way they would have to do that, it would dramatically increase the front height to fit the port there. So it could be done. I mean, obviously we look at every other mouse that does it. So obviously it could be done. But it would be a non-trivial change to the shape.

And it would probably force the mouse to become something like whatever one actually says they want. Like a taller because I think the whole thing would have to get taller. It's just the USBC for it on the front. You could not change the profile at all except for one little like horizontal bump out for the USBC. It would be ugly. And that's why they didn't do it. I don't think you'd have to change the profile at all. Nor would you have to make it an actual split two button.

It's just that the one big smooth top button would now have a little flattened part in the front where the thing plugs in. And if you don't want it to be raised at all, you'd cut a notch into the front of it, like a little like toe into it or whatever. Like I don't think the charging port, the reason people are snarking about it is because how it's still the same place it was, which is not optimal. But here's the thing. They didn't redesign their peripherals. Right.

It's just like with the AirPods Max or any other things. This is not a redesign. They just added USBC. Right. If they had totally redesigned their mouse and the new mouse, whatever the new mouse looked like and the new mouse also had the charging port at the very bottom, then I would be very upset. But I'm not too upset about this because they didn't redesign it. It's the same mouse as before. They just changed the port. Right.

And you could be upset that they didn't redesign it, but like good luck because they do not redesign their peripherals very often. It's a long time between designs of these things. So yeah, I'm not particularly upset about it because I don't use that mouse and it's not a redesign. Right. Presumably, when they do a redesign someday, who knows when at this point, when they do a redesign, then it will be time to say, what have they learned about the charging port location? Right.

And have they decided to change this from a very low profile mouse to a taller one or whatever? And I'm not sure everybody wants a taller one. Some people want a taller one. Some people like the low profile one. I don't know what the ratio is or whatever, but that is one of the compromises of the low profile one. If always done, it is selecting beautiful form over this one aspect of function, which may or may not bother you at all. Most of the people I use on market would don't use it.

It's because of the shape of the mouse. That's nothing to do with the charging port. Yeah. Anyway, so I'm disappointed in this update for sure. It will continue to be the mouse that I use because honestly, frankly, what I am hooked on in this mouse is the scrolling because you can swipe your finger on the top and it scrolls like Apple's track pads do. That to me is the reason I use it. I'm not choosing a stupid battery design. I'm not choosing a low shape. I'm choosing that.

As far as I know, no other mice on the market are able to do that. As long as that continues to be the case, I'm going to keep using this mouse because the scrolling to me is everything. I'm fine with the rest of it, but yeah, it could have been made a lot better and they just didn't do it. Sometimes Apple does these kind of cynical updates almost where it's like, we so don't care about this product.

But we have some reason we need to update it that we're going to do just the absolute bear minimum. See also the iPad mini update. We're going to do the absolute bear minimum here and just like, it's like the Unix Tux command, just touch the product. It changes as little as possible. Like we're new. We updated it. USB C. That's what you guys wanted to write. Crickets. I don't know. I don't know if they're going to schedule for updating their profiles or their monitors.

They're definitely not in practice. It's just many, many, many, many years between and just like it's not the time for them to update the peripherals, but they do want to keep them from being embarrassingly out of date with lighting so they just swap the port. When it comes time for them to make new peripherals at some point in the future, be careful what you wish for.

Maybe they'll have a totally new idea about what they want to do and the thing that you loved about it, like the touch scrolling will be gone. And by the way, third parties could do touch scrolling just like Apple does. And just choose not to because the market for such a mouse, I guess manufacturers think it would be very small because that's not what people want. So they want 15 actual physical buttons all over the thing or they want game or mice.

Or what I don't, you know, the whole peripheral market is weird. But so there could be third parties that do a mouse that has a great touch service on it. In fact, a better one because if you look at the touch services inside the magic mouse, it's not that sophisticated or high resolution. So they could even improve that. But apparently no one feels like doing it. So it's the Apple mouse or nothing and someday when they change it, who knows?

Maybe you'll need to hoard these little sushi mice because the new ones will be not too early. I mean, given that they for years came with desktop max and everyone has like a box of it in their closet somewhere who's ever bought a desktop. And I can not want to use it. I've got some totally unopened ones. My attic. Right. Like I'm sure there will never be a time where these are going to be hard to find if you want one. Well, maybe the batteries will be dead and will want to set the charge.

Well, then those double A battery ones would be really compelling. Yeah. Gotta bring those back. No, I mean, and the thing is like they there is so much more they could have done to this mouse to update it. Like, for instance, maybe move to a better Bluetooth standard. You know, the modern Bluetooth standards are even more, you know, efficient and faster and everything. Maybe add multi device pairing. That would be great. I would love multi Mac pairing on the magic mouse.

And they used to have that by the way. I think the original magic keyboards had multi Mac pairing, but the modern ones do not, which is like a regression, which is not great. Haptic feedback in the mouse might be cool. Sample rate, resolution of the sensors, stuff that they haven't really been aggressive in updating it. But it's not, but like I said, it's apparently not time for that mouse to be updated. Someday they'll do it, but that day is not today.

So whatever you get, this is not a redesign. That being said, it was, it was very tempting for me to buy a new trackpad of mouse because the only, they are the only thing left on my desk that I routinely use that uses lightning. And so I have this dumb little lightning adapter that sits on top of my desk all the time, just to charge up these keyboards at this trackpad and mouse that I have here.

And like, I'm like, I don't, I don't want to spend $250 to get rid of this one tiny thing off my desk, but God is it tempting. I think it's the exact same thought. And you don't have to worry about the weird globe key because you don't use that keyboard rate. Right, right. I think it's the exact same thought. And I could get black ones, which at the time I bought these, there were no black externals that had touch ID. And now I could very tempted holidays are coming, the holidays are coming.

I'm just saying. That's another thing, by the way, about the iMacs, of course, all the iMacs, like they always have come with color match peripherals. I don't know if the color match peripherals have changed color. I assume they have to match the new colors, like the new green mouse. Those look different than the old green mouse, but you get a color match, color match chords, color match mouse and keyboard with whatever color of iMac you pick.

And you cannot buy those colored peripherals separately. So if you just have a random Mac and you're like, I would love to have a pink keyboard. Tough luck. Apparently Apple will not sell you on, which makes me wonder if your keyboard breaks. And you like, you know, you want to get a new one or like, it has a failure and you want to get a new one under warranty, presumably Apple has the ability to get you a new pink keyboard for your pink iMac and they will do so.

But it's weird that they don't sell them. Maybe it's just an inventory issue and it would be tough to keep all those colors in stock. But be aware, you cannot buy one of the colorful ones of any of these things.

Well, I mean, first of all, yeah, Apple does typically have a mechanism by which if you give them the serial number of the Mac and you say, I broke my keyboard, please sell me a new one, they will usually sell you one through some kind of, but you know, you have to go to the genius people in the store and have them work it out for you and stuff. But there is a mechanism for that usually.

And second of all, as mentioned, a lot of people who buy these computers with that come with these peripherals, don't end up using those peripherals. There is a healthy volume usually on eBay of any color you want of iMac keyboard mouse and trackpad. So if you ever want like, you know, the orange mouse, just go to eBay, you can usually find it for about list price. It's kind of weird though, though, they don't have them, like for example, just for mail order.

Like just, I mean, maybe if it's a wait because stock, whatever, but they, I feel like this should just be something that you can either have some limited amount of stock on the shelf in an Apple store or just buy it through the Apple store online. But instead of going to eBay or having to either legitimately or pretend you have one of the color dynamics.

One thing I'm a little sad about is they did not, and as you know, same story with the Harpoon Turtle, they didn't change the design of the smaller touch ID keyboard. I have the, what is it, hundred, whatever key, big keyboard that has a numeric keypad on it. And I did that expressly because I wanted the inverted T arrow buttons. And I don't really need the numeric keypad. And I do use it since it's here, but I would much prefer not to have it if I could.

But I'm not going back to the weirdo, you know, up down half height buttons on the little keyboard. And they didn't redesign that either. And that bums me out. But here we are. Going back a half step, Marco, do you, I'm sure we've talked about this at some point in the past. Hi, John. Marco, do you ever use a magic trackpad at your desk? Like is that just not your cup of tea? You just said he just said he did like three minutes ago. Oh, I'm sorry. I told you. It's not even in a previous episode.

Yeah, I'm pretty enough. Well, did we get sidetracked? I think that's a no small part. I thought so coming back to the actual news. Yeah, I know right. The iMac, I think we've covered everything except the starting price is still $2.00. No, no, no, no, no, no. Well, we already did the keyboard stuff. All right, let me take this. You tell the story. Yeah, right. We're turning to the iMac with their weird parenthesized names. This is the iMac parentheses M4 comma 4 ports.

What is different when you get the one with 4 ports? Obviously it has 4 ports. We'll get to that in a second. If you get the 4 port one, you get a 10 core CPU and a 10 core GPU as opposed to the bin diversions of them. You get a RAM that goes up to 32 gigs. You can get 16, 24 or 32, which is the thing you don't get an option for on the 2 port version. Your SSD still starts at 256. Even though this is the fancy iMac and 256, 512, one terabyte and now you can get a 2 terabyte option.

You can get it even at a standard on the power brick thing on the 4 port version. There's an option for a nanotextor glass. I don't know if this is the same nanotextor as the iPad or the same nanotextor as the XDR, because those are two different nanotextor processes. I don't know which one this is, but it's a $200 option and you get a polishing cloth.

You obviously get 4 ports, 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports on the M3 and earlier versions, it was 2 Thunderbolt and 2 USB, so like I'm the old iMacs with 4 ports, there was 2 Thunderbolt and 2 USB. Now all 4 ports are Thunderbolt, that's because the M4 has 4 Thunderbolt controllers versus 2 and the M3 and earlier. And obviously all these things have headphone jacks on the side because it doesn't fit because on the back because it's too skinny.

You get a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID and now KCC seems to want to talk about pricing. Wow, so the M4 with 2 ports is $1,300 and the, do I say M2? My goodness, the iMac with 2 ports, whatever I just said, the iMac with 2 ports is $1,300 the iMac with 4 ports is $1,500. That's the starting price obviously, as soon as you touch anything having to do with an option, the price balloons very rapidly and makes you really question what it is you're doing.

But thankfully you don't have to touch that ramp setting anymore unless you really want it. I've got through this too many times so I don't go over it again but like the prices for their upgrades, that's where all the margin is. Yeah, very much so. But the good news is there's, there's target, oh no, no, no, never mind, there's no target display mode, that was wrong. Yeah, I mean, so this is target display mode for people who don't remember.

Back in the day Apple would give these all-in-one Macs with a big screen, is all-in-one IMacs with a big screen, they would say, hey, if you ever don't want to use this as a computer anymore, you can use it as a monitor because it's got a really big monitor that's built into it. The Mac part of it becomes like old and just like too slow for you or whatever but the monitor still looks as good as it did the day you bought it.

Now you can just buy like a Mac Mini or something, connect it to your iMac and use the iMac as a monitor because sometimes especially in the days of the 5K iMac, those monitors were really good. And Apple took away that feature years and years ago and everyone keeps waiting for it to come back on the all-in ones. This is not that time. It's getting kind of like less excusable not to have this feature because these days these Macs have Thunderbolt ports on the back of them.

That is what is used to drive monitors. It's not like the case where oh you couldn't even run the 5K because it only works internally with the tool display controllers and there's no external bus. There's external buses now that could drive this monitor. This is only a 24 inch monitor. It's got a Thunderbolt 4 part on the back of it. It's really small and thin. It doesn't take up a lot of room. It would be a perfect monitor and the other angle is the environment.

It's creating more e-waste when an iMac gets old and it's a little bit old and slow or maybe you bought it with only 8GB of RAM because you got the base model and now it's kind of chugging and it can't do Apple intelligence. Instead of like throwing it out or trying to give it away to someone who might want an old junkie computer, you could keep using it. Keep it in your house.

You could prevent you from buying another display because hey you've already got a really nice display and it would prevent you from throwing it out reducing e-waste.

Now in the grand-same, I think so few iMacs are purchased that it probably doesn't really matter but the lack of target display mode is getting worse and not better as the iMac becomes more and more like a monitor, has even better potential ports to drive it and as Apple's environmental efforts get more and more edge in best 2030 approaches.

And so speaking of the environment, the new iMac with M4 is designed with the environment in mind, with 100% recycled aluminum in the stand and 100% recycled gold plating tin soldering and copper in multiple printed circuit boards. iMac meets Apple's high standards for energy efficiency and is free of mercury, brominated, flame retardants, and PVC. New this year the packaging of iMac is entirely fiber based bringing Apple closer to its goal to remove plastic from its packaging by 2025.

You can pre-order it right now and could as of Monday it ships sometime next week, I think Friday? I don't know if that's 100% confirmed but I believe it's Friday. I'm not sure whether they didn't say that in the like videos or whatnot but here we are. So the iMac, before we move on from the next thing, the iMac has always, the colored iMacs has always been really good computers. They remain really good computers.

If you bought an M3 iMac that week before this one came out as long as you got it with enough RAM, you're fine. This is a good update. They updated, like when they update the lowest end in a product line, it's hard to get too mad. They're like, well, it should have Wi-Fi 7 and has Wi-Fi 6E and it's a low end product. You want it to be inexpensive and honestly, nobody needs or cares about the particular Wi-Fi standard on just a basic iMac.

The fact that they come with 16 gigs of RAM makes us potentially the best iMac update in years. The M4 is, the M3 was already more than fast enough to do what most people are going to do with the iMac. The M4 is incredibly fast. Reminder of this chip came in the iPad. The single core performance of the M4 is ridiculously good. That's what matters for a lot of this sort of plain boring single core or single task type operations that someone's going to do.

Like rendering web pages or just doing individual stuff that's not like massively parallel. The colors are great. I think this is with a really good iMac upgrade and I know I complained about the SSD. That's just because that's the new bottleneck. That is the thing we'll be complaining about from now on. But everything else, I think they've pretty much done an amazing job on. If you want to buy an all on computer for someone in your life, show them a bunch of iMacs. Let them pick the color.

They'll love it. Yeah. It's a great overall computer. Even though John mentioned that the spec up pricing is really rough, especially when you look at the storage pricing, dear God. But that being said, if you were the kind of person who would spec up the RAM before, it's effectively a price drop now because the base has gone from 8 to 16. So if you were otherwise upgrading from 8 to 16, that was $200 before.

So now it's kind of like having a $200 price drop on your total configuration if you were going to get anything more than 8 gigs of RAM. So overall, you know, you win some, you lose some with Apple. I wouldn't expect the storage to be anywhere close to what it costs on the market because it never is. Even though I would expect it to get cheaper over time. But regardless, we didn't win anything on the storage this time, but we did make a pretty big gain on the RAM.

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And if you're a customer and you want to trade something in, there's a full list of TipTop Partners stores there too, that's tiptop.com slash retailer. Thank you so much to TipTop for sponsoring our show. I was very amused and impressed by Tuesday's announcements. No sarcasm. I was here for it. And Tuesday was the Mac Mini and, oh man, it's many. So there's a newsroom post. There's an announcement video just like with the iMac. And it got more mini for sure.

So the Mac Mini is now, what did they say, five inches by five inches, I believe. It is also taller than it used to be, which is not a bad thing. And in fact, we'll talk about why it's a good thing. But it's two inches high, five inches wide, five inches deep. The M2 Mac Mini by comparison was a little bit less than an inch and a half high. So half an inch shorter. But it was seven and three quarters inches wide and deep.

So that makes a difference of 0.59 inches in the height dimension and 2.75 inches in the width and depth dimension. Yeah, it ends up being something like two thirds, the volume total of the old one, which is actually not as much mini or then the rumors were suggesting. People were expecting like an Apple TV size thing. It's nowhere near that. It is not that much smaller, but it is noticeably smaller. Yeah. And speaking of the Apple TV, that is 1.3 inches high.

That's compared to two and 3.66 inches wide and deep as compared to five. So the Apple TV is just a little bit less than three quarters of an inch squatter and about one and a third inches less wide and less deep. The M4 Mac Mini is one and a half pounds for the M4 or interestingly 1.6 pounds for the M4 Pro. The M2 Mac Mini by comparison was 2.62.8 pounds. So a difference of 1.1 to 1.2 pounds. The Apple TV meanwhile is under half a pound no matter how you slice it. So about a third is heavy.

So as for the case, like, yeah, the rumors of it being Apple TV, it's pretty squarely between the Apple TV and the old Mac Mini. And remember the old Mac Mini, those that case dimension has lasted 14 years all the way back to ones that had an optical drive slid in it to know about all that cases. So it's long in the tooth. But what they've essentially made is it is not a like Mac Apple TV. It is a very small Mac studio.

And wise appearance wise, it looks like it took a Mac studio and hit it with a shrink ray. And now it is smaller. And so that is clearly like the proportions they're going for. And I think it looks good. It would have been cool if it came in like space black or something. And then it would have looked even more like an Apple TV. But thumbs up for the cases on having not seen one in person. I think they did something smart by by it enhances the family resemblance of the Mac family.

Because before the Mac Mini was kind of like the odd one out, it's like none of the other Macs look anything like this. But now it just looks like a small Mac studio, which is cool. Yeah. The only thing I would say about the physical design of it is if using it in server racks or server environments is as common as some people might think or assume. I actually have no idea how common that is. But if it's common to use them as servers, this design probably is worse on a few fronts for that.

You know, for instance, the old design would fit into one rack unit, one U of height. And this one does not. But I mean, flat though, but everyone anywhere in the rack might be old Mac Mini's put them on their side, though, didn't they? I think. But yeah, so we'll see. Anyway, you could get a one-you mount that held like, you know, two of them next to each other or something like that if you didn't need that many of them.

So you know, there's obviously, you know, custom things for having a whole bunch of them. But if you only have like one or two, the old design is probably better for that. The new design also, because they moved the power button to the back left bottom of it, it's going to make it fairly difficult to reach if it's mounted in pretty much anywhere. You got to be able to fit your finger in there and about that power button. Right. So that's where it is. It is literally on the bottom in the corner.

I think I understand why they put it there. And I think it has mostly to do with cost. The Mac studio that this is the shrunk version of has one of those like practical joke hidden power buttons that no one can ever find unless you already know where it is. It's on like the back left corner and it's so carefully precisely machined into the case with just a slight indent that is actually hard to find even by feel even when you know where it is. But that that buttons like that add cost.

First of all, you got a bunch of hole in the case. And I don't know if this is in the notes, but like this new Mac mini case is made by some like less expensive, extruding process that saves aluminum for environmental reasons. Right. So you're going to take all these cases and incredibly precisely machine out a little thing for the power button and then incredibly precisely machine the aluminum power button that's going to go in that place.

That adds a lot of cost to what is supposed to be an expensive computer, right? So if you're not going to do it like the Mac studio, your other choices, okay, it could just be on the front back or sides. Not unlike the one on the Mac studio, it's unlike the curve or it's like it's not just like straight on circle. It's weird. You do it on the sides and make it a straight on circle, which would be a little bit less expensive, but you're still machining a hole in the case.

You're still machining the aluminum button or whatever. Well, hold on though, that's exactly how the old Mac mini did it though. Right. But this is cheaper and why is it cheaper? Because on the bottom, it's a hole in plastic, which is way cheaper and it's a plastic button. I think it's plastic. If that's black aluminum, then it's not for price reasons. But I was only at the bottom. The bottom is plastic. At the very least, it's straight on.

And yeah, so that's that's where they put the power button. I think the power button in the Mac studio is also kind of annoying as someone who has to reach under my desk to get it there. Power button in the front would be uglier, but a little bit more functional. But my guess is that for a computer this small, they're saving costs. And also if you look at the, like, I mean, you'll see it in the iFixit tear down, but even look at apples like internals showing what is inside this case.

It's pretty tightly packed in there. You could get a power button pretty much on any surface if you wanted to, but the bottom is probably the most convenient. So as someone who never shuts down their computers, I don't really care about this, but you're right, Marco, that the rack, especially if they're on their sides and the rack or even if they're, especially if they're on, they're not on their sides.

Getting to that power button requires you to either like pull the things out so you can get at them or if they're on their sides to leave a big enough gap for your finger to go in. Yeah, or even if, you know, if it's in like a cabinet somewhere, like a, in part of your TV console or, you know, just anywhere that you might have one of these things not on a desk, it's going to be really tough to get to that power button in a lot of those cases. By the way, it's real time follow up.

Thanks to ZM Nox in the chat. The old Mac mini, the power button was on a curved surface, but it was that, that black plastic section of the back. So it was curved in plastic, not in metal. Yeah, I mean, like it's a smaller computer. Like this is a compromise. I kind of understand by that again, this is not, this is their cheapest standalone, like non-mondered desktop thing. So I give them a lot of pass on this.

The airflow for this case, according to Apple's little diagram, it's all through the bottom, right? So there's no vents on the front, on the back, on the top, on any place like that, it's just that circular vent on the bottom, and there, according to Apple's diagrams, it pulls cold air in from the front of the circle, swirls it around, going across all the internals, and pushes hot air out of the back of the circle.

So you could still kind of use it in a rack on its side with the cold in the front and the hot in the back, but it's weird that it's just a single circular thing. They do the same design they do with the Apple TV, where it's got the logic board, and then on top of the logic board is the analog circuit board for power supply and everything, so the heat from that hopefully rises away from the logic board, right? But if you have a side, I guess that doesn't really help.

Anyway, that's their cooling design. I hope it's quiet. The Apple TV's that they had a fan were so quiet that I literally could not hear them with my old man ears. I believe the new Apple TV does not actually have a fan, which is why I thermal throttles all the time. This one does have a fan, and hopefully it is quiet. I do worry a little bit about this airflow design. I think it is very likely to be quiet because there are no openings on the sides or tops. I think it's very likely to be quiet.

What I worry about is it's thermal cooling capacity. I think it's probably very likely not to have a huge amount of cooling capacity, and this I think is more likely to throttle than a more open air design with the MX Studio is. I mean, this is considering what this comes with, which we'll get to the processes in a second. This is very much like, take what's in our lower end laptops, not our very high-send laptop and put it in a case that's way thicker than a laptop.

You think that would give them enough room to do cooling that's at least as good as a laptop, and I hope that's what they achieved. Obviously, if they decided, well, this is supposed to be a performance-oriented computer, they would just do what the Proventory computers do, which is you put a bunch of holes in the front to take the air in and a bunch of holes in the back to push the hot air out, and have everything go straight through the case. That is not what they did.

That's not what this computer is for. I really do hope, though, that it has at least as good cooling as the MacBook Pros that have these same chips in them, because it's so much thicker than them. Obviously, those ones have more room to spread out stuff like the power supply, which they don't need to do with that, because it's in the power brick. They have more room to spread stuff out, so we'll see how these work.

Considering how they've done with the Apple TV and all the past Mac minis, and the low power of the M series chips, I'm pretty optimistic that unless they do a Mac Studio, M1 Mac Studio style fan that makes some up-and-on-christ noise, that this one should be fine, I bet you could get it to Thermal Throttle, but probably I'm hoping no more than you could get the equivalent MacBook Pros to Thermal Throttle. All right. So, it has an M4 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, or... No bend ones.

No bend ones, just that one. Or you can get, you can opt into the M4 Pro, and I believe this was the debut of the M4 Pro. 273 gigabits, not bytes, right? Gigabits. Gigabits, my... Capital B. ...for clarification. Yep, you're right. No, you're right. So, the M3 Pro bytes per second of memory bandwidth, which is 75% higher than the M3 Pro. My word, the M3 Pro had 150 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth.

That is the NANIS. And Apple will emphasize to you if you mention this at all to them, that's really good for AI. They will tell you. Yes, indeed. In general, the increasing memory bandwidth is good for... Well, let's go for everything. But like, remember that these things use sort of unified memory for the GPU and the CPU. And the olden days at Apple were things were split. Very often, the video card would have tremendous bandwidth to its video memory.

And then the CPU would have lower bandwidth and narrower buses to its main memory. But combining them both here means that there is a good reason to keep cranking up that memory bandwidth, even if only for the GPU stuff. But guess what? That's the exact same bus that the CPU gets its memory as well. So this is a rising tide that raises all boats. And it is a big jump over the M3 Pro, which was no slouch. So thumbs up on this.

Yeah. Yeah. So the CPU situation for the M4 Pro Mac mini, there's a 14-core CPU. And then I guess you can option a bin version. Is that right? That's 12-core. Yeah, four-core bin. Then there's 10 performance cores on the 14-core CPU and four efficiency cores. Or, you know, again, there's eight performance cores on the bin version, four efficiency cores. And the M3 Pro has a 120, is that right? That's 12-core CPU. What is it? Goodbye, San Diego.

Is that 12-core CPU, six performance cores, six efficiency cores on the M3? Remember the M3 Pro was a weird one. They had done something different. The 6-6 split between performance and efficiency was more efficiency cores. And it was kind of a strange arrangement. The M3 Pro was very different from the predecessors used to be. They would just take the max chip and remove some stuff from it. But the M3 Pro was totally its own chip and they went with 6 and 6.

And apparently, for whatever reasons, they decided that arrangement was not what they wanted to keep going with. So now, the M4 Pro is 10 and 4. Back to sort of very heavily biased towards performance, right? The 6-efficiency cores, sacrificing some of those transistors for more efficiency cores and fewer performance cores, that's not what they wanted to do with the M4 Pro. So the M4 Pro memory bandwidth is hugely increased and it is a 10-4 arrangement instead of 6-6.

Yep. And then the 20 core GPU or the 16 core for the bin version that is up from 18 cores and 14 cores in the M3 Pro. Then 16 core neural engines, same as the M3 Pro. So yeah, there's a lot going on here. And this is a lot for a little baby computer. Yeah, they keep putting in these little spec things next to the CPU and I can't tell if they're giving you information about the width of the instruction decode or improved branch prediction or larger reorder buffers.

I don't know if that's new information now. Most for most part, it doesn't matter. As we saw, like I said, with the M4, when we're benchmarking that in the iPad, just incredible single core performance numbers. Presumably, that same M4 in a Mac Mini will do even better because I'm guessing it's clock tire and has better cooling on it. And the M4 Pro, we don't have any benchmarks at this point, although probably they're being published as we're talking right now. This chip looks good.

But if you thought the M3 Pro is like, it's not as good as the M2 and M1 Pro. It's kind of like Wimpy or whatever. I think they have reversed that and now the M4 Pro is really earning that pro suffix. Yeah, it really does jump up quite a bit. And I would even, jumping ahead a little bit, if you look at what the Macs is that was released today, I think the Pro stands up pretty well against it. And it's substantially cheaper, which we'll get to. But yeah. John, let's see us the Steve situation.

Graham, it's Graham. It's the Mac Mini. It's their lowest end desktop. And it starts at 250kGSSD, which you may think, well, maybe people don't need a lot of storage. Who cares what it starts at? You care because getting anything bigger costs so much money. It just costs so much. It's ridiculous. So I really wish they hit bump the base, but they didn't. Your choices are 256, 512, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. And if you get an 8TB, you might as well buy a new car with your Mac Mini. It's ridiculous.

Yeah. The pricing of the SSD options has not changed. It's still like a $2,200 option to go weight terabytes on most of the... Which is not how much. I mean, just look at the one terabyte. It's insane. I don't know. The pricing is insane. So SSDs, bad situation. Hopefully you can get by with the base. Remember, unlike Graham, with the SSD, you do have the option to just buy an external SSD connected to a Thunderbolt port and expand your storage that way. It is slowly less convenient.

But at least you have that option. So it's good that the RAM situation is ta-da 16 base on all of the Mac Mini's, which is great. Thumbs up. Love it. Your choices are 16, 24, 32, 48, and 64. A wide range of options, all which are priced insanely except for the base 16, which should be enough for most uses for Mac Mini. Yeah. The Mac Mini has never been a good value when you spec it up, just like many Apple computers. The value gets eroded very quickly once you spec up anything.

But that's why the base model is so important. And again, just like the other computers that used to start at 8, that now start at 16, it's almost like getting a $200 price drop if you were going to upgrade to 16 anyway. So Bravo for the 16, thumbs down on the storage. We'll get to that some other time. Thank you, app on intelligence. Indeed. The port situation on the front, like the Mac Studio, there are two USB-C ports. They are USB-3 or 10 gigabits, gigabits, excuse me, per second.

There's a headphone port and power indicator light on the back. You've got power, Ethernet, HDMI, and three Thunderbolt ports. But what flavor of Thunderbolt you ask? Well, I'm glad you did. On the M4 Mac Mini, there are three Thunderbolt four ports, which are 40 gigabits per second, Symmetrical, Sundercive. On the M4 Pro, we have the introduction in Apple World of the Thunderbolt five port, which allows for 80, that's twice as much, gigabits per second Symmetrical sender receive.

Or you can optionally, or your devices can optionally ask for 120 gigabits per second send out of the computer and 40 gigabits per second receive back into the computer. John, why would one want to do this? To drive displays that insane resolutions that it's saying refresh rates, which gets back to the thing of like, all right, now we've got a Mac with Thunderbolt five. What kind of display could this thing drive?

An Apple, I think, is being conservative in its specs based on like what Mac OS supports. But 120 gigabits per second with display stream compression could drive a very huge single display at very high refresh rates. It's awesome to see that even if you can't technically do it right now because Mac OS doesn't support it, Thunderbolt five is amazing. Thunderbolt one, two, three, four. We've kind of been stuck at four gigabits per second. Three to four didn't change the speed at all.

Five doubles the speed. Five more than doubles the speed because you can go asymmetrically. That's your goal for displays. Thunderbolt five is amazing. I love to see it on the Mac Mini. It's a reason to get the one with the M4 Pro in it. I know it's weird that they tie the SOC to Thunderbolt five. I think it actually has to do with the chip. Remember, the M4 is great because it's got four Thunderbolt controllers, but there are four Thunderbolt four controllers.

The M4 Pro supports Thunderbolt five, as you'll see with the rest of the computers. A lot of the, with all the SOC things, what the computer has is very often dictated by what's in the SOC. M4 Pro supports Thunderbolt five. It's great. It's very future-proof compared to Thunderbolt four, highly endorsed. Yeah, that's really cool. You get gigabit ethernet. Oh, I'm skipping something. I'm sorry. If you wanted a Thunderbolt five cable, how would you go about doing that, John?

You can get it from an Apple. I am shocked to learn that it looks like it costs the same amount as the Thunderbolt four cables did. It's a $70 because they have chips and the connectors and everything. It's pretty thick and beefy looking. Yeah, you can get one meter long Thunderbolt five cable for $70 from Apple or Achiever elsewhere. Thunderbolt five is awesome. I am very excited for it. That's really not bad.

Yeah, I mean, it's a lot of money, but given what's in it, wasn't there the, was it Mythbusters that went through this, or, no, it was just Adam Savage that went through this like a year ago and looked at, okay, why is the Apple cable so expensive? And it turns out for good reason. Who knew? They're active cables. Other people sell them as well. But active cable means there's chips and the connectors that are doing stuff as opposed to just being metal wires that connect to conductors.

Yeah, and it's not like it's the same as a $5 USB cable. Like any high, high data rate Thunderbolt cable that's one meter long is going to be probably at least 30 to 40 bucks. So for the Apple version to be $70 really is not that crazy for the Apple standard markups and quality differences. Yep. Networking. Gigabit Ethernet is standard. You can get 10 Gigabit Ethernet for 100 bucks. Which is cool. For like the mini, the really cheap desktop that you even have that option.

And by the way, when you get 10 Gigabit Ethernet, you also get 2.5, 5, like you get the standards that are in between there as well. So you can make, you know, to market a totally point, for a huge amount of money, you can make an amazing, very small server. M4 Pro, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, assuming the cooling is good, if you spend the money on the huge amount of storage, this is a very small premium package for a very high price that has just incredible performance and connectivity.

So despite the fact that the minis as always are just way more expensive than you think they should be, they are great little computers. Yep. The rest of the networking though, same stories before Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3. Still right. Yeah. Oh well. All right. Display support. So you've got HDMI video output, which supports one display with up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz or 4K resolution at 240 hertz. That's applicable to both the M4 and the M4 Pro.

Over the M4 and only the M4, you can do display port 1.4 over USB-C that means up to three displays. Two displays up to 6K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt and one display with up to 5K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt or 4K resolution at 60 hertz over HDMI. That didn't sound right to me. Did I do that right? Is that right to you? In a way they word these things. So like what they're trying to say is like what combinations of displays you can use.

This is copy-pasted literally from Apple's website and it's so freaking confusing. I wish they would just like have a diagram of like here are things that we can support. But I think you read it right. It's just a very confusing sentence. The point is with what you're hearing here, it's display point 1.4, which dictates a lot of what the kind of output formats are supported. And as we noted before with the iMac, where they said 120 hertz at 8K, that stat is also not present here.

You see stuff like with the next one with two displays. They say you can do this giant sentence. One display with up to 5K resolution at 60 hertz over Thunderbolt. And one display with up to 8K resolution at 60 hertz or 4K resolution at 240 hertz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. Right. So you can get up to 240 hertz on 4K. But if you're looking for 8K 120 or 8K 240 or whatever, that's not happening on the M4 one. It's display point 1.4 only. It's Thunderbolt 4 only.

That's not what you're getting with the M4. We just find for the base model thing. Again, it's great that the M4 supports this because the M4, if you look at the controller, we'll also eventually save us from the MacBook Air that only supports one external display. The M4 solves that problem by having more display drivers and the VMAX mini shows that it's capable of that. All right. And then the M4 Pro has display port 2.1 instead of 1.4 output.

That's very important because if you go look at the Wikipedia page for display port 2.1, you say, what resolutions and refresh rates display port 2.1 support? It's a big expansion in capability. Do these max support all the potential capabilities? It seems like the answer is no. But this is future proofing. I think it's just an OS issue at this point.

You get it Mac with Thunderbolt 5 and it supports display port 2.1 presumably, if not today, then eventually you will have access to all of the resolutions and refresh rates that are supported by the hardware. Yeah. So that means up to three displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. You could also do up to two displays, one at 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt and one with up to 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K resolution at 240Hz over Thunderbolt or HDMI. That's pretty cool.

I've only Apple sold some external monitors that refresh at the higher 60Hz. Imagine that. Imagine that. And then tell me about dependencies, John. Yeah. So I didn't go through every possible configuration here, but like when you go to Apple's configurators, sometimes features are tied to particular models for a reason. You can't get Thunderbolt 5 on M4. It doesn't support it, it's only in the M4 Pro, so that makes sense, but there are other read dependency.

So if you get the M4 Mac mini, your maximum is 32GB of RAM and your maximum is two terabytes of SSD just because Apple says so. The RAM, maybe that's a limitation based on the SOC on which ones they want to manufacture, but the SSD doesn't make any sense. And the M4 Pro, imagine this. It starts at 24GB of RAM. Can you imagine how is this even happening? It starts at 20... The base RAM on the M4 Pro model is 24GB. It's like, it's just, it's RAM Christmas around here. It's ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the only other choices are 48 and 64. They skip over 32. So if you had your heart set on 32 to try to save some money on the ridiculous RAM upgrades, tough luck, you got to go all the way up to 48 or 64. And it also starts at 512GB SSD. Wow. I mean, obviously the M4 Pro Mac mini starts to get real expensive real fast, but base RAM is higher and base SSD is higher, still small. But higher. So thumbs up to that, loving the Mac mini base bumps. They didn't have to do that.

They could have started the M4 Pro at 16. They could have started at 256. I don't know why they did this. It doesn't make any sense to me. What's going on over there in Apple, but thumbs up. All right. And double thumbs up to environment stuff, because this is the first carbon neutral Mac. 100% of the expected customer use electricity use is matched with low carbon electricity. 100% of manufacturing electricity for the Mac mini is source renewable energy. 50% or more of the shipping is non-air.

More than 50% of it is recycled content of the stuff that's 100% recycled. There's aluminum and the enclosure and thermal module stage. There's copper in the multiple PCBs, multiple thermal module components, AC inlet prongs, and multiple small parts. There's 100% recycled gold in the plating of all the Apple designed PCBs. There's tin in the solder of multiple PCBs, rare earth elements, and all magnets are all 100% recycled, and zinc in the AC inlet prongs and multiple small parts.

80% recycled steel in multiple components, 20% or more recycled plastic in 25 components, 100% fiber-based packaging, 42% recycled content in the fiber packaging, and no established final assembly sites generate waste sent to a landfill as part of Apple's zero waste program. That is extremely freaking cool. No sarcasm. This is what it takes to make a carbon neutral Mac. They've been doing carbon neutral products. They've been moving up the scale. You're doing a watch.

How much energy is that going to use over its life or whatever cranking up to a Mac? It's a small Mac to start, but this is the first carbon neutral Mac and they've had to do a lot to make that happen and to review what their carbon neutral claims. What they're saying is this thing will be carbon neutral over the expected lifetime of you using it. That means all the electricity it uses for all the time it's plugged in your house in addition to all the manufacturing and everything.

Obviously they're buying carbon offsets to do some of this and carbon offsets are not the greatest thing in the world, but you can look at the effort they're putting in. They are trying. They are, because they've got that 2030 goal of carbon neutrality and everything. Here's the first Mac and it's the Mac Mini. They continue to make progress, steady progress with every new product release. This one notably doesn't have a screen.

I wonder if they are including the power usage of the expected monitor situation. I can't imagine they would. Is that an all-it monitor you're going to use with it? It's the easiest one to do. It doesn't come with the screen. It doesn't even come with a keyboard and a mouse. It's just the Mac Mini and a power plug. This is big progress. You're right. Carbon offsets credits are not amazing, but that's why Apple is also doing a lot of other stuff.

I believe their carbon offsets credits are only a small part of what they're doing with making things carbon neutral. They're actually going and buying renewable energy resources and stuff like that. It's very different. This is a great thing. They're continuing to move this forward and this matters a lot and it's hard, so I'm glad they're doing it. We are Spongebob's episode by Uncommon Goods. Spark something uncommon this holiday season with incredible hand-picked gifts for uncommon goods.

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Thank you to Uncommon Goods for sponsoring our show. Wednesday, which is today, and as we said a little while ago, it's like two, three, out two hours ago, something like that. We got a very brief little bit of information about the existing MacBook Airs, which was a bit unexpected. It's Ram Christmas. It's Ram Christmas, baby. You could see this writing on the wall once the week started. M2 and M3 MacBook Airs now started 16 gigs Ram. Heck yeah. All right. That's huge.

When is the last time Apple has done this? Take an existing max that they've been selling and change literally anything about them ever. Let alone saying, hey, we've got the M2 and the M3 to the two past models of MacBook Airs that they continue to sell. They went back and they said, you know what? Drop the 8 gig model. Make the 16 gig model. I think it's the same price as the 8 gig model. Yeah. You didn't get a chance to look. Yeah. Everything starts at the same price as again.

It's like a $200 price drop if you were going to upgrade the Ram. It's just now, now you just get that you get the 16 gigs for the base price. You still get 256 storage, but you get the 16 gigs. That's great. And especially for a low end product, that's a low end high volume product like the MacBook Air. That is significant and that is very impactful. So I'm very happy to see that. And the Tim Cookway of like, let's just keep selling a product that people don't want to buy anymore.

Like they're still selling the M2 MacBook Air in case you didn't know. But I think in this case, for a MacBook Air class machine, like I'm still using an M1 in MacBook Air, right? The M2 MacBook Air is so good as a low end laptop. Like the M2 is not like holding it back because it's too slow or it's missing some features. It's fine. The only thing that might be holding back in M2 is, oh, you didn't buy it with an RAM and an Apple intelligence is choking your Mac or whatever.

And so then bumping it and continuing to sell it is very Tim Cook is like, we should keep selling that M2 one. It's cheap for us to manufacture. We were making it for years. People like it. The only thing that's bad about it is the SSD storage and the RAM. And they fix the RAM situation. A 16 gig M2 MacBook Air is an amazing machine for someone to take off to school or use for their work. Full-fledged Xcode development on it, no problem. Don't think like, oh, you can't do high-end things.

You can just a little bit slower, right? But it will do all of them. I can tell you, so my lightweight travel laptop is an M2 MacBook Air. And with 16 gigs of RAM, I have been able to do all of overcast development. I can do it on there. I don't, when I'm at my big laptop, I'd rather use that because it's faster. But if I'm on a trip or something, I can and do use the M2 MacBook Air, no problem. It is, again, it's slower, but it's fast enough and I can get a lot of work done.

And certainly, if I was on a budget trying to get started with iOS development, no question I would say, get the MacBook Air. It's great. And you can totally do it. I just can't believe this. The Apple intelligence, they must be the Apple intelligence RAM fairy, just wandering through Apple, with his magic wand saying, even Max, we've been selling for years. You get more RAM too. And no increase in price. Everybody gets more RAM. I know I'm on the iOS devices, they need minimum 8 gigs of RAM.

And you're like, well, why can't Mac OS use minimum 8 gigs of RAM? The RAM situation on Mac OS is very different than on iOS and iPad OS. There is no out of memory killer wandering around, hitting things with hammers and killing them off or whatever. There is a potentially aggressive use of swap, although they added that too. I believe iPad OS and later releases. But anyway, the situation on the Mac is more of a free-for-all.

The options are free to use more RAM than they are allowed to use on those other more constrained platforms. That's why Max probably need more than 8 when iPad only quote unquote needs 8. Obviously, all these systems could use more. Yeah, because you might have 19 windows on your screen on the Mac. And if those windows are on your screen, the OS cannot just kill those apps in the background because they are there. You are using them. And also on the Mac, you have things like Chrome.

Chrome has a new lower memory mode for its tab things. I shouldn't be defending Chrome because I have 96 gigs of RAM and don't think there are many more. But if you don't have 96 gigs of RAM, maybe use so far. Yeah. And just things like electron apps. Desktop apps now use so much RAM. Slack. Look at the RAM usage of Slack. Oh my God. Slack, Discord, all the various electron or similar framework apps. Your desktop apps use way more RAM than you think they should. Yeah, Max need a lot of RAM.

And the OS is not going to kill them off when they are not visible, which is the thing that happens all the time on iPad or iPad OS. It generally makes you can't actually even see that many apps or that many windows at the same time. So there is so much more constraints there. But yeah, that's why they are bumping even the MacBook. They should have bumped them years ago. Yes. It's amazing. They should either stop selling them and introduce an M4 MacBook Air at 16 gigs, which is not out yet.

Spoiler alert. Or do what they did, which is we are going to keep selling them because we love Tim Cook, but 16 gigs, ranked bass everywhere. The reason, whatever the reason, this is great. And yes, it is years overdue, but at least it happened. So that is great. And they doubled it. They didn't just do like now you get, you know, nine or ten. They could have done that incremental bump years ago. But if you're going to increase it now, 16 is the new floor.

So enjoy the few brief years where the base RAM is going to be satisfactory on Apple's computers. It's a wild, amazing time, y'all. So we've got MacBook Pros. That was the big announcement for today and the final big announcement. We've got space black and silver or the only colors because they're professional or something. No space grade though. Space grade was professional. I guess so. RAM situation. So you've got three different tiers.

You've got that like not really entirely a MacBook Pro, but I guess it's a MacBook Pro, which is an M4, no adjective that can offer 16, 24, 32 gigs of RAM. What I consider to be the base of the MacBook Pros, the M4 Pro models have 24, 36, 48, 64 in 128 as options starting at 24, just like the Mac mini M4 Pro starts at 24. That's the base RAM is 24. What is going on? It's amazing. It's a mere triple channel memory is what's going on, but yes, go on. Yes, I know. And M4 max 36, 48, 64, 128, baby.

That's the thing you would think they would always do is they charge you so much for the M4 max models that can't you just bump the base RAM. The base RAM is 36 on the M4 max. Amazing. What a time to be alive. And for storage, the M4 is a half a terabyte or one terabyte. Are they allowed to do that? Are they allowed to sell a base model MacBook Pro with more than 250 gigs of SSD to Tim Cook know about this? What is happening? Nobody knows.

The base storage is 512 on an M4, which is still too little. Which the base should have been a terabyte like five years ago, but whatever. The numbers are going up. For after you're not going up for so long, the numbers are going up. Love it. I think maybe they had done that with the M3 as well, but I'm just excited about all of these. The base numbers going up. Yeah, really is incredible.

So for the M4 Pro, half a terabyte, one terabyte, two terabytes, four terabytes, M4 max, one, two, four, eight, those are your options. M4 max starts at one terabyte. That's where the M4 max should start. It's also where the M4 pro should start. It's also where the M4 should start. But anyway, any Mac that includes pro in the name should start at one terabyte. All the rest should start at 512.

Especially because of how inexpensive one terabyte of the particular SSD chips they're buying, how inexpensive it is. How much cheaper is it than a 256 than a 512? It's like they're pinching so many pennies. They should, but anyway, again, why do we care about this? Because this is a portable computer and attaching extra on drive is much more of a hassle than it is on an iMac or a Mac mini that you have on the desk.

It'd be if you want any of these upgrades, they charge you fantasy prices that just eight times the real cost of them or six times or whatever it is, it's ridiculous. That's where all the money goes with these models. But yeah, we've got all these great options and the RAM situation is looking better. Yep, yep, it's really incredible. The display has a nanotexture display option. This is the first time in years that I'm aware of a Macbook Pro having any sort of anti-glare display.

I definitely checked that tech bot. Check? Wow, let me try that again. I definitely ticked that check box. There we go. Several years ago, many years ago, probably almost 10 years ago now. Yeah, I believe it's been since the retina came out because the retina never had an anti-glare option. The last matte screen option on the MacBook Pro was like 2014-ish, or no, 2011-ish before the retina came out. Although Apple would tell you that all their displays are anti-glare, but I know what you mean.

Matte finish versus anti-glare is different. There's anti-glare coating that they can put on screens when they're still glossy versus making the screens essentially textured, so it's more of a matte finish. Yeah. And this is the first one to appear in an Apple laptop since then. Because it isn't like it was in the MacBook Air or anything like no. It was not available in any Apple laptop for 13 years or whatever. And now it's back.

It makes sense because they just added it to the iPad Pro as well when that was last updated a couple of months ago. And the iMac's got it, so they would have to put it in here. And again, we don't know if this is the same now texture processes, the XDR or the one that's in the iPad. We do know those are two different processes. I would assume they're using the one in the iPad, but we'll find out when someone gets these under the microscope and or gets an Apple person to answer their question.

I mean, you know, since the XDR one costs $8,000 and is very delicate. Yeah. And the MacBook Pro one costs $150. I'm guessing it's the cheaper one of the Mac. Well, it's a smaller screen. I mean, the iMac one is $200, though, for a 24-inch screen and for a 32-inch screen. Well, everything about the XDR is priced, you know, pretty gilcely. So but yeah, I'm assuming the XDR one is more expensive and more fragile than the ones they would put on the consumer displays.

I am personally glad that I don't prefer nano-texture, but so I never have to pay for this option. But for people who do, it's great to have it as an option and a pretty reasonably price option. You can't get a rail upgrade for those prices. I'll tell you that. Yeah. The one thing I'm curious about is like, and maybe this will only be known over time.

You know, one of the challenges in MacBook screen management over time is trying to prevent or clean off the keyboard imprint that you get on the screen. I am a little wary because normally I would think this would be a great option to order for me because most of the time I'm using my laptop closed in Clamish on the mode with a monitor at my desk.

So I don't care about like the, you know, the color and sharpness loss when I'm at my desk most of the time, but then when I go out into the world with it, then I would love to have this option. So it seemed like a no-brainer except I am a little concerned that maybe those keyboard imprints might get harder to clean off or become permanent more easily.

Yeah, the keyboard imprint, you may be thinking to yourself, why does Apple still have this problem where the keyboard puts your greasy finger grease on the screen? Why don't they just leave a gap between the keycaps and the screen? And the answer is backpacks. They do leave a gap. Yes. But that is a huge expanse of very thin metal and screen. And when you put any kind of pressure on a laptop is in the sandwich closing force, this Marco would say. You press the screen into the keyboard.

If you want to avoid it, try not to squish your MacBook. That's hard to do. It's hard to put in any kind of bag where it's not squished at all. But that's the problem they're facing. There's no, you know, unobtainium metal that they can put at a huge 16 inch expansive, extremely thin screen that doesn't flex at all in the middle. I think I'm assuming that they are using the more durable nanotextra from the iPad, which literally lets you swipe your fingers and a pencil across it.

I'm assuming they're using that and I think it won't be that bad. Yeah. Yeah, that might probably make sense. And by the way, there is a way to avoid that problem, which is use one of those pieces of cloth that you stick on your keyboard when you close it up. That does avoid the problem. It's just a pan in the butt. But that does avoid it. But otherwise...

You've got to make sure you put the cloth in the right direction because if you turn it around, now you're pushing the grease against the thing and it doesn't let your thing close all the way. And it's just, it's not a reason not to buy laptops. And I was worried like, if there's a little wrinkle in it, is that going to be just enough stress to crack the screen? Crack the screen. Crack the screen. I think the risk profile is a little bit higher with those.

Yeah, the tolerances on these computers are very tight. Yeah. Indeed. No, I'm very enthusiastic. I am not in the market. We'll probably get to this at the end, but I'll cut ahead. I'm not looking to buy any of these computers. I want a new MacBook Pro, but I have an M3 Max MacBook Pro. There's no reason for me to upgrade. And I also want a Mac Mini as my, you know, Plex and channels workstation, but again, no need to upgrade. And if I were to upgrade, you bet your bottom.

I would tick the NanoTexer display option because I occasionally use my computer outdoors. And I don't do it often enough that it's an egregious problem, but I would love to have an anti-glare screen. That sounds great. And speaking about doors, up to 1000 nits in SDR. So in standard, what's the DR? I just had a brain. Standard green. Standard green. Yeah. Thank you. And that's up from what 800 was the last one, right? Yeah. I mean, like, this is the thing about these displays.

So there, it's still HDR, max of 1600 nits, which it has been for years, which is what also what the XDR is, right? But the user interface is not an HDR. User interface is in quote unquote, SDR, standard dynamic range. And it's just essentially a choice, a power saving and potentially image retention choice of when you're not in HDR mode, how bright should you get? And they've slowly been cranking up the, how bright you're allowed to put it in SDR, which obviously costs battery.

And obviously it has to be safe for the screen with the image retention and stuff like that. And but because they're not also raising the high dynamic range ceiling, they're narrowing the gap. So now there's a 600 nits difference between SDR and quote unquote HDR, whereas before I think they started it at like 500, then 600 and now it's 1000. But it's important if you're outdoors with the laptop and it's bright sun, you can't even see your screen.

You just want to lean on that brightness button and you're going to be sacrificing battery life, but it's worth it to be able to actually see your screen and work in it. And there have been utilities, you know, third part of utilities for all these max that at 69 nits screens, whereas like, do you want to run your Mac UI at 1600 nits? You can. Uh, you know, Apple is not going that far, but built into the OS now. If you lean on that brightness button, you'll get up to 1000 nits.

I will say that, um, I have, and I think we've talked about at least pieces of the story before. I've gotten into getting USB-C power cables that have like a little watt meter on them. I don't need this information and it's the sort of thing that in one side of my mouth, I will tell you the people who have battery percentages on are monsters. And then in the other side of my mouth, I'll tell you I want to know exactly how many watts are going into my devices.

Um, it's very, very contradictory and silly, but here we are. Uh, and I will say that there's been a handful of times that I have been using my MacBook Pro while connected via one of those cables and not a MagSafe cable. And I will turn the brightness way down and I don't remember numbers offhand, but I'll watch the wattage that it's using when it's idle go to like, I don't know, call it 10 watts. That might be twice what it is.

It might be a third what it is, but you know, just for the sake of discussion, it'll go down to 12 or 10 watts. Then I'll go, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, blub, and bring the brightness all the way up and suddenly it's like 50 watts or something like that. Like, you're only going to have to, you're only going over to 600 nits. Yeah, exactly. Well, whatever the M3 max will do. But yeah, you get the idea.

It's, it's a stark and surprising difference that brightness makes on how much power the, the device is using. It's very surprising. The camera is also way better. We were privately talking about this before we got on the air. We're not entirely sure what the prior situation was. We didn't have time to go look it up, but they are saying that the new camera is 12 megapixel and it is center stage supported. I could have sworn that was the case already, but it seems not.

But center stage is the thing where it'll like pan zoom and whatnot in order to get you and whoever else is in front of the camera in the frame. And so apparently that's a whole lot better. Well, I would, I would issue caution on this because when, you know, what we saw with the studio display, you know, and the, those, what was the first product to have the center stage camera? It was one of the iPads, right? The one that turned the landscape. Okay, that's right.

The problem is the way center stage works is it has an ultra wide camera and then it basically crops in a region of it that it detects that you are in. So it is a, it is a crop from a wide angle camera that you are seeing the output of. And the problem with that is that you lose a ton of resolution when you do that because obviously you're cropping a wide angle camera.

So, you know, so what you get then is a blurrier picture and typically you also get much more aggressive denoising in medium and low light. So it ends up being a far worse picture quality. So I would you, you know, until we until these things are actually in people's hands and being reviewed, I don't know that this is going to be a meaningful upgrading camera quality.

It might just be they had to make the camera optics better just to give it enough, you know, headroom to crop it down for center stage mode and have it not look really bad like those first center stage cameras did. Yeah, Apple's not good about like making it clear when the camera hardware has improved.

They just want to tell you what it has and the way they phrase it is like 12 MP center stage, which is like code, you know, center stage, you know, is this branded thing with the wide angle and the cropping and 12 MP tells you something. But you're like, what was it 12 MP before? Is it different 12 MP sensor? Is the sensor bigger? Like they don't really want to give you lots of technical details about the camera.

So the we'll find out when people get these in their hands and start testing them and do aside by side with the previous MacBook Pro cameras. I don't think they advertise desk view with this like they did with the iMac, the iMac again. Like did they for this is what? Yeah, because I was wondering like, because then you got to figure like, what's the angle of the screen link?

Yeah, like, like, like, is it showing your keyboard or I guess it's shooting past your keyboard because the iMac one, it seems like it's like I wonder where the angle is because you would want desk view to show the desk, not the trackpad, right? But some will try and find out I guess.

Yeah, but yeah, basically do not order this assuming the camera is better, you know, order it, and order it now if you don't care if the camera is better because that first batch of center stage cameras were terrible. So hopefully these are at least as good as the outgoing non center stage ones after the cropping has has occurred. But honestly, I don't think that's, I don't think that's super likely. Yeah, Zee Mox in the chat says it was 1080p before.

The problem with that is I think these cameras are also advertising as supporting 1080p video. Right. Because the output, the cropped output, it would cropped output as 1080, right? And the sensor is 12. Yeah, but we're basically getting there is a sensor size shrink, right? Because you're taking the inner crop of what's probably about the same size camera sensor.

So that's probably going to mean more noise and more aggressive noise reduction, which was the biggest problem with that first batch of center stage cameras to begin with. Apparently desk view is right at the top of the web page, which I hadn't seen because again, these computers came out just as we started recording. So forgive us for not being on top of everything, but we want as fast as we could.

Yeah, so 24 hours of battery life, I presume that's just for the M4, not the M4 pro and M4 max, but again, I'm not 100% clear. That was just in their press release. I'm sure there is on the tech spec page, you'll see much more granular breakdowns. But the point is they're advertising really good battery life. They're not what they're not doing is saying, hey, we got all these new great M4 CPUs, but sorry, you're going to have to sacrifice a ton of battery life.

That's not what they're saying at all. Yeah, they're actually quoting very similar battery life between the CPUs on the compare page. It's like in the 14 eggs that has the base M4, that's 24 hours, and then the M4 pro version on that same computer is 22 hours. So they're quoting 10% difference between the two. And that might be all it is in practice. I guess we'll see. I mean, as usual with any kind of modern computer battery life claim, it depends a lot on what you're doing with it.

So it's not super useful to try to compare absolute numbers. It's more of a relative thing. So yeah, maybe you can assume maybe the higher end chips might get 10% less battery life overall doing more idle things. But once you crank it up, I'm sure they can burn through the battery way faster. Yeah, I always assume with Apple's numbers in these modern years, just assume those numbers would be you using your computer in pretty much the most casual way. Email, web browsing, and that's it.

No video conferencing, no compiling in Xcode, no audio or video editing, right? The number is for just casual like office style. You can be in a word processor. You could be in a spreadsheet. You could be browsing the web. And that's what those numbers are kind of based on. So and the more hardware they put in these, we've talked about this many times, the more hardware they put in the SOCs, the more cores, the more GPU things, the more anything that's in there.

When that stuff is sitting idle, it doesn't take as much power. But when you crank all of those things up, it will destroy your battery, right? And that's what you wanted to do. You wanted to use the energy that's there to get your work done faster. And what it means is that you can, you know, would you rather have fewer cores and it take longer to compile your thing, or would you rather have it use way more power for a shorter period of time?

And in general, it's better to use way more power for a shorter period of time because A, it gets your job done faster and B, sometimes that actually saves more energy. So I, you know, it's, again, don't, don't assume if you buy this, you only have to charge your laptop once per day. That may be true on your average normal day, but if you have a very intensive day with lots of Zoom meetings, even that can really eat into that battery life.

So although I think maybe Zoom uses an hardware acceleration that it's not that bad, maybe it's actually just the electron app that Zoom is built on that I will eat all your battery life. But anyway, battery life still looks good. And these are, remember, these are not, we haven't talked about it yet. We didn't mention anything about it, but I'm assuming based on what I saw on the website, they didn't change the case. It is not a redesign case.

It is not a thinner case, it is the same one, the previous M3 and M2 and M1 MacBook Pro are in as far as I can tell. As far as I know, that is correct. Connectivity M4 gets Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 1.4. The M4 Pro and M4 Max gets Thunderbolt 5 and DisplayPort 2.1. And it still rhymes, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. And here's where I say, okay, all the previous models, the iMac, the Mac Mini, fine. The MacBook Pro I would have liked to see in Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth.

And I don't know what dictates this is just a Broadcom chip. I don't think this stuff is in the SOC. So it's just like, this generation, this round of revisions, the M4 ones, they're just not, this is not the year that they go to Wi-Fi 7 everywhere, right? Even the Wi-Fi 7 has been out for a while. And the only machines I'm disappointed on are the MacBook Pro's, especially the high-end MacBook Pro's, because that's where you want to see the stuff.

It doesn't matter for the other ones here, a little disappointment. But remember, Thunderbolt 4 versus 5, if you use those ports, if you want to drive a big display at high refresh rate, or you want to have super fast storage of some kind of like rate array of SSDs or something, go to the M4 Pro, because they're not holding it back from you, the M4 literally only supports Thunderbolt 4 and DisplayPort 1.4. So if you want Thunderbolt 5 and DisplayPort 2.1, M4 Pro and 4 Macs, it's part of the SOC.

You should definitely do it. It's a big upgrade if you care about those things. All right, let's talk about DisplayPort for the M4 Macs. They're up to four external displays, up to three displays with 6K resolution 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one external display, with up to 4K resolution at 144Hz over HDMI.

A secondary option you can choose is up to three external displays, up to two external displays with 6K at 60Hz over Thunderbolt, and one with up to 8K at 60Hz, or one with 4K at 240Hz over HDMI. They really need a chart. I know you said that a few minutes ago. They need a chart. And the M4 and the M4 Pro, I didn't put them in here because there is the same as you heard before. Like basically the external display to support is dictated by the SOC.

So the only one you haven't heard about before is the M4 Macs for the M4 and the M4 Pro. It's the same as it was in the Mac Mini, I believe. All right. M4 Pro is a 14 core CPU or 12 core if you elect for the BIN one, and 16 core GPU or 14 core in the BIN one.

One thing with the BIN ones is I'm assuming, obviously the BIN ones are cheaper and they charge you a lot for the upgrade and we really have no basis for judging the margins on the upgrade of the core is except to say that they're probably really expensive but who knows.

Anyway, my assumption is that one of the advantages of the BIN ones aside from being cheaper is that I assume they also use less power at maximum because you can't crank up 14 CPU cores because you literally only have 12 that work and that may be something to consider to console you if you're like, oh, I don't do I want to pay the extra whatever $100 to get the one with all the cores that work. Do you care about that? What differences is it going to make in your life?

Are you doing jobs to take an hour and now they're going to take 40 minutes instead? Are you doing jobs to take three minutes and now they're going to take three minutes to five seconds? Like get the cheaper one with fewer cores to save you from burning your battery if you don't care about having an maximum power. The M4 Max gets 546 gigabyte per second memory which is compared to the 240 10 gigabytes per second on the M3 Max.

This is actually the thing I think that makes me most jealous about these but that's either here or there. It's not as big a jump on the M4 Pro of the M3 Pro. I didn't know the percentages. Someone can do the math in the chat room but it's not a 75% jump but it is a jump. 16 core CPU or 14 core BINned 12 performance cores. We're assuming 10 performance cores in the BIN version. Four efficiency cores and Apple claims a plus 20% multi threaded performance over M3 Max.

Seems like four efficiency cores is what Apple thinks is sufficient for just right because the efficiency cores are doing like the stuff that's not very intensive, low priority stuff in the background. Just the apples efficiency cores are actually fairly powerful these days and they gave you six of them at one point but now with the Pro and the Mac chips it's four efficiency cores for both of them and all they just keep doing is giving you more and more of those power cores.

Yeah so this one has 12 power cores, 12 performance cores or 10 in the BIN version. That's a lot of very powerful cores. This is a big chip. Yep. And then 40 core GPU or 32 core in the BIN version and again about 20% GPU improvement, performance improvement over the M3 Max. In pre-order today they shipped November 8th environment.

100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure, 100% recycled rear earth elements and all the magnets, 100% recycled tin soldering, gold plating and copper in multiple printed circuit boards. And the packaging for the 14 inch MacBook Pro is now entirely fiber based joining 16 inch MacBook Pro and bringing Apple closer to its gold to remove plastic from its packaging by 2025.

I hope that's not anything we missed on these MacBook Pro's again they were released like as we started recording so the timing wasn't perfect for us. But overall I, you know, I, it's hard for me not to get distracted by the 16 gigs of RAM on the MacBook Air because selfishly from my perspective it makes my life so much easier when recommending a computer or someone to buy because the answer is always they, they probably want a laptop.

They should just get the MacBook Air and now I don't have to give them a speech about why it's really important for them to send $200 on another 8 gigs of RAM. I could just tell them to get the base. We check in with them about how much stuff they have, right? But again with cloud storage and everything a lot of people can actually get by with 256 especially on a low end thing. And in the MacBook Pros, clean upgrade.

They took the M3 ones, they put M4 in them and guess what the M4 SOC's, the M4 line is good that we heard the rumors months ago that Apple is going to put every one of its Macs on the M4, which may not sound exciting like don't they always do that? The answer is no, they don't always do that sometimes. Max get left behind. The poor Max studio and Mac Pro still have the M2 in them.

The MacBook Air still has the M3 in them but eventually they will come a time when the top end products that Apple sells and all of its categories will have M4 something in them. The plain M4 is an amazing chip, amazing single core performance. It made up for a lot of the problems of the M3 especially the dual display is supporting everything. M4 Pro takes a different approach than the M3 Pro. It's like a huge jump great chip and the M4 Max is exactly what you would think would be.

It is not the same as the M4 Pro as far as I know we'll look at the die shots to see if the Pro and the Macs are just the trunk conversions of each other. But anyway, the M4 Max has got more stuff. Pro starting in higher base RAM than the M4 and the Mac starting in higher base RAM still is great. This is a great update to a bunch of Macs that the rumors are.

They might be introducing new slim versions of these and there will be other potential, you know, it's, there's uncertainty in the future of this one. They go to the M4, the M5 or the M6, maybe they'll redesign the cases, maybe they'll take different choices, maybe they'll take away the SD card. This is not that. This is the Mac Pro that you've known and loved with what I think is the best, obviously, it's the best M series set of chips they've made.

But I think the trade-offs from looking at the, how they've arranged these things, the trade-offs are great for these and I really do think the fact that this is the year Thunderbolt 5 starts rolling out really makes the M4 Pro and M4 Max, Max very attractive to people who care at all about external peripheral speed or future proofing for a really high resolution, really high refresh rate monitors. Yeah, but overall, like I love this lineup now.

Like this is, this is so solid because as John said, like you don't have to try to steer people away from the 8GB base models anymore.

The only thing I would strongly recommend pushing people to 512, now that it's, you know, only a $200 upgrade that I'm pushing for instead of a $400 upgrade that it used to be, maybe it'll be a little bit easier, like to me, if you're going to do any kind of like, you know, substantial power usage at all on one of these laptops, the one to get I think is either at the low end, get the MacBook Air, but they have like another tier up that has $16, $512 for $1300. Get that one.

That's the new budget model for people who care about computers. $1300, MacBook Air with 512. And then, honestly, if you want like, you know, the MacBook Pro features an experience, you know, John's right that if you care about things like display, feature proofing and everything, Thunderbolt 5 is a big deal for most of us. That's not usually the case.

One of the best deals typically in Apple's lineup in terms of, you know, bang for the buck that you get has historically always been the base model of the biggest laptop. You know, so it used to be the old 15-inch MacBook Pro and PowerBook. Now it's the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the base model 16-inch has for $2500, which is around where it has been for quite some time.

$2500, you get the best screen, you get the best speakers, you get the best microphones, like all the other stuff that is the best in the MacBook, where you get all that. And then it's that's the M4 Pro with 24 gigs now and 512 gigs as the base. That's a really great all around computer. I can do pretty much everything most people need to do. Now, yes, if you spec it up, you can get more RAM, you can get more disk, whatever, you can always do that. You can go up to $7000 easily with this thing.

But if what you're looking for is like best bang for the buck, I think it's the air and the base model 16-inch. And this is also the last one or two years where we can not yell at the MacBook Air for not having an HDR screen. And that's allowing for Apple being behind. That's the thing that people I think underestimate about the pros is that that screen. The screen on the MacBook Pro has been great.

Having HDR, I think is just increasingly important in the Apple world because all their phones take HDR pictures, right? You really want to see them in full HDR on your screen. And the laptop screens are great. MacBook Air, who knows? Maybe the M4 MacBook Air will have an HDR screen. We'll find out. But right now they don't. And so people wonder, hey, should I get a really spec'd up MacBook Air? Or should I get the base model M4 MacBook Pro? What's the difference? Do I care about the pro?

And I was like, the main thing that you will probably care about is the screen. You will notice the screen. When you look at your pictures on the screen, you will notice. Most of the time people don't notice anything about the screen. They're like, oh, viewing angles, color saturation, no one is ever going to notice that. But when they pull up a picture they took on their iPhone in HDR, it looks different. And a way that people will notice. Even not even just side by side.

Just bring up the photos. When they go in HDR picture, people will go, whoa, in their eyes, they'll, you know, like, it makes a difference. So I hope, just like this year, we have all risen up to 16 gigs RAM base in the Apple World. Someday, the promise land where every Mac will have an HDR capable screen with 120 hertz refresh rate. We're a long way from there. But we can get there. I believe, I need to give an I believe speech. Martin Luther King, I believe speech.

But we can get every Apple device. I mean, rumor is that iPhone 17 is going to be 120 hertz across the whole, like even the non-Pro models and everything. So the phones will probably get their first because the screens are smaller. But right now, XDR, 60 hertz, studio display, 60 hertz, all of the non MacBook Pro's are in 60 hertz. Like, I'm X screen 60 hertz, no HDR. Like, we need to get there. That's another mountain we have to climb. But for right now, the MacBook Pro's have it.

They've always had it. And the screens are great. That is a reason to consider even the basis of base model MacBook Pro if you care about HDR at all. Yeah. And also, and when you go up to the ones that have the Pro or Mac chips, you also get more ports. You get ports on both sides. You get the SD card. You get all these upgrades to the MacBook Pro that is kind of, you know, better for convenience or connectivity or, you know, just quality of life.

So yeah, if you can swing the MacBook Pro, it's a great buy. Now the MacBook Air is also a great buy. Again, just get 512 pleats for the love of God, especially if you think like, oh, I need something for X code, you definitely want a lot of storage if you're going to be using X code. Just, just, you know, do not get the two. I don't care. If you're like a young person, you're like, I want to get into coding, but I don't need storage. I have like, I stream on my music. I have my cloud photos.

Trust me. X code eats a disk space like crazy. You need the 512 if you're doing any kind of X code work at all. But yeah, these are great products all around. I'm very happy to see them. Yeah. And in terms of eating space, like I said, with a iMac or Mac mini, you can just touch a very fast SSD to one of those Thunderbolt ports and give yourself more storage. It's advantage of having desktop. With a laptop, you are not going to want to do that.

You're not going to want to do the VARCO thing where you Velcro and SSD to the back of it. Like, you can, but it's very awkward. And when you run out of space, a Mac OS gets very angry and b, you will get very angry because you'll feel like my computer is full. Do I need a new computer now? It's not that easy to deal with that. What should I delete? Should I delete anything? Am I making a mistake by deleting precious memories of my children to fit within the stupid 256 gig SSD?

Or like, should I delete some SDKs that I'm not using or do I just screw up my build or I shouldn't have deleted that one or I need to re-download it like, when you fill your disk, it's a bad situation on portable computers or devices on your phone or your laptop. And yeah, so maybe you can fit within 2 to 6, like, look into your heart, look at your actual computer, see how much storage you're actually using, see what you're actually can fit within. But this is, this is the next bottleneck.

So every time you remove bottleneck, the next one just rises to the services. The number one, number one, new bottleneck on base model Mac 256 gig SSD. Yeah, but don't let us poo poo this entire week of incredible releases. Like, this is an incredible, and we've said this consistently for years. It's an incredible time to be a fan of the Mac and it just keeps getting better and better.

And I'm really, really pleased that I suffered through the dark ages of the late teens in order to, in order to reap the rewards here in the early 20s. It's been, it's been an incredible phenomenal time to be a fan of the Mac. And I hope it continues. I mean, Apple is, it's not perfect, but darned if they're not firing on almost every cylinder. So the really, really good work this week.

Yeah, this, this isn't above average year for upgrades, above average easily, but and these were already great computers. Yeah, yeah. So we're already really good and this isn't above, if you're wondering, we're always saying like, when is the right time to buy? When are they the good computers? These again, we're not going to say right now because people haven't tested them for all we know, they thermally throttle and blow up and catch fire or something, but they probably don't, right?

But wait, wait, see the actual reviews of people who get these in their hands. Wait for Marco to buy one. Have you tell you about it? Right? This isn't a, from looking at the specs. This isn't above average year of updates in terms of how much better they are than the ones before and the ones before were already really good. All right. So our sponsors this week, tip top, uncommon goods, and one password extended access manager. And thank you to our members who support us directly.

You can join us at the FM slash join. One of the perks of a membership is overtime in addition to our cool merch discount, which you mentioned earlier. So you might want to join us for that, but you also get overtime. This is our bonus topic every week. This week, overtime is about the recent news on the security research that's been done with Apple's private cloud compute that they are debuting now. So there's been some security research updates and we're going to talk about those in overtime.

Thank you so much everybody for listening and we'll talk to you next week. I can't. I got a Mac many. You couldn't make it through the recording. Jesus. No, I what the hell for I got a yesterday. They're adorable. That's why I told you last week. Have you heard of the show Casey? I told you last week I was buying one and why I'm buying it to replace my one ancient and my other recent but broken synologies.

Sorry, I blocked it for my memory because I was so sad at the anti-synology snark, but here we are. No, yes. I'm glad what did you get then? I got close to the base. The only thing I touched was I went to 512 and I went to the 10 gig ethernet. Do you have 10 gig ethernet in the house? There's that just future proofing. I have 10 gig wiring in the walls now and I'm starting like I have some of the ports I think on my big router are 10 gig compatible but I think only the LAN ports are something.

I'm starting to lay the groundwork for that and I intend to keep this thing for a long time and it was only like 100 bucks or something 150 bucks. I'm like, all right, I'll upgrade that and then I'll, you know, that gives me a reason to start maybe look at upgrading my Thunderbolt dock that I have for my MacBook Pro. Maybe that would be easy to get a 10 gig ethernet situation going on there. It isn't as far as I'm aware.

You can get 10 gig ethernet adapters but to my knowledge, there are no like docking station style things that have 10 gig ethernet. So like my beloved Caldigit TS4 has two and a half gig as an example. Thunderbolt 5 docking station is probably will. Oh, that's true. That's a good point. Yeah, I should clarify. I would even just going to 2.5 would be a substantial upgrade from what I have now.

And so since I'm planning on using this Mac mini, basically as a fancy NAS for the most part, I do want to start experimenting on it with things like running background jobs for overcast. So if I wanted to start trying to transcribe podcasts in mass, obviously the way to do that correctly is in a data center. But I can start experimenting with it in my house and then see. Or one Mac mini. Yeah, that's either a data center full of them to all through this for one Mac mini in a closet.

Where's this one going to be, by the way? Um, directly under a waterfall outside. Oh, it's like me. Yeah. Or in case he's desk. Yeah, we're the one. It's equally dangerous. At least the waterfall is not sticky. Also fair. Also fair. Uh, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm excited for your purchase. What does it come on Friday then as far as you know? Yeah, like next year. Yeah, I'm sorry, a week from Friday. Yeah, yeah, day one.

The reason I asked where you were going to put it is because I wonder if you would have an assessment of the fan noise, but if it's in a closet, you probably won't notice. It's actually it's probably going to be in my garage. I have a. It's not an outdoor computer. Well, the garage is our new garage is semi conditioned. Um, it is fully insulated and it has a split unit to keep it from reaching temperature extremes in either direction. So it is semi conditioned and mostly fine.

So I'm going to try it there. You know about your kink. It's fine, Mark. Oh my god. I like the foot of electronic equipment outdoors. It's not outdoors. Uh, semi outdoors. We're just going to move right along. Uh, why did you put a mini split in the garage? Like what, what, what were you trying to guard again? So it would be semi conditioned. Well, no, I understand. Actually was, yeah.

So it was because it was, okay, the way a long island works, uh, everyone like knows a guy and when you ask a contractor like, Hey, can we install a split in this room? Sometimes what happens as he comes back and he's like, Hey, uh, I got a unit. It's no more money, but there's one that has two heads. Do you want it? Uh, and like, it's no more money really. Yeah, I got it. It's ready to go right now. Okay. Sure. We can put the second head in the garage. That's what happened.

There was a room next to the garage that went at, you know, a regular room that needed a split installed on it. So we put one there and they were like, we could do it right here for no extra money. We'll get to put one in the garage too. And I said, fine, whatever. They're independently controlled. You can't afford not to put one there. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. So I don't, like, you know, like in the summertime, we were running it in dehumidified mode, you know, like, it's just, it's kind of nice to have certain options like that. So it's fine. Uh, I don't intend to ever use it aggressively, but it's nice for, uh, extremes. Well, now you need to keep your Mac mini comfortable. Yeah, exactly. Uh, no, I actually, I'm in full support of this idea.

So my parents in their house, um, which Marco briefly saw many years ago now, but, um, they have a three bay garage that the ceiling is like 20 feet in it or something like that. It's an absurd amount of space. And, um, when our kids were much littler, um, they wanted to have, uh, like an extended family thing like it was Christmas or Hanukkah or something.

I forget exactly what it was specifically, but they realized that, well, this is going to be tough because the very young kids are going to wake up with a hearse all who, who've been hollering and whatnot. And it's winter time. So we can't exactly just go outside, who put in a hollering and whatnot might be the most southern thing you've ever said.

Well, you never know what y'all get into, but, um, anyways, no, but, uh, one way or another, what dad ended up doing was putting a single mini split in this very, very large garage. And that's we, he would set up, you know, like, uh, just folding tables and, you know, like chairs and whatnot in there and, you know, mom and dad mean, my brothers and family and whatnot would all chill in there.

And it was great because we were far enough removed from the interior of the house that, uh, the hoot nanny wasn't heard inside. And, and we could still live in and not live, but, you know, being a conditioned space. So I, I, I've been wanting to find a reason to do it in my house, but we are never in the garage for any long duration of time. So I haven't done it because there's no need for it whatsoever. I kind of want to just in principle. Well, your cars are in there, right?

When you keep your cars cooler. So when you get in, I guess you can turn them on remotely and cool them off, but still, like I just feel like cars, especially in the south are places that are really hot, where just stuff bit the interior recarb baking at like over 100 degrees or 120 degrees is not, you know, it's, it's not bad because it's not in the sun. So it's, it, or the hood might be in the sun because we back into the garage because that's who we are.

Um, so the, you know, the hood might be in the sun, but not the, the passenger component. I guess it's not in direct sunlight, but still like if it's not in a conditioned space, it's just, and it's in a closed space in the summer, I can imagine. I mean, they're designed for that. Yeah, it's not as bad as you think. It's actually worse. Yeah, I know, I know they're designed for it. I just, I just feel bad for the car. It's much worse than winter. So it's well for the people.

Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, all those, all those glues and materials that are made to withstand 170 degrees without degrading too much. We've all seen old cars where those dashboards, they, they put up a good fight, but you know, a decade in, they start to fall apart. And if you, and if you keep them, if you don't, you know, expose them to extremes of temperature, they will be nicer for longer. That, that is very true. Um, but no, it's not nearly as bad as you think around where we are anyway.

The worst part, at least for people anyway, is during the winter because it will still be properly cold out there, um, in the mornings. And so, uh, Aaron's car, I can run on electricity. If it's plugged into the house, it'll, it'll warm itself up over the span of a half an hour. If I want it to, um, or I can actually start the gasoline engine as long as the garage doors open and warm it up that way. This is the garage where your water heater is.

Yes. So your word is getting so cold in there, it seems like it's probably not getting that cold. It's not, I mean, compared to what you two are, your water heater is in there. Compared to what you two are used to, it's not that bad. But actually, so I have a heat pump hybrid water heater now. Oh, that's so what it does is it steals heat from the garage to heat the water, which means it air conditions the garage.

So I actually have to be careful, you know, whatever choices I make with the split, you know, that I'm not basically just undoing my energy savings for that's funny. That's wild. Um, but yeah, so, uh, I can run Aaron's car, always, if it's plugged in for, you know, like 20, 30 minutes and warm it up. However, uh, you and I suffer from the same problem with our cars. And so far as if I were to turn on my car remotely, it would drive itself through the front of the garage.

So that's not a possibility. Unless you don't park your cars in gear, John, in which case we have a whole new world of things to discuss. I don't park my car on the garage. That's what the problem is. Oh, fair enough. You got, you guys need EVs like this, this totally solves this problem. I was not in gear, it would be rolling into the street is what I would be doing.