685: The Ability to Be Hotter

John, do you want to step into the corner with me, the anniversary corner? Because on episode four hundred and seventy six on the thirtieth of March twenty twenty two, do you know what you did, John? No idea. You announced your independence four years ago. Happy Independence Day. I always forget this is in March. I d I also f I also forget the total number of years, so thank you for reminding me again. You get fireworks?

Yeah, we should get fireworks. Can we can we if we we'll have the our editor uh edit in the case? Sent with fireworks. There you go. I just gave you the text version. Right, right. Uh anyway, happ happy anniversary, John. I'm glad that you are still independent and things are still going okay. Mm-hmm. That basically sums it up. Thank you. Are there any are there any learnings, as they say, that you would like to share with us?

Yeah, I don't know. I I don't have any wisdom to impart at this time. Uh but I'm glad I'm still here and making it work. Me as well, and I'm sure I speak for Marco when saying that. Yeah, you you may have to speak for me a lot tonight because I'm I'm a little bit tired um because as I mentioned a couple after shows ago, um I'm training for this thirty-two mile Manhattan walk. And what that means is taking a lot of long walks. And today's was the longest so far at twenty two miles.

Um so it's been and then there was like we're trying to schedule around like, you know, Easter and spring break and stuff, and there was really no other time to record the show besides the evening of me. Doing a twenty two mile walk that started at six in the morning. So the jokes might be a little bit rougher tonight. Sorry about that. How many steps is that?

Uh it it today my in Pedometer Plus I crossed fifty thousand steps for the very first time. So it's like a day at Disney World. And by the way, I'm happy to say I don't I I don't think I'm allowed to talk about it yet, but Panometer Plus Plus has a wonderful um update coming in the future. I am

So pleased with this app. Like this is our friend underscore David Smith's app. I I know you what you think Pedometer Plus Plus is, is that app that you can install on your phone and see your step count. And it still is that. But what it also is is an amazing walking and hiking app on the Apple Watch. And it shows you like the you know, the live walking or running or hiking or whatever workout on the watch with a great map. It blows away everything else I've seen. So number one I would say like

You know, I know our friend underscore David Smith probably won't be as aggressive as I am about telling you all this, but this app is awesome. And if you walk or run or hike and you want something on your Apple Watch to show you where you've gone and how far you've gone. It's a great app for them. Um, especially that map view. Really, really good. So Panometer Plus Plus for that. Um, I would also say that as a little preview, I don't usually announce future products, however.

I will say that a future episode of this podcast, I will be talking about another non-Apple smart athletic sports watch. Um I I it just it did not arrive in time. It arrived three hours after I left my house, uh, for this walk. But it will um hopefully in a future episode I will have more to report about that.

You gotta do what everyone suggested and what underscore has done is hey, you got two wrists. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do a walk where I'm gonna have, you know, that on one like the the Apple Watch Ultra on one and then the you know the new sports watch on the other and I'll compare them. Um and uh by the way, the Apple Watch Ultra

doing a, you know, nine hour long walk with GPS and, you know, full workout sensing mode, but with low power mode so that always on screen is turned off, uh, lasted that entire time with like Forty or no, sixty percent battery left. Oh. Um so it'll have no problem lasting the full thirty two miles. Um Secondly, uh thirdly, whatever I've lost track. I'm I'm tired. Um uh last night I saw um the this new movie called The AI Doc or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.

It is a bit of a rough name. It also has an amazing list of interviewees. So it's basically a documentary that's just like a series of interviews with very important people in the world of AI, including Sam Altman and Dario and Daniela Am Amade from uh so Sam Altman of course from OpenAI, the Amade is from um Anthropic, which is actually a sponsor of this episode. Um

and a whole bunch of other people from the AI business and also like good AI thinkers and everything. And I really enjoyed it. It's o this is not a sponsorship. It's only in theaters for a reasonably short time'cause it's not that theaters? I thought I was gonna think it was on YouTube. I assume it will be in theaters for a little bit, but I think this is the kind of thing that eventually you will see on YouTube.

Um, but I would suggest if you're into this business, like the the list of people that the filmmaker got to interview is pretty impressive. Um so I I think we're gonna be seeing like, you know, clips from this over time and stuff like that, so it's pretty fun. Um yeah, that's it. So I watched a movie about AI and then it took a very, very, very long walk and it was pretty fun.

All right. Uh we should do the thing that we always forget to do. And thank you to John for not only putting in in our internal show notes. New member special with a yellow background and obnoxious pink foreground color. But also at the top of the follow-up section, because I often jump over the pre-show section, go straight to the follow-up section. is a second instance of new members special in pink and yellow. Everywhere you go, there I am, Casey.

It's a dream come true. Uh but yes, we do have a new member special. John had the genuinely brilliant idea of taking all of the icons from our home screens from uh whatever episode it was like a month or two back that we talked about our home screens and John put together all the icons at great pain in order to do a tier list. So we have ATP tier list, home screen icons. John, is there anything you would like to add about this particular member special?

Uh yeah, uh as I say at the top of the show, it's also kind of an excuse for me to try out my uh vibe coded tier list app. So if you want to see the first outing of that app, you can check it out. There was one one problem that I that happened immediately as soon as we started that I just could not believe, but couldn't deal with in the moment, which was the stupid green pencil icon from Zoom.

overlaying on top of my beautiful clean app and I was hoping that it wouldn't appear in the screen capture, but it totally does. Anyway, we have since we believe we have since solved that problem after finishing the episode.

uh found the setting in Zoom. If you go to the Zoom website under settings and meetings, turn off the annotation feature, which is what that little pencil is for. So hopefully next time it will not be there. Also people suggested a feature to be added to my tier list app that will

show an enlarged version of the item we're talking about, which definitely helps when we're talking about something we want to look at, like a logo or an icon. So I'll make sure I have that. The next time we do a tier list, which may not be for a while'cause we've done a bunch of them recently. Um people also suggested uh in in my tale of woe about how I got these icons. I didn't mention all of my tale of woe. Part of it did involve writing various scripts and web scrapers to try to get icons

from the new app store website, from the old iTunes URLs, from the uh the App Store API that's available. And I could get lots of icons from there and I could get artwork from there, but they would never Right. They either didn't have a transparent background or they were the wrong size or they were weirdly truncated.

Um, I also got another suggestion to try device control again and I was like, I I I tried that and I got messed up icons, but maybe I have to try it on Tahoe. So if I ever have to do this again, I do have a bunch of new suggestions about uh where to get stuff from. And speaking of icons. Uh one of the icons that we discussed. I guess I won't spoil which one it was. You can watch the episode. One of the icons we discussed had a strange feature.

that we couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be like, is the corner of the icon peeling up, which totally used to be a thing in the iOS X days, by the way. Tons of icons did that. You know, is it is they trying to show a page curl and it's not working? And we couldn't figure it out. Uh well Silias, it was the Ukrainian flag. Uh, because the developer of that app is from Ukraine originally.

Uh and we just didn't pick it up. Um, I'm not sure it helps the icon, but we didn't figure out what it was because you didn't have that key piece of additional information. So the mystery is solved. It wasn't a page girl, it was a flex. Well it was the colors from a flag, to be clear. If it was the actual flag, I think we would have been a little bit less dense about it. But nevertheless, we missed that reference and sorry about that. It wasn't intentional. Um

huge supporters of Ukraine in its invasion by Russia. Um and I I I don't want to minimize that at all. Um but yeah, we we kind of, you know, poked at the lecture I'm like, why is that there? It kind of looks weird. Why is it blue? And that's why. And we didn't know that. Sorry about that. Yeah, I kind of feel like a dirtbag now that we know what the story is behind it. But we really truly didn't. So our deepest uh apologies. And for the record, I rated that icon higher than these two.

Setting aside the corner thing'cause I just think it's a good icon. But anyway. I stand by the rating, but I respect the reason. Yes. What Marco said. Yes. Very well done. All right, let's do some follow-up. Uh Marco, do you have anything with regard to overcast transcripts that you would like to discuss? Nope. Working on a few, you know, very minor bug fixes. I I want to get the version that's out that I have out there now.

I wanna get this out there to all my customers. There's enough enough demand for it and Even even like transcripts with some shortcomings are better than not having transcripts at all. So I I intend to release this basically this version. I might do like one more small bug fix build, but I'm gonna basically release this version probably this week or next. Real time uh bug report slash confusion. I was using the app on the

iPad, I believe, and I was trying to get to chapters and I could not find them. I just goes right from like the thing to the transcript. I'm like s I swear chapters should be there. On the phone I can get to the chapters.

But for this podcast, which did have chapters, it didn't show them. What's the deal? Um I will check. I the I I do a few special cases for the iPad layout. Um and there's there in certain cases chapters are shown in a sheet instead like a pop up sheet instead of um inline in the scrolling thingy.

Um and I think that's the case on the iPad, but I will How would I get to them? I couldn't figure it out. I might have broken that when adding the transcript pane to that scrolling thing. So I will double check that. Thank you. Okay. Also, since we're in the real-time feedback portion of the show, uh earlier today I was listening to my favorite F1 podcast, which is called uh Missed Apex.

I really, really enjoy it. It's a very good podcast. Uh however, their ads are real bad. Um they're, you know, like they're not host red generally speaking, and they're they're really not great. And so I wanted to skip through them and they don't do chapters. And so I was just, you know, bracing myself to mash on the fast forward button. Um, but then it occurred to me, wait a second.

There's a transcript. And I bet I could figure out where the end of the ad was based on the transcript. And not only that, but Like th there was a music bed in this particular ad and there were little musical notes on the side of the transcript. I don't know if that's your doing. It's deliberate. I don't know. Uh but it was very, very smart. And so I went when it went I found the end of the musical notes and then that was the end of the ad. It was perfect. A plus

No notes. That's why those are there. A few people have asked why are you doing music detection? Here's the thing when you start using transcripts. They pretty quickly become a way that you navigate the podcast. Like when something comes up, whether it's an ad or maybe just like a topic that you want to skip past or whatever it is. It's a lot nicer in many cases to navigate past it or to go back a little bit or whatever by looking at the transcript.

and you know, scrolling quickly, you can you can kind of skim the text a lot faster than you can skim audio. Um and so you you quickly like skim forward, you find where you want to be, and you tap and it seeks there. And the music notes are there because I I I kinda I had that idea during development. I played with it and I liked it a lot that like

That's exactly that a lot of segments are delineated by either quick little blurbs of music or the presence or absence of music suddenly after a while of having it or not having it. So it makes it easier to see where those section breaks are. Now, in the future, you know, if I

lean more into like, you know, trying to find automatic chapter marks or or automatic topic changes or things like that. Um, then there's more I can do there, of course, but I think regardless, having the music note indicator helps you kind of see the podcast as you are skimming or looking for something or trying to skip past something.

Yep, it was very well done. And you know, uh now I feel slightly bad uh besmirching Miss Apex. Like th I get it. The ad the ad market stinks. You take what you can get, you know, it's it's tough. But listen, it's we are all podcast listeners. We, uh the three of us also make a decent living from podcast ads. And yet it's okay, I can say it's okay to skip a podcast ad. It's fine. Like we you don't owe the podcaster, us included, you don't owe us your attention on ads.

We give you a file and you can navigate that file and listen to what you can navigate it however you like, and you can listen to it or not listen to it however you like. We give you the file and the rest is up to you. Yep. Yeah, you don't need to listen to that. Just click on the links and buy the products. Preferably with our code. Yeah, please use our coupon code, ATP probably, or something like that. All right, moving along. Uh is MacBook Neo a hit?

Uh Tim Cook on the twentieth of march tweeted. Mac just had its best launch week ever for the first-time Mac customers. We love seeing the enthusiasm. Yeah, he didn't say anything about what particular product sold because that information cannot be released in the Tim Cook era. But you can read between the lines there and say, Yeah, they also released the M five MacBook Pros, but probably there are not as many first time Mac customers there and they released the Neo and yada yada.

This all uh you know, the and this and people reporting like, hey, I went to the Apple store and uh they they tell me that the Neos are selling like hotcakes or whatever, seems like the product is doing well. Yeah, sure does. Yeah, I saw one in a coffee shop today. Oh, nice. Yeah, the the the blue one. It looks awesome, of course. Yeah, it does look very good.

All right, let's talk about the MacBook Neo uh and kind of how it's a throwback potentially. Adrian Bengston writes, listening to you speak about the Neo, it reminded me of the iBook G3 Snow in 2001. So good and for its price.

This was before the unibody and it was mostly plastic, but it felt really good in your hand, exactly like John was describing the feel of the Neo. It was nowhere near being, or excuse me, I, as an Adrian, was nowhere near being able to f afford a power book. So this was my first laptop.

And it was good enough to do real work on. I loved it. It even made my girlfriend switch to the Mac. She actually wanted a PC laptop, but there was no comparison. Either PC laptops were big and freaking ugly, or they were nice and small, but completely unaffordable, like the Sony Vios. So switching to the Mac was an economical decision and that was unheard of. I'd even go so far as to say that the White iBook it was the most affordable Mac ever until the launch of the Neo.

Yeah, I think this is the one that we used to call the Ice Book'cause it was like a white plastic, but I think it had like a clear outer shell, like the w it was white painted on the inside with clear on the outside, if you know what I mean.

Uh it was very curvy, it was very nice to handle. Obviously it was giant by today's standards, but you know, 2001, it was a long time ago. Uh that was a good laptop and it gave people uh a lot of people a good impression. Now obviously I don't think that one held up. In the long run, like physically speaking, as well as these aluminum ones will, because the plastic bodies were creaky. There was the ones that got the yellow staining on them. Some of them could smell weird, like

We have come a long way in material science then but since then. But for the time, I think a lot of people have a nice impression of this, which was also a small, very rounded, adorable laptop put into a market where it stood out for those. Well there have been at least a couple of teardowns. I think we've talked about one or two of them, but there was a new one um done by the framework uh company, the the founder, Nerev Patel.

Uh he and a coworker did a MacBook Neo teardown and they compared the MacBook Neo to their own framework laptop twelve. Uh Narav came up with a bunch of tidbits. I also came up with one. Let me start with mine. The framework laptop does not do inverted T arrow keys, which is gross. It's the ones that Apple was using for a while where the up and down are the same height as the left and right, like the combination of up and down are the same height as left and right.

I hated that. I don't like it. Not good. W when you first uh mentioned this I thought, does it have uh because I was thinking like, Oh, no inverted T, does it have the old style you guys don't remember this, but the old style for arrows, uh arrow keys. on Apple keyboards for a time in front on certain models.

Oh, the ones where they were all in a line? Yes, they're all in a gun. I'm like, surely it doesn't have that, but no, it's got the before Apple made half size left and right arrow keys, there was a phase where Apple was doing full size left and right arrow keys.

It's still in a technically a T shape, but the full south left and right hierarchies made it so you couldn't feel where the left and right were as easily. Luckily Apple snapped out of that eventually, like so many other things, but framework has gone with the full south. All right, and then f for his c uh notes, complaints, etcetera, uh he complained And I agree, by the way, about the maximum hinge angle of the Neo, this drove me nuts when I first originally got my polybook.

The compared to almost any PC that I'd ever use, Dell, IBM, it didn't matter, uh, laptop specifically, you can usually make those displays go a hundred and eighty degrees, you know, so lay flat, you know, parallel with the keyboard or even with the keyboard. Um, whereas most Apple laptops can only go, I don't know, like 120 degrees or something like that. And it doesn't really bother me near as much anymore. It does sometimes, but gosh, it drove me absolutely baddie when I first went to the Mac.

Uh so Narav was complaining about that. sort of reliability and quality angle to that. Uh angle, get it. Um Because like the Apple's one of the things that makes Apple's laptops uh

stand out from the competition, even the very cheapest Neo, is they usually have pretty nice hinges, like the they'll have the whole thing where you can open it with one finger and the whole laptop won't lift. But also it where at whatever angle you put it at, it will stay there pretty well. But it's also not hard to move. It's just

Getting that right balance between it's easy enough to move, but it also stays where you put it, and you can also do one finger opening. And there's a lot that goes into. All right. Um Given all of that, maybe part of the mechanism that makes that work also means that it can't open as wide. I I hope that's the case because if they're just deciding oh we don't want it to open as wide, I I've heard this complaint from a lot of people, even people who've only ever used Mac laptops.

People sitting in, let's say, unergonomic positions, they just want to open the screen a little bit wider than it can. And they just can't like maybe it just needs another, you know. five or ten degrees and then just doesn't have it. So that's a that's a potential future enhancement if Apple can figure out how to make the hinge still good, but give a few more degrees of opening.

Yep, absolutely. Uh continuing with the observations from the video, uh the bottom cover of the Neo is not CNC milled like it is in a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro, at least according to Narav. It is stamped instead with a little machining added afterwards, making it more flexible and less able to form an even seal with the rest of the case.

Yeah, he was suggesting if you go into the Apple store and like pick up a MacBook Neo and look at the seam, like to hold look at an edge on and look at the seam between the bottom cover and the rest of the case. that especially like in the middle of the scene where there are just clips holding it, that it's like the gap is not as even and as tight as it is on the ones that have CNC milling. Maybe this is what the rumors we're getting at.

Um that were saying like, Oh, Apple's found a new way to make the case that is less expensive, I think The main body of the Neo is still machine, but this bottom one is apparently stamped to save money and that makes it a little bit more wibbly wobbly and that's uh he was saying that's why they had like

Screws on all the corners and all the edges, but then they didn't. They have clips on the left and right side in the middle of the left and right side. I don't know why they just didn't put other screws there, but

Um, like I said, the the uh regardless of what they did to save money, the construction of it when you pick it up in the hand, it still feels very solid, which uh which he acknowledged. So I think that's the main takeaway there. But they found a way to get money out of it without seemingly sacrificing much except for maybe like uh fractions of a millimeter in the the shut line between the bottom and the top of the case.

And then uh additionally, the framework laptop twelve logic board is like four times the size of the one on the MacBook Neo because it's effectively a phone's logic board. really astonishing to see. Yeah, it's amazing like how you you look at that. It's like how could they both fit a laptop in the same case given the massive difference in the size of the logic board? It's it's a really interesting obviously frameworks whole deals, their stuff is like very serviceable and has

lots of swappable parts and you can upgrade the memory and change these little modules that you plug into it. It's like it's it's totally going in a different design direction. It's also more expensive than the Neo, by the way. Um, but check out this teardown if you want to see uh, you know, obviously it's done by the by the founder of framework, so they're a little bit biased towards the framework, but it is really interesting to see.

a different way to do a similarly sized and, you know, similarly priced laptop.

All right. Uh let's talk about the MacBook Neo via Chromebooks th or versus Chromebooks, excuse me. This cracked me up. So let me read both of these bits of feedback back to back, if you'll permit me. Henry writes, I agree that the MacBook Neo will not be an alternative to the Chromebook. The real appeal of Chromebooks to school districts is isn't cost, it's device management. Hi Marco.

In the high school I teach at, every student has a Chromebook over one thousand nine hundred in one building. When one quits working or is forgotten at home, the student goes to the library and checks out another. It takes maybe two minutes. Students can't go one period without one because all curriculum is digital.

We have a couple of students who are trained to replace broken screens by salvaging parts. The IT depart department is never involved at all with the Chromebooks except for student password resets. IT spends more time managing my graphic design classroom of twenty eight IMAX than they spend managing one thousand nine hundred Chromebooks. There's no way the IT director would ever consider MacBooks, says Henry.

Ari writes, My wife is on the local school board and was on a budget call. They happen to be approving this year's one-to-one student laptop purchases. That is to say, you know, one laptop per kid.

The district uses iPads in K in kindergarten and first grade, Chromebooks in two through seventh or second through seventh grades, and MacBook Airs in high school. This year's MacBook Air order was about a thousand units. I mentioned the NEO to my wife and she asked the head of IT his thoughts on the call. Quote We're incredibly excited and have five on order for testing, quote.

There were already plans to consider moving to MacBook Airs for the middle group and replace them every four years due to Apple Care costs not working out in the district's favor. No one will miss those Chromebooks. Even if that doesn't happen, our district is looking at between four and five hundred thousand dollars in cost savings. So in summary, Henry says, No freaking way that they will go to Chromebooks and Ari says they're absolutely sorry, no freaking way they would ever go to

uh the MacBook Neo and Ari says they're absolutely going to go to the MacBook Neo. Two different places. But it's just funny the the whiplash of these two comments. Yeah, I don't think they're in conflict because one is in a school there where they already have MacBooks for everybody. And I think Henry's point stands, which is like Um, I'm not sure how well the Neo would do. uh given the criteria that he is touting for the Chromebook. So the first example is

uh say you forgot your laptop or something or you're you need another one. You just go to the library and pick one up. Chromebook, that's more of like an OS platform thing because you just sign into the Chromebook with your Google ID and all your stuff is there because all your stuff is never there. It's in the cloud. That pulling that off, like I don't think if you forgot your your uh MacBook Neo and went to the library, even if they handed you a new one.

Could you have it up and running to the point where you could use it for something in time for your class, given how long it would take for the Mac to do its whatever network boot setup home directory configuration, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean? Like having all your stuff there. I'm not sure how people configure MacBooks in the school systems, but if it's a one to one type thing, I have to imagine there's more local stuff.

Or even if there's not any local stuff. I don't see I don't know. Like I I I think a a lot of I mean, m my kid only had a a MacBook Air in in a couple of in the in the Fire Island grades, like a couple of elementary school grades, but Now we're in a bigger district, it's all Chromebook, he's he's in eighth grade, but even even districts that use MacBook Airs

I think they still just use a whole bunch of web based tools much of the time like for most or all of the work. But you gotta log in, right? Do they all log in as like a school account? Yeah. They he has like a school Google account and logs into all these weird websites, you know. Right, but but is it individual school Google? I'm saying you gotta type something in the login prompt. You have to log in as a user. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah. I don't know I

I guess I don't know how they do that. You know what I mean? And it's like okay, well if I just give you a blank one, what's the user account? And if there is no user account, how long does it take? Could even if there's like a network thing that just sets it up, like you just it's single sign on, you enter in your school email address, like the time taken to just set up the home directory or whatever, I'm not saying it's gonna take forever, but I just feel like uh Chromebooks are

have an advantage here in that they can probably l let you do a a Google ID, you know, login with the Google type thing to a Chromebook faster than you can do the equivalent on the Mac. I'm guessing people can write in and tell me. The second thing is um The repair.

And that's where I think a lot of the teardowns in the Neo come in here. They're saying, like, oh, well, we have students replacing the screens on the Chromebooks because it's easy enough to do that a student can do it and we have the parts and so on. And here I think Apple has come a long way. So first of all, Uh as of several years ago, Apple will supply you with parts and instructions on how to do it for lots of its products, including the Neo.

Second, as we covered the other teardowns, the Neo is way easier to take apart than all the other Mac laptops. So there's stuff glued in there, you don't have to like you know, take a a heat gun to any part of it and break any seals and do all this other stuff. A student with the appropriate weird, you know, eye fix it, pentalobe, whatever things can in fact

take apart a MacBook Neo and replace. Maybe not the screen, because I think all the teardowns were like, well, we just we don't know how to get the screen off of the top lid, but if you've got the screen and the top lid, I think a student could replace. So although Chromebooks still have a lead here, I think th the NEO is closing the gap by making it feasible to have a bunch of students whose job it is to grab from the bin of

uh, you know, spare lids to the Neos and take a broken screen and put it in the recycle thing and put it put the new one on. So You know, I I I agree with Henry that it's still not quite the same, but I do think the Neo is actually making some progress in the direction of uh the Chromebook advantage.

Yeah, it'll help a lot. And and I think whether whether, you know, this whether you side with Henry or Ari on this one, I think depends a lot on the supporting infrastructure around the the laptops themselves. You know, your budget.

Uh yeah, budget.'Cause e even then, like, you know, even with the MacBook Neo being about five hundred bucks for education, that's still about twice as much as most of those Chromebooks cost those schools. Um so you're still looking at a huge price difference. And of course then, you know Like, you know, in my kids' school again, it's all Chromebooks, um and they have a whole program. There's like an insurance program that we buy for damage uh you know, and you know, there's he whenever

something happens, you know, some the corner of the screen cracks or whatever, um, keys fall off. Like the weird stuff happens. These are middle schoolers. Um, but but like You know, there he brings it into some place in the school and he gets a loner and then he gets his original one back maybe like a month later. You know, there's all this

support around it. There's service depots, there's in school service, there's the insurance thing that you can buy to I mean make get a damage waiver. Like there's all that stuff around it. And then even setting aside the service and the damage and the price Then there's, as you mentioned, John, the software and application and login management. All of that

Chromebooks are popular in schools for lots of reasons. It isn't just cost, although the cost is a big one, but all of those management things, like if you are a school that is all invested in that ecosystem, that mi all of those management sides of it, they make that very easy on the IT departments. And when you're running fleets of hundreds or thousands of these for all for a whole bunch of kids and a whole bunch of teachers, like

It's a huge job just to manage those. And so if you have the infrastructure in place to manage Chromebooks and it works well for you. Apple's not really going to be changing a lot with the Neo. But if, as John said like earlier, if you already have Apple administration, if you're already using fleets of MacBook Airs,

then the Neo is a better situation for you because it costs less and it's easier to service. But if you don't already have all that in place, this might not move the needle that much.

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All right, let's talk about the M5 Pro and Macs and their, I guess, medium cores. We have uh nine to five Mac write up uh that's about An an article on the Mac and I website, which is in German. Uh so Johannes Schuster wrote and is quoting Anon Schimp Schimpy who is uh on platform ac architecture at Apple.

Apple's new performance core is a completely custom designed microarchitecture, so it differs significantly from both the super core and the efficiency core. Furthermore, it manages to surpass the efficiency of the efficiency core. That's straight from Apple. They're making a straight-up claim for what we're calling the medium core, just because it makes more sense. They're saying it's actually more efficient than the old efficiency core, which

Kind of leans towards maybe the M6 will use these cores instead of the old efficiency cores, but we'll see. Uh remains to be seen if they're even going to use the triple architecture for the plain no suffix M6. Uh but that's a bold claim. Uh don't worry about the medium cores not being as efficient as the efficiency cores. They're actually more efficient claims app.

All right, and then Doug Brooks, who is Mac Product Marketing, explained that while the chips do support PCIe five, they are actually custom designed controllers. Yeah, usually uh the Apple doesn't talk about these things like what you know, what standards does it use or whatever. A PCIe five I think is a standard from like twenty nineteen or something. So they're you know, there there are later standards that are still in in progress, but

In case you're wondering uh if Apple's keeping up with the times, I'm not sure. Maybe the M4 and M3 also use PCIe five, but you just r so rarely hear Apple talk about this and unless you find someone who's really dug into the chip. It doesn't come up, especially since it's not like there's any PCI slots or anything. But yeah, PCI five is in there.

And then uh from the write-up on 9 to 5 Mac, uh, we were interested in whether two chips with the fusion architecture could be combined using UltraFusion to create a single system on a chip consisting of four dies. That would then be the M5 Ultra, but Apple traditionally doesn't talk about upcoming products. Quote: At the moment, we have only announced the M5 Pro and M5 Mac.

was all Shimpey would say. That's such absol this is from the Mac and I website, by the way. It's not from the the nine to Mac thing. So as I said, like this is translated by Google. So forgive us Germans if this is not good. Like literally I'm just using Google Translate to translate a webpage. It's the best we got. But the And again, the quotes are translated too. Like even though I don't think a non speaks uh German, these quotes are in German and then translated back to English. But

This is as close as you'll ever get anyone uh from Apple to confirm the M five Ultra or some other M5 chip. At the moment we have only announced the M five Pro and M five Max. You sure have. Um yeah, so I'm looking forward to something that's not at M5 Pro and M five Max in the Max Studio for WWE.

Really, John? Are you now? I am. We'll get to it. Uh all Pro and Max chips differ in the number of GPU cores, memory bandwidth, and maximum addressable RAM. We got the impression that Apple wanted to gain experience in experimenting with the core count, quote. We're not trying to experiment, figure things out that way, explained Shimpy. Ultimately we're not commercial semiconductor manufacturers. We develop chips specifically for a particular product generation.

So many people have have said this both officially and off the record, that this sentiment that Apple builds chips for products. Apple doesn't build chips and then figure out what to do with them. That's part of the whole deal with Apple Silicon. Is they're not just building oh we should just have a a uh you know A good line of chips, then we'll figure out what to do with them. It's like no, when a chip is designed it's

four specific products. Now sometimes it's easy. It's like, oh, we're making a ship for the iPhone. You think we're gonna have an iPhone? We're totally gonna have an iPhone. But even there it's like, what features will this iPhone have? What are the requirements of this iPhone? What things do you want us to make better than the previous one? Um and sometimes it goes awry, as we'll discuss later. Um, but even like we've heard things about um

chips and entire computers they were originally designed and built and planned for a product that never shipped or shipped in a different form and just ended up being repurposed. So, you know, things happen. But The this is gets back to what we were talking about with the uh the S O I C M H chiplet architecture thing for the M five Pro and M five Max, where there's separate dives for the CPU and GPU. It's like well

Now that they've got this chiplet architecture, they can mix and match all sorts of stuff. And they're like, No, that's not how we do it. Yes, we will mix and match things, but only in the specific ratios, the specific combinations that we know we need for our specific products that we're planning this for. So

Again, don't expect a pop-up menu on the Apple configurator where you get to choose the CPU cores and choose the GPU cores, uh, beyond the typical like uh binning and sliced up into pieces options that we get today.

All right, let's talk ubiquity. Uh first of all, half of the internet wrote to ask, hey Marco, why not use site-to-site VPN for your swarm in the data center and your house? And I haven't spoken to Marco about this and I I don't know what your answer will be, but I wanted to mention that former and I think future sponsor Tailscale, which I am freaking in love with, um that what one of the great things about Tailscale is that it

it basically removes the idea of what network are you on when it comes to connecting to your other devices. So yes, a site-to-site VPN would fix Marco's problems perhaps when he's at home. But what if he leaves the home? And yes, I'm aware that there's like Unifies Teleport, which by the way I have not had a particularly great experience with. But uh one way or another.

What's great about Tailscale is I can be with my phone, I could be out. I could be watching Declan uh, you know, play football and check on something real quick. I could be in an airplane, I could be on another continent. I could be on Wi Fi, on cellular, it doesn't matter because you're always connected to your other devices, no matter what the networks are between them.

So I'm reckoning that maybe, Marco, that's why you haven't tried this option, or maybe you're about to tell me you've given up on tail scale and that site to site is the right answer for you. Um I ha so this is I actually tried this with the restaurant uh back about a year ago. I just couldn't figure out a way to do it because the way Ubiquity does those like site to side bridges, by default, it basically like it lets you

you know, transfer it lets you tunnel your traffic through the other place to go to the internet, but it like totally blocks access to all of your network devices. Casey, you had this issue too, right? Well, no. Um, I have briefly tried this with Unify Travel Router, um, which I am really a big fan of. But my problem with Teleport is that right I've never tried site-to-side VPN, but with teleport.

It's extremely fickle. Like even with their own device, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And it's considerably less reliable than TailScale is, which is really weird. Yeah. I I tried I tried teleport and I tried like various bridging options about a year ago. I did not have any luck getting them to work to be able to see devices on the local network. Uh that w on the remote local network. Um so I don't

I I can try it again sometime. I would love to not need tail scale on every machine just to be able to access it remotely. Um but there are other options too. Like for instance, I could like tunnel thro I could like set up Tailscale on one machine there and then like tunnel to that one to access the other ones. Like I have other options, um, but right now this was just easy to do and it's fine. Um and I and I set the tail scale keys on those machines not to expire.

Which is an important step. I learned I learned that the hard way for the first few machines I set up. Whoopsies. Yeah. So anyway. So far the tail scale option is working fine for me. In the future, if it doesn't anymore, then I'll look at other options. Um or if there is something that's really, really easy and that is reliable and flexible, then that's fine too. Um but for the moment it works fine.

All right. Uh we talked, I don't know, maybe a month or so ago, maybe two, about uh MLO, what is that, multi link something like that? Multi link operation, I think. There you go. Thank you. And uh how basically it doesn't work anywhere as per some article that we had talked about uh several episodes ago. Well, Ubiquity in the last couple of weeks has debuted a new product called Airwire.

And what their release video, their like trailer, if you will, and they do this for both software and hardware. Um, their trailer basically said uh the, you know, nobody could use MLO, particularly because the clients were always trash. And

What we're going to do is we're going to have our own Wi-Fi client that you then plug into via Ethernet, if I'm not mistaken. So the literal quote from the video is the infrastructure was ready. Now the clients are. And so there's also a blog post about this reading from the blog post.

Nearly every Wi-Fi seven client today advertises MLO compatibility, excuse me, capability, yet they only use one link at a time. Instead of combining bands through simultaneous multi radio operation, they simply switch between them. Airwire, this new product, is a plug and play USB C Wi Fi seven. Oh, I'm sorry, it's not Ethernet, it's USB C.

Uh Wi-Fi 7 client, engineered for true simultaneous multi-radio performance with STR MLO. It operates independently on 5 GHz and 6 GHz at the same time, aggregating spectrum instead of alternating between bands. The result is a real multi gigabit throughput, ultra low latency, and improved connection resilience. So pretty cool. Four inch uh three and a half inch by three and a half inch by one inch uh USB C rectangle.

That you plug in and it's got like a lid that kind of opens like a laptop lid, and that's the antenna. And it's like it's basically saying. Your laptop's Wi Fi can't do this. Your Mac Wi Fi can't do this. Whatever you have can't do this because nobody seems to ship.

uh simultaneous MLO Wi-Fi 7 clients, but we have a box that will do it. Plug this box into your wireless device. Stop using the wireless radio that's in your device, and instead have your device through the U this USB C connection, use our box and we'll do the Wi-Fi for you.

One of the clunkiest things I've seen since the trackballs that would clip onto the side of a laptop really compromises the uh the portability of your portable device, but if you absolutely positively need to have simultaneously simultaneous MLO because it's the only thing that can provide you that extra bit of bandwidth and lower latency that you desire, apparently Ubiquity will sell you.

Yeah, Ubiquiti sells a lot of very specialized products. Like if you have very specific needs for this kind of thing, now here's a product for you. Almost no one should buy this because almost no one needs this. But if you do, here it is. That's exactly right. Yeah, I I would say this thing looks and it's hard to get a good idea of scale, but it looks to me.

like the uh Mac minis that we had up until the most recent release with like a flap on the top, like John does. Oh, it's like an Apple TV actually. No, yeah, that's a good that's a better analogy. Yeah, I would say that. Uh anyways, it does look cool, but I agree with Marco, probably not for you or me. Uh now a lot of you are probably already firing off emails to us because we said in the beginning of the show that we stand with Ukraine and yet we are also talking positively about ubiquity.

Uh we have gotten this feedback a million and seven times, and so let's talk about it. Uh on January twenty-seventh, uh what is the name of this place? Hunterbrook Media. Uh reported, official ubiquity distributors appear to have continued supplying Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, sometimes rerouting shipments through intermediaries in high diversion risk countries like Turkey or Kazakhstan, uh trade records show.

Some appear to have used intermediates later sanctioned by the US for export control evasions. Ubiquity openly admits, quote, we do not have any visibility quote over purchases from its distributors, but legal experts told Hunter Book that that's not a viable defense. US export controls and sanctions operate on a strict liability basis, meaning even unwitten unwitting violations are still violations.

Ignorance is not really a practical excuse, or rather a legal excuse, a former s senior State Department sanctions official told Hunterbrook. A sanctions compliance lawyer added, You're doing ver you're you, doing very little effort, were able to determine that it's available for purchase by the Russian armed forces. The company's compliance team should be taking additional steps to prevent that. Uh this sounds really, really crappy and it might be really really crappy.

But there's a catch, John. Do you want to tell us about this? Yeah, well there's a couple other things from the article as well, uh talking about how uh Ubiquity did actually cut off direct sales to Russia when they invaded and all this other stuff or whatever. But here's the thing.

One of the reasons this has been in the notes forever and hasn't even made it into overtime is because as soon as the story came out I added it to the document and I'm like, oh I'll just let that um it didn't make it in time for a show, but like by next week I'm sure we'll have more stories and I can add more links to it. And there just weren't any. And every time someone brought it up, I would say, Where did you hear about this?

And they would tell me, and every single source was always s uh pointing back to this Hunterbrook is it Hunterbrook Media? Hundred Burk Capital. Capital Five. Yeah. Anyway, and like everything pointed back to Hunter Book. I'm like, there was no corroboration from no other sources from literally every place you saw there's a YouTube video about it all, but it's the person for Hunter Book on the video. There's a blog post about it, but they're just linking back to the Hunter Book and like.

Like are there is there any other source for this? And just eventually it's just like, well, I there's never apparently there's never gonna be a second source for this. It's just gonna be Hunter Brooks. I figure we should talk about it just in case people wanna know about it, because we do talk about ubiquity a lot. But the disclaimer on the actual article that we will link from Hunterbrook says. Uh based on Hunterbrook Media's reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short on

the stock symbol for ubiquity and long a basket of comparable securities at the time of publication. So I forget I couldn't look this up by googling or, you know, I I didn't couldn't find this in our history, but I believe we have talked in the past about a similar situation. Maybe it was also Hunter Brook. Where where it's like

Some company shorts a stock. And if you short a stock, you make money if that stock price goes down and you lose potentially unlimited money if the stock price goes up. So some company will short a stock. and then post a negative story about that company in the hopes to make the stock go down. And Disclaiming it and saying, here's a big negative story about ubiquity. And by the way, just so you know, we make money if the stock price of this company goes down.

Which is fine. Maybe they're shorting it because Ubiquity's doing a terrible thing. Like you know, it's not doesn't it doesn't mean that they're lying to try to make the stock go down. Maybe they're saying, Hey, we're shorting it'cause we know they're doing a bad thing and we think people will agree with us and that will make the stock go down and then we'll make money.

But the fact that I cannot find a single other source that doesn't eventually lead back to this one hundred book media story makes me question this a little bit. Now, I fully believe The first of all it's a fact that Russia is using ubiquity stuff. Okay. The question is

What is Ubiquity doing to stop that? Are they doing enough? And again in the article you'll see that they have cut off direct sales to them and they they've banned all Russian IPs and they've done a bunch of other stuff, but still the fact remains Russia is getting these products. through intermediaries and resellers and ubiquity as claiming ignorance or whatever. So I'm not sure what to make of it because I'm not an investigative reporter on the Russia beat.

Uh, but obviously, as we noted before, we do stand with U Ukraine. Russia is terrible. Uh they shouldn't be getting ubiquity stuff. The fact that they are is something that ubiquity should stop. But I don't know how much credence to give this report that ubiquity is a

is knowingly acting badly for its own self interest. It's plausible companies do it all the time, but you know, do with this information what you will. The link will be in the show notes. You can read it yourself. Let me add a bit more information here that's I think extremely pertinent to this. So This is a investment firm that has has taken a short position. And again, so that means they make money if the stock goes down. Now, if you do this to something like Apple or Google.

It's gonna be hard to make a dent, but ubiquity is different. If you take a look at Ubiquiti's stock, It's pretty unusual in a few ways. One of the biggest ways Is that the founder and CEO still owns almost all of the company? There's very little public stock actually issued. And there's not that much liquidity and there's not that much trading volume because there's not that many shares. So if you look at Ubiquiti's stock price over, you know, the last few years, it goes all over the place.

It's easy to manipulate. So if you were trying to make a bunch of money on a short position, if you could put a story out there and the stock dives 20 or 30%. you're gonna make a lot more money than if you try to hit a bigger stock that has a a huge amount more trading volume and a huge amount more shares, and maybe you only make it go down one percent.

So if you wanted to manipulate a stock in the tech business, Ubiquity would be a really interesting choice for that because of the very unusual dynamics of its stock relative to other well-known tech companies. So that's why you see, I think, a lot of these kind of weird stories trying to like move the ubiquity stock because it works and it works. Pretty effectively compared to most other targets. So I think stories like this you have to take with a large grain of salt.

If the Russian military has equipment from ubiquity. Well, everyone has equipment from Ubiquity. It's a very popular company that sells a huge amount of tech and networking gear all over the world. If there's a huge market of demand for it. And again, this is not saying Ubiquiti sold it to Russia. This is saying that Ubiquity is not adequately policing its third party sellers to make sure that third party sellers who buy it from Ubiquity don't resell it to Russia.

That's kind of a lot to put on the company, honestly. Like I I mean that's the law. The whole point is that that's the law, that you don't get to say, well, we just give it to distributors. What they do with it after is not our problem. The question is are they doing enough? That's what it comes down to. Right. And it kind of sounds like they're doing a reasonably okay job of like doing their diligence and like not like knowingly sending it that way, but like

If they sell to somebody and then that person goes and sells it, like you're never gonna get a hundred percent compliance on that. And a product like like products like Ubiquities products that have they sell in such high volumes. And they sell all over everywhere, that's gonna be really hard to get 100% compliance on. So given like the the problem space that this is.

And then given that this only Only this particular media reporting seems to be about this this issue and that the company doing the media reporting stands to make a lot of money by a stock going down that is very volatile and can and swings in huge amounts based on media reporting.

I have a hard time taking this story super seriously. I mean, I I take it seriously, but I just think like i i you don't know where the cause and effect is. If you're trying to make money shorting a stock and you find a stock that is like as you described, Marco, has high volatility, um You would look at that and say, is there any way we can make the stock go down? And one of the ways you can make it go down is revealing true information about a bad thing the company's doing.

It doesn't mean the thing isn't true. Your motivation for doing it is for you to make money, not because you're just magnanimous and want the world to know about this bad thing. But, you know, it's like doing negative uh, you know, uh a research on your political opponent or whatever.

Uh you're doing it because you you want to rin the win the race or whatever, but the information can also be true. So I don't know. That's why I say I don't know what to make of this. Like The motivations are clearly we're doing this to make money and we want the stock to go down and and the reasons we would pick ubi ubiquities of reasons you say, but all that doesn't mean that the story is not true.

Um and so that's that's why you would I would hope that I would see some other reporting about it. If this is actually an issue, if ubiquity is uniquely badly policing its distributor network or one of the worst in policing its distributor network or something like that. But just no one else picked up this story. No one else wanted to that I've said found no other reporting it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just that every single person who reported this to me, I always said,

What's your source for this? And they all pointed back to the Hunter book. So that's why I say, do with it what you will. Decide uh on your own, uh, whether you this changes your opinion of Ubiquiti or not. But the story is out there and you can read it, and it's from this particular source.

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Without further ado, John, it's a sad day. Reading from nine to five Mac. Apple has confirmed to nine to five Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It is being removed from Apple's website as of Thursday, March twenty sixth. Apple has also confirmed to nine to five Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. I'm sorry for your loss.

I mean it's nice that we just recorded an episode before this came out where uh I basically said, I can't believe they haven't killed it yet. What are they waiting for? Well, they were just waiting for us to drop the episode apparently. Um I mean

I a lot of people will write again and I when people write in and say, you know, I wonder what John thinks of this, I do wonder if they're like, you know, uh only a sporadic listener of ATP because God, we've talked about this topic so much. Uh And if you had listened to every episode and had not tuned out like Casey every time I mention the Mac Pro, I feel like you wouldn't.

I I feel like you would know how I feel about this and how I feel about it is what I said on last episode. Like the machine has been effectively dead for a long time. Like especially with the you know, the the f past few milestones that happened when it was like

We were waiting for, you know, news and rumors or whatever and I think it was an episode a while back where I was like, notice how there's no rumors at all about anything having to do with the Mac Pro and sure enough, whenever the events came along, there was in fact nothing to do with the Mac Pro and it's like, Well, that's it, it's over.

Like they upgraded the studio to the M three Ultra, which itself was weird. Did they upgrade the Mac Pro to it? No, they did not. Well maybe they'll do it the next event. No, they didn't. And it's like, well that's it. It's dead. It's done. Like

This is not what you do to a machine that's a going concern. And then it became ridiculously embarrassing. And I made the snarky toot about uh the the Neo being faster in single core than the Mac Pro because it's just so old and expensive and of course the prices never changed and You know, it just needed to be put out of its misery. Apple, you know, does Apple was clearly no longer making this product, and I would much rather see it.

Put out of its misery and discontinued immediately rather than uh waiting for the Mac Studio to replace it and saying, This new M five Ultra Mac Studio replaces the Mac Pro. They're not even waiting until then. Why wait? There's no point. Uh so it's gone and buried. Um if you want to hear me talk about the Mac Pro in the more positive sense, not the M2 Ultra one, because it's hard to say anything positive about that one. But uh the twenty nineteen Mac Pro, the one that I'm actually using.

Uh we'll put a link in the notes to uh an episode one, two, three of the last detail on relay with Dan and Tom, and I was their guest and uh you're supposed to talk about like an item that means something to you design-wise.

And I chose the twenty nineteen Mac Pro and talked about it at length. If you're wondering why I like this machine, obviously it's from a design perspective, but uh Take a look into that episode if you want to hear me uh think on uh better days when the Mac Pro 2019 Mac Pro was a really amazing machine when it was released. That was in twenty nineteen. We're in twenty twenty six now. And the M two Ultra One was really never uh a very good machine.

Um and w people ask what are my plans? Obviously, again, if you listen to the show, you know my plans. My plans are I'm gonna get a uh an M something Mac Studio most likely, assuming I can stomach the RAM and storage costs, which that's not the Mac Studio's fault. That's AI's fault, but you know, it is what it is. That's my fault for waiting too long, presumably, although I'm I'm glad I waited because not that I don't want an M4 Max, but I wanted to wait until the, you know.

Until all the possibilities had foreclosed and now they have everything everything has foreclosed. There's gonna be no Mac Pro Map. Apple says there's not gonna be one. And by the way, don't wait for a new one because that's not happening either. They're really making sure you know that this is an X product. Uh, unlike for example, like I I think Gruber gave this example, like the weird thing where they stop selling the big home pod.

And it's like, well, that's it. The big home pot is dead. And then a little bit later they introduced a new big home pod. It's like, What? What I thought this was a dead product because it was just dead for a little while. But Apple wants you to know this is not a home pod situation. This is a dead dead situation as in. We have no plans for another one. It's not like there's gonna be a new Mac Pro at next year's WWDC or something like that. Just forget it.

Um Yeah, and Apple doesn't often tell you they're definitely not gonna make another thing. Like I think the only one I can think of is when they a couple years ago gave a statement to some press saying that they were not gonna make any more bigger IMAX. Remember that? Yeah, yeah. That was like don't w don't wait for a twenty seven inch one when this twenty four inch one is out. Like we're not it's not gonna happen.

Um and and you know, these statements are always like we have no plans, um, which means they currently have no plans. In five years, there could be plans. But you know, all they're saying is it's not gonna be a home pod situation. We're not discontinuing this because we ran out of stock before WWC. That's not the situation. Ja, and again, it's... shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who's watching Apple or listening to this program because the product was so incredibly dead.

The I mean obviously as soon as they didn't put the M3 Ultra in it to even continue the farce of it being a Mac Studio in a bigger case, they didn't even continue that. So clearly this has been dead for a long time. Um, the only thing I have to say retrospectively about it is, you know, again, a repeat of things I've said in the past, but uh people don't listen to every episode. Um the Mac Pro is essentially the only

failure of Apple Silicon because the job of Apple Silicon was to replace, you know, Intel processors with Apple processors in all of Apple's products. And it did do that eventually to great effect in every single product, to amazing effect in every product. Except one, and it's the Mac Pro. And it's not because Apple had a difference of opinion and said, well, we don't need a big computer like the Mac Pro. They planned to make a chip for the Mac Pro, but they could not do it economically.

There was at least the M one plan for like the M M one like big giant mega the coin ultra stuck together chip. Um, there was diagrams of it, there was things leaked from Apple or whatever. I'm not sure how far extended past that. German says in twenty twenty two they canned their final plan for like a quad processor or whatever, but it's a thing that they wanted to do.

But they could not do it. And there's a million reasons why. Like you're not gonna sell a lot of them. It's very expensive, yada yada. Like it makes sense, but it is the one failure. And lots of people are saying, Okay, but that was a different era. Nobody needs expandable RAM or internal storage or slots. All those things are are you know.

We don't need those anymore. Uh setting aside whether there's really zero use for slots, I mean part of that is Apple's decision to not support third-party GPUs, but setting that aside, especially in the AI age, I would argue that potentially having a giant case slot. Stocked with a bunch of NVIDIA GPUs for doing AI stuff would actually be a useful thing, but Apple doesn't get along with NVIDIA. Anyway, um, set the slots aside entirely.

Just within the realm of is there any room in Apple's product line for something that is not the something more powerful than Mac Studio? I've always said and I continue to say, absolutely yes, and here's why. Right now we have great examples of applications that run on Macs that we wish would go faster.

that we wish had more capability. Local models, local AI models. Yeah, you can gang together a bunch of Mac Studios, but basically local models will use every ounce of computation and memory you could possibly throw at them. The Mac Studio is great, but it's a plus size Mac Mini. It's not that big. With the new SOIC M H chiplet architecture, where Apple can do separate dies and put them into things, th they are now able to make chips.

that are bigger than they used to when they tried when they would take like The M whatever max. which was close to the what the reticle limit, close to the close to the biggest chip that they could possibly make. And they would take two of those and combine them and call it an ultra. And it's like, well there's no point if the ultra fits in the studio, there's no point in ever having

Anything other than the studio because that's the biggest ship we can make. But now with the CPU and GPU at least being separate. The CPU can be as big as M4 Max or whatever. The GPU can be big as M4 Max and you can combine two of those and now you've got a monster chip. But guess what? You cannot put that monster chip inside a Max Studio because it can't dissipate the heat.

Why does Apple still need something, whether it's a Mac Pro or whatever, something bigger than the Mac Studio? Because they're leaving computation on the table. You they can make it is possible with the current technology we've seen of the M5 Pro and Max to make a chip that is too hot to fit in the Mac Studio.

Now, obviously, if they ship a chip in the Mac Studio, it's not going to be too hot to fit in the Mac Studio. But they're also not going to plan and design and build the chip that would be too hot. But they could. You could make it bigger, faster, hotter. And why would you make it bigger and hotter? Because it will do more computation. Like it will be faster. It will h you could put more memory on it, like You need a bigger case that can dissipate more heat.

just for the CPU GPU stuff and their current plans. No slots, no third party GPUs, no expandable memory, no none of that. Just basically something bigger than the Mac Studio. And that is my argument. Maybe I'll write a post about it someday, but probably not, because I'm old and tired.

Um that you know, the case for a true Mac Pro successor, they did, they made it. The twenty nineteen Mac Pro was amazing. It fulfilled everything that it needed to fulfill, but that was a different era. In the current era, there is still a place. for a Mac that is more powerful than the Mac Studio because the Mac Studio it's got its own little thermal corner and it has amazing capacity and it can cool basically the biggest chip Apple could make with like the M3 Ultra.

But now I believe Apple has clearly the capability to make a chip that is more powerful but too hot to fit in the Mac Studio. And where are they going to put that? That's why I think I will still be there will I will still be lobbying for and dreaming and hoping for that Apple should make a a Mac that has better more cooling capacity.

than the Mac Studio, so they can put a bigger chip in it that wouldn't fit in the Mac Studio. I'll also separately believe that the role of slots is still potentially good or whatever, but that's that's

nebulous. But the the the heat capacity thing is not nebulous. That's and that's that's why the old M2 Ultra Mac Pro was so ridiculous because we knew that chip fits in the studio. You can buy it in the studio and yet they're putting it in this cavernous case with massive cooling. It was just a complete waste. Um, so fingers crossed for let's say seven years from now, we'll we'll report back here.

And see if Apple has made a bigger Mac than the Mac Studio. The rumor we had was that there was no plans for a larger chip than the Ultra until at least the M seven generation, but that was a vague rumor and it was a long time ago, so I'm not holding my breath for that, but Yeah. RAP Mac Pro, it was already dead in all but name. Now it is dead dead. It is clarifying for purchasers. It is clarifying for me. And yet.

That still remains the one glaring failure. Not maybe glaring. Glaring to me. The one glaring to me failure of Apple Silicon is they could not figure out how to make a replacement for the biggest, fastest, hottest chip. That would require a big case to cool. They tried, they failed. It's not a big deal to anyone except for me, but I still think they should shoot for that.

What is it that you think uh you you mentioned AI, you know, uh uh processing and stuff like that. Is there anything else that you can think of that would require just that much memory, that much Uh compute. I mean obviously gaming. I mean not I know people don't care about that and Apple's gaming performance is amazing.

But yeah, gaming will also use all the transistors you can throw at it. Like, you know, well the frame rate is good, but could it be better? Yes. It can always you can always just especially GPUs, they're so embarrassingly parallel and everything. that would be another application not that Apple's gonna make an eight thousand dollar computer to play games on or whatever, but that's that's an easy one. But but no, the AI thing is just so such a no brainer now because

We are in such an early part of that curve where the like the models that everyone wants to use literally can't run on anything that even on a desktop they can't run. They only run on sixty thousand dollar NVIDIA rack mount things and probably multiple ones of those given how many tokens they used and That's that's a uh a place where we haven't been for so long, where there is a thing we want to do in computing that cannot fit on your desk.

An AI is currently that. It cannot fit on your desk. I mean, I guess it could if you, you know, spent a few hundred grand and put a rack there, but Like it doesn't fit in a normal desktop computer of any reasonable size and dimension and and it's gonna be a while before we catch up with that. And why do we ever need to do that? Why wouldn't we just always run it on the server?

Because local has advantages, obviously. Like the you know, setting aside all the privacy and other stuff like that, being able to do stuff locally is advantageous for multiple reasons, which is why we never fully converted to thin clients where everything is in the data center. So um Yeah. Gaming and I guess

AI. And it saying AI is like, oh, that's just one use case. It's like a million use cases. Like, yeah. This is not a a narrow uh use case. This is we don't even know what the full possibility space is of this technology until it starts to level off a bit. Yeah, that's like saying servers. Well, servers can do a lot, actually. There's a lot of different s yeah, anyway. Yeah, I I think the The Mac Pro, you know, for Apple killing it now, it's kind of like when they killed the iPod.

Like not that many years ago. Like when the by the time they killed the iPod it had really effectively been dead for a pretty long time. And yet it was still a useful product for DJs and you can't even say that about the Mac Pro. Yeah. Well, but you know, the Mac Pro I'm sure the Mac Pro had like five or six customers.

You know, I'm sure there there were people who filled it up with the sound processing cards like you know, like which was about the only reason to have it. Um But if you look at the arc of the Mac Pro. I assert that the last good Mac Pro was sixteen years ago. The 2010 Mac Pro. Oh, 2019 was amazing. What are you talking about? Here's why it wasn't. Okay, so let me let me go back a a a minute.

This product from Two thousand eight, the first Mac Pro, which was you know basically the Intel version of the G f of the Power Mac G five. Um that was a great La the Paramount G five, you know, it wasn't had some flaws, but like it had it was a great line of computers. When they when the Intel transition happened, the 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, those were the four Mac Pro models that were unique.

There was the update in twenty twelve, which is how we got our first favicon with the new badge over the uh Mac Pro. But it'cause it wasn't really an update. Um it was just like they kind of they just raised the minimum spec. and added one more top-end configuration option for the family that they already had been using for two years, because Intel released like one more little tiny model up top.

Um, but it was not really a new Mac Pro, not really even a speed bump because the components were all the same, just a different selection of them. Um but anyway, so you had four unique Mac Pros in that old cheese grater case. And those it was, you know, every couple of years, Intel would release a new series of the Westmere Xeons. I guess that that was one of them. They would r the new series of the workstation grade Xeons, uh, about about every 18 months, and that's when we get Mac Pros.

and they were great. They were extremely capable. they were very competitive with other options at the time. Like you could if you bought like an O six or O eight Mac Pro, like my first one was the O eight one, that O eight Mac Pro not only outperformed everything else on the market for the for the Mac user in O eight.

in every way, includ i in single thread it would at least match it and multi-thread it would destroy it. And, you know, you'd have GPU advantages, you would have huge amounts of potential RAM and storage. The RAM was ECC and everything was more reliable. Like huge reasons to have the Mac Pro in those years. And it was reasonably price competitive. Like it wasn't cheap. A decent one might cost you like

twenty five hundred to thirty five hundred dollars um back in those times. And that was reasonably competitive with high-end desktops and high-end laptops of the time. And then that would be relevant. That would be like a well performing computer for for most people. five years maybe for John twenty five years? A little bit over ten. I use my twenty. I think my two thousand eight Mac Pro was I I used for a little bit over ten years. Sure. Like so those computers like at the time they existed.

They were competitive. They were reasonably priced. They were extremely capable for a huge variety of what Mac users needed and wanted to do. And they w they remained competitive for years after they were out. Look at what happened after that. So 2012 wasn't a real update. 2013, the trash can. The trash can was almost none of those things.

Apple redesigned it to take away almost all of its advantages. It was no longer reasonably priced. It was no longer as capable because Almost immediately after it was released, it lost single threaded performance, or maybe even it already was.

Multithreader performance was good for a little while, except until well until it died from thermal problems with the GPUs. GPU performance was again okay for a little while, but it was it didn't remain competitive for very long. It was way less expandable. And way more expensive. So they shrunk them by the by their own choices. The market for professional workstations was it's was still a healthy market back then. But by Apple's own choices with the trash can redesign, they shrunk its market.

And then they also push the price way up. Then what happened? Then nothing happened for a while. The iMac Pro was good. That was kind of a one off. We're not talking about that right now. The next Mac Pro was the twenty nineteen one. Yes, six years later. Um so they they neglected this market.

For six years. So during that time, there were no Macs with expansion slots. There were like, go ahead, try to kill the market as best as you can. Then in twenty nineteen, they released John's current Mac Pro, the Intel twenty nineteen Mac Pro, the last Intel one. It started at what was it, six thousand dollars, John? They designed a computer that starts at six thousand dollars.

So you've already this was something that, you know, the the previous tower version started at like twenty seven hundred or three thousand dollars, and you've now doubled the entry price. skyrocketing this market way up, like you are losing so many people from that. All of the GPUs you could buy were also pretty expensive. So, you know, you're really pushing price here. So you've now you're limiting it really to extreme high-end buyers only.

No hobbyists are gonna buy it. No power users are gonna buy it. Like no one like John who mostly wants to use it regular ways but wants to play games with good GPUs. Like none of those people are gonna buy it except John. But like so they shrunk the market. So far down.

less than a year before the Apple Silicon transition. And of course they would have known that when they released it. So what they did was through their own choices and their own In some ways negligent, in some ways just mistakes.

they kept shrinking the market for this product massively by their own choice. Now what was also happening in that time was The market for professional desktops was itself shrinking, not just from Apple, but from everybody as more people were moving their work to laptops.

And as Apple was losing a lot of that high end computing market, anything that was using Nvidia's CUDA, uh that all moved off of Apple platforms. A lot of high end video editing was moving off of Apple platforms. Apple was losing a lot of the high end pro markets already for other reasons. Then Apple Silicon happens. And what Apple did was design this amazing architecture that serves pretty much everything below that need. Amazingly well.

We have amazing phones all the way up to amazing workstation class laptops and the Mac Studio, which is like a pretty great overall, you know, asterisk here and there, but like pretty great overall computer. Except Look at the performance of the Ultra Chips versus the Max Chips.

it doesn't scale up that well. It scales up basically only in some of the GPU compute benchmarks, like the metal, like metal and open CL. Like those scale up. Nothing else really does. And part of the Apple Silicon architecture also is you don't get upgradable RAM So you have to buy it all up front.

And of course then that means you have to pay Apple's prices. So it's again the so the RAM, super expensive, cannot be upgraded ever down the road. Neither can most uh neither can the SSDs in any of these products. Um so you have

Total lack of upgrade ability, everything being expensive up front, and limitations on the capacities of these things compared to where they were before when they were socketed. So What Apple did with the entire Apple Silicon transition was lop off the high end of the market in either performance, price, or limitations.

So and so the so you have, you know, John's twenty nineteen Mac Pro, then less than a year later the Apple Silicon transition begins, then the Mac Pro M two Ultra Generation, which as John was saying was just not useful. It was like, what is the market for this? If you cut off GPU expansion, And it's still insanely expensive compared to everything else.

No longer GPU expansion, no longer RAM expansion. They just kept cutting off markets, reducing the selling proposition, increasing the pricing on everything, on everybody trying to buy it for whatever they did need it for, just cutting off markets one by one. And now AI is happening, and Apple is just nowhere in that business. And maybe they'll get there, but they are currently nowhere. So buy Apple's own

Failings and decisions and directions, they are doing great in every single other part of the Mac hardware lineup. The Mac hardware lineup is awesome, but the Mac Pro, they just kept cutting off limbs.

And some of those were inevitable in the long run. A lot of them weren't. A lot of them were just bad execution or, you know, greedy pricing decisions from them and like and they just kept cutting off and cutting off and cutting off. So yeah It's dead now, but the last good Mac Pro was the twenty ten Mac Pro 16 years ago.

I don't think everything you said supports that. I the twenty nineteen was the last good Mac Pro, clearly. I know it was a shame that it got Apple Silicon, but like when it was released there was no Apple Silicon. So we can only you know, even though Apple knew that it was coming, whatever

At twenty nine when that twenty nineteen Mac Pro was released, it was an amazing Mac Pro. Now granted the price was higher, uh, as you noted, it was not as economical as it was, but I think that's a as the two thousand eight one. But I think that's just a sign of the times in that Apple realized we have to move up market because That's where that that's where the people who are going to be able to afford this computer that we want to make exist.

And the other users will are better served by our lower end stuff. You know, at that point you could do Final Cut on an Intel laptop still, even though it wasn't as good as it is in Apple Silicon. So they went up market with it, which is fine. You can go up market with a high end computer. Uh but the the twenty nineteen Mac Pro is what they promised to that twenty seventeen Mac round tables is we're gonna make a modular Mac Pro that's our biggest, baddest computer.

How long will it be before Apple ever makes another computer with the capabilities of the twenty nineteen Mac Pro? Setting just in terms of RAM. It could hold uh 1.5 terabytes of RAM. Granted, it was slow RAM, not like today's super fast RAM, but it was 2019. Massive RAM capacity. How long?

Has it been or was it? I'm not even sure I'll have to look up the stats in this. Before there was ever a Mac that could contain as much GPU processing power as the 2019 Mac Pro, which I believe could hold four AMD GPUs, two dual cards in it. It was either it was so long before that was bested by any Apple Silicon things. I have to look up the stats to see how close it is to being competitive with the M3 Ultra, which is the current Mac GPU. Yeah, wasn't it like this year? I think it was recent.

I have to look up what the but like the thing is like, well what am I gonna do with all those GPUs? What the hell's the point of that? I can't play games on it. There's no game that's gonna run on four NVD uh four AMD uh GPUs.

Again, what could I do with a box filled with GPUs in today's age? I can think of some things you can do with that are that aren't gaming, you know? And their whole relationship with NVIDIA and how they messed that up as you noted is thing. But like the twenty nineteen Mac Pro, when it was released, was had capabilities that were so far above any other Mac in terms of

what it could do and what you could stuff inside it. Because remember back then you could put in uh you know, graphics cards. You could buy them from Apple, you can put in third party ones. You could expand the storage. You could expand the RAM. All inside the big giant tower case like

It fulfilled the promise of that coming again, listen to the episode of uh the last detail, hear me uh talk about how I love the design of this thing. And yeah, it did go upmarket from the 2018. But twenty eighteen was was in an era when power users would buy desktops. And by twenty nineteen we were no longer in an era where power users were even interested in desktops. It was more of like a home thing. So who is gonna be interested in an ultra powerful thing like this? People for whom

A$6,000 starting price is not a big deal, right? That's the market they were going after. And the 2019 Mac Pro hit it. And then we were just off into the wilderness and how long will it be before at this rate, how long will it be before any Mac can hold one point five terabytes of RAM? And again, I know it's faster RAM these days, yada yada, but like

You know, how long will it be before you can uh add as much GPU capability uh like relative to its time? Like in twenty nineteen, the amount of GPU you you could fit in here, scale that linearly with uh, you know, today's standards. It the what Apple is doing with the GPUs is amazing, but it is non-expandable. And you cannot like, you know, how many watts of heat of GPUs could you put inside this? If you had that many watts of heat. in a Mac today.

Just think of the GPUs, the Apple designed first party GPU you could put in there if you had a case that could dissipate it and a GPU that was designed to be in that case that could dissipate it. And so I will defend 2019 Mac Pro forever. I love the twenty eight two thousand eight Mac Pro.

you know, I I used it for a decade. Like I loved that computer. It was amazing, but it was from a different time. The twenty nineteen Mac Pro fulfilled the promise that Apple made in the twenty seventeen Mac round table. It's just, you know, it got run over by Apple Silicon. Like it is what it is. Like I'm not I wouldn't want Apple Silicon to have been delayed for for the honor of the twenty nineteen Mac Pro, but

They released what they said they were gonna do and they did a really, really good job of it, and then we're back in the wilderness. And speaking of the trash can, by the way, lots of people make this comparison and in some ways it's

unfair and in some ways it is entirely fair and shows how times have changed. The Mac Studios the the trash can, right? That's it's it's got its own little thermal corner. It's got no expansion. It's all in one tiny little thing. It doesn't fulfill the same needs as the two thousand eight Mac Pro. Uh, but it was fine when it had a bigger subling next to it or when Apple was pretending they were still interested in that market. But now

They're basically saying like the Mac Studio is the big highest end desktop we're ever gonna need. It's like saying the trash can is the highest end desktop we're ever gonna need. And the market said no to the trash can. The market said, Apple, we don't like your trash can. It's bad. You're not able to update it.

uh you need to do something about that. At least Apple's able to update the Mac Studio. But I think the market will not sh put not push back against the Mac Studio the same way they did about the trash camp because it's we're in a different time now. So and as you noted, Apple has so thoroughly abandoned and screwed over the market that would buy a seven thousand dollar expandable computer that it will be a long time before

they're receptive to anything that Apple introduces. But I still say essentially a bigger Mac Studio. I'm not saying it has to be a tower, but like for the people who would buy a Mac Studio. Would you buy one that has two times the computation cap capability that is also twice as large? A lot of people would say yes. They would say, Give me twice as much RAM, give me twice as much GPU, give me twice as much CPU, so I can run my local models that are twice as big.

Um or whatever whatever you know future computations we need. I don't think Apple has anything like that planned, but that's what I'm looking forward to sometime before I die. You know, to build on something you said earlier, uh you know, what if you had the ability to be

Hotter. What if you had the ability to use more power? Don't we all want that, Casey? Tell me about it. Um But I I think there is there is an interesting thought exercise that we may or may never may or may not ever get to experience or see the end of. which is, you know, the the A series of chips

I think we can all agree were designed at the start to be power efficient. Like that was, if not the priority, it was certainly extremely high on the list. And And to extract or extrapolate from what John was saying earlier, you know, what if there was a chip where perhaps power efficiency just wasn't

Or if it was on the priority list at all, it was way, way, way further down. And what would that look like? And how incredible could that be? Because these Apple chips, you know, the the the H series chips, the M series chips. They're incredible, incredibly fast and incredibly power efficient.

Imagine what it would be like if they took the the the gloves off and said, you know what, we're just gonna use as much power as we need. Well I think that's the wr wrong way to look at it though, because I think y you still wanna make the most power efficient thing possible because

think of how many more how much more computation you can do within a given power envelope. Like that's the beauty of the ultra and even the max for that matter. The the computation that is done in like the M whatever Max chip CPU and GPU compared to the heat that is dissipated is amazing when you compare it to a standalone Intel or AMD CPU and a standalone AMDB uh AMD or NVIDIA GPU.

Like the total amount of heat dissipated by like those discrete components versus the total amount that Apple's chips uh dissipate to do the same job. Like that that's miraculous. Like that's why I'm saying like That's you are you've done it Apple. You have chips that use very little power and do amazing computation. You're able to put in its thing the size of the Mac Studio something that competes with stuff that requires a giant tower case.

Imagine what you could do with that exact same check and just put twice as much in it and make it twice as hot. Like, I don't want them to say throw power to the side. I want them to use their power efficiency to say this means we can put more GPU cores in. This means we can add because

I mean s maybe more CPU cores, so maybe they've used too many, although Threadripper would say there's still room for more CPU cores. But there's always room for more GPU cores. Like there's always room for that. And so Take advantage of this amazing technology you have, especially with the chiplets. Cause before you could say, well,

That's all well and good, but they're already making the biggest possible chip they can because they do combine CPU. You know, it's it because it's an SOC, they're already at the limit. But now they're not at the limit anymore. At the very least, the the limit should have just doubled because they have d they're doing separate dives for the CPU and GPU. So

Fingers crossed for the future. But I I I agree with you, Casey, that I think they could do great things, but I think the reason they can do great things. is because they're never going to ignore power efficiency. And that's an advantage that lets you put more stuff in. before you run out of like whatever the maximum wattage is for a tower computer. Yeah, for your your outlet in the your n North American fifteen amp circuit. Yeah, and they're not even close to that. Like the studio dissipates

so little heat. Like it's so tiny. It it does have fans, but it's so tiny and so quiet and dissipates so little heat and it's like it's competing with like these giant PC towers with a thousand fans and nine hundred watt power supply or whatever. Yeah. But and and keep in mind like you know, it as like to kind of expand on that, like You know, efficient like w being willing to be less efficient. Is not

i is not the limiting factor here. It i it is total power use.'Cause like, you know, for what gates the performance of modern processors is basically how much heat can you how much power are you allowed to consume And how much heat can you get away from the chip as quickly as possible so the chip can continue generating that generating that much heat? Um and so efficiency always will lead to better performance. Um I think the bigger issue with

with Apple's limitation here is architectural. That as I was saying earlier, like Apple Silicon, it it scales up really well through the whole low end of the performance. Uh line and well into the mid-range and and well into what most people would consider a high end. But once you start trying to go past Some of these upper limits. Again, look at look at benchmarks of the M3 Ultra vr versus the M3 Max. And certainly versus the M4 Max, which came out at the same time. Um

And the Ultra is not very competitive unless you have very specific workloads. And even those, even the GPU workloads that scale the best for the M3 Ultra. The M four Max. comes very close. Like i so the the actual need for the M3 Ultra is very, very small. The main reason to buy it is that it raises other limits like the RAM limit. Although I don't know if you've looked recently at Mac

studio availability and shipping times. Yeah. You can't even get the the the high RAM ones. And you know why by the way. If you currently uh if you currently try to spec a one twenty eight gig Mac studio, it says pick up Wednesday, August twenty sixth.

Oh my word. Yeah, like and like that makes perfect sense because uh as we said, like uh you know, Apple does component deals for uh locked in the price for a long period of time and that's an advantage to them at the early stages of this terrible RAM crisis. But I can bet you they are not pre-purchasing and locking in purchases for the the whatever 128 gig RAM modules for the Mac Studio. That's more of a like if anyone orders this we'll get it built. Well guess what?

Now they can't get that stuff because like they don't keep they don't you know w when they're selling for like the laptops or whatever, they're like, Yeah, we're gonna pre order X number of million of these'cause we know that's how many you're gonna sell. How many Max Ram, Max Studios, do they even sell? So like, ah well, those when those orders come in, we'll just we'll just buy them at the market price at the time. Oops.

Now the market price is insane. Maybe you can't even get those things. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah,'cause like'cause you can get like the one twenty eight gig uh MacBook Pro, the new MacBook Pros, you can get those like next week. Yeah,'cause they probably pre ordered and have a deal for those, but not for the next studio. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at the scaling up of Apple Silicon, like the way they've designed the architecture with unified memory and everything being like part of why it's so fast.

There's a lot of integration here. A lot of the controllers are on the die with the processor. Like there's there's a lot of integration of all the different components that if you look at modern PC architecture, there's a lot less of that. Like Some things have moved onto the processor that used to be separate chips. Like there used to be something called a north bridge and a south bridge and like

I don't I don't I haven't been paying too much attention to PC architecture recently, but like the the on on the PC side they're they're starting to look a lot more like Apple Silicon these days. Yeah, like stuff does like over time like s more stuff from the what used to be called the North Bridge moved into the processor and stuff like that, but like

as you scale up the performance of these architectures, integration gets you a lot of wins. And but the problem is the more stuff you integrate into the main SOC or the main CPU die. the less like expansion you have to to like broaden with some of the horizons here, unless you make a whole bunch of different

you know, parts of of the whole bunch of different processors that have a whole bunch of different controllers integrated into them. And so like, you know, y you you will see that like on high-end data center CPUs. You're not gonna see it in from Apple. You're not gonna see them make twelve different types of chips. You know, they might have like variants here and there. Anyway, so The Apple Silicon Architecture

is great for the bottom ninety percent of what people need. But for that top 10% of the market that needs like again, what if you need the 1.5 terabytes of RAM that the old Mac Pro supported? You still even even before this current RAM shortage, the Mac Studio maxed out at 512. A third of it. And that's years after the twenty nineteen MacBook.

And that's because the architecture is different. Like to because to put that much RAM in Apple Silicon, you need you know you need a whole bunch of the Apple Silicon chips fused together and'cause they have all the controllers built in. Like there's all the the level of integration they have It's just it's again, it's different architectural decisions. It is fantastic for all the computers that all the rest of us use.

but it it precludes them from offering these very high configurations. And I don't think the architecture scales well. So I don't I don't even think that if they did like the quad max chip. I don't even think that would be competitive. I think I'm guessing the reason why they didn't end up shipping that was probably partly because it would cost a lot. But I bet also, I bet it just wasn't worth it for enough people. Like I bet w they learned that when they scaled things up.

It didn't scale up enough to be worth that cost to any buyers. I bet that's the real reason. Well I I don't think so. You're saying like oh the Apple Silicon architecture can't scale up or whatever. Everything you cited for the problems with scaling linearly and stuff, that's all to do with the fusion architecture where they take two maxes and and stick them together end to end, right?

And that is their problem with scaling. The the first time they did that, they screwed something up with the GPU and that didn't even scale linearly. And then they fixed that. But it like that architecture of saying we don't want to build We either don't want to or can't build a chip this big on a single die because we're at the retica limit or whatever. So we're gonna take two of these other things to your point, two of these other chips that we already have to build for our laptop.

And we're not gonna do a whole separate chip, but we're just gonna take two of the laptop chips and we've also designed in a way for them to talk to each other with this, you know, fusion architecture where they stick to each other end to end, just like our old uh shirt says with uh two maxes flipped over and stuck together. That architecture does not scale well, but that's not Apple Silicon, that's the whatever it is, the silicon interposer or fusion architecture thing.

I think we're beyond that now, as evidenced by the chiplet architecture on the M5 Pro and M5 Mac. And so I'm not saying what Apple is going to do, but if they wanted to They could totally abandon the Silicon Interposer two maxes stuck together architecture. And just build a big dedicated CPU on its own die with no GPUs, and a big dedicated GPU on its own die with no CPUs.

and make them both at the reticle limit and stick them on a chip and there's your M5 Ultra. I would love for them to do that. I don't think they're going to, but I would love for them to do that. And that is still Apple Silicon. So there's nothing inherent in Apple Silicon that says you have to do that end-to-end thing. And that is the linear scaling barrier. That is the thing that is cost costs tons of money but doesn't give you the bang for your buck.

And so I think the you know, the runway is clear for them to do something better, especially with like two nanometer or whatever they end up going to in like the M six or M si I figure when that's gonna happen. Like the the next process shrink.

with the Chiplet architecture, frees them up to leave behind the ultra, the what has been the ultra architecture, which is taking two maxes and sticking them together. Because I think that is a cost savings and it's been cool, but it has essentially run its course.

It was never as good as it could have been, but it was a reasonable compromise to get something out better. And by the way, one of the other big advantages of the Ultra has, which you see in some of these reviews, is, and we don't talk about that much because it's not in the world we're in, but it has twice as many media units. And lots of people who do like these uh, you know, benchmarks of like, Oh, I'm exporting for Final Cut and like, huh.

No matter which M chip I use, it exports from Final Cut at like the same speed or like the Pro versus the Max. Why is it the same speed? Because that's all happening on the stupid media engine. And the only way to get it to go faster is get the Ultra because it's got double the amount of that stuff because it's two maxes stuck together. And lo and behold it goes twice as fast.

again, if you built a dedicated high end chip, maybe you'd put four media engines in. You know what I mean? Like you'd make different decisions. But to your point, it's like are the are they ever going to

Is it ever going to be economically feasible to make anything custom for the Mac Studio, or is even the Mac Studio stuck with? You just get the leftovers from what the laptops use. And maybe we can stick two maxes together and you should be happy with what you get, happy with your nonlinear scaling, whatever. It's better than a max. It is.

Uh, and people who pay for it if you want something better than a Macs, here's our ultra. But that's not the promised land of this, you know, of of performance. And so I do hope, especially with the Mac Pro gone for good now.

that they have some better plans for the studio. Cause I do and I I you know, the silicon interposer thing with the two maxes and that's also not particularly power efficient. Because and you're there's a bunch of stuff we talked about, there's a bunch of stuff on those chips that is

You don't need twice as many of those, but you get them because it's two maxes, right? It would be better if you could consolidate the parts that are in common and yada yada. So that's what I'm hoping for. And I don't think it's a limitation to Apple Silicon. It's just a limitation of the the

cost saving approach they have been using for the Ultra since the M One Ultra. And I agree with you that the uh the the quad one that they abandoned, they abandoned it for a reason, not just for the hell of it. They wanted to do it. They tried to do it. They had visions of you know, putting it together, but like If the scaling on two of them was bad, the scaling on four would be even worse.

And the cost would be even higher. And yes, it would have been faster than an ultra, but it wouldn't have been twice as fast as an ultra. And so it's a point of diminishing returns. So basically they couldn't they couldn't pull it off. They couldn't deliver what the twenty nineteen Mac Pro delivered, which is something that has a big multiple of the capability of its contemporary Max. They just couldn't do it in a in a feasible way and they so far they haven't been able to. So

Fingers crossed that the M5 Ultra is if it's not, if it's still two M five Maxes stuck together, that'll still be the most powerful chip that Apple makes, and it'll still be really good. And we'll check the benchmarks and see is the scaling better than it was, even if it's still not linear. But you know, I need something to hope for, so I'm here I I'm out here hoping that the M five Ultra will not simply be two M five mags stuck together, but I would not put money on it.

So when do you think you're buying a new computer then? Ugh, it depends on how much the eight terabyte SSD costs. Uh as soon as they introduce the uh oh I'm gonna try to get like a friends and family discount from Apple, uh from folks that I know who work there. Um, and sometimes the friends and family discount is not available immediately. Like you can't pre order with it or whatever. So I it it might be a while after the M five whatever

Mach studios come out, I have to wait around until they show up with the friends and family discount. But when that happens, I will buy one and will I get the Mac? Which would be fine for me. If will I get the ultra if such a thing exists? We'll talk about that on the show, I'm sure, but that's the plan. M five something, Mac Studio appearing on my desk. whenever I can wh whenever I can order it and uh assuming I can afford the eight terabyte SSD, because that's honestly, I mean, look.

Uh it's not a coincidence that I made an app that saves disk space. I am pressing up real hard against the four terabyte limit on my SSD. I use my app a lot, like for real. Like I use it to save disk space. I need more disk space and the next Size up that Apple offers is eight, and it's going to cost so much money. Um, yes, it is. Can confirm, been there.

That's what I'm planning for. And you know, I I've said I think months and months ago I've said I'm planning on getting an M something Mac Studio because I had no faith that the Mac Pro was gonna come out, and lo and behold that is. What do you expect to miss about the physical?

parts of the Mac Pro. Like'cause you have your like your time machine drive internal to the Mac Pro, don't you? I sure do. Yeah. I have my super duper clone and like internal storage is for sure the thing I'm gonna do. So it sounds silly'cause my internal storage is incredibly slow.

Like it's not it's like it's connected to SATA for crying out loud, but they are SSDs. And the the trouble free nature of internal storage and internal buses, I j I'm gonna miss that the most. Because it's not like I'm getting amazing performance out of it, it's not like I can't but it just

It's all inside the box. I don't have any wires hanging out. I don't have they never like unmount weirdly or do weird stuff. They don't have their own power supplies. My in I have an internal time machine SSD and I have an internal super duper.

Which and they're SSDs, but they're and they're slow, but having that inside the case uh is something that I will miss. And I you know, that's a that's a niche market or whatever, but I really do wish there were better External storage options because when I get my Mac Studio, I'm gonna wanna have uh an SSD time machine drive and I'm gonna wanna have an SSD uh super duper bootable clone drive. And, you know, I can go try to buy those and buy a Thunderbolt enclosure or something and put a N VME.

you know, bought bare spinning hard drives and put them into enclosures since the days of like the, you know, classic Mac. Like I've done that a lot. I would just prefer to have rel reliable uh trouble free storage that I can use for this. I mean hell, I'll probably uh I can't. Uh I I always I I'll probably take those SSDs out of the SmackPro and use it, but I can't because if I have an eight terabyte SSD, it's not gonna fit on my four terabyte backup drive. But oh that's gonna cost

F after I buy Apples eight terabyte prices, then I have to buy then I have to pay actual market prices for non Apple storage to get my uh, you know, time machine drive and my clone drive. I might even have to buy new spinning discs for my Synology to fit the backup so This is gonna be an expensive year and I may have to space I may have to space this out a bit. Uh we'll see how it goes.

John, you spent eleven billion dollars on the Mac that you're using to speak to us right now. Seven years ago. Well, I'm just saying uh it th given that you spent as much as a freaking civic on that and and uh half of that price was the monitor that I'm still gonna use. Mm-hmm. Aye, well all c all snark aside, I am sorry for you. I'm glad for you that you have an answer because it is, as you mentioned, Apple style to just kind of let this thing fade into the night as it had been doing, but

I'm glad you have an answer, but I'm sorry it's not the answer you wanted. Uh already have the answer. Like let's like I said, the very last the very previous episode, we had the answers. No one no one was confused about what was going on with the Mac Pro. It was just a question of what are they waiting for and they were yeah, they were waiting for us to post that up.

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I was excited about this capability before it shipped. Years later I find zero iOS apps that I regularly run on macOS. I can partly blame the allow this app to run on macOS checkbox and app store connect that apparently most corporate developers disable out of habit. But I'm also not sure that the experience of running iOS apps on macOS beats using the corresponding web app or picking up my phone. What iOS apps do you find useful to run on macOS?

You know, I I echo a lot of what Alex is saying here. I was pretty excited about the thought of doing such things when it was a you know uh uh the the sparkle in Apple's eye. But in reality, I almost never use this. And for a lot of things, I would reach for iPhone mirroring before I would reach for, you know, installing an app on my Mac.

Um that being said, the only thing I can think of offhand is channels, which does have a web app, but it's mostly about management. It's not you really about consumption. Um and if there was any weak part of channels, which uh you know is a former sponsor and a friend of mine is uh one of the co co founders. Uh but anyways if there's a weak spot about channels, it's that uh the web the web user interface, particularly for the purposes of consumption, isn't really not great. And so I've installed

the iPad app on my Mac and use it every great once in a while. I I don't think there's any easy way for me to tell. Is there what other apps I have installed? So uh I don't even know. I can't think of any others off the top of my head. I mean you might have overcast installed. Oh, I did use that all the time and then I mostly just used my phone, either with the phone speaker as god awful as that is or occasionally via iPhone mirroring. That's a good point.

I this is one of those ideas that when when Apple Silicon first came around and and this was uh this was one of the features of it, I thought this is gonna be really useful and Yeah, I think the combination of so many apps opting out of it and also like if you actually use iOS apps on Mac, it's not that useful. It's not that great. Like

I if it if it patches a need that otherwise you would not be able to serve. So for instance, like my Overcast app runs that way. Um I personally don't really use it because I don't listen to podcasts on my Mac, uh but More people than I expected use it. Like significantly more than I expected. I I I I never would have guessed it would have the use because it has.

But it's still not like the majority of the of the user base or not even close. Like, you know, most people don't use it. But it does have some utility. But If you actually like try to use iOS tabs on the Mac, they don't work that well. It's kind of a weird experience. Lots of things. are just worse about them or clunky or don't fit the platform or don't quite work the way you expect them to work.

Because when you design apps for iOS, you're designing for touch on a totally different platform. It it just it it doesn't translate as directly and as well as I think people want it to. I don't even use like the iPhone mirroring thing that they added uh last year. Um I don't even use that because I find that to be too clunky and I'd rather just pick up my phone out of my pocket and, you know, use it that way.

These are features that to me like I will use in a pinch, but I don't have that many pinches. Yeah. I don't run any iPad apps on my Mac because I can't run iPad apps. Oh John. Uh yeah, but so I mean obviously I do have Apple Silicon uh uh um Macs here. Um and I I think the only one

Uh I think the only iPad app I have knowingly installed is Overcast. And that was actually to work on uh to to to correctly file apple's bugs because they had a bunch of bugs related to the APIs I was using in Switch class when it came to um iPad apps. Like if you asked to get the icon for an iPad app, their API would vend you uh a dimmed icon with like the circle with a line through it buster over it?

Which is not great. It's not really what you want. Uh and they fixed that bug, thankfully. But it was it was a bug like that for like a year and a half and I had to work around it or whatever. There was also some weird stuff with like the way the notification thing that Switchclass uses to say, like when an app is launched, tell me. And when an app exits, tell me. Because of whatever weird way that iPad apps are handled on Mac OS.

The notifications for those apps launching and quitting were different and caught like the timings were different and different events came at different things. So I had to work around that. And so that's why I have Overcast installed is essentially to debug my app switcher app. when it comes to uh iPad. If I had an Apple Silicon Mac, which I will eventually, um

I and we were back in time. One of the things I would have looked forward to using on it is let's say Status Board by Panic, a discontinued app that I have since uh vibe coded replacement of on the web. So I don't need that anymore, but I would absolutely use that. And that's a perfect use case because as Marco said, like iOS apps or iPad apps on the Mac.

Talk about not behaving like a Mac app. They just absolutely do not behave like a Mac because they're not. They're not it makes sense. Like, but they don't. But and they also don't behave like an iOS app. Like if you if you're like an iOS developer and you've used the iOS simulator.

You might think the Mac apps would behave like they do in the simulator. They don't. They don't even let you do the option thing to use the little virtual pinchy finger. It's even di'cause of course, like that would be a little bit weird too. So it's even different from the simulator. It there are so many little things that are different and The supporting APIs and the way they behave is also different. So you have things like background downloads and background refresh.

uh and push notifications in services, different kind of extensions, lots of like airplay, lots of stuff that either doesn't work on the Mac at all Or works very differently. Context menus, another great example. Polder refresh. Like there are so many things on the Mac that just don't work the right way as they do in iOS or are absent or don't work at all or have bugs or crash if you try to use them.

Yeah, and and Apple could do things to make those APIs better so that they will behave better when they're running on the Mac, but like Things like status board are ideal because it's essentially like a big widget. It's mostly read only. It's an app that didn't exist on the Mac at all and there used to be no web version of it before I had my thing slapped together.

Um, and so I would, I would absolutely would run status board on my Mac as an iPad app and just pad it up there as a little dashboard of stuff, just like the old I just like I used to run dashboard. But that's the type of app that I would do. Like if there was some kind of app

If there was a social media app that didn't have a native Mac version, maybe I would use that, but I vastly prefer to just have like, you know, Ivory on Mac as opposed to, you know, iPhone mirroring ivory on my phone or something like that. But like that's that's where I would be using it. It's like you said, it's gap filling.

This isn't available on the Mac and using it uh using the iPad version, you know, or the phone version mirrored is better than nothing. And there are apps where that is true. A status board totally would have been the case before I had the web version. So Yeah. And developers not opting into it, it's like

There you know, there's a million incentives for them not to do it and and Apple didn't really make it attractive for them to do it. Like there was there were plenty of sticks and not a lot of carrots for doing that. And so I don't really blame developers for not checking that box, but you know, it is what it is. And this is the argument for like

You know, these are separate platforms with separate strengths and being able to use them uh use any app anywhere is convenient, but it doesn't suddenly make the platforms the same. They're just not like fundamentally one is a touch-based thing that you carry around with you and one uses Uh much more precise pointer on bigger screens and yada yada like

those differences will never go away. If there was a grand unification and there was one Apple OS, those platform differences would still exist. And that one Apple OS would have to handle those platform differences. One Apple OS can't be like, oh, it's a big phone everywhere. That's not gonna work.

My uh my reminder app that I occasionally remember to work on uh that I'm using it. You should put a reminder for that. Yeah, right. I I use it constantly, but uh you know, so anyway, so uh I I'm having it I'm having my this is my vibe coded reminder app. I'm having it be uh cross compiled with Swift UI, there it compiles on Mac and it compiles on iOS. And many of the things that I have had the AI do for me, um, is

customize the behavior between the two and have d have it behave differently and look differently and have different controls between the Mac version and the iOS version because they're just different. They're like one of the things I added the other day was um Like a swipe to snooze or s you know, swipe the other way to delete an iOS on on the on the row of the reminder. Standard iOS swipe action. Um and on the map of course it dutifully added that on the Mac.

where it makes no sense'cause you never want to m to like swipe your mouse over a table row on um on the Mac and have it swipe to delete accidentally. You never want that on the Mac. That's the wrong thing on the Mac and it's easy to accidentally do and hard to intentionally do. user, uh I don't have any problems with doing swiping on the Mac. Well, lucky you. But anyway, uh on the Mac.

That is not a a useful or that is not like the standard correct metaphor for actions. On the Mac, the standard correct metaphor for quick actions on an item is usually a context menu, keyboard shortcuts, or visible controls. And so I'm having different like I'm I on the Mac I have the right click menu to do those same actions. Or I'm you know, at some point I might add keyboard controls. Like

You develop software and you develop interfaces differently for these two platforms because they work differently. So anything that tries to run the same code, the same app, with the same interface, or almost the same interface. on both of those platforms, it's gonna result in mediocrity. And that's what this is. It's a well-intentioned system that doesn't work very well and therefore isn't that compelling most of the time.

All right. And then finally tonight, Michael Brescher Jr. writes, If you were in charge of the Mac and iPhone software teams, how would you all balance new features needed to keep up with the industry with keeping design native to people who have used the Mac for over thirty years, like John?

Also, would you all move to one and a half or two year cycle for the OSs? This is a tough thing, right? It's and this is what makes engineering so fun and so challenging is figuring out the right balance. And I don't know, I I I I feel like for me If things are new that doesn't immediately bother me. So as a silly example of this, um Volvo just released for Aaron's car a new version of the infotainment software that really aggressively re-jiggers where everything is on screen. And

In some ways, I think that these these uh the the rearranged deck chairs are an improvement, right? And it's for the best. But I can tell you for Erin, it's been very frustrating because she, as the primary driver of that car, will mash on a particular portion of the giant touch screen in the center dash in order to see her like backup camera, for example. And now that button's somewhere else. And that's frustrating for her, and I get that.

Uh liquid glass pissed off most of the community. And I don't I mostly don't agree with that. I mostly think liquid glass is actually pretty good. Um, but it certainly made everyone upset and it definitely moved things around. And so I don't necessarily think new is bad, and I'm kind of of the opinion, like actually a great example of this.

God help me, I'm gonna get so much email. Please email someone else. Uh but the icons the icons in the menu bar, like I don't think they're particularly additive, but I am not deeply morally offended by them like it seems most of our peers are. That doesn't make me right for the record. I'm just telling you my personal opinions about it. And so I I I don't think that new is necessarily bad. Where where it becomes frustrating to me, and this is not a particularly hot take.

is new for the sake of new. And I think Michael was touching on that, you know, new features needed to keep up with the industry. Well, the a great example of that is let's AI all the things. And I think there's appropriate times for AI and there's nothing.

Inappropriate times for AI. And do I really need what I don't even remember what the stupid thing is called was like something playground? What's the the image playground? Image playground. I couldn't even remember the darn thing because I've used it like twice. But it's here. But it's here, baby. I cannot tell I have dismissed image playground as here forty eight times. Yep. Exactly. Um so you see where I'm going with this, right? Is that uh

I I don't think adding just because you're keeping up with the Joneses is necessarily the right idea. And Apple in the past had usually been very good about yes, that's wonderful for you, but we don't need that. It's not additive for our users, not helpful for our users. So

I I'm kind of meandering around the question rather than answering it because I don't I think every decision would be different. It would it would have to be on a case by case basis. But I think generally Apple's thrust to move forward isn't by itself. unhealthy. I think the problem is that sometimes there's a little too much new shiny and not enough improvement of what was already there. And I think what makes it even more

aggressive or worse is when the new shiny is just for the sake of new shiny rather than actually additive. But I don't know. That maybe maybe that's a non answer. So I think the the the big challenge here is like if we're in charge of the Mac and iPhone software teams and we're trying to figure out keeping up new features to keep up with the industry, are we talking about Ten years ago? Five years ago? Or now? Cause right now

The hot news stuff, admittedly, you're right, Casey, like keeping up with with hot new stuff is it can be wasteful and it can be misguided. Um, but right now the hot new thing is AI integration and AI based features. And that is No matter what you think of AI, uh there's there are three things that that are real. Number one, it's not going away. Number two, it is not as bad as you think it is. And number three, it is not as good as you think it is.

It is a really, really big deal despite all of those all of those dynamics going on. It's here. It's going to define and direct. a huge amount of what is what we use computers for, what they can do, what we can do. Like it's a big deal. It's ver it's a very disruptive and promising area of technology.

And so right now, trying to figure out like, hey, how do we how do we like add new features to like the Finder or something like that That is a something that people should occasionally be considering, but like if you're the head of Mac and iPhone software. That's the that that kind of thing is the last thing you should be considering. Whether we put icons in the menu items.

That's a terrible design decision to have them there, and especially the way they're you know, the the choices they've made, et cetera. But like that's not a good use of anyone's focus right now. There's huge shifts happening in the tech industry. There will be huge shifts happening for the next, you know, number of years. This is a you know. No matter what you think of AI, it is going to be as disruptive as things like the internet.

mobile. It is on that level of the amount of disruption that this is going to cause to our business and many other businesses. When the internet first came out, if a leading computer company maybe spent a lot of time doing a lot of other features and things that didn't matter as much and maybe missed the internet. that could be a problem. They they might have to like really scramble and catch up later. Um let's say maybe that same company, maybe a little while later, missed mobile.

And mobile was exploding, the smartphone revolution was exploding, and they just weren't in that game and stumbled around for a while and kind of never got in that game and it reshaped their business forever and they missed out on that entire thing. That's Apple right now with AI. Apple has missed the main part of it so far. They're scrambling. We'll see where they get. But right now, that needs to be their focus.

And we can debate all we want about the crappy Tahoe redesign they did to Mac OS, which they did and it needs attention. But if you're the head of software That kind of thing is not what you should be paying a lot of attention to right now because the entire industry like has this massive earthquake shaking it all up.

and you're worried about like whether your corner radius should be smaller or not. Like, no, that's not your job. Delegate that to the designers. Hopefully they have, you know, better leadership now and they have better heads on their shoulders and hopefully they'll fix this problem. But your job as the head of software needs to be

What do we do to embrace AI, to make good features with this, to keep ourselves competitive and to and to move our platforms forward in the actual real modern place that we find ourselves and uh hopefully can catch up soon.

I don't think I would uh concentrate quite that much on the AI stuff, especially considering how badly Apple is doing there. But yeah, this is one of those things where it's like it would have been better if ten years ago they had struck a better balance between uh, you know, new features and keeping up with industry trends because that would put you in a better position. And I

I would argue that having paying attention to the plumbing, especially on the Mac, but even on the iPhone or whatever, like really just, you know Uh polishing up the basic functionality release after release is super essential in a world where you're going to drop in a bunch of agentic AI because The cleaner you can provide interfaces to your functionality, like that you have stuff that it works, it's proven, it's reliable.

putting uh you know, allowing AIs to start controlling that or having access to it, like, you know, uh for example, what Apple has done with security. Like they weren't doing it for AI, but having a good security architecture Allows them, you know, potentially, because we don't know what they're actually gonna do, but in theory, puts Apple in a good position to have AI features integrated with the phone in a way that is privacy preserving.

Let's say they didn't do anything with privacy and then AI came along and they said, Oh, well, we should really just concentrate on AI now. It's like, no, you should have been concentrating for the past twenty years on privacy stuff because if you want this, you know, unreliable LM things to control any aspect of the phone.

You need to have a good privacy architecture in place. And they do, thankfully, right? And that's that same philosophy, I think, is what they should be doing over all their platforms, which is It behooves you. to maintain and polish and improve the basic architecture because whatever the next thing is. it will be easier to integrate it into your stack.

If you're not building on a house of cards, if you didn't neglect privacy for twenty years, if you didn't, let's say, neglect the Finder for the entire history of macOS X, it would be way easier to hook up an AI for into that if it wasn't like this terrible fragile house of cards that's buggy and nobody likes anymore. And so, you know, you can't go back in time and fix that, but like Uh to answer Michael's question, like the balance between like new features and keeping up with the industry.

Every one of my like Apple report cards I've ever done, I've said that Apple is not correct not striking the right balance between essentially maintenance stuff, like you know, taking existing features and and eliminating bugs and improving the design and new features. That continues to be the case. It is exacerbated by what Marco said, which is like, oh, guess what?

There's a bunch of really new stuff that you should get on right now. It's a lot easier to strike that balance when you're kind of in a quiet period. When you're not, that's when you're, you know, all those chickens come home to roots, like, ugh, we totally should have been keeping Mac, you know uh more ship shape for all those years cause now we're gonna try to hook up this agent stuff to it and it's just it's you know, it's terrible.

Setting aside, that's probably not what Apple's problem is. Their problem seems to be just with the basic AI stuff or whatever, but Uh yeah, I would I would you know, this is the type of thing where like if you keep making a a a mistake in one direction. You keep uh overcooking something.

Just try to undercook it. Just try to undercook it once. Like go in the other direction because people like correct for it and they're like, Oh, we're going too far to A, we need to go to B and they go like slightly less far to A. And it's like can you make the m can you at least make a mistake in the other direction? Uh and you know, the the mistake in the other direction being like, you know, snow leopard, no new features or whatever. Let's actually do this as a marketing push.

And that was kind of a one time thing. So I think they need to massively correct currently in the direction of shoring up existing functionality, which is exactly the opposite of what Marco was saying. It's like you just gotta ignore stuff'cause you're behind that AI. But like I I think those two things are not mutually exclusive. And that gets to the

Second point here, which is would you change to a one point five or two year cycle or whatever? I have said for years and continue to say, based on my twenty-five years of experience in the software industry and releasing products on schedules and deadlines. that it is absolutely possible to have annual releases.

smartly choosing what goes in those releases or not. You can stagger them, you can have two year plans, three year plans. It's not like oh you can only do things that fit in one year. No. This is a scheduling possibility. You can have things take three years to come to fruition. And still release uh on a yearly schedule. It's just a question of being smart about picking what's in it and what's not.

Apple's problem is not the annual schedule. Apple's problem is their inability to correctly pick stuff that will fit in a year. That's their pr that's always been their problem. And that is it, you know, that's most organizations' problem. Like, I don't know how many times I've had this exact discussion in in my jobby jobs about like deadlines and schedules and what can fit and resources available or whatever. Like

It's like like Casey was saying, it's a trade off. It's like we have this many people, we have this much money, we have this much time, we have these people and and who have these skills. Like it's not, you know, everyone's not just fungible, right? You have this set of people and this set of skills and this set of resources and this time or whatever.

What can you fit? Can you get X by this date? Can you get Y by that date? If you have to have something out by this date, what can what can you fit in? Don't be ambitious and say we're gonna be done by this date and we're gonna have all the stuff. You know, like you're not gonna have all the stuff. So you have to start to cut things. And Apple has been really, really bad and I feel like worse over the past several years. At figuring out What can we actually fit?

into an annual release. And instead they just like they overstuff it, then they trickle stuff out over the course of the next year, which bleeds into which pulls resources in people who should be working on the next year's release. They're too busy releasing the rest of this year's release, which trickles out over the year. That's their problem. Their problem is one of You know, it's it's not just them. It's every everyone has difficulty of like estimating

software projects and figuring out what will fit it within a schedule. So I don't think it's the annualness of it. If you did a two year they would do the exact same mistake. They would just do it over two years and it would be even bigger disaster or three years or four years. So

That's the challenge. I would not necessarily like I think a macOS could use the two-year cycle, but it wouldn't remove the problem because their problem is if given a finite period of time, choose features that you'll be able to be done with by the by the end of that cycle, and Apple is not very good at that. And and nobody is. It's a difficult problem, but it is frustrating to see Apple continue to have difficulty

getting that done. And like I said, if you if you know, the only time they didn't have this problem was when they didn't have any regular cadence whatsoever, which generally is a sign of an unhealthy organization if you're like, well, we can't build to a deadline.

It's just done when it's done. Oh, nice, you know, nice work if you can get it, but that's not usually not the real world. Usually you can't just have that luxury. In the early macOS 10 days, it was like, eh, we're working on another version of Mac OS, but we're doing a lot of other things too, and it'll be done when it's done.

And Apple was smaller then and people were paying less attention and it wasn't that big of a deal. And the phone pulled resources off the Mac and Mac OS releases would take eighteen months, sixteen months, thirteen months, like whatever, whenever it's done, whenever it's ready, no big deal. But that is not the sign of an efficient

effective organization. We can't build to a schedule. We just do stuff and we when we finish it, we release it. That is a little bit too touchy filly for whatever m trillion dollar corporation. So I think it behooves Apple to continue to try to get better at Actually

uh hitting deadlines with a set of realistic features that you can finish, not just barely finish so it barely works, but finish to a degree of quality that you would be proud of within the allotted time and being honest with yourself about what you can actually do. If only. Thanks to our sponsors of this episode, Masterclass, Factor, and Claude. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join, one of the many perks of ATP member membership.

is our weekly bonus topic, ATP Overtime. This week on Overtime we're gonna be talking about we have an update to the egg. What is happening with Johnny Ives OpenAI product or product? Updates to that in overtime, join to listen, HTZFM slash join. Thank you so much, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

C A S E Y L I S S. There's a historical contention between Marco and I about uh naming things on Long Island. But there is one parti one particular naming thing that he's been doing for years That has just been bothering me and he did it again in this show and I figured we need an after show, so let me see if I can convince him to stop doing this. Oh my god.

I I I know the argument will probably be that this is not just a you thing, this is just a common thing and you're just doing what other people do and so you're fitting in with the culture and yada yada yada. And in general I am a descriptivist, not a proscriptivist, but I can't feel like this one. Maybe I can convince you. Oh, I can't wait. Uh you always talk about going over to the mainland. Yes, but...

The definition of the word mainland, reading from Miriam Webster here, is a continent or the main part of a continent distinguished from an offshore island, or sometimes from a cape or peninsula. Well guess what? Long Island is not a continent or the main part of a continent. It is in fact an offshore island, thus the name and the surrounding of it by water. So you're not going to the mainland You're going to another different island. This is one of those things that is Technically correct.

But the per again, yeah, you're right. Descriptive is Well here's my first question. Do other people say mainlanders is just a youth? everyone on Fire Island when referring to Long Island. I'm not shocked, those people have no idea what's going on over there. Wow. Most okay, most Long Islanders don't even know Fire Island is there and they've never even been there. What are you talking about? Everybody on Long Island knows about Fire Island. It is not an obscure.

Slow down. I don't have a horse in the On Long Island? Would you relax for a second? I actually don't have a horse in this race, but let's just remind ourselves that your whole ouvre with regard to Long Island is Thirty years out of date? Forty years out of date? Sure, but I will I let me assure you that Most people on Long Island don't know if Fire Island exists is false.

Most people on Long Island absolutely know Fire Island exists. And I but I will wager that most people on Long Island have been to Fire Island. Not only do they know it exists, they've been but it's not that far away. And here's why. Because Long Island which is part which partly undermines your point here, is really big.

Really big. And it's full of lots. It's all I mean it is that's that's the main dimension it makes you this big. But it's really big. So first of all, like everyone on Fire Island. refers to Long Island as the mainland. Well, they're all wrong. I think I would love for y why don't you come to Fire Island? And tell everyone they're wrong and and and see what they think. Mainland is not the correct term for another album. I mean technically North America

is an island. No, North America is not an island. It's just a really big one. North Amer isn't ever isn't Pangaea really an island'cause it's surrounded by water. No the answer to that is no. Yeah. It's not. The continent has a definition. It's all about relative scale. What's a continent if not a giant island? Is Australia an island?

Uh no it's uh Okay. What about New Zealand? I know well isn't isn't that crazy. This is like a robot or not episode. Can you imagine that there's a definition depends on depends on the size of things, that a very small thing is like a pebble in the water, is not an island, but then like Like Pangea is not an island, but something in between is an island? How does that work? That's just the nature of the language we use to describe things. And all I'm saying is mainland is the wrong.

You are wrong. Well no, I think everyone in Fire Island is just using the wrong word. But I I understand that it's a cultural thing and they all like to say the mainland is just they just happen to pick the wrong word'cause they don't have another word. It would be interesting to see if like someone from Hawaii could tell me whether they use mainland to refer to like the big island or whatever. Probably not'cause

They do call it the big island. Well, cause and but the size differences between the Hawaii island. Yeah, well I mean but but I mean they ha they use the term the big island because That's more descriptive. Yeah. I d I d I don't actually know anything about Hawaii, so I can't I can't comment on but it's it's similar in nature in that like when you're going from some tiny little speck to something that's massively larger and you call that the mainland.

And of course obviously people in Hawaii have like, you know, the continental United States to refer to as the mainland, but I just want to say that in addition to all the other things that you do nomenclature-wise related to Fire Island and uh the referring to Long Island as the mainland is nonsensical and I hate it. Uh but apparently it's everyone in Fire Island, not just you.

If you were on Long Island and you referred to the mainland, nobody would have any idea what you were talking about. I no one on Long Island refers to the mainland. Right. Right. Because it doesn't make sense in that context.

You're you're making my point for me. I'm not making my point. I'm just saying that that no one uses mainland on Long Island. It doesn't we don't use some other incorrect term instead. Oh my God, John. You don't like what I'm saying. Like we don't this it's not a thing that gets referred to. Talk about Manhattan, but that's also an island. Right. And nobody nobody in Manhattan would ever say like if they were going to New Jersey, I'm going to the mainland.

No. Like they would never say that. That's true. They wouldn't. And yet it would be the right term if they chose to do that. It would be correct. I literally earlier today walked from Manhattan to New Jersey. I walked to the mainland, John. No one said it. You could have said that correctly in that instance, but you didn't because it's not a thing that's done. But if you did say it, it would be correct.

Because that is a continent or the main part of a continent I distinguished from an offshore island. Oh my god. Yeah, next time I'll pull all the bikeets that are whizzing past me to see, Hey, are we going to the mainland? Where are you going? Is this the mainland over there? They would be confused, but you would say, Technically I'm using the right word. I think the thing that cracks me up most about John's

ownership of Long Island is that you haven't cla been able to claim any ownership of Long Island in thirty years. When you grow when you grow up there, that's that's the claim. That's the claim is growing up there is makes all the difference. I I get that. But like And I maybe it's unfair because I moved so much when I was growing up and I was only ever in a place where like

two maybe maybe four years at a time. Yeah, but you don't feel like you have an ownership of place like that. Right. But to me, like I don't own the podunk little town in Western Connecticut that I grew up in. Not in a literal sense, you know what I'm saying. But Well Connecticut doesn't have any culture, so

Oh, all right. Now your n New York is definitely showing it. Except for uh rich people in Greenwich who consider themselves New Yorkers. I mean the whole left hit the whole left side of the state thinks they're New York. Casey, in the last thirty six hours I have stepped foot on all four of these places. Fire Island, Long Island, Manhattan, and the mainland. And John's still gonna override me on this. I know, it's so true. I mean I'm it's just it's it's funny to me.

How devoutly, John, in particular, you you you believe in this balls to bones and yet It's it's so unequivocally outdated information. Now it may still be accurate, but it's the definition of mainland is not an outdated information. It is a definition in the dictionary. Like maybe they'll change the definition someday. Maybe they'll say uh, you know, the the the existing definition and also Long Island. But that doesn't currently say that. No what uh what I my point is that the colloquial usage

Oh I'm not saying it was any different when I was there. I'm saying if it was the like that when I was there was also wrong because it's not the definition of the word. And if they're working on changing the definition, they got more work to do. 'Cause it hasn't happened yet. That literally figuratively people are doing better. That got in the dictionary. Literally can also mean figuratively. Can you imagine they got the opposite definition in there? Yet mainland is not budging so far.

So like biweekly. Well biweekly I think happened before we were all born, but by the way, I for the record I'm aware that New Zealand is actually two islands. I just I I didn't ha even have time to go back and correct it then. There are so many times on the show that I know, and I it's not just me, that I know something that, you know, we either I misspoke or one of us misspoke or perhaps spoke in a not entirely accurate way. And I can hear the

of all the emails coming. But the conversation has moved on and it it's e and then what ends up happening because it's me is I forget to come back and be like, oh by the way You can insert it an end. That helps. Uh well either way. Uh it's just this happens all the time. And there's so many times that I'm like, oh, I gotta make sure I say blah blah blah. And then one of the great parts of being on the show is that I get to listen to the show as it's happening and so sometimes

So the conversation will move on and I've completely lost the plot on reg with regard to going back and you know filling in whatever blank we need to fill in. Marco will occasionally move those things back. If I say a thing like, oh I forgot to say during this section, he'll put it back in that section, which saves me a lot. By the real time follow up, New Zealand is like a million islands. It turns out there's two big ones and a lot of small ones. Ha ha ha.