613: Dress for the Chip You Want
14 Nov 2024More details on the M4 and Mac Mini, and the rumored Apple… WallPod? HomeScreen? Intellivision. There we go. No potential naming issues at all.
Episode Description:
- 🚨 LAST CALL! 🚨 ATP Holiday Store is open! 🗣️ Place your orders by Sunday!
- Follow-up:
- Aperture was not a purchase; it was developed by Apple. (via Jason Sims)
- “Plain” M4 MacBook Pro and external displays (via Eric Roch)
- Mac mini
- “Modular” storage
- Other tidbits
- Heatsink differences
- 256 GB = 2× 128 GB
- Wi-Fi & Bluetooth are their own PCB
#askatp: setting up external SSDs (via Peter Welpton)- Thunderbolt performance limits
- Geekbench scores across Apple Silicon (via Wes Campaigne)
- Apple’s smart home ambitions
#askatp:- Should users be worried that 8/16GB RAM is “claimed” by Apple Intelligence? (via andrewsleigh)
- Why can’t Apple make a Studio Display with MacBook Pro backlight technology? (via Henri Sivonen)
- What power user hacks can we not live without? (via Ryan Tierney)
- Post-show: Marco’s Mac Mini setup
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Vision Pro cheerleading
Sponsored by:
- Tailscale: A secure network that just works.
- DeleteMe: Making it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Use code ATP.
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Chapters
- Esc
- ATP Store 🖼️
- Marco got hit hard and soft 🖼️
- Apple made Aperture
- “Plain M4” MBP
- Mac Mini details
- Small internal, big external storage
- M4 gains 🖼️
- Sponsor: DeleteMe (code ATP)
- Rumored Apple telescreen
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- #askatp: RAM vs. Apple Intelligence
- #askatp: Mini-LED Studio Display
- #askatp: Hacks we rely on
- Ending theme
- Marco’s new Mac Mini
Esc
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you hitting escape for most of the time, Margo?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of times I will use it to defocus a text field or something, or cancel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a menu, or cancel a dialog box. I don’t know, I use it all the time. Or I’ll use it for autocomplete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in text areas or in Xcode. I use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John The main thing I use it for when I’m not in Emacs, which I’m rarely in, but anyway, the main thing I use it for,
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it or not, is canceling drags. I don’t know if you two do this, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John often dragging things around in the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Finder and saying all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinking better of it. I’m like, no, and I just want that drag to be over. And I love
⏹️ ▶️ John escape for that. I do wonder when people who don’t know how to do that, what do they do when they have essentially a handful of files
⏹️ ▶️ John and like remember where they started right because
⏹️ ▶️ John are weird about that. Like, I didn’t know I could do this. This is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you what, really. Yeah, what I do, I just try to carefully put it back. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John what I do. Escape,
⏹️ ▶️ John escape. That’s why you had your escape key for it. Instead of escape, you don’t have to, carefully putting it back used to
⏹️ ▶️ John be so much better. And now in the Finder, even if I try to carefully put it back, it’s like, I don’t trust
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s like, is it going to move files up on the, like it was a list view window. Try putting files
⏹️ ▶️ John back in a list view window where you have a bunch of folders turned down. Escape. Escape says, bail out of this drag
⏹️ ▶️ John operation. Works across the whole operating system, I’m pretty sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, this is life changing. So this even like, when you told me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a year ago, to like, because in order to get to my downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folder, I used to like click the stupid icon that brings up the stack and then like. Wait, the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcut? Yeah, and you told me just hold down command option and click the downloads folder and it brings up the folder. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the dock thing, yeah. Yeah, like oh my God, that’s so much better. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, yeah. Imagine if you could configure it to do that on plain click. Imagine that. I’ve been waiting like 17
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco for Apple to say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be great if you could make that an option or a plist setting or something, but nope. And so like it’s ingrained
⏹️ ▶️ John in my hands. I’m command option clicking on folders in the dock forever. Yeah, thank God for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You still can’t dock a folder alias, by the way. I filed that so many times, they just keep closing
⏹️ ▶️ John it as like, we don’t care. Make an alias to a folder, drag it into the dock, try to drag something into that alias of the
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. Does the thing dragged go into the folder that thing’s an alias of? Nope, it just bounces back, because it’s like, I have no idea what
⏹️ ▶️ John to do here. It doesn’t make any sense to me. You dragged a file onto a folder icon, I can’t figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Abort, abort. Just put the file in the folder, Apple. or don’t let me put
⏹️ ▶️ John aliases to folders in the doc. Those are your two choices. Either one is fine. Current behavior
⏹️ ▶️ John is maddening. Anyway. How do you really feel? I filed it. I filed it, they closed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I should file, every five years I should refile that bug. Not that anyone’s working on the doc anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a reasonable interval to basically like bother them again about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John something. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, to watch your feedbacks just descend into the black hole. video.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have one final reminder about ATP merch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, can you tell us, what should we be buying right now? You
⏹️ ▶️ John should be buying everything. This is the last time we will be telling you about the ATP Holiday
⏹️ ▶️ John Store, which I know it seems ridiculous because it’s only the middle of November as we’re recording this, but like I said, we’re trying to push
⏹️ ▶️ John this sale back so you have a chance of getting these things in time for the holidays. This sale ends on Sunday,
⏹️ ▶️ John November 17th. This is your last chance. If you’ve been putting it off saying, oh, maybe I’ll get something, whatever, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John do it now. the time you hear this episode, it may be within a day or two of the thing closing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what do we have this year? Obviously we have our gift memberships. And by the way, gift memberships are available all year round. We
⏹️ ▶️ John put them on holiday sale because it’s the holiday season. You might want to give someone a gift membership. You might want someone to get you a gift membership.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do that at any time. Like on the store page, if you’re logged in, you’ll see a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to give you an ATP gift membership, or you can just tell people to go to atp.fm slash gift. It’s real easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can do that at any time. That’s the one thing that lives past the end of this sale is the gift memberships. You should still,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, get them now and copy the link now if you can. But anyway, the actual merch. So we have all our M4
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. As we have discussed in the past several episodes, the M4 series of chips that
⏹️ ▶️ John have been released for Macs are really good. Lots of people writing in to say, hey, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have an M4 Mac, I have like an M2 Mac. Can I get an M2 shirt? It’s like, just like going
⏹️ ▶️ John for a job interview or being in a job, dress for the job you want. You may not have an
⏹️ ▶️ John Dress for the chip that you want in your Mac because who knows when the M4 chips will be sold
⏹️ ▶️ John again. So even though you might have an M1 or an M2 or maybe an Intel CPU like some people,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should still get the M4 shirt because by the time you actually get an M4, maybe we’ll be selling M6
⏹️ ▶️ John shirts, right? So if you want a shirt to match your thing, you should get it. And like I said, this is a great line of chips
⏹️ ▶️ John as we will discuss at further length in follow-up, believe it or not, for like the third week in a row, how
⏹️ ▶️ John great the M4 things are. And the shirts, they’re just M4 shirts, but if you wanna represent and
⏹️ ▶️ John show that you’re representing one of the really good M chips, not just because it’s the biggest number that’s available,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is a really good one. So M4, M4 Pro, M4 Max, T-shirts, long sleeve,
⏹️ ▶️ John sweatshirts, you name it, we’ve got it. In black and also in a whole bunch of colors
⏹️ ▶️ John with the monochrome M4 logo on them. And of course, we’ve got our ATP pullover hoodies
⏹️ ▶️ John in various colors as well. We got the ATP Pixels product in a variety of different
⏹️ ▶️ John styles that’s proven to be very popular. Long sleeve t-shirt, t-shirt, sweatshirt, all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we have our plain old ATP logo stuff with colored shirts and also the black shirts with the rainbow logo
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. We have our zip hoodie, which is very popular. My family loves the zip hoodie. When
⏹️ ▶️ John they destroy and or lose them, they make me buy another one. That’s how much they like them. It’s one of the few pieces of branded
⏹️ ▶️ John merch that my children are willing to wear because the branding is discreet. It’s just a tiny little embroidered logo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And otherwise, it’s just a really nice, comfortable, high quality hoodie, and that’s what they love. We’ve got the polo
⏹️ ▶️ John available. Speaking of dressing for the job you want, or maybe dressing for the season you want, because it’s short sleeve.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve got a whole bunch of mugs left. So if you want a Cobalt ATP mug,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, maybe get two, because people drop them and break them, and then they want a replacement, and we don’t sell them anymore in that color
⏹️ ▶️ John or style, and then they’re sad. So always get backups. And we’ve got the ATP hat. So yeah, this is your
⏹️ ▶️ John last chance. You’re not going to hear about the sale anymore, because by the time we record the next episode, the sale will be over and
⏹️ ▶️ John it will be too late. So get your stuff while you can. ATP.FM slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I should mention that. That’s where you go. ATP.FM slash store. And if this was an actual podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John ad, I would have to read it a third time, but it’s not. So I won’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to ATP.FM slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash store. One more time. This is just an exclusive offer for our listeners. ATP.FM slash
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we didn’t even mention that. Remember, if you are a member, you get a 15% off discount code that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be on your member page. If you’re already logged in to ATP.fm when you go to the store page, it will fill it in automatically.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you can always go to your member page and copy and paste it. We even make a little copy button so you don’t have to try to select text in a web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is always ridiculous. That’s why these copy buttons are all over ATP.fm, because I hate trying to select text in a web page.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the selection is all over the place and you get like a space at the beginning end and stuff. So we will give you a copy button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want to become a member, just get a discount. It’s totally worthwhile to do so if you can save more the one month of membership
⏹️ ▶️ John costs. So there you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go. And I will just pipe in very quickly and do my annual, I guess, biannual reminder, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey common reminder that there is always always like 50 people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that say, Oh, I forgot to do my order. But there’s also a handful of people that legitimately say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no, Oh no, I’m that person. It’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s nothing we can do. Once the sale closes, the sale closes. So don’t be that person. Don’t be the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to come hat in hand, puss in boots style, looking up at me with your big gigantic eyes saying, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Casey, I forgot this time. Don’t be that person. http.fm. informational cosmetics series tar.net now.org
Marco got hit hard and soft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recently learned that was from a pop song, but I have already forgotten which artist and song it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John What’s from a pop song? I’m the problem, it’s me. Oh, yeah, well, it’s an obscure act. You’ve probably never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, let’s move on. I might have gone to their concert, depending on who it is. I don’t think you did.
⏹️ ▶️ John You would remember it. Would I? You would, indeed. Your wallet would remember it. Yes, it would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, what, is it Taylor Swift? Yes. Yeah, I definitely didn’t do that. I thought something like that would slip your mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I did see Billie Eilish, though. All right. How was that? Excellent. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that was not at your request, so… Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You bring enough people to Phish concerts, and eventually you gotta go to a different one. It’s payback time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I am not surprised that that was a very good show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, it was amazing. I would like, I totally, I totally get why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she’s so popular. Like there’s very good reason. It was very good.
Apple made Aperture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on before everyone writes us an email. And let’s start with Jason Sims, who writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aperture was indeed developed from scratch by Apple. I guess one of us, John, I suppose,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has said that it was a purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just said I didn’t remember. Remember, we were talking about Apple’s various pro apps, many of which were
⏹️ ▶️ John purchased from the outside, like Logic and Shake and stuff. And I said Aperture. I couldn’t remember if that was a purchase
⏹️ ▶️ John or developed in-house. And we got a clarification, developed in-house. There you go. Well, I appreciate it, Jason.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cancelled in-house. Haha. Uh.
“Plain M4” MBP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the MacBook Pro, Eric Roche reminded us to point out that the plain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M4 MacBook Pro now supports two external displays at up to 6k
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt or one 6k 60 Hertz over Thunderbolt and one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4k 144 Hertz over HDMI. The M3 MacBook Pro by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comparison, the plain M3 MacBook Pro, not the M3 Pro, not the M3 Max, but the plain one, Supported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only one external display with up to 6k resolution at 60 Hertz and required you to close the lid to use a second display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With up to 5k resolution at 60 Hertz I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t remember we mentioned this on the thing on the things launcher Maybe we just you know and folded into our past discussions
⏹️ ▶️ John of the multiple display controllers on the m4 But just to reiterate one of the big limitations that people
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like about the plain m3 MacBook Pro was It’s not very good external display support You just got one
⏹️ ▶️ John external display and then halfway through the life of that product Apple said oh Oh, here’s a software fix to let you have two external displays,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you got to close the lid because we take away the internal one when we give you the external one. All those limitations are
⏹️ ▶️ John gone with the M4. You get legit two external displays, plus also still the one on the laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is pretty much what I think should be table stakes for a bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John of the line MacBook Pro, and now it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, that baseline MacBook Pro like that just has the M4 and the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro chips, that is now a pretty good option for a lot of people. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that competes well with the MacBook Air because it gives you the pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen, the pro speakers, the port on the right side, the SD card slot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the right. Like it actually gives you a lot over the MacBook Air for not a ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more money. You do kind of pay for it in weight and thickness, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good, yeah, that’s a really good option for a lot of people now. And so I’m actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to see that product no longer be this weird asterisk that like you try to convince
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people not to buy. That’s a product now that like I could actually see myself buying in the equivalent in
⏹️ ▶️ John And it starts at 16 gigs of RAM. And I don’t know if we emphasize that when we first talked about it, but you just mentioned it in passing.
⏹️ ▶️ John These things in the past have had two ports only on one side, but now it has three ports. So one of the ports
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other side, you might think, well, who cares? You know, it’s the bottom of the end, bottom of the line one, how many points
⏹️ ▶️ John do you you really need, two is fine. It’s so convenient to have ports on both sides because
⏹️ ▶️ John you never know what kind of desk setup you’re gonna be sitting at, which side it’s convenient to get the power cable from,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, if you have a USB-C power thing and you’re not using the MagSafe thing because MagSafe is still just on one side.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s nothing that you need to excuse on the baseline one anymore. It’s got a great processor,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s got more ports than it used to, it’s got reasonable display support. It is really a better,
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive MacBook Air. Of course, when the M4 MacBook Air comes out, We’ll see how that model shakes up, but for now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a really impressive machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, honestly, it’s a great option for a lot of people.
Mac Mini details
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With regard to the Mac Mini, we have quite a bit of follow-up and the bombshell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that dropped I think it was sort of mentioned during Quinn’s teardown which I think happened either right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before or right after we recorded But then it has become even more of a bombshell. The new Mac Mini has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote-unquote modular storage So as it turns out there are different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like setups and boards and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but All the different Mac Minis have their SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on removable boards which is not super duper. In fact, I would argue it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t user replaceable unless you are really going spelunking, but it makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot more replaceable than it ever had been before. So John, can you tell us more about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so the modular storage, anyone who’s familiar with the inside of recent Apple Silicon Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John will recognize the quote unquote modular storage. It’s the same type of storage module that’s used in the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John and also very similar to the one that’s used in the Mac Pro, including even the 2019 Mac Pro, not even the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon one. Um, it is a card that goes into a slot
⏹️ ▶️ John that has the, you know, SSD NAND storage on it. And that may make
⏹️ ▶️ John you think, great, storage is upgradable on these things. And technically speaking, it kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Uh, we’ll put some links in the show notes to, uh, someone demonstrating
⏹️ ▶️ John what it takes to upgrade the storage on a Mac mini. Uh, it’s dosdude1, which I think that name is not quite appropriate,
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. And also the same YouTuber has done upgrades in the past with MacStudio
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs. The short version is, get out your soldering gun.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t buy those little modules. They’re not standard modules. It’s not like an M.2 module or NVMe
⏹️ ▶️ John type thing. It’s not standard at all. It’s an Apple proprietary thing. You can’t buy those Apple proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John things. You can find a used one like on eBay or something and stick it in. But then in that case, it still
⏹️ ▶️ John feels like it doesn’t work unless the NAND is actually blank so what DOSDU does is
⏹️ ▶️ John gets, either takes the one that came with it and desolders the NAND chips from it and then
⏹️ ▶️ John buys blank non, you know, no data nothing on them NAND chips and resolders
⏹️ ▶️ John them on top of the board or if you look at the MacStudio SSD upgrade video from a year or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a timestamp link in there, someone made a custom printed circuit board by looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at apples and saying I’m going to make my own empty printed circuit board like that. So you could in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John find that person in France who made that custom circuit board, buy it from them, find those blank Nans
⏹️ ▶️ John that Dostude found to buy somewhere, buy those, solder the two of them together, and voila,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have an empty storage module that will work in a Mac Studio, maybe a Mac Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ John certain Mac Minis, which we’ll get to in a second, right? So it seems to me, like, at no point in this process is
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody hacking any security key or fooling some DRM encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John or jailbreaking anything right? It’s just a question of how hard is it to get the parts.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems like if someone wanted to sell third-party SSD upgrades for
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Mini or the Mac Studio I don’t see why they couldn’t do what the person in
⏹️ ▶️ John this video did which is find that guy in France and like buy his printed circuit board design
⏹️ ▶️ John and mass-produce it, find where that guy I bought those blank NAND modules for because they’re not like special Apple NAND
⏹️ ▶️ John modules or if they are he found a place to buy Them and then combine them put them in a little
⏹️ ▶️ John retail box and say hey guess what would you like to upgrade your Mac Mini To a bigger SSD? We’ll sell
⏹️ ▶️ John it to you for half the price that Apple sells it I’m not quite sure where that market hasn’t opened up Maybe it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t there’s not enough people who own these devices to make it worthwhile to do what I just described But technically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking you’ll see two YouTube videos where it is literally possible to upgrade the storage on on your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John using those little card thingies, which is good, I guess, but like I said, since 2019 with the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, the little module things have been upgradable. There just hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been a thriving, I’m not gonna say legitimate, thriving, normal third-party market
⏹️ ▶️ John for upgradable storage. You really have to be kind of like a do-it-yourselfer or someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John wants to use a soldering iron or someone who wants to cruise eBay for used parts and deal with all those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s all sorts of weird caveats and stuff. So it’s not ideal, but Apple, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re not gonna solder it to the board, A, you should sell them separately yourself at your own ridiculous prices,
⏹️ ▶️ John because at least that gives people an option of upgrading. You know, if you could buy an upgrade from Apple at ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John prices, at least you’d feel comfortable that I know this is gonna work. And B, it would be great if you just let third parties build these
⏹️ ▶️ John things and sell them. Remember when third parties used to be able to sell parts that you can put inside Macs to make them better? Remember, Casey, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John could buy third party RAM and stick it in your Mac and there’d be no problems whatsoever? make it better though?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. I mean, for years, for people who are newer Mac users, for years and years, for
⏹️ ▶️ John a good sort of middle portion of like the recent Mac era,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was standard practice to tell people, if you were a tech nerd, oh, hey, buy this Mac, but buy
⏹️ ▶️ John it with the minimum everything, the minimum RAM and the minimum storage. And then when you get it, buy a
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party RAM upgrade and a third-party storage upgrade, and your total cost will still be less
⏹️ ▶️ John than if you had bought those upgrades from Apple, this whole expensive upgrade thing is not new for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, that was how I bought my first few Macs because I would never be able to afford the Apple upgrade prices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, this is one of the things we very much lost going to the modern, like everything soldered on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board kind of era that like used to be able to just buy the base model and go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Newegg or Amazon and buy some components and stick them in and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s not, you know, entirely Apple being super evil by soldering all these things to the board. Like lots of things
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be replaceable. Cell phone batteries all used to be easily replaceable. They’re not really anymore. Laptop batteries
⏹️ ▶️ John all used to be easily replaceable. They’re not anymore. It’s not just Apple, it’s the industry. There’s reasons for this. It’s more reliable, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller, it’s thinner, it’s more power efficient, yada, yada. But when Apple does make something like say, a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John computer where they have enough room to make removable storage and they choose to do so, like the Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the Mac Pro, and now also like the Mac Mini, if you’re gonna make modular storage
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, like give consumers the benefit of modular storage. Again, even if it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple selling the upgrades at their own ridiculous prices. Apple would not be losing any margin. It just makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it more flexible. It’s one of the benefits of desktop computers is they can be larger, take more power. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough room for removable stuff inside them. They didn’t do it with the SoC, they didn’t do it with the RAM. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that all makes sense given the way the Apple Silicon works, but they did do it with the storage. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of a shame for it to remain the realm of people who are comfortable desoldering
⏹️ ▶️ John chips and everything. Cause it’s not easy. Watch these videos. It’s not the type of thing that you’ll just do two seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ John It takes skill and care and you’ll probably screw it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think this the benefit of these SSD modules being socketed now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not really for us to change them. It’s to make it cheaper and easier for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to change them in the case of service. So like, you know, if in four years, your SSD dies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is probably going to be a cheaper repair that Apple would have to do to repair it, then replacing the entire logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco board, which is what they would have to do before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And David shot points out in the chat that For the Mac Pro, you can in fact buy Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John branded SSD upgrades at Apple ridiculous prices. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not unprecedented.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, don’t. Look at this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they cost what you would think they cost. They cost exactly the same as if you can configure with the machine with it, which is to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John six, seven, eight times the real cost. But you can buy them and you can be sure that they’ll work because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gracious. $2,800. $2,800 for an eight terabyte SSD array.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two terabyte for $1,000. That’s how much storage costs, right? $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ John for two terabytes. That’s accurate, right? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yet more reasons why the Mac Pro is trashed. Am I right? Am I
⏹️ ▶️ John $1,000 for two terabytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying Mac Pro is trashed. We can all agree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyways, that module really does look very similar to the one that’s in the Mac. I think it’s probably exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same module that’s in the Mac Studio and some Mac minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So from our friend, Paul Haddad, who is the author, one of the authors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Tweetbot and may it rest in peace and ivory and so on and so forth. Paul got a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minis, I think with the intention of returning one, if not both. And so Paul had some toots about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Paul writes, the M4 Mini Pro SSD is faster at comparable sizes compared to the M4 Mini, the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plain Mini, if you will. And there’s some links we’ll put in the show notes with different toots of his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that demonstrate this. Paul continues, I use the SSD benchmark results from Tom’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hardware for the 512 gig M4 Mac Mini Then compared it to my M4 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac Mini with the same size SSD, the M4 Plain at 512 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Tom’s Guide is 3,437 megabytes per second read, 3,017.3 write.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In comparison to the M4 Pro that Paul has, which is at also 512
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigabytes, 5,085.4 megabytes as compared to 3437 for read, and 5,397 for write as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compared to 3,017. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, 5085 instead of 3437 and 5,397 instead of 3017.
⏹️ ▶️ John so this was the difficulty of like, we’re trying to suss this out going back and forth on Mastodon, it’s like, benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John are weird because you really kind of want to run the benchmarks on like the same machine
⏹️ ▶️ John or at the same time or in the same environment at the same temperature. Shouldn’t be that big
⏹️ ▶️ John of a deal for storage, but I’m not entirely sure what explains this. So very often you’ll see different SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John sizes have different speeds because sometimes very larger sizes will have like four chips instead of two and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John read and write them all in parallel. And these speed tests are always like, what is the most fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John that I can shove on there? It’s only kind of a realistic task if you’re transferring
⏹️ ▶️ John individual very large files because otherwise the overhead of dealing with all the individual file metadata will swamp
⏹️ ▶️ John the transfer rate. But it’s just like, what if I’m, you know, What if you care about like copying huge
⏹️ ▶️ John video files or reading and writing huge video files, you know, in a video editor or something, that’s where you
⏹️ ▶️ John might care about this. And there’s, you know, Blackmagic disk speed test try to measure this. Why would the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size SSD though, be faster on an M4 Pro than it is on an M4?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not sure what explains that. Is it a different NAND chip? Does the M4 Pro have more,
⏹️ ▶️ John have a wider path to NAND than the plain M4? I would love for somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John who is more intimately familiar with these to explain this. It could just be that, you know, oh, that benchmark test was run
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, the benchmark setup was different, or they ran a different
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the test or something like, so that’s why I put links in the show notes to these two results. This is the best we could do because no one had
⏹️ ▶️ John these two machines sitting there. Someone had an M4, someone had an M4 Pro, we were collecting the results. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 3,000 to 5,000 is a pretty big difference. And so if you care about that, maybe you like benchmark the machine
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re planning on buying before you buy it. But practically speaking, if you’re just, if you’re not doing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John that cares about the absolute fastest sequential read and write speed, you probably don’t care too much about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, then iFixit did their tear down, which is only like five or six minutes long. And you can see in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, and this is what I was alluding to earlier, that the SSD modules are different between the M4 Mac mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the M4 Pro Mac mini. In fact, the M4 module
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks very, very similar to the Mac Pro module that you were talking about earlier, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And the Mac Studio module.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it OK? But the M4 Pro looks quite a bit different. But you can see the differences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in their teardown. Additionally, there’s actually, and this is super cool, no sarcasm, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is super freaking cool. Maybe this has always existed for other machines and I didn’t realize it. But there is an actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support document that talks about how a user could replace the SSD module.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, it says, before you begin, remove the following parts, bottom cover, antenna plate, and fan, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not an insignificant process, but they link to the instructions for each of these things, and then they tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly how to do the SSD. And I am here for this. Again, perhaps this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was something that existed and I wasn’t aware, but this is super cool. It is worth looking at this write-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple’s website, just to see how well-documented it is. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John giving a little bit of side-eye though, because I’ve watched a lot of Mac mini teardowns at this point, and the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John cover, which is plastic, which is where the power button is, that bottom plastic cover. It has four
⏹️ ▶️ John like little, you know, pin clip thingies that you have to unclip and also
⏹️ ▶️ John glue, because why not? And I have seen at least one YouTuber crack
⏹️ ▶️ John the plastic bottom while trying to pry it up with those little guitar pick sort of like little thingies like that iFixit
⏹️ ▶️ John uses. It is a thin plastic bottom cover. Why is it glued? The thing’s not waterproof.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it, like, do you need to glue it? Like they could have just screwed the bottom in, but then you’d have visible screws. So fine, you don’t want to use screws.
⏹️ ▶️ John they use those little pin thingies. Are the pin thingies not sufficiently strong that they have to glue it? When you put it back, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna glue it. No one’s gonna buy a little stick of the special Apple glue and put it around the rim
⏹️ ▶️ John to glue the thing back together if you’re doing it at home. Maybe if they repaired it at an Apple repair center, they would do that, but you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to. So getting the bottom off these things is I feel like needlessly unfriendly.
⏹️ ▶️ John iFixit didn’t even make too much of a mention of it because they’re so used to prying apart things that are glued together, and this is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John an easy one compared to opening up a phone or an iPad or something. But geez, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a aluminum square with a plastic thing on the bottom. Just let me unscrew the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom and take it off. Or make it waterproof or something, I don’t know. Something to defend against
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey and all of his drinks that he’s gonna spill
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco on his Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s kind of a shame, but it is nice to give the instructions and it’s pretty easy to get to once you pull out all that
⏹️ ▶️ John other stuff. One of the reasons I think the M4 Pro module
⏹️ ▶️ John is different is because if you look at the images from Apple’s repair guide or the teardowns,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll see that the M4 Pro Mac mini is different on the inside.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M4 Pro SoC is just plain bigger than the M4, right? And therefore it has a
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger heat spreader on it and a bigger heat pipe. And that bigger heat pipe leads to a larger
⏹️ ▶️ John copper heat sink with more fins, kind of like on the Mac Studio. When you got the lesser models, you would get a
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller aluminum heat sink. And when you got the Ultra, you’d get a bigger copper one, Same deal here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the bigger SoC takes up a little bit more room so that the place where the
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD goes on the plain M4 is a little bit too narrow. So they put it kind of on
⏹️ ▶️ John the side in a skinnier little card. The connector is the same. Like the connector is
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the way it was, but it’s just, it’s in a different place and it’s narrower, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So iFixit actually tried swapping them. And first they just took
⏹️ ▶️ John like an SSD from one M4 Mac mini and put it into another M4 Mac mini and that worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you have two Mac minis and just one SSD, you can swap it between them and it’ll be fine. But then they
⏹️ ▶️ John tried to put a plain M4 SSD into an M4 Pro Mac mini and it sort of fits.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can, the connectors are the same and you can kind of shove it in there, but they couldn’t get that to work right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s not supportive for some reason or maybe the connector was just not connecting all the way because it was on an angle. It wasn’t clear, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t detail their experience. but these are two different modules. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if and when Apple does sell these modules, make sure you’re buying the right one for your specific Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have a couple other things we need to mention. First of all, there are two NAND chips on the 256 gig model. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are two 128 gig chips, one would assume. And additionally, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are on a separate PCB, which is a little bb
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circular one, which was kind of interesting. And that’s the one that’s mounted like in the center of the fan, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on the very bottom. So the two NAND chips is important. I mean, it’s commonplace
⏹️ ▶️ John now, but for a while back in the earlier Apple Silicon things, they would ship
⏹️ ▶️ John the lowest end storage with a single 256 gig NAND chip
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of two 128s, and it would be roughly half the speed because you can read and write to both the chips at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time. And they backtracked on that and fixed it. And just to let people know going
⏹️ ▶️ John forward, the Mac mini also does not do that terrible half speed SSD thing. So even if you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the base storage, you get two 128s, so it should not be a half speed drive. It’ll still be slower than the 512
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one terabyte and all that other stuff, but it won’t be like half as fast as it could be. So that’s great. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John wifi and Bluetooth being on a separate, tiny little adorable circular printed circuit board,
⏹️ ▶️ John just really highlights what a shame it is that this thing doesn’t have wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John seven, right? Because it’s not like they need to do like a big revision
⏹️ ▶️ John to the board. Like at any time, they could have just, you know, they could have designed the whole Mac Mini logic board
⏹️ ▶️ John and had it all ready to go. And it’s just a question of what little circular wifi Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John thing do we attach to it? And that could have been at the last minute. Oh, put a wifi seven in there, but it’s not. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it means that the next version of this, it should be easy for it to get wifi seven and Bluetooth 5.4 or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is entirely separate. Like it’s literally, it’s such an adorable like quarter size printed
⏹️ ▶️ John circuit board that has all that stuff in it. And it’s just connected with antennas and wires and everything and it’s I think it’s at the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John just so we can Get away from the other components because all of the wireless stuff in this aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John Little cube thing is comes out the bottom where it’s plastic where it’s radio transparent So the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the wireless stuff isn’t nestled into the aluminum. There’s no like Plastic lines
⏹️ ▶️ John like on all the iPhones on the top all the wireless stuff has to come out of the bottom so that’s why the circuit board is down
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but it does make it very modular.
Small internal, big external storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then we had some questions with regard to external storage. Peter Walton writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an effort to bypass the silly overpriced storage upgrades, the obvious move is an external SSD. What I’ve never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really understood is, what is the best setup of files and libraries, etc., between an internal 256
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a larger external drive? How would you choose which data to put where so that you could get the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance? And additionally, Dennis Lee writes, do you have a recommended best practice for how to operate a Mac with a base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level of storage and a much larger secondary disk? Do you make symlinks between the file system and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folders on the secondary disk, or do you just turn the secondary disk into the boot drive?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is always tricky. It’s kind of a shame that Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John sell the Mac Mini with an internal SSD so small that the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve really put on it is the operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, please don’t advocate for them to ship smaller SSDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be an interesting thing that they could do. A little bit of the trouble of this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John some applications don’t like it when their stuff is not on the boot drive. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple applications historically have not liked it when their stuff was not on the boot drive. And you may be asking yourself, which applications
⏹️ ▶️ John is that? How do I tell? Is there some web page I can go to where Apple will tell me that I shouldn’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John my photos library in external drive, or it is supported and I can do that? Where do I find these answers? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was more upfront
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. At this point, Apple has done it so much so often, it should be like in the get
⏹️ ▶️ John info screen on the finder that says just FYI, this thing really wants you to have it stuff on the boot drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise it’s going to flip out right. I think most applications
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t care about this. But it’s worth looking into in particular photos is the one you probably care about if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John big photo library, because that’s one of the biggest things a lot of people have on their Macs. And if you want to download originals from your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library, you better make sure that it is supported in external drives. I actually don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John know the answer because mine is on the boot drive, but I believe it is currently supported. I think it may be it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John supported to have it on like a NAS or something, but I think it’s supported on an external drive. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s one thing to look into is look at the applications that you use, and how much data they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John and see which ones you would like to be an external drive and then check whether that is supported by
⏹️ ▶️ John the application vendor. Worst case, you could probably email support or something and find out for each application.
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, can I put your library, your data, your whatever on the external drive? Keep in mind that some applications
⏹️ ▶️ John do stuff like have cache folders and things that you don’t get to pick where they live if the program
⏹️ ▶️ John is not very configurable. So they’re just going to go on your boot drive whether you want it or not. And those might be big.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you really do have to figure out how much stuff you’re going to have on your internal drive. But
⏹️ ▶️ John in general, I would say it’s in this scenario where you’re going to have like boot drive
⏹️ ▶️ John and then bigger external drive on a desktop that’s permanently connected. I would try to put everything on the external
⏹️ ▶️ John one if I could just so I wouldn’t have to guess where things are and only Put things on the in on the boot drive that have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be there, right? Now, how do you accomplish that Dennis’s question? Should I make sim links?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should I make aliases? Sure, I make hard links to directories. How should I weave these things together? Should I do the weird
⏹️ ▶️ John overlay mount thing or whatever? It’s gonna be annoying Don’t use sim links. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be sad Lots of programs don’t handle them correctly You’re not gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John an answer from support about whether they do that or not. You just have to find a way, you just have to hope that your
⏹️ ▶️ John programs that you care about let you put your big stuff on the external drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gonna be annoying, because your documents folder is gonna be on the boot drive. And you’re like, don’t try to move, this is another thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t try to move your home directory to the external drive. Yes, you can do that, but you’ll be sad. It’s just not well
⏹️ ▶️ John supported by Apple. And you’re gonna have to like fidget with stuff. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons why people who have the money, pay the stupid Apple tax to get the gigantic
⏹️ ▶️ John internal drive because dealing with it on an external drive is annoying. The best case
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario is just data files that are there. So in that case, nothing’s
⏹️ ▶️ John ever gonna be reading them except for yourself and you can put an alias in your documents folder to your external
⏹️ ▶️ John drive or every time you save, you can just save and select your external drive from the OpenSave dialog. If it’s all just
⏹️ ▶️ John like data files, like video files or whatever, that should all be fine on an external drive. but if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like libraries or things that belong to stuff like my iTunes library, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an external drive, but it’s also not in my home directory. And so far that hasn’t blown up in my face, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every individual app has a different attitude, let’s say, towards you
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make it store its stuff somewhere other than where it wants to. And you just have to make sure it’s well supported. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mean to discourage people from doing this, it can be done, but it is going to be annoying. There is no
⏹️ ▶️ John seamless magic way where you can just have these merge and it just looks like one big disc. I’ll just make a like transparent
⏹️ ▶️ John fusion drive out of my internal SSD. Like lots of things are technically possible but they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John not well supported enough to recommend to somebody unless you’re a nerd and you just wanna do it because you think it’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I understand the motivation behind this but I don’t think I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend it. I really don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the problem is like you are, if you’re doing this, you are entering territory
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the vendors of all your software mostly don’t test or even use themselves very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. You know, Apple is one of many, like you can tell, if you try to do this, you can tell that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, no one in Apple does this. It becomes very obvious very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there are some things that do work well. You know, John mentioned the iTunes library that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found whenever I’ve needed to do that, that does work well. Photos, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can move your photos library, but I did have that problem a year or two ago when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it started taking up huge amounts of space on the internal drive for some kind of like unclaimed or like unallocated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or untracked space usage. It was really weird. So like, it seems like you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it again, but like you’re just, you’re gonna run into a lot of little annoyances and bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and untested or under tested conditions. And so, you know, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco balance that with like, how much do you want to do this? How much do you need to do this? Like it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost you something. So, you know, you gotta weigh all that when you’re deciding.
⏹️ ▶️ John And speaking of costs, some other people also asked about performance. Is the external SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have worse performance than an internal one? And I thought I had an obvious answer to that, but then I just started to do some
⏹️ ▶️ John more research to get the numbers and it’s really weird, right? So the internal SSDs on Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John can be extremely fast. We read before some numbers about internal SSDs, the 512
⏹️ ▶️ John internal SSD having 3000 megabytes per second read write, but then the M4 Pro at 5000 read
⏹️ ▶️ John write, you’ll see them pushing up into 6000 megabytes read write on the bigger ones, right? Internal can be
⏹️ ▶️ John real fast. And so first, you may be wondering, okay, so if internal can be up to 6000 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John read, right? If I got a fast internal one, can I compete with that an external? So Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John three and four, top out at 40 gigabits per second that’s 5,000 megabytes per second
⏹️ ▶️ John so in theory if you had a five or six thousand megabyte per second internal in theory
⏹️ ▶️ John an external one if it was the only thing contending for your Thunderbolt bus could match
⏹️ ▶️ John the speed of an internal one like the bus wouldn’t be the bottleneck but keep in mind that these m4 things
⏹️ ▶️ John these desktops have Thunderbolt 5 and that’s 80 gigabits and that’s 10,000 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second so the bus the wire connecting your Mac meaning to the SSD is not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be the bottleneck most likely right but now the question is what do I put at the other
⏹️ ▶️ John end of that cable that can achieve those speeds and at first I thought well
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably can’t find an SSD that’s gonna be as fast as these little nan things that are real close to the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU with those proprietary connectors because they probably just have a wider bus or whatever and I looked up lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of benchmarks and you’d see people benchmarking their external SSDs and they’d be happy to get like 2,700 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second read-write, 3000 megabytes per second read-write, where the internal ones were getting up to six. I was like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John the external ones are like half the speed, that’s a bummer. But then I found some reports of external ones that were faster, that
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed to be close to the internal ones. So I don’t know, like, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bus is not the bottleneck here. It may be the,
⏹️ ▶️ John so when you buy an external SSD, you should buy a Thunderbolt one. If you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a product that is a Thunderbolt SSD, that connects with a Thunderbolt cable and uses the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John protocol connection stuff, you can buy that as a standalone product. You can also buy enclosures that
⏹️ ▶️ John support Thunderbolt that you plug in an NVMe standard NAND thing into.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you’re like, which enclosure do I buy? Which enclosure has the best performance? It doesn’t overheat, it doesn’t throttle after
⏹️ ▶️ John a certain period of time. And then what SSE do I plug into that? There’s a lot of, it’s kind of like buying an external,
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day when you’d buy the hard drive mechanism and the external case that it goes in, it’s tricky. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you care about the absolute fastest speed, it is easier to just
⏹️ ▶️ John find benchmarks for the built-in one on the Mac that you care about and decide whether that is fast
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. But you can get very fast speeds on external SSDs,
⏹️ ▶️ John just maybe not the maximum that you can get on the internal ones. And I wish I could give you a more concrete answer about
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the source of the limitations. Again, on Thunderbolt 5, the limitation is not the bus. It’s something
⏹️ ▶️ John else. Maybe it’s contention for the bus if you have a bunch of other stuff going on. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it’s not a satisfactory answer, but just like the answer is find benchmarks for the external SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you’re thinking of buying, whether it is a standalone product or an enclosure and a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John and decide if that benchmark satisfies what you think your needs are. And after saying all this, you may be thinking, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’re saying it’s so great, you can do external storage, you can’t upgrade the RAM, but you can do external storage, but now you’re saying external
⏹️ ▶️ John storage is useless. It’s totally not. Like for normal stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John where your disk storage need is I have huge files, like say you’re a video editor, you can fill like any
⏹️ ▶️ John disk or storage with just huge video files. Go out and shoot footage at 4K 120, you will fill
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. And those files can live on an external SSD that does 3000 megabytes per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can edit 4K footage at that speed. Now I’m not an expert video editor. Maybe they’ll tell you that, yeah, but you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John run into problems when you do X, Y, and Z with very large products very large resolutions or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for data files, if you just need a place to store huge data files, a big
⏹️ ▶️ John external SSD is great. And if you need every last ounce of the speed, maybe you can put your current project on the
⏹️ ▶️ John boot drive, edit it and then put it back over there. But yeah, like for most storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you care about is having the space to keep your stuff. Not that you’re constantly going to be reading
⏹️ ▶️ John all of your stuff at 6,000 megabytes per second so that you can’t do external storage at all. And then of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, if you really wanna spend the money, I’m sure some vendor will sell you some insane external
⏹️ ▶️ John storage device that puts a bunch of SSDs in parallel and does get speeds that rival or exceed
⏹️ ▶️ John the lone single internal SSD, because you can do the, you know, that whatever that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is that MKBHD bought for his Mac Pro, it’s like a PCIe card with like eight SSDs stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Then you, yeah, then you might run into bandwidth limits, but the good news is it’ll go up to 10,000 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second in theory on Thunderbolt 5. So external storage is still very useful, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is an additional complication, which is why it’s a shame that Apple charges so much
⏹️ ▶️ John for its internal storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s becoming my number one bugbear is now that the base
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM is at least, you know, reasonable, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SSD prices are just from a different planet. They really, really are. I mean, well, and I guess I should also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be thankful that they haven’t raised prices, you know, And it seemed, in a lot of ways, things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that should be more expensive because inflation haven’t gotten more expensive. So there is a lot to be thankful for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but man, are they ever making it up with these SSD prices. Grace.
M4 gains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about the M4. Wes Campaigne did the Lord’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work and compiled a whole bunch of data on single-core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Geekbench scores per gigahertz for the M-series chips. And—
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is gigahertz the singular form of that unit of measure? Sorry, gigahertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s just one hertz, one gigahertz. Just one gigahertz,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s it. One ping only, please. Anyways, so yes, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very fancy chart in the show notes and as well or there’s a table as well as a chart
⏹️ ▶️ John I had to make the chart when people don’t post a table full of numbers. No one can look at that and know what it is. You got to visualize
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s what charts are for. It’s for visualizing numbers. Humans are much better at looking at a bunch of bars of different heights
⏹️ ▶️ John than looking at numbers, even though it’s like all the information is there in the numbers. It’s just harder to see. So I made I
⏹️ ▶️ John made the chart and you may be wondering who cares is about single core performance per gigahertz. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John another way to demonstrate how good the M4 generation is. So what
⏹️ ▶️ John we mean per gigahertz is like, so these chips score a certain score on the Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ John single core thing. We’re just looking at the individual cores at this point here. And whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that score is, you can also look at the clock speed that the chip was running to achieve that score and do some division and find
⏹️ ▶️ John out for each one gigahertz, how much of the score that it achieved attributable to that
⏹️ ▶️ John gigahertz right and that matters because you might be wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John is the m whatever faster than its predecessor because it is like a quote-unquote better chip
⏹️ ▶️ John or is it just clocked higher like did they make changes to the cpu core the individual cpu
⏹️ ▶️ John core that make it a better cpu core or is it just that changes to the processor now let them
⏹️ ▶️ John take essentially the same cpu core and just clock it higher right and to be clear clocking
⏹️ ▶️ John higher is great back in the in the good old days, we used to clock things higher and they would just get faster and it was like free money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those days are long gone, right? So just being able to clock them higher is great and we will take
⏹️ ▶️ John every ounce of that that we can get. We would love it if the CPU never changed and they just double the clock speed every year,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would love it. There’s no reason to like demand the CPUs be quote better at what they do
⏹️ ▶️ John in each clock cycle. But given that we can’t keep doubling the clock speed every year, given that clock speed
⏹️ ▶️ John gains are hard fought and require process changes and it just really is like pulling teeth to
⏹️ ▶️ John get those little bits of clock speed, it would be nice if the CPU could also
⏹️ ▶️ John do more in each turn of the crank in each one of those clock cycles. And if you look at the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John through the M4, M1, M1 Pro, M1, M1 Pro and Max, M2, M3, M4, and
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the performance per gigahertz, it has been increasing. The M1 had 738
⏹️ ▶️ John giga bench score per gigahertz. So then it goes 746, 756, 755, 759, 778, 751, 758, 763.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s going up, right? We went from 738 to 763. This is performance per clock.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, obviously the clock speeds have also increased across that whole thing, which is why an M3 is
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than an M1, right? But now look at the M4’s bars. They are 890, 889, and 896.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a discontinuity. M1, M2, M3 barely eked out small gains
⏹️ ▶️ John in sort of architectural improvements and all the rest of their improvement has been from cock
⏹️ ▶️ John speed, which again is great. We love it. And you know, the M3 is certainly faster than the M1. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the benchmarks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, there’s been like, you know, cache increases and stuff like that that also help a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like there was cache increases on the M2 and on the M3 as well, right? And this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John core, by the way, because multi-core is very different because these have different number cores. But just looking at the individual core scores. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be that all of the additional performance per gigahertz is attributable to just massively big caches
⏹️ ▶️ John in the M4, but whatever it’s attributable to be, it is a discontinuity. The M1 and M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 were getting a little bit better per clock and the M4 gets
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot better per clock. Now we’ll see, does this continue or do we get M5, M6, M7
⏹️ ▶️ John that are also gradual, but it’s just another way of demonstrating how much better the M4 is than
⏹️ ▶️ John the others. And by the way, the M4 is also clock higher. That is not represented in this graph because this graph is intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John ignoring clock increases. But yeah, the entire M4 generation
⏹️ ▶️ John is a pretty substantial leap over all of its predecessors in many different ways. We don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have a power chart in here, but lots of people who are testing these are amazed at how low power they are when they’re doing nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to their predecessors, which is also great. So, buy those shirts.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey an M4 shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you never get an M4 Mac. This is a good generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so Wes also notes that if you look at the iPhone Pro scores over the last few years, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a similar major jump at the A18 Pro’s performance per gigahertz. Whatever they’ve done to improve the performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this latest generation of performance cores is really amazing. And then Ken Case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points out, a fun discovery this week is that an M4 Mac Mini with four performance and six efficiency cores does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a clean build of OmniFocus one and a half times faster than an M1 Ultra Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with 16 performance cores and four efficiency cores.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that is a Comparison of two chips that are very unlike each other the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John end m4 and the highest end m1 doing a real-world task in cases runs
⏹️ ▶️ John Omni group by the way makers of lots of fine applications and Doing a thing that you need to do as part of your job
⏹️ ▶️ John how long does it take to build this application that we develop and after four
⏹️ ▶️ John generations of the m-series chips the slowest m4 is is now substantially
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the fastest M1 that was ever sold in a real world multi-core task.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is, I mean, the progress we’ve made in processor performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just since the Apple Silicon era, even if you only consider the Apple Silicon era within itself, not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considering how it compared to Intel, which- The M1 was not a bad chip, it was amazing. Yeah, the M1 destroyed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything before it. And even just, I mean, you look at what we have done since the M1,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which admittedly that was what, four years ago, you know, a little over four years ago, something like that. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was, you know, not, you know, four years is a long time in computers. But when you compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gains we’ve had in the Apple Silicon era, versus what we were getting in the Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era for like the previous 15 years, you know, with Intel chips, you were lucky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were getting maybe five to 7% per year faster. Like you were not getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of gain. So this has just been an incredible run so far. And I’m sure it’s gonna ebb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and flow in like how quickly things progress over time, but we’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really great era right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and if you look at Intel, by the way, Intel now is getting a TSMC to manufacture all our parts of
⏹️ ▶️ John its chips because it can’t, its process isn’t as good. So the Intel chips are like, there was all this noise about them being competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talked about the Qualcomm chips being competitive. All those Intel chips
⏹️ ▶️ John and Qualcomm chips when we were talking about them, they were all comparing themselves to the M3. And we always knew the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 was coming, and it’s like, okay, well, it’s fair to compare it to what’s on the market, because they’re comparing their chips to what you can buy now, and you can only
⏹️ ▶️ John buy M3 Macs now. Well, that time is over. You can buy M4 ones now, and they’re amazing. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John too bad for Intel’s stuff and for Qualcomm’s stuff. They had their brief moment in the
⏹️ ▶️ John sun when they were within shooting distance, within whatever the expression is, within
⏹️ ▶️ John punching distance of Apple’s then best line of chips, but the M4s are here now, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have jumped out ahead fairly comfortably in all measures that anyone cares about. And obviously it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just the SoCs, everything has to do with the M4s, all the architectural changes, although
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, you know, the memory controllers and the storage stuff is related to the SoC as well, but it’s everything about these computers
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, that’s how far we’ve come. You wait for four generations of SoC and the slowest one is faster than
⏹️ ▶️ John the fastest original series chip. So we’re making good progress. It’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John to see. It’s still it’s hard fought right it requires billions of dollars in new process and lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult Chip design and lots of you know it’s not as easy as it was back in the old days when we were just cranking up The
⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed and you just get faster Those days are long gone, but that’s why it’s so great to see that It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh the m1 came along and it was amazing and then it just kind of plateaued after there nope They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still making good gains Whatever brain drain happened from when all the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple silicon people left to form Nuvia and that got bought by Qualcomm Apparently it has
⏹️ ▶️ John not been enough to completely cripple Apple’s ability to make good chips because the
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 chips are great.
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Rumored Apple telescreen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve had fits and spurts of news over the last, I don’t know, month, maybe two months
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about some sort of home device that Apple was flirting with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we had the biggest, I guess, like summary and a little bit of new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news from, as you would expect, Mark Gurman. This was yesterday as we record this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a lot to read here and I apologize for that, but I think all of this is interesting and is a pretty good summary.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And also, like I said, some new information.
⏹️ ▶️ John a summary. This is here’s the way I characterize it. We’ve talked about this home pod with a screen for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, more than multiple months. I think it’s been a long time we’ve been talking about this. A lot of time we talked about it
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically about the robot arm that’s going to make the screen point towards you or whatever. And that was all like Apple’s planning
⏹️ ▶️ John a product that’s like a home pod with a screen that might have a robot arm. Let me tell you about it. But this dump
⏹️ ▶️ John from German here is like, all right, that time is over where we talk about a vague product that Apple has,
⏹️ ▶️ John let me tell you about the specific product that Apple is going to release. And this has tons of details
⏹️ ▶️ John that have not been in there before. I mean, he might as well have included like a name and a product shot. Like this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a lot. That’s why we’ve included all these details. Cause this is, you know, when you read the German stories and it’s like, Apple might be looking at this
⏹️ ▶️ John and looking at that. And then you read the German stories, it’s like, here’s what’s coming out next week. And he tells you everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about the machines. This reads like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So let me start reading. The device has a roughly six inch screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and looks like a square iPad. There’s also a camera at the top front, a rechargeable built-in battery and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal speakers. Apple plans to offer it in silver and black options. The product has a touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface that looks like a blend of the Apple Watch operating system and the iPhone’s recently launched standby mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the company expects most people to use their voice to interact with the device. Hardware was designed around App
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intents, a system that lets AI precisely control applications and tasks, which is set to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey debut in the coming months. The product will be marketed as a way to control home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appliances, chat with Siri, and hold intercom sessions via Apple’s FaceTime software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates, and playing music.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to display their photos. Apple’s already planning a more expensive follow-up version, because of course they are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a robotic limb that can move the screen around. The higher end product could be priced at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as $1,000, which if you follow Jason Snell’s math, which is double whatever you think it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will be, then it’s $2,000. The display only device will be far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than that and approaching the cost of competitor’s products. And for reference, the Echo Show 8 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey priced at 150 bucks while the Echo Hub is 180. The Nest Hub Max costs $230.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen. We’ve got the Playdate dock all over again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On a nightstand or on a desk. The screen device, which runs a new operating system code named
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pebble, too soon, will include sensors to determine how close a person is. It will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then automatically adjust its features depending on the distance. For example, if users are several feet away, it might show the temperature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As they approach, the interface can switch to a panel for adjusting the home thermostat. That’s very clever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey During development, Apple discussed launching an app store part of the device, but it recently decided to exclude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this feature, at least in the initial version. That sounds familiar. The product will be a standalone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device, meaning it can operate almost entirely on its own, but it will require an iPhone for some tasks, including parts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the initial setup. Apple hopes it can sell multiple units of the device to consumers who will place them around the house
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use them several times a day.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is a product that is a product that is less than, I guess, let’s just say less than a thousand dollars, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to this rumor, because I don’t know if it’s going gonna be $200 or $150, but less than $1,000, no apps, no app store, it is an appliance
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sense of the HomePod, I guess. You don’t buy apps for your HomePods, right? That you just
⏹️ ▶️ John put them in your house, they do a thing, they hopefully are inexpensive, and the thing that they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do is it’s going to be a screen that lets you do home stuff and maybe look at some photos and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John do FaceTime stuff. And that is, I think, a pretty reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John product. Lots of the rumors were so concentrating on that robot arm and thinking it’s gonna be like in your kitchen table in front of you and turning
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen around. But it’s like, this is just, people say, oh, it’s like an iPad I hang my wall, so up. Well, first
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, iPads are super expensive. And second, iPads don’t have software
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets them do the things that this thing is gonna do. This is really like, think
⏹️ ▶️ John of it as like Apple’s ecobee or something similar to that. Or I guess the Echo Show is kind of similar
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But like, I like the idea that this doesn’t have apps initially because it forces
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple to say, make this product useful with just the stuff that it comes with. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should be able to fiddle with all your home stuff and see what the temperature is and adjust your thermostat.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s neat that you can also talk to it and have it do voice assistant stuff and it can show pictures of your family. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess you could do FaceTime if you had it on the kitchen counter or something. But really, I just see this
⏹️ ▶️ John as being sold as like, in a fancy house to control house stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have a couple of these hanging around and it would be nicer than an ecobee,
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer than a nest integrated into Apple’s ecosystem. And it opens
⏹️ ▶️ John the door for potentially Apple to sell devices that connect to this and do interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. So far, Apple hasn’t been interested in that. They don’t sell the thermostats, they don’t sell the smart lights, they don’t sell, so
⏹️ ▶️ John they just, you know, they do HomeKit and they support Matter and Thread Radios and all that stuff, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t sell devices that connect to this. But if this is not an app store play, but is instead
⏹️ ▶️ John just a electronic product you buy from Apple to solve a problem for a single price one time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That at this point is actually kind of novel and refreshing, which is maybe sad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s how I feel about this. I’m like, yeah, a less than a thousand dollar thing that’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John full-blown iPad, that I don’t want to be a full-blown iPad, that just does home stuff, that does it in a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John way with a pleasant interface with no ads, that never asked me if I want to reorder something I just ordered from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I give that a thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two major concerns about this kind of ads presented. Number one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is exactly the kind of product that Apple historically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has kind of put out there and then neglected, and then it dies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the entire HomePod line, you can look at and say, hmm, that’s the predecessor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this. How’s that going?
⏹️ ▶️ John If it kept working though, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I kind of hope. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s a big if.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a big if. I kind of hope that my ecobee thermostat doesn’t keep getting updated and doing weird stuff. I just want it to do exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what it does now, forever and not break.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, here’s the problem though. Number two thing I’m worried about is, this sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends a lot on HomeKit and HomeKit accessories and the market of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HomeKit accessories and how good they are and how healthy that ecosystem is. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a great thing I would depend on. You know, I have a bunch of HomeKit stuff. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mixed bag and over time it does not seem like it’s going in a great direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like again it’s it’s kind of one of the things that’s been put out there and then just kind of sits around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we see a story play out with HomeKit that we see a lot with Apple which is they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco declare a certain standard that standard ends up being more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or harder to implement than people making their own standards or other competing standards and as a result there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not much of an ecosystem there. It’s, you know, a handful of partner brands and not much else. That’s what we see with HomeKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And HomeKit adds to it the other problem of Apple not caring that much about it. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Home app is kind of a mess. HomeKit itself is kind of, you know, spotty here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not nearly as reliable as, you know, dedicated systems like, you know, the Phillips Hue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco systems or like, you know, Lutron Caseta, like where they kind of have their own protocols. Like, you know, those are way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable. You don’t see a lot of HomeKit products being released. You don’t see that ecosystem really thriving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So whatever this product is, that Kerwin’s talking about this square wall pad thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever this is, controlling home devices should probably not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major reason why people would buy this, because I think that’s gonna be disappointing and probably neglected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the other parts of this, you know, from a technical point of view, as soon as Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released standby mode on the iPhone, We were all saying, like, why isn’t this just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPad that you can stick somewhere and it’d be like an appliance? It seems like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made this system on the iPhone, which is like this whole environment where you’re kind of running these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blown up, but small information density widgets in kind of this like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appliancy kind of mode. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is indeed screaming out for like more products to expand what that does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But even that, Apple put it out there and kinda
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t do anything with it after that. They put it out and kinda walked away whistling like a cartoon character.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are they going to invest more in that? Is it gonna work better? Is it gonna have better capabilities? Is it gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit easier to develop for? Cause standby is not super easy to develop for. And then we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving into the App Intent system that this is allegedly based on, which again, that’s part of Apple Intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s part of the plan for like the next year of Apple Intelligence, where it will hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to index and then start operating on app intents that our app exposed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that, first of all, is an API that doesn’t exist yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an area of iOS, which is intense, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco historically has been very limited, a little bit buggy, very hard to develop for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now you’re launching it allegedly or developing or kind of relying on that ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is difficult, buggy, and not well supported, and largely non-existent so far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Integrating that with Apple Intelligence, which is not, you know, it’s barely existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far. That’s in its very early days. Trying to build upon Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which so far we’re still waiting for it to get good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It hasn’t yet. And a quick aside here, I think it was a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mistake to launch the Siri UI redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the colorful border around the screen before it is the Apple intelligence version of Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They should have paired those things together because what people see now is, oh, Siri’s different and this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the update. Great. And then you asked to do something and it still sucks. And then you think Apple intelligence sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that was a terrible marketing move to split that off. the colorful border should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indicate this is the new Apple Intelligence Siri. And if that Siri isn’t ready yet, we shouldn’t be seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that colorful border yet. Anyway, that’s an aside. So going back to the square pad wall thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like this is a product. In this, you know, Mark Gurman conception, which I’m sure is incomplete and missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the point and way less cool and missing on some of the features, fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this version of it, what I’m hearing is here’s a product that we’re kind of not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where this fits in a lot of people’s homes, lives and budgets, being built upon a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of kind of unreliable or often neglected parts of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech stack and business. I don’t know, I’m a little wary of this product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it’s described so far.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of like it because the competitors are so terrible. Like for example, when I was visiting my
⏹️ ▶️ John brother out in California, they wanted something in their house that could just show like their calendar,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? you know, their Google calendar, whatever they were using, but it was like somewhere convenient in the house, like in the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John or on the wall or whatever, just so they can keep track of stuff. They don’t have to like look on their phone or scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, because calendars are big and you need to see lots of stuff. That type of appliance, a
⏹️ ▶️ John relatively inexpensive compared to like an iPad, thing that can just show your
⏹️ ▶️ John calendar and like the weather and the time, people buy those that do literally nothing else. They don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have any apps, they don’t have any features, they don’t control any home stuff. All they do is show their calendar. It’s not even interactive, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t even interact with it. It just shows your calendar and the events and the time and maybe the weather. And it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a hundred dollars and it’s some weird Android tablet and they buy it and they’re happy with it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that it doesn’t have apps, I think is key for this product. I hope it never has apps because I just
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to be a inexpensive and Apple land, which probably means like $299 or whatever. But still like a thing that’s not an iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that is inexpensive compared to an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John that just does a limited number of things and looks nice and doesn’t have ads on it and doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly want you to buy things and isn’t doing weird, creepy stuff or whatever. It has good security,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not selling any of your information and it just does something boring, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s a market for something like that. I’ve always wished Apple would make one of these things because a lot of the third party ones, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John questions of like, is this just constantly gonna be selling me things? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John listening to hear what TV shows I’m watching it’s selling that information to some data broker or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is a company that I trust to do a simple thing that just shows the time and the weather shows the
⏹️ ▶️ John family calendar shows a slideshow of you know, photos of my kids when it’s idle,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And if as a bonus, it can also control my home kit enabled thermostat or something that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great, right. And you know, setting aside now good home goods going, I don’t have a lot of experience with
⏹️ ▶️ John home stuff. But it seems like there is no with the exception of Lutron, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John flawless and works perfectly, but is not a sort of smart, like smart app platform
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything. I don’t think they have anything equivalent to the big thing with the screen. With the assumption of sort of infrastructure stuff that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing, everything that tries to do something nicer ends up being kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John flaky or annoying or just sort of not up to Apple standards. So I think Apple should have a product
⏹️ ▶️ John like this. And yes, they should also make the HomeKit stuff better and they need to deal with that. And they need to actually use all the
⏹️ ▶️ John thread radios that are shipping over the devices. By the way, the Mac mini also has a thread radio. We don’t even mention
⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore, but like Apple, everything Apple sells has three radios. What is it good for? What is it being used for? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Someday it will be super important. But anyway, Apple does need to shore that up. But setting all
⏹️ ▶️ John of that aside, just a little cheap screen that’s not a hand-me-down iPad that
⏹️ ▶️ John comes with mounting hardware that you can stick somewhere in your house that looks nice and does a simple thing, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good product. I question why Apple, I’m a kind of, not question, I’m kind of amazed that Apple is building
⏹️ ▶️ John it because I currently don’t see the services revenue angle and it seems like everything Apple makes needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to have that angle, but this has no apps, no cut a percentage of developer
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff for it, presumably no subscription other than maybe iCloud they can integrate into that. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing you buy that’s nice that does something in your home. And I long for products like
⏹️ ▶️ John that that are not junked up. And I hope that’s what this is. If it’s not what this is and they get all tied up
⏹️ ▶️ John with a robot arm thing and try to picture this as the ultimate home kit console for a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ John house that doesn’t actually exist outside of Apple’s little model home where everything is controlled by HomeKit and it all
⏹️ ▶️ John because in real life, people have Ring doorbells, people have Google security gambles, people have all sorts of different stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing is not going to help you like integrate that heterogeneous smart home
⏹️ ▶️ John and clarify it all and connect with home. Like that’s not this product, right? But in that case, I’m just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you at least just show me a calendar and a clock in the weather and maybe I’ll buy it. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ John bar is low is what I’m saying. Like the bar for stuff like this, the bar is really low.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to find stuff like this that is actually nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve never had any of the screen based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assistants in my house. We did have the original, very tall tubular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Echo. We have a couple of Echo Dots that we almost never use to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, there’s one in our primary bedroom that about the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time it ever gets used is for me to tell it to ignore or clear my notifications after a delivery from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amazon. Or occasionally, Penny will go to sleep in her bed in the bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while we’re downstairs watching TV. And so I will do a drop in up to the bedroom to tell her to come
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downstairs and go pee before we go to bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’ve got one of those dots too, by the way. And it is basically the Amazon has delivered something light.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for that function.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that I can when it lights up, let me know that there’s a package. And I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ John won mine for free in a work
⏹️ ▶️ John so I didn’t even pay for it. But it keeps working. And when I tell it to clear notifications, it
⏹️ ▶️ John does every time. And when I do my little three voice assistant competitions from the
⏹️ ▶️ John dining room table, it participates gamely. So we’re well worth the $0 I paid for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey team. But yeah, I don’t know. I’ve never had, like I said, a screen based one in my my house or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my life. And I have some friends or we have some friends that are local and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be at their house from time to time. And they have, I don’t even know the name of the device, but it’s a Amazon device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is a screen that looks roughly the size of a laptop screen. You ever take a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems to me like it’s a rotating billboard of stuff that I am deeply uninterested in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that very well could be that that’s how they set it up. And maybe I would set it up differently and better and whatever, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case may be. But based on that one experience,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That doesn’t mean that this doesn’t have a place in my life, particularly if it’s done with a little more taste, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume Apple would. But knowing what little I know now, I don’t feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I have a need for it, but that’s also the same thing I say about every freaking device that Apple ever makes. So here we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I think your experience with seeing a lot of mediocrity in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Amazon products with screens, That mirrors, I think, almost every report I’ve ever heard about them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, and I even had the very first Echo Show. That was the very first Echo with a screen that I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought one and returned it within like one day of having it because you know what, what we very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned with the Echo Show series is that you can’t trust Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a screen. They just use it to promote stuff at you. You are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re literally paying them money to have them advertise and yell in your face. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s, that’s not a great product experience for most people. You can turn off some of those things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they’ll just add new ones and opt you in because that’s a wonderful trick that for some reason is legal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what we see is like we see the failure modes of these products in Amazon’s case, the failure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode is they just use it as an advertising channel to, to spew ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at you in various forms, whether it’s promoted news stories or direct actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just ads, like whatever it is, they’re spewing stuff at you that that you don’t want. In Apple’s case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the failure mode will be unreliability and neglect. So we have to see, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I will trust Apple for the most part, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely, but for the most part, I trust Apple not to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as egregious as Amazon in spamming us with stuff we don’t want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now. When you walk into the room and there’s a new Apple TV Plus show filling the entire screen, we’ll know they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco failed in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how about a sports team score that I don’t care about? You know you can catch us right now on Apple TV Plus? That
⏹️ ▶️ John user interface failure. Apple’s not trying to sell us anything with those sports scores. They’re just scores
⏹️ ▶️ John that are just annoying us in ways that we could not figure out how to stop without extreme effort. So that is not, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just bad UI in there. But the Apple TV Plus shows, I think, is an example of them being like, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John put them in the keynotes now. It’s like, hey, while we’ve got your attention, did you know there’s a new TV show coming out on the service
⏹️ ▶️ John that we want you to subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can also see them, in various ways, they have eroded the user experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS over the years to do things like harass you with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications and full screen takeovers and stuff for things like if you haven’t bought Apple Music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you aren’t an Apple Music subscriber and you try to use the Music app, good luck with that. If you don’t buy Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Care for your phone and you went to the Settings app, good luck with that. They do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertise at us and they are getting more and more shameless about it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect a product like this to not be immune to that, but I think it would be a vastly different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level lower than what Amazon does with their Echo Show series. So anyway, so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see this kind of product line. The problem with, Google also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has their own versions of this and I don’t have any experience with them. John, your Google things don’t have screens, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I was just looking at the Nest Hub Max, which looks very much like what Apple is competing with. It’s the more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s like a little Android tablet on an angle on a little stand that probably does all the things that Android
⏹️ ▶️ John tablets do, but in a more limited homey version of it. That definitely just looks, I mean, Google’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be advertising to you as much as Amazon is, but it’s like a Google ecosystem version of
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And I feel like that is probably Apple’s target is the Nest Hub Max with its functionality, but it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the Apple ecosystem as well. So if you just did want something to show you your Google calendar, maybe the Nest
⏹️ ▶️ John Hub Max is the answer, but I haven’t actually used it. So I don’t know how annoying it is and how flexible it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I don’t know anything about it. We’ll see. I haven’t really heard anything about people who use those, so I don’t think there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of them. But I would suspect that might suffer as many side Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco projects do, probably from a lack of attention. But that’s just speculation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Google is a little bit more invested in the ad ecosystem than Apple is, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, sure. But I do think Amazon historically is the most egregious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at spamming you through their Alexa products, through the Echo products, like with extra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commentary that promotes some stuff that you can do, with extra content, extra things showing up on your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, we know with the Amazon products how that fails. Apple just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if they’re gonna do this, again, we don’t know much about this, obviously, but if they’re gonna do something like this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like it rests on a lot of assumptions about subsystems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work better than they do, a lot of architecture and infrastructure that doesn’t seem to exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet or is barely being deployed in the form of Apple intelligence, into a market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hardware that is not nearly as good as Apple purports it to be or wants it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be with HomeKit stuff, and relying on a market of software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the form of apps and app intents and things like that, where like, how do we know apps are even gonna take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of app intents? How many apps are actually going to adopt this new API? How many apps are going to want to be controlled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headlessly through Siri and Apple intelligence without making you go into the app and see all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apps promos and stuff. It’s like there’s a lot of kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of faith going into this product from the way it’s described here that I’m not sure I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of strong confidence in. So I don’t know. This remains to be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do see the market for a dashboard type of thing but I don’t know that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this but I guess we’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, if the price is low enough, it doesn’t, all your concerns really don’t make that much of a difference because it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it this way. Do you currently have an old iPad that you use to listen to music in your kitchen? Well, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a cheap version of an old iPad that you use to listen to music. If you subscribe to Apple Music and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you listen to music, you already subscribe to it and you’re currently using an old iPad in your kitchen, this will probably have,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll be cheaper than that iPad was when it was new. It will come with that little speaker stand thingy, which presumably will have better
⏹️ ▶️ John sound than your iPad speakers. And it’s designed for this. It’s got a little stand, you don’t have to prop it up on something
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe it’s even waterproof. No, it certainly won’t be. But you know, you can dream, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can do FaceTime from it more easily because it will have that center stage camera or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and maybe the robot. Even if it does none of the things that you were just worried about, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use any of that. You literally use it as the equivalent of those radios that used to be mounted to the
⏹️ ▶️ John underside of cabinets in kitchens. You remember those? It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what this is for the modern era. And it is 100% a straight up replacement for
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple households that are bought in on the Apple ecosystem, that old kid iPad that you have in the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at recipes and listen to music, right? And that’s like, if it’s $299, there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it does nothing else, its entire life except for those things, when your old iPad breaks or some
⏹️ ▶️ John kid knocks it over or it finally dies or the battery swells or something, your replacement is not to go look for
⏹️ ▶️ John a used iPad or try to take one of your kids old ones, replacement is to buy this thing. So like I said, the bar is really
⏹️ ▶️ John low. If this thing really is $199 or $299, it doesn’t have to do everything
⏹️ ▶️ John under the sun. All the dreams about App Intents and Siri eventually getting good and controlling your magic home kit house
⏹️ ▶️ John where everything works, it doesn’t have to do any of that. Still, it’s worth the money if it actually is cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, the thousand dollar one with the robot arm? Now, maybe it needs to do something more useful, and we’ll see how that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes. But all my hopes are pinned on this thing actually being inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John and and doing the things that an old iPad is currently doing in people’s kitchens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’ll be inexpensive. Other than that, I’m with you, but I don’t think it’ll be inexpensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, pricing is one of the most difficult things to get rumors about because they could change that at any time, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is ballparking it saying the expensive one is a thousand and the other one is trying to match competitors that cost
⏹️ ▶️ John in the low hundreds, so we shall see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I think it’s very clear that the correct way to price it is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be competitive with your competitors. Or if you’re gonna do the Apple thing and go up market a bit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you need to be in spitting distance of the competitors.
⏹️ ▶️ John 299 isn’t spitting distance. The most expensive one on this list was 230. So 299, it’s the expensive one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree, but I fear that the HomePod people are gonna get there and be like, well, we have all
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the speaker stand will also be 299. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right, exactly. But like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even whatever onboard speakers there are, not the Playdate dock, if you will, but the onboard speakers, you know, the HomePod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are gonna be like, you know, we have all this sweet ass tech that we can just drop in there lickety split,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s gonna be great and also $1,000, but it’ll be great and sound amazing in the kitchen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know. I’m hopeful that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is cool. I love the idea. What did he say? Something like when you’re at a distance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’ll just show the temperature and very little else. And then as you approach it, like shows you controls for the HVAC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very slick. And that’s the kind of affordances and design that we love from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, the thoughtfulness that we love from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what every Nest and Ecobee thermostat has done forever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like every smart
⏹️ ▶️ John home thermostat does that, but presumably they have a larger high resolution display and the standby mode and widget
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. They can do smarter things. Like my, you know, my Ecobee does that as well. But like, that’s why I have hopes
⏹️ ▶️ John for the price of this thing. Cause my Ecobee thing was not expensive and it has, I can do voice assistants
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. It does Apple’s voice assistant. It has the proximity sensor. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John granted, all it does is control my heating and cooling, but it works with HomeKit, it works with its own
⏹️ ▶️ John app, and it was cheap and it continues to function, and I’m perfectly happy with it as long as it keeps doing exactly what it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s my hopes for this product, that it will be like that, which, like I said, is unusual
⏹️ ▶️ John for modern Apple, because everything seems to have a play or an angle or some kind of integration,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this could just be a straight up useful electronic gadget that you can buy from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John that differentiates itself from its competitors by being higher quality and being less annoying with ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m certainly interested, even though, like I said, I don’t feel like I have a need for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my life, and our kitchen doesn’t exactly have an overabundance of space unless you’re mounting it on the wall, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re mounting it on the wall, then you got power to it unless you do the recharging dance, which Mark alluded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to. And it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John magnetic and stick to your fridge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, except our fridge is a stainless steel fridge, it’s mostly not magnetic, or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the situation is where most of it isn’t magnetic. I don’t know. If it’s cool enough, I will find a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buy it. It’s for my work, you too. You see, it’s for my work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But yeah, I mean, I’m interested for sure. And I love the idea of Apple starting to get back into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home stuff. I mean, as we’ve all lamented many times, even though I really do like my Eros set up and they are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past sponsor, I would love to have Apple, you know, take a crack at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home networking, which I don’t they have any interest in to be clear. But you know, them starting to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do stuff in the home, it leaks, it gives me a hope. You know, you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a chance and we’ll see what happens. But I don’t know, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is something that I’m seeking, I am definitely cautiously optimistic about
Sponsor: Tailscale
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#askatp: RAM vs. Apple Intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, you want to do some Ask ATP? We haven’t done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a few minutes, I feel like. We’ll start with Andrew Slay, or maybe he’s Andrews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lay. Anyways, this person writes, we are all relieved that minimum RAM has been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increased to 16 gigabytes across new Mac models. But we know this is tied to Apple Intelligence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As a potential purchaser, should I be concerned that half this RAM is, quote unquote, spoken for by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI, and I will still need to upgrade further to get the 16 gigs to use myself? Or do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the wrong mental model of how RAM works? You know, it’s funny this is brought up because I can’t speak for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it works for artificial intelligence stuff. And maybe one of you can clue me in on this, but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing that gives me even more pause is the quote unquote video RAM, because that’s also shared,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the, this seems to be on and interrupt me when you’re ready. If I’m speaking, you know, untruths, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we’re sharing RAM between not only the system, not only Apple Intelligence, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video, the graphics card. And that is starting to get spread kind of thin. That being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, I don’t think it’s really spoken for in the way that Andrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slay is thinking of. So what’s the reality here?
⏹️ ▶️ John I always think about the unified memory architecture where there’s no dedicated VRAM. I always think of
⏹️ ▶️ John when I hear people say that, well, you don’t need more RAM on Apple Silicon because Apple Silicon uses less RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John than Intel for hand wave reasons. Right, like no, you actually need more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the source of that urban legend is essentially that the original Apple Silicon Macs were
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing, their SSDs were fast, the CPU was fast, and they could get away
⏹️ ▶️ John with swapping in ways that the older, slower Intel Macs with older, slower
⏹️ ▶️ John SSDs and older, slower RAM could not. And so people started to believe that Apple Silicon Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow need half the RAM an Intel Mac, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it may be true that an Apple Silicon Mac with half the RAM could run circles around an Intel Mac, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not because there was anything magical about Apple Silicon that said, oh, it doesn’t need RAM anymore. You still need RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, just everything else was so much faster that you would overall probably still be faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you would absolutely be faster. And it’s what made, because people ran benchmarks. They’re like, how is this eight gigabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 MacBook Air beating this 32 gig Intel thing? It’s because the Apple Silicon is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The SSDs are fast, the RAM was fast, everything, they were really good, but it doesn’t mean you don’t need RAM. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, setting that aside, I wouldn’t worry about Apple Intelligence stealing
⏹️ ▶️ John all of your RAM. First of all, most of the Apple Intelligence things that Apple has shipped and announced shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be doing anything with your RAM if you’re not using them. So if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John worried about RAM at all, don’t fire up those LLMs and ask them to do a bunch of stuff for you, and they
⏹️ ▶️ John are not going to be there like reserving 16 gigs for themselves, which technically they could, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can wire pages down or whatever, but nothing that Apple really does in their operating system would ever
⏹️ ▶️ John do something at that scale. So do not worry about that. It has more RAM so that
⏹️ ▶️ John if it needs to, it can use a whole bunch when called upon to do so, but it will not be sitting there hogging
⏹️ ▶️ John half of your RAM doing nothing, right? And second, even when you are doing stuff, presumably whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing with Apple intelligence will be kind of like bursty. Oh, I’m gonna do a thing now where
⏹️ ▶️ John I want you to generate an image for me or fix this writing, and then you’ll be done with that. And then it will go away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And hopefully Apple have written these things in such a way that you get, that RAM goes back into the free pool
⏹️ ▶️ John when that process exits and is done doing whatever it was doing. And now you’re back to your,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, working with your Mac the way it is. And finally, of
⏹️ ▶️ John all eight gigs is probably too little, they doubled it. They didn’t just make it nine or 10. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have enough headroom that it’s not like, I mean, remember, that you’re doing Apple intelligence
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff on phones, that their entire RAM is eight gigs. And you’re worried that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John intelligence alone is gonna use eight gigs. That’s not gonna happen, right? So I would not worry about this. It’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong mental model of how RAM works. I think it’s just not the right scale for thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John about how much RAM Apple intelligence is going to use and how long it’s going to need it and when it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John need it. 16 gigs is good, even with Apple intelligence. And like I said, if you’re worried about it
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, first of all, I think, I mean, in the current operating system, you can literally turn off Apple intelligence as a toggle
⏹️ ▶️ John switch in settings. I don’t know what that switch does, but it makes me think that it’s like, look, if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want any of this stuff, you don’t have to use it. And presumably that would save RAM. But even with that toggle switch on, if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John call upon it to do anything, if you don’t ask it to revise your writing, if you don’t try to generate an image, if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John ask it a question, it’s not gonna be taking up a lot of RAM. And you can convince yourself of that by booting
⏹️ ▶️ John any modern Apple Silicon Mac that has Apple intelligence and just boot into the finder
⏹️ ▶️ John and then pull up activity monitor look how much RAM is being used and compare it to like the previous version the operating system without
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple intelligence. I don’t think you’re gonna to see a big difference.
#askatp: Mini-LED Studio Display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Henry Sivonen writes, what’s blocking Apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight tech
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that MacBook Pros have to enable HDR? My understanding is that the studio display has constant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backlight behind LCD and MacBook Pro has by zone variable backlight behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LCD. Apple clearly already has the firmware that knows how to drive the MacBook Pro LCD and backlight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey layer in combination to produce an HDR result. What’s preventing Apple from putting a MacBook Pro style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backlight and firmware in the studio display form factor at the studio display price point? I think you just answered your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own question. Is the backlight plane hard to scale up despite TV scaling mini LED backlight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to even larger sizes while staying less expensive than pro display XDR? Are the LCD layers substantially different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the two cases? And that’s the hard slash expensive part to scale up. Surely Apple wants the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire lineup to do HDR eventually. Why isn’t Apple there yet with the studio display?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Quick aside, which just made me think about this. I went to the Apple store today just to look and I succeeded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in just looking, the new Mac mini, freaking adorable and very light, but freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable, so cute, I kind of want one. But the MacBook Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I brought my M3 MacBook Pro and sat it next to the M4 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cranked up the brightness in both. And granted, this is inside an Apple store, so everything’s freaking, you know, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sun is shining in there anyway, but it was noticeably different how much brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the M4 MacBook Pro was. I wouldn’t say it’s night and day, but you can tell the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just occurred to me just now, I didn’t think to look in or ask if there was a nanotexture one, but just the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brightness alone made me jealous. Jealous enough to spend thousands of dollars to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my one-year-old one? Absolutely not, but jealous nevertheless. With regard to Henry’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey question, I think, John, you’re probably best suited to answer, but I’m going to take a stab at it, I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expense in no small part. I think the technology is probably, to Henry’s point there, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for for whatever reason, and I don’t know why, and maybe John, you can fill me in, it’s gotta be really freaking expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, Apple seems to forget that they make displays because they haven’t updated your beloved XDR in like 15 years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the studio display and since it’s been released. So somebody should remind them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that these exist and maybe we’ll get answers.
⏹️ ▶️ John The answer to Henry’s question, what’s blocking Apple from upgrading the studio display with the kind of backlight of the MacBook Pros?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like, there’s nothing stopping them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could keep the price the same. They wouldn’t, but they’d probably make it more expensive. But no, this tech exists. They put it in their
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops. They could put it, it’s easier to put it in a giant display like that because it’s bigger and
⏹️ ▶️ John you have more room for all the stuff. They could do it and it would probably be more expensive because it would be a better
⏹️ ▶️ John display and whatever. But they absolutely could. Nothing is stopping them. That’s what’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating. They just haven’t decided to update the displays yet. When they do update them, presumably they’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff. But right now, kind of like the mouse and the keyboards, We’re just not updating them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, nope, it’s just we sell the Studio Display, we sell the XDR, the price is the same as it’s always been.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do exactly what they always did. Someday maybe we’ll update them. If you are a long-time
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple fan, you know that they don’t update their displays very often. They just don’t. Why don’t they? It’s incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating, but they absolutely could. There’s not some super expensive, difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do things. There’s plenty of PC monitors that do all this stuff that are way cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ John than the Studio Display because they’re PC monitors. Obviously when Apple does it, it’ll be more expensive. Nothing is stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s what’s so frustrating. And we’re all just, we’re just out here waiting. It’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll update it someday. And when they do, we can buy it. But in the meantime, this is what they have to offer. Take
⏹️ ▶️ John it or leave it. All right.
#askatp: Hacks we rely on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Tierney writes, your recent discussion on launchers made me wonder, what is a power user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hack you can’t live without or customization which makes all other Macs feel broken? For me, it is a multi-button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse where I have assigned shortcuts for enter, copy, paste, and command tab to move back to the last app. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have RSI and so I try to minimize my use of the keyboard, and this lets me navigate through tests with the mouse dramatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster. I was thinking about this, I’m sure that there are answers to this question, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m struggling to think of what they are. I am a big believer in hot corners. I’ve been trying to teach myself to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gestures on the magic trackpad instead for much of the same things that I use hot corners for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but old habits die hard. Also, I’m an Alfred, a diehard Alfred person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I feel like a computer is broken without Alfred and I guess rockets, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will probably forget to link in the show notes, but it’s a thing where you can basically type out the name of an emoji and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just insert wherever your cursor is. Um, I, that’s about all I can think of. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, what have you got in terms of power user hacks?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the ones that trip me up the most when I’m on someone else’s computer. There’s two. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second worst one is the lack of a clipboard manager because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will so often, like, you know, because I’ve been using LaunchBar’s clipboard management for so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years now, so often I will treat the clipboard like a stack. If I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to copy and paste two different things into two different fields from one place to another. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to the first one and hit command C. Then I’ll go to the second one and hit command C because that will stack them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up in the clipboard manager. Then when I go to the destination, I’ll paste the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, then I’ll use the key to invoke the clipboard manager to go down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and paste the second one. Well, if you don’t have a clipboard manager, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until you go to paste the second one and then you’re just like, oh wait, this is just broken. It’s just gone. The thing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copied before, now it’s literally just gone because the the other one overrode it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is one thing that that tripped me up for sure but the biggest thing by far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that tripped me up almost immediately upon using any other computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the original touch bar era when the escape key was in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the touch bar I remapped escape to be the caps lock key.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when I use a Mac, when I want to hit escape, I hit caps lock. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. You don’t need a third-party app to do this. You can do this right in the keyboard. It’s called the modifier keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco section in settings. Now when I go to any other computer, I constantly hit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco caps lock instead of hitting escape. Nothing trips me up faster than that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suppose I could train myself back to the escape key. I just haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a reason to yet. And it’s so much faster to to have your pinky right there hitting that key, that then reaching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to the escape key, like it’s much better. Like if you don’t have a good use for caps lock,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map it to something that you use a lot. It’s really nice until you use someone else’s computer. But until that moment, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice and escape is a good one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of remapping that key, I understand why you arrived at escape, but I always kind of like the fact that escape is in the upper
⏹️ ▶️ John left because it’s kind of like the escape-iest place on the keyboard, like at a corner, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like when I was in college, the, I believe it was Sun, the Sun
⏹️ ▶️ John branded keyboards that came with your Sun computer had control where cap locks is, just like it was literally
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the control key on the keyboard. If you do anything with control a lot, like Unix or you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Emacs stuff, setting aside the meta key, just having control where cap locks is, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John so convenient and so natural that I really got used to that for a while, but
⏹️ ▶️ John then I stopped using Sun computers and didn’t bother remapping. And a lot of people do it to this
⏹️ ▶️ John day on Macs, Like Marco said, it’s built into the operating system. You can go to system settings and remap a cap
⏹️ ▶️ John locks to be control and live my life from the nineties with sun keyboards that
⏹️ ▶️ John had a control key over there. It’s really nice. It’s much more comfortable than reaching the control key. It’s less important on Macs. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the things I love about Macs that I do not understand why people don’t appreciate more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t hear more people praising it. For people who are into Unix,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac uses a command and to a lesser extent option for its keyboard shortcuts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Copy is Command C, paste is Command V. The command key is right next to the space
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. It’s great. That leaves control essentially free for all the Unix stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all of these people who are using Windows and like, oh, how do I copy in my terminal emulator without sending
⏹️ ▶️ John Control C? We don’t have to worry about that. It’s such a clean separation. It’s so beautiful. It’s one of those things that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t fix once it’s broken, like in Windows. Like they have all these hacks about like setting your settings
⏹️ ▶️ John so when you hit Control C, It knows when it’s copy versus it knows when it’s sending SIGINT to your thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s just such a hassle that we just don’t have to deal with and I love it, right? But anyway, if you do use control
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, not having control way down in one of those escape-y corners of the keyboard, it’s nice to have it on CapLocks.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, I don’t remap my keys. I think part of it has to do with me using Apple Extended Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, Apple Extended Keyboard 2. That CapLocks key was the old-style
⏹️ ▶️ John CapLocks key that stuck down. You’d go click and it would stick halfway down.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco click it and pop
⏹️ ▶️ John up. You can’t really map that to control. Physically speaking, it’s not gonna work the way you want it to.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess I got into that habit for a while as well. My answers to this question of things that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John live without, Marco got one of them. I think probably Clipboard Manager is my number one because I do exactly the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve lost data that way. Like I’ve copied something and then it’s just like scrolled away or closed
⏹️ ▶️ John the tab or whatever and then I’ve copied something else and then I’ve gone to paste and realized, oh, that first thing I copy is gone
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. I can’t even use my classic Mac RAM snooper thing that I would run and panic. They
⏹️ ▶️ John would scan through all of RAM to find the thing that I had previously copied that saved my bacon many times. Memory protection
⏹️ ▶️ John makes that more difficult. That’s probably my number one. Quicksilver
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably close number two. I’ve talked about that in past episodes. It’s in a period of stability right now. But like I said
⏹️ ▶️ John before, Spotlight is now good enough and fast enough that I can mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John get along without it. I obviously, all my stuff, all my Quicksilver stuff isn’t there,
⏹️ ▶️ John but using it just to launch stuff is reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John The apps that I make, so I make Switch Glass in front and center, those two apps are there
⏹️ ▶️ John because they make the Mac work the way I want it to work. I want the window layering to work like it
⏹️ ▶️ John did in classic Mac OS, or when you click one window belonging to another application, all the windows of that application
⏹️ ▶️ John come to the front instead of just the one that you clicked, unless you modify or click on it, and then just the one that you clicked
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to the front. That’s what I want. When I’m on someone’s Mac that doesn’t have that, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John chances are good if I’m on someone else’s Mac, everything’s freaking full screen anyway and it’s some tiny little laptop and it’s just madness,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like even my son, the way my son uses a computer, because he didn’t really use computers at all,
⏹️ ▶️ John he was just an iPad kid, until he got his laptop for high school and college. And because it’s a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop screen, he does everything full screen, he uses spaces, he three-finger swipes between them,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how he uses a computer. He finds it very efficient. Every time I have to do something on his computer, I pull everything out of full screen
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can get any work done and see more than one window at a time and he thinks it’s madness. And I think what he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing is madness. And I try to tell him, this is fine when you’re on a 14 inch laptop, but someday
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re lucky, you’ll have a really big screen. And if you make all your apps full screen, it’s inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see how that goes. Someday if you do all your homework and brush your teeth every day, you’ll have a big screen like me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You can get a
⏹️ ▶️ John real monitor. It’s looking at the world through this tiny porthole. Because he went from an iPad to a laptop that
⏹️ ▶️ John was similar size to the iPad screen. You know what I mean? So it kind of makes sense. but yeah, front and center
⏹️ ▶️ John and switch glass, I literally wrote those apps, not because they were gonna make me
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of money and they absolutely did not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I want them to be on my computer because I previously I was using drag thing for both those
⏹️ ▶️ John functions. Drag thing did a bunch of stuff, more stuff as well, but James Thompson stopped making drag thing, so I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to replace it. And it’s not like I can’t live without those things and they’re not really
⏹️ ▶️ John hacks because the front and center thing, some people don’t even want unless you’re a real old school Mac user I still think it’s useful
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you just run it in modern mode where it by default it works the normal way having a modifier click
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull the windows forward instead of having to go into the dock icon is actually kind of cool but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that is an invisible thing that runs in the background that I it’s not that I can’t live without it I
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t want to live without it on my Mac if I’m on someone else’s I know I’m on someone else’s I can deal with it and then switch glass is even
⏹️ ▶️ John more narrow it’s like why you have a list of running applications somewhere else on your screen. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John the dock is for. There’s your running applications. Why in the world would you do that? Well, I’ve always wanted them
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in the upper right. I wish I didn’t have to use the dock at all. I wish my app could do everything the dock does,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple does not provide API’s for that, especially for an app that’s going to be in the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have to run the dock and switch class, but switch class lets me pick the order things are
⏹️ ▶️ John in just like kind of like the dock does, but in a more regimented way and switch class lets me change
⏹️ ▶️ John its position and appearance and do all sorts of like, it’s redundant. I get it’s redundant,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s old habits die hard. And I wouldn’t want to use my Mac without those things. But when I go to
⏹️ ▶️ John someone else’s computer, I know they’re not going to be there. I understand how the computer works the other way.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as it’s not as sort of like, like Marco with the escape key or like
⏹️ ▶️ John both of us with the copy and paste. That’s the type of thing where you you don’t think about it until you’ve fallen into
⏹️ ▶️ John the trap till you’ve hit the wrong key till you’ve lost data because you copied and pasted that doesn’t happen with those two. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that’s my answer is clipboard manager, Quicksilver, and then the two apps that I wrote to make myself feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and Delete.me. And thank you to our members who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support us directly. You can join us at ATP.fm slash join. Members get ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overtime, a bonus topic every week, among other things. This week in ATP overtime, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be talking about a listener, Patrick, asked us why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do we hope the Vision Pro succeeds? That we had mentioned that like we hope it succeeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why do we hope it succeeds? That’s going to be this week’s overtime topic. Thank you for listening everybody. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join us at https://www.atv.fm.com if you want to hear that and many other benefits. And thank you. next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any
⏹️ ▶️ John research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t mean to, accidental, accidental Tech Podcasts,
Marco’s new Mac Mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did finally set up my Mac Mini. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news broke over the last few days, there’s apparently this big Synology security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem that had like some zero day that you have to like, everyone’s like, oh, go update your Synologies really fast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s some big zero day thing in one of their packages or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know anything about that, Casey? Because when I saw that message, I went and looked at my Synology and it said, oh, I’m all
⏹️ ▶️ John up to date because I have my thing set to run auto updates. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey assuming I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re not. So I’ve only dug into this the teeniest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey littlest bit. And if you are a owner of a Synology, please double check all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my math on this, because I might be steering you wrong by accident. But with that caveat aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and disclaimer aside, my understanding is there was some sort of conference. I couldn’t tell you what specifically it was. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was some sort of conference that happened in the last week or two, where some of the attendees announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps discovered some zero-day exploits. I think one of them was real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad with regard to Synology Photos, which is not something I use, but there have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple others. I think one was with Synology Drive, which I swear by, this is how I use Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without having Dropbox natively installed on literally anything that I own.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I think that the DSM, their basic operating system, if you will, also had a vulnerability.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think as we were sitting down to record, the DSM update might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been released, but the email that we all got was, hey, FYI, there’s some bad stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out there. We haven’t fixed all of it yet. And in fact, I think when that email was sent, because I got it as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey none of them were fixed. And then I believe shortly, like within hours of that email, my Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Drive software wanted to be updated. And allegedly, although I have not checked,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s, I think, a new DSM update waiting for me. and presumably you if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to grab it immediately. My understanding is it is pretty bad, the security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vulnerabilities, but the good news is as far as we know, they haven’t really been in the wild, but for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey days, and I think that they were patched, as quickly as can be reasonably expected.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I guess my thing will auto-update while I sleep. My Synology is not exposed to the internet, so I’m not too worried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. But anyways, Marco, you were starting to say you’re setting up your beloved Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically over the last few years, like when I moved to the beach, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old Synology at the old house, the old 1813 plus that was running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever. I had that hosting a bunch of stuff for me, but I had mostly, if you, listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a long time ago will recall, I had gotten into iSCSI for this purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the problem I was trying to solve back then was I had what was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ending up being like, you know, 10 or 12 terabytes of archive storage, I wanted Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to back it up. And the only way to do that without, like you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do Backblaze B2, that’s like their block storage where you just pay per gig that you use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s way cheaper than S3. So that is an option, and you can back up a lot of data to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze B2 for not that much money. And there’s a built-in app on the Synology to do exactly that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what I wanted was, and I don’t even know if that option existed when I first started doing this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, instead, you could, if you had an iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driver for the Mac, you could treat the Synology just as a giant iSCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive and have like a Mac Mini or some other Mac hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iSCSI driver for that, and then Backblaze would see it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a connected drive to the Mac and back it up with a regular Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan for unlimited space. So that if you had a lot of terabytes of data to backup, that was way cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per month and honestly way better than trying to use B2 with some third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backup solution. So forever ago, I had this old Mac mini, this 2014
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base model Mac mini. I had it since it was reasonably new, and so around 2014 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various utility functions here and there, I ran Plex on it and some stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I use that to basically host my archive storage. When I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved to the beach, that I didn’t wanna bring that whole big setup and I wasn’t sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long I was gonna be there. And so I still needed some archive storage and some like local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time machine server functionality. And so I got a tiny Synology, the four bay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like the DS420J, I think. It was something that ends in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco J, has four bays. It was a pretty low-end model. That Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been incredibly unreliable. It would just fall off the network sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would have to be rebooted frequently for access. It would just disappear. It was just really unreliable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I couldn’t really figure out why. Honestly, it’s not my job to figure out why. My job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to do other things that make me money and stuff. The last thing I would want to deal with is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaky few hundred dollar Synology. I don’t have time for that. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided I’m going to, now that I’m not living at the beach anymore, I had in my office
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an ancient Synology full of like four terabyte hard drives sitting, taking up half my closet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then this four bay ridiculous, like unreliable thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some pretty good hard drives, you know, it’s like these four, like 16 terabyte hard drives, I know. So pretty good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided, you know what, screw this. I’m getting out of the Synology business. And this was well-timed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the security vulnerability. But I decided, you know what? If I’m only using this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a big, dumb disk, I’m not taking advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other features of an entire NAS with its own app platform and packages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. I’m not doing any of that stuff. I’m just using it as a giant disk that I want to be backed up. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do that with anything. So that’s why I ordered the most recent Mac mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was gonna order a Mac mini months ago, but we’d heard they were being updated, so I figured, all right, I’ll wait till the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update. So now I have a brand new Mac mini that is almost the base model, just with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 10 gig ethernet and the 512 update, because I can’t buy 256. I just, I can’t let myself do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I’ve done that and regretted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it every time I have done that. Pretty soon, maybe that won’t fit the operating system, so good call. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, now I have that, And I have decommissioned and actually recycled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both Synologies because nobody wanted them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the record, before anyone jumps on your back, you had very graciously offered to ship either
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or both to me. And the 1813, it is heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would have been very expensive to ship to me, even if you had taken out all the drives, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco would have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would have been over $100 to ship. And like, am I going to ship you? I’m going to pay $100 to ship you an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 11-year-old Synology that you don’t need?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Exactly. That’s not worth the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shipping. So you did offer, which was very kind of you. And I just, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as I wanted to take you up on it, I couldn’t find a reason for either of them. I’ve already got a secondary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology deployed to my parents for backup purposes. I don’t need more than one in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So before anyone jumps on you, you passed the friend code, the friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test, and you did offer. I just, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t offer them to me. You were in the same chat room. You didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. I know, I’m just saying that I wasn’t offered them. I saved you from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably true. I mean, I already have the exact one that you just got rid of. So, I mean, it’s not like I need another
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but just FYI. Actually, if I had known that you had 16 terabyte hard drives in
⏹️ ▶️ John one of them, that’s what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, no. Oh, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kept the hard drive. Well, I know, those weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John offered to anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because what I ordered instead was just a four drive Thunderbolt disc enclosure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from OWC. Like one of their kind of mid-range ones. And so now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have discs that are directly plugged into the Mac Mini through that enclosure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m using just software RAID 1 with two pairs, because Mac OS has built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support for software RAID 0 and RAID 1. If you want to do fancier things like RAID 5, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use third-party stuff, but built into the Mac, you have RAID 0 and RAID 1. So I just, I did two RAID one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pairs, four disk bay thing, nice and easy, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running and it’s backing up to Backblaze. It’s almost done already. It’s doing great. It’s serving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files to my network. It’s, I haven’t enabled time machine server yet. I gotta go do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But otherwise, it’s nice that, and by the way, for the record, I’m no longer using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of those little dummy HDMI dongles that you have to plug into its butt to make it boot before. The new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones don’t need that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I didn’t know that, but I can’t remember who it was, but somebody had said recently that I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the Apple Silicon Macs do not need them. Here again, check my math on that, I’m not 100% sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that is what I believe to be the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and that was a little unknown to me at first because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had the M1 Mac mini briefly serving a role like this at the beach, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one did, I had problems getting that one to boot headless, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason, I guess those were resolved since the M1 era. So the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one boots just fine and doesn’t need a keyboard or a mouse or anything plugged in, it just boots up and it’s nice and easy. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a software improvement, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of Mac minis and booting and external storage, kind of, I meant to mention this when we were
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about the person’s question about like, how do I deal with a Mac mini that doesn’t have a lot of internal storage and I have external storage?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should I boot from the external drive as a way to sort of solve the problem of the bifurcation?
⏹️ ▶️ John First, we should have emphasized that that is, if you want to do that and just forego the internal
⏹️ ▶️ John drive entirely and boot from it, that solves a lot of the problems we were talking about with like apps that don’t want their stuff to be on
⏹️ ▶️ John the boot drive, because you just make the external one the boot drive. But second, I want to emphasize that Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs cannot boot from external drives in the way that you think they can. As in,
⏹️ ▶️ John if the internal hard drive dies, you can’t boot from an external one, which may not make any sense to you, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, what do you mean? That’s the whole point. I’m booting from the external drive. I don’t care if the internal drive is torn out, it should be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the way the security architecture works on all Apple Silicon Macs is, they essentially always boot from the
⏹️ ▶️ John internal drive. They just stop during the boot process once they’ve booted a substantial
⏹️ ▶️ John amount, and they say, oh, you wanted to boot from that drive. Okay, I’ll chuck you over there. And it does
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff behind the scenes in a secure way, blah, blah, blah. It’s a security feature, it’s not Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John being mean. From your perspective, it just basically looks like, oh, I can boot from an external drive, but be aware
⏹️ ▶️ John that you are always relying on the internal storage functioning and having an operating system on it
⏹️ ▶️ John that works. So if your internal SSD goes bad, you can no longer boot that Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that you thought you were quote unquote booting from an external drive. So please keep that in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, that’s my Mac mini story so far. It’s just working just fine. Like it is just, it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I installed it in my garage and the most exterior wall possible. Oh, there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, gracious. So just mostly for John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Started in his garage, he punched a hole in the roof to let the rain fall through onto it. Well, it has to keep itself
⏹️ ▶️ John cool somehow. Yeah, yeah. Do you use screen sharing to mess with it, if
⏹️ ▶️ John ever do need to mess with it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s great. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have it open right now. When you do that, what does it do for the screen resolution, considering there’s nothing attached to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s 1080. Hold on, give me a moment, I’ll report back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I suppose you could go into it and then just go to display settings and change that, and it will just remember that its non-existent
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor should be 4K or whatever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so right now it’s 1080 by default, but can I change it? No. Go to
⏹️ ▶️ John displays, and by the way, when you do screen sharing, I’m assuming you just type command space S-C-R-E and it just worked,
⏹️ ▶️ John but keep in mind that the screen sharing app is not in the application folder or the utility folder
⏹️ ▶️ John on macOS these days. It’s in, I think it’s in like system library core services or whatever, which is annoying, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, usually I just, I go in a finder sidebar, I go to the network location, it says, it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there. Ah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. just click the share screen button from that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, there is, I don’t know, actually it is in utility, sorry, I take that back. I think it used to be in core
⏹️ ▶️ John services, but now it is in application slash utility slash screen sharing app. It’s the same app that
⏹️ ▶️ John launches when you do the thing that Margot just described, or when you just do open URL, VNC, colon slide, or whatever, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a million different ways to do it, but anyway. So you changed res, what does it do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so it turns out you can, and I remember Paul Haddad actually had posted about this the other day as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you do plug in one of those dummy HDMI adapters, that enables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more resolutions, I believe up to 4K. By default, it does 1080p,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1X, that’s it. But it depends on what you’re using this for. For my purposes of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco administering a computer that’s acting as a disk server mostly, that’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kinda weird though. When they solve the problem of not needing the dongle, it’s strange that they just didn’t let you pick whatever the heck resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John you want. It’s not like that thing will be breaking a sweat to just have a little bit larger, higher resolution display,
⏹️ ▶️ John but whatever, hopefully you never even need to do that screen sharing. It just sits there in your garage with water dripping onto it, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John its job. Exactly. Freezing cold in the winter, hot in the summer, your heat pump water
⏹️ ▶️ John heater. Stealing all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of its heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever it’s doing, I don’t know what’s going on in your garage, but it’s semi-outdoors. That should be the name of your electronics
⏹️ ▶️ John channel. Marco Armand Semi-Outdoors. It teaches you how to take things that aren’t meant to be outdoors and kind of sort of almost
⏹️ ▶️ John put them outdoors. In all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairness, that 13 year or 12 year old or whatever, 11 year old Synology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operated in a garage for its entire life. And it was, not only was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Synology perfectly fine and 100% reliable, I didn’t even lose a single hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive that entire time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mine is still running right now. It’s the last, well, it’s not the last one. It is the last one standing with the original hard drives. My 2013, more
⏹️ ▶️ John than 10 year old Synology, all the original drives that
⏹️ ▶️ John were put in there in 2013, and every single one of them is spinning as we record this. Mine has
⏹️ ▶️ John been indoors this whole life. So I guess, Marco, you provided an excellent home for spiders and other bugs for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco over a decade. That was nice of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever mice are living inside there, whatever kingdom they’ve created for themselves, it hasn’t bothered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my. Remind me before we leave this topic behind, what Mac mini did you get? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we covered this, but one more time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Base model plus 10 gig ethernet and 512.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So not a pro or anything like that, just the M4 plane?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I actually do intend to do some like overcast processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tests on this. So I have some ideas on maybe how to do transcripts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with overcast and-
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the fastest single core CPU in your house now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, honestly, it really is. And I’m not really near any upgrade cycles for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other Macs. Like my Macs right now are my M3 Max MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my M2 MacBook Air. And both of those are great and fine, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’ll be updating either one of them anytime very soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m probably gonna do every two years on the MacBook Pro. So that would be, I’d do the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation on that. And the MacBook Air kind of as needed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s just all savor Marco saying the phrase upgrade cycle and applying it to himself. Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just say that for a moment. As if
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John as if there’s some kind of cycle that he adheres to for upgrades?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for my main beefed up Mac, I actually do. So I had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 Max MacBook Pro, I skipped the M2 generation, I got the M3. You had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M1 MacBook Air first, right? Yes, but when the Pros came out, I upgraded to the Pro and it was great. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got the M3, I skipped the M2, got the M3. Now I’m skipping the M4 and I’ll probably get the M5. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, we’ll see. Yeah, we’ll see. And the MacBook Air, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco portable one, that’s the M2 right now. I maybe like if the M4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air has come out and they have nano texture, that would be interesting because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently use it on the train and it is very bright in the winter on the train.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that I actually like, I am tempted by nano texture but not tempted enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the M2 yet. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John tempted by the 500 nit MacBook Air screen. I mean, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s not helping. Is it 600 now? I forget. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the, honestly, the MacBook Air has been a pleasure to travel with. Because that M2 MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so, first of all, it feels amazing. It’s so nice for my light travel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses. And by light, I just mean weight. Like, what I’m doing on the MacBook Air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes, yeah, it’s just like email and FaceTime, but a lot of times I’m doing overcast development on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s fine, like it’s not nearly as fast as the MacBook Pro, but it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good considering it’s a two and a half pound, allegedly low-end model of