Upgrade - 175: $4,999, Cheap!

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

Jason reviews his new base-model iMac Pro, we speculate about the unified (or not) future of Apple's software-development platforms, and there's an awful lot of news from the world of streaming media.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 175 today's show is brought to you by squarespace fresh books and mission u my name is mike hurley and it is a pleasure to be joined again by mr jason snell jason snell we are back to the regularly expected programming after a great holiday season it's good to be back and happy new year happy new year everybody i we think we've had some great shows over the last few weeks we've been very happy with uh how the holidays panned out for the upgrade podcast we were talking before the show we're already thinking about summer of fun we have like a whole thing but mike nobody cares about that right now because it's time for hashtag snell talk see what i did there i do see what you do

interesting today's uh snell talk question comes from ian and i am asks jason do you use the dark menu bar and dock on your mac no i figured you wouldn't but if anything was going to convince you it would be the space gray i make pro because there's like a match there no no the reason is the reason is the same reason that i don't use it anyway which is i actually kind of would like to use it my i usually keep my office kind of dark um i would i would love a dark theme for mac os the dark menu bar is not a dark theme that's the problem it's not enough it looks out of place yeah like the okay hey we colored the menu bar um but what about all the windows and do other apps have the ability? Some apps have a dark mode. Most do not. You see, I just turned it on,

and every other thing on my desktop uses the same coloring as the regular menu bar, right? Like, all of the Chrome in all of the apps, right? So, like, my C app, Skype, Chrome, it's all the same. Like, Finder, even Finder doesn't change, right? Skype, uh, Chrome. It's all the same. Like finder, even finder doesn't change, right?

Like nothing changes. It just now looks weird. So I agree. It would be nice, I think to use, to have a darker theme, but they're just, it doesn't extend past those two things,

which is kind of strange. I want a real, I want a real dark theme. I want a, an empty Safari window in dark mode to come up black instead of white. Um, I want the finder windows to be, to be dark, right? I want, I want a real dark mode if they want to do a dark mode, one that, that is minimizing the amount of really bright white stuff that happens everywhere. But the menu bar and the dock, it's just,

it's not enough. I don't like how it looks it seems out of place um and so yeah that's that's my reasoning is not that i wouldn't consider doing something like that it's like i don't like the um partial measures of the what's currently in mac os and they introduced that a few years ago and they've just done nothing with it i i was really hoping they would just say okay developers here's how you sense whether you're in dark mode or not and here's how we implemented it in the finder and all that no they just no didn't bother you know logic logic's got a great dark mode like logic pro 10 is dark mode and it's fine and final cut yeah exactly right there there how much blacker could they be none more black but the rest of the system just doesn't do that and i don't

like um i don't like the piecemeal aspect of it so that's that's why no um you're right it would be i guess extra nice on the darker uh darker silver of the imac pro versus the lighter silver of the imac but alas we are going to be talking about the imac pro today before we do that we do have some follow-up but i will say if you have a uh question to open the show just send a tweet with the hashtag snell talk and we will pick for a pick them for later episodes. Thank you so much to I am for their suggestion. I just wanted to thank everybody for their great comments about the

upgradies. I had a great time putting the upgradies together as we do every year. And I'm already thinking about what big and wonderful things we're going to do for the Upgradies next year. And I feel vindicated. I feel satisfied. If you go to Macintosh.fm slash about, which is the about page for Welcome to Macintosh, Mark has put a winner of the 2017 Best Podcast Upgrade Award

right there on the page. I'd love to see that. I want to see more of that over the internet, the acknowledgement of the Upgradeys. I think Canis did that with Ferrite. At the bottom of the Ferrite product page is the 2015 Upgradeys symbol. So yeah, that's right. Market this thing people we need it we need we need it so then people will care more and more about it we know you care we

need the whole world to care because that's what that's the path to real trophies i want to do real trophies but uh we need to see that people actually want to receive them first. So there you go. Yeah, that is true. A lot of stuff has happened in what is usually the quietest time of the year, hence why we create episodes like the Upgrade is in the Holiday Christmas Special. We had some huge news in regards to iPhone batteries and Intel CPUs. Most of this stuff is taken care of now. They're really long-winded topics and there are better places that have been discussed even by jason so if you want to hear more about jason's thoughts on the iphone battery scandal situation i don't know any other

type of word to describe it i was on this um kind of obscure podcast most people haven't heard of it it's less than known very good but less than known well it's hosted by kind of a a blogger who um an enthusiast you know he yeah that's it that's it it's it's an enthusiast blogger john gruber and his it is his strangely named podcast the talk show um anyway i was on there on the the the penultimate episode of 2080 17 because they had the start the star wars holiday special basically on the on new year's eve so on the on the december 30th episode um episode 210 of the talk show john and i talked about the battery stuff in great detail i yeah you know i'm very happy sometimes you say things on the talk show and um and then like a week later somebody very angry who only listens to the talk show and doesn't know who you

are or what else you do uh appears and says you made a misstatement here that shows that you know nothing about apple you should learn about apple i'm like okay thanks uh this time though i'm actually i'm i'm i'm extra happy with what we did because i i feel like we broke it down in to all of its component parts all of the issues the places where apple is complicit the places where apple was trying to do the right thing you know what you know i think it's a good one so people should check that out if they have not heard the talk show uh number 210 the episodes that you two are on together tend to be my favorites um it was a very good one so there's a lot there a lot of information there also we didn't talk about baseball or keyboards almost at all which is shocking

that was a surprise after we got to about two and a half hours, I almost mentioned baseball. And I thought, I'm not going to do that because we'll be here another hour and a half. And so I waited until we were done recording, and then I mentioned baseball. And we did talk for another half hour, but it wasn't part of the show. So you're welcome, people who don't want to hear us talk about baseball. Then there is this whole Intel CPU thing uh the meltdown and the specter uh atp episode 255 and download episode 36 for further information about that yes i'm really pleased that we did not have to speak about this thing specifically because i listened to the episode of atp and i think my brain leaked out of my ears i do not understand it i go to learn about processor architectures from john syracusa

because he's a fan like you know like john doesn't drive a uh a sports car but he reads all the car magazines he's also a fan of processors that doesn't get them and bless them so i like to i i that was a good that was a good episode and we did talk about it i don't this is just one of those things that's pretty low level that i just it just doesn't compute with me um like the cpus aren't computing anymore so you can go find out about that information too if you want to so i think we should now get into regular programming and i want to discuss some media news um i like this this ongoing segment that we have now i have yet to brand this segment so i'll work on that we'll come up with something i can do a little tiny bit of follow-out here too

just to plug if people like us talking about the future of of streaming media and things like that we did a really nice episode i'm very happy with it um december 21st on download called let deadpool be deadpool but it is uh uh julia alexander from polygon and natalie jarvey from the hollywood reporter and we basically talked the whole hour about what like the disneyox merger would mean for streaming, and I'm really happy with how that turned out. So if people like us talking about this, they should check out that episode, and I'm hoping to have them on again to talk about it in the future

because I think it's a very interesting topic, whatever we call it here. So David Letterman on Netflix. The show is called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. There was a couple of reasons on where to bring us up one is that i know that you love david letterman uh the other is the fact that this is really interesting from the way that this show is going to be distributed it's monthly one episode at a time which is very strange for Netflix. Yeah, they made this announcement that they were doing a deal with Letterman to do these specials.

And the way they described it is that he was going to do a series of specials. And the way it was going to drop was not described. Um, and it, the way it was going to drop was not described. And I kind of figured that they might do a, you know, here are three episodes or here are six episodes kind of thing. Cause it's very Netflix. But what they're doing is there is a precedent for this. They're doing what they did with Chelsea Handler's talk show, which dropped, it was a, you know, their, their foray into like, we're going to do a talk show and they dropped those or kind of a talk show sort of but they drop those regularly not um in a binge all

at once yeah and i i think netflix likes experimenting with this they for originals they prefer not to do this they really prefer binging although in the u in the uk and the rest of the world you see that you see weekly netflix releases a lot from mostly american television shows that get picked up picked up like um uh show like the good place is on in a bunch of countries on netflix even though it's on nbc here we get jane the virgin that way right and star trek discovery actually works that way too although that's that's being released weekly in the u.s and netflix is not waiting until the seasons are over to drop those they're dropping them weekly so but you know in the u.s i will tell you if netflix has any control over it they they vastly prefer to drop in a binge um and they do with uh like even there's a sci-fi show i

really like called travelers which is from a network called showcase in canada and netflix i believe runs it everywhere else in the world and they wait for the season to end like the all the episodes run in canada or almost all the episodes run in canada my understanding is that the first season they dropped it with two episodes to go and everybody in canada freaked out because they were being spoiled on the ending by everybody who was binging it in the u.s they didn't do that this year i think i think they learned their lesson this year but that this is an example where netflix would rather drop it as a bingeable set um even when in another country uh it's it's uh doing weekly but it's really only in the u.s that they're doing that so anywayman, it sounds like what they thought was best, he thought was best, was to deliver these things monthly.

And when you think that Letterman used to do four or five shows a week to do a monthly thing, I don't know, that sounds like a much more reasonable approach in terms of production, in terms of recording, to sort of say, we got a pace going, you know, we're going to release these things monthly. They become kind of more events that way, but there's still a pace to them. So, I like that idea, but it is kind of unusual for Netflix that it's rather than having a season of David Letterman specials drop in July, they're going to run, you know, one a month. And the thing that really surprised me was they announced this last week and the first episode drops Friday. So this is also not a David Letterman.

Here's the name of his show. He'll be here in March. It's he will be here January 12th. So that was surprising, too. So I guess off we go. And I'm looking forward to seeing what, you know, a guy who doesn't need to work, essentially, other than I think emotionally he needs to work, but monetarily he doesn't need to work, doing something that uses his skills and strikes his fancy without needing the grind,

and then using 30 years of knowledge of doing interviews and doing a tv show and like what do you do the same and what do you do differently so i'm kind of fascinated to see um what he does he did a sort of half of a national geographic special last year where he went to india and i thought it was pretty great i thought he i thought it was a a nice mixture of kind of documentary and also his dumb jokes so uh yeah i'm looking forward to the first episode is january 12th with barack obama yeah first first extended post-presidential interview with barack obama and then the way that it works is it's not just an interview like there are supposedly related like there's some man on the street stuff because letterman always used to like doing that and

there's some related bits so that'll be kind of interesting too to see how it comes together that it's not just like a barbara walters special where it's a sit down with famous people but it's also got some other other stuff so i'm kind of fascinated by how they're doing that and i noticed the jerry seinfeld show is now they made a deal with with him netflix did so frustrated to move from crackle to netflix so that that's happening too so netflix is definitely experimenting with more of this stuff too so i love love comedians and cars getting coffee it's fantastic it's one of my favorite things i found in years i i watched the whole thing relatively recently like i'd seen episodes here and there but i watched all of it but on netflix there are like there are like 12 seasons of the show they've broken

them down into collections yeah and cups of coffee it's very strange yeah it's weird the way that they're doing it because they've mixed them all up yeah that it's like all over the place so it's a bit weird they've remixed them it looks like they had to had to re-edit them and stuff because they had like they they were all presented by acura before but now on netflix they're not so they had to drop them as sort of like they're like re-edited or at least somewhat modified versions um i did i did laugh because they are not seasons they're like cups of coffee yeah late night espresso just made a fresh pot light and sweet and here's here's the wacky thing i was thinking about this from a programming standpoint you know how normally in their interface it'll it'll show like s2e3 season two episode three

for comedians and cars getting coffee it says c1e4 for cup because they're calling them collections that it's for collections it's just like it's bizarre it's like yeah i don't know what they're doing there but but i'm because they're doing another season so what do they do with that one where do those episodes well that that'll be frustrating collection five coffee cup five season five i don't know but anyway netflix continues to do interesting things as they spend a whole lot of money uh on content a whole lot of money billions amazon are planning to bid for premier league football games so this is a pretty big deal uh for the uk market so they're looking to buy up a portion of them which costs billions right but like they will just be buying a selection of games um it potentially is 20 32 something like that it is unknown right now um but this would be a big

thing for them i believe that amazon bought some nfl games yeah it's weird no how that way because they're like rebroadcast so if you they're they're games that are on television they're not they're not um exclusive but they got the streaming rights basically which i think it was it was an experiment um the this is interesting in the u.s if you get npc sports network you basically get all of the premier league games you can stream the ones that aren't aired yeah um but in the uk my understanding is it's much if you've got a team that you watch and it's harder to get their games because you may need to sign up for a bunch of different services. Yes, it started to change in the last few years. It used to be just Sky mostly had them or the terrestrial channels.

So you had some of them for free. If you wanted all of them, you got Sky. If you wanted all of them, you got Sky. Then BT, the telecommunications company, they started buying some of it as they created their own TV and sports channels. Now, in the last couple, I think maybe last year, BT and Sky actually shared their channels with their subscribers after being at war for multiple years. And the belief is because companies like Amazon are moving in.

So now, because what will happen if Amazon buy these games, the only places you will see those specific games are on Amazon Prime. They will be nowhere else. Yep. So this is a pretty big move from Amazon into the UK sports market. Premier League football is worth a lot, a lot of money. It is. It's very, very lucrative and therefore very very expensive right like if the from bloomberg like if it's right you know what they're saying that you could be looking at

like multiple millions if not billions just for a small subset of the matches it's worth a lot of money so net uh rights sale in 2015 with all of the different rights purchasers rolled together was more than five billion pounds which is almost seven billion dollars yeah it's huge and this is every year right like that is yearly uh so it is it is a huge market for sports in the uk i think that's three years worth that they bought for that but it's still it's billions a year um and amazon it sounds like since they're likely to bid for a smaller package it sounds interesting um that seems like their nfl strategy here which is let's try it out yeah they want to see if it actually does anything like do people just miss the games or do they sign up right but yeah but they might do that

down the road and i thought about this with the nfl too that they're trying this now to see how they how it goes but you know because otherwise if they want to buy an exclusive package of nfl games there aren't that many of those and they it will cost them a huge amount of money um so try it out with something cheaper basically but it is it is interesting um and we're going to see more of this i have a whole tangent i'm actually going to write So try it out with something cheaper, basically. But it is interesting. And we're going to see more of this. I have a whole tangent I'm actually going to write at some point. We had the College Football National Championship game last night and a bunch of different versions of the same game live on a bunch of their channels and then more versions like you could get one with the home radio

announcers overlaid over the espn telecast or you could get coaches analyzing what was going on on the field a whole bunch or just one where it was some of that like top down stuff yeah they do the all all 22 where you can see the whole field like you're a coach watching um the game film uh they have one from the little sky cam that's on a cable there's a whole channel of just you're floating over the fields you know a lot of it's not watchable but it's interesting the the my point here is live sports this is a computer nerd thing believe it or not even though i'm talking about live sports live sports is way harder to do than streaming video like net what netflix does netflix has a cdn a content delivery network and they put the files all over the internet so that you can get them quickly when hbo comes out

with game of thrones it's got that file on its cd all over the place. And so one, you know, it is prepped for streaming. And that's one of the ways you avoid crashing your service. When you have an episode, a new episode of game of Thrones is that you've got it prepped. And I was talking to somebody about, we talk about how BAM tech,

which was previously major league baseball's streaming service. And now are streaming tech spinoff and was uh majority owned by disney now um and how good they were and then somebody said well bam tech does espn and the espn live streams were a mess um and they were that was on new year's day and they were a mess last night as well apparently and here's the thing live sports is hard because you can't take a pre-encoded file and distribute it to your cdn it's a totally different infrastructure if the content is being created and encoded and distributed on the fly. And it's harder to do that. So that's also part of the test, I think, of Amazon doing some live sports,

is that they have to change their infrastructure to do live TV. Amazon actually did a live event on New Year's Day here in the US. They had Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon in character do the Pasadena Rose Parade as a kind of a parody, yet also a real live coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade. And again, where did that deal come from that's totally bizarre but the live thing i think the the short version of this is live is different and amazon is really interested in experimenting with live and it could potentially change the game because there's a lot of stuff on traditional tv especially sports that happens live but also like award shows and other events like that and streaming that's been

one of the traditional kind of like bulwarks against erosion of television by cable companies and by tv channels is well live stuff is harder um it's like oh you can't do that they can't do that you know so this is yeah wouldn't it be something and it might the truth is it might be more convenient um for the depending on what truth is, it might be more convenient for the, depending on what the package is, it might be more convenient for UK people who like soccer to get streaming Amazon stuff than to have to navigate all the other stuff. But I don't know. It depends.

Breaking up the rights makes it a lot harder. We have a way easier, Premier League's way easier to watch in the US than it is in the UK. Yeah, because you just get it all. Because fewer people care about it here. So NBC was able to just buy it lock stock and barrel um youtube is off of the fire tv now so amazon is promoting that people watch it via web browsers uh they just shipped their own web browser silk onto the fire tv probably for this purpose and they're also promoting firefox as how you can watch youtube and then within the last couple of days another shoe has dropped in in this dropped in this fight which is that google have announced partnerships with a bunch of

companies including jbl lenovo lg and sony for their assistant screen smart display so they have a bunch of products to have a screen on them and they have created a new interface for google assistant which includes youtube so of course there's another part of it they had enough they had a thing that they were working on so the fact that their agreement wasn't that great of amazon they don't care because it's going to help sell some products that they're affiliated with this is a similar story i mean i mentioned something like this which is where does this arms race go next because youtube works in web browsers and if amazon just puts youtube in a web browser and says hey we're a web browser does youtube start selectively blocking web browsers of companies they don't like that seems like it's a it's a bridge too far to me

yep so maybe this is it or maybe the arms race will continue yeah it's a i think it would be especially difficult for them to just be like no firefox right like i feel like they'll end up as like collateral damage in this so yeah it continues to move on and i think it's just kicked up a gear now that uh google are making their own products it's really wild all right today's show is brought to you in part by a new sponsor and that is mission u mission u is a one-year program that gives you the skills and experience needed to launch a successful career in data analytics and just about every other 21st century career they have a student-centered approach. Mission U proved this with no upfront tuition costs or high-risk loans.

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We spent time of it. The iMac Pro. Yeah, it arrived on Boxing Day, Mike. What a great day to unbox a computer on Boxing Day. You have an extra box. I think so. It's the best day. Not quite a Christmas present, but close.

Believe it or not, the understood history of Boxing Day is when we take our new computers out of their boxes. That's what it means. That's been that way since the 17th century. It's funny, really, when you think about it. But yeah, that is the understood. Yes, back when computers met a person who did math they would get in the box they would take it to the university they'd open the box and surprise somebody with a computer's inside and the computer would jump

out of the box and say boo you know jason i just learned about this because uh for analog we are now watching uh we finished firefly, and we are watching Crash Course Computer Science. Right. And we just did the first episode, which is about early computers, and I found out that the first computers were people. That's right. Which is hilarious. That's where the word came from. It was a person who computed things.

Hello, computer. Turns out. And the computer would say, hey, what's going on? How can i help you need some math all right so before we get into talking about this thing uh i want to do a specs recap of your model just so we can frame it so you got the base model four thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollar base model yep the cheap i went cheap mike i went cheap i cheated i cheaped out you went to the thrift store with this one that That's it. It was a little tag on the side that said,

cheap, $49.99. Only. You've got the 8-core Xeon, 32 gigabytes of RAM, and a 1 terabyte SSD. Yeah, I did. I will ask you, you've been using it for a couple of weeks. Would you change any of those specs would be my first

question to you is there anything in there that you're like a little bit of buyer's remorse like i wish i would have got this instead no no i mean i've heard people say that the 10 core marco will tell you the 10 core is maybe the sweet spot because it's got a little bit better uh of the turbo boost which is the sort of single core performance this in in my tests the single core if you're working on something that is not multi-threaded at all it's it's essentially the same speed as my old i7 um from 2014 like single core and the 10 core is a little bit faster so i mean a spoiler alert for my review which might come out this week in mac world is if all you do is single core stuff why would you buy one of these that's the whole the whole point is these are good at multi-core as a single core processor it's fine

it's it's it's like a 5k iMac it's fast but um the point is that it's got so many of these cores so i thought about the 10 core but but i was on Leo Laporte's screensaver show over the weekend, and he has the 10 core because Rene Ritchie talked him into it. And, you know, he ended up spending like an extra two grand putting features in it. And for me, I could only barely justify the $49.99. barely justify the $49.99. In fact, what I would say is, I probably don't need 32 gigs of RAM. If they would have let me take 16 and knock some money off the price, maybe that would have been my preference. But I am very happy about having lots of RAM, and I'm very happy about having more storage, because I have the 512 SSD in my 5K iMacac and having a little bit more elbow room with the one terabyte is really nice so i'm pretty happy with it as is i guess my only other regret would be that i probably should have

bought the mouse too because everybody wants space gray peripherals and if i had bought the mouse i could have sold that to somebody get some money back for the record i sold my keyboard to john syracuse for the cost of that keyboard in normal silver you fool and shipping yeah because he is a friend can sort it on ebay for a billion dollars um i had to just look up i have 16 gigabytes of ram in my imac and i i don't think i need more than that like I don't well that I don't know if I ever feel it I don't even know what I would need 32 gigabytes of RAM for. The story so far in the chat room says lol first time I've heard someone want less RAM I guess my point is that I can look an activity monitor I see when we're um when we're hitting when we're swapping RAM to disk and it

never happens and it basically never happened in my old computer i am not doing things that are super heavy uh consumers of ram i mean the the the gpu in here is totally overkill for me too um i ran a gpu benchmark last night that is one of these tests that we used in mac world for years and it runs on my 5k iMac at in the highest resolution highest quality it runs at like 12 frames a second and it's at like 100 degrees c when it's doing it and the fan is blowing loudly and I ran that on this iMac pro with that uh the vega card in it and it was doing like 35 frames a second easy and it was not even running that hot so again probably overkill for what i am using this thing for but that's that's the deal with this computer is they've

decided to not really skimp on the base specs and i think the reason is like if if you start to look at it and say well do i need eight cores do i need 32 gigs of ram do i need a terabyte ssd that's when somebody comes to you and says let me show you the 5k imac like we have a very powerful computer that you can spec up to four thousand dollars and have all of this stuff in it and it won't be quite what this is but you don't need this right like i i do feel like apple is drawing a a divider here because they do have a very powerful imac that is not the imac pro that uh so if you want less than this there is a computer for you it is not this with fewer specs in it so the base model for me is really nice because it's like would i have splurged for 32 would i have splurged for a terabyte ssd probably not maybe but um i had no choice so oh well i'll have to live

with 32 gigs of ram all right so you didn't buy this computer because it was space gray i did not you didn't buy that would be a terrible reason to buy this computer will some people will you didn't buy this computer for another reason which is this is the best mac you can buy right now right like there are you know there are many reasons that people buy a computer you bought yours for speed and for efficiency and for processing i did so proof's in the pudding yes what are the actual So most of my tests are versus my 2014 iMac 5K, which they have revved several times. There is a 2017 model. Stephen Hackett had the – and I had the i7, so the faster processor and actually the faster GPU. Stephen Hackett bought the new i7 of the 5K iMac, and then he returned it and bought an iMac Pro but while

he had it I had him run some of the same tests I ran so I could compare it I could compare it to a current iMac because I don't have to wear with all of Mac world anymore where I have every Mac that I can survey before me and I can compare them all I am now on my own and I bought I bought an iMac uh when I when I started out and have kept it. And so that's my reference system. So I did a bunch of tests using real things I do. That was important to me. In the end, I did run a couple of other kind of benchmark stuff like Geekbench and one of these 3D tests.

But I tried to – Yeah. Like, you know. Yeah. I mean, I can sign off and say yes it's faster which we already knew but i tried a bunch of stuff so i tried a bunch of podcast stuff and a little bit of video stuff because the reason i bought this is for podcast stuff that a huge part of my podcast workflow prep workflow because i do so many podcasts with people who do not have

pristine audio environments because they're just people like me recording a podcast your the mega office environment is entirely pristine i there are there are a few people i know i don't need to denoise their audio file i'm in like a podcast clean room here yes you are you are you are wearing a a uh it's not a clean suit it's a silent suit silent suit you zip it up silently with the microphone inside and then that's there's nothing yeah exactly but most people instead have their computer fan blowing and a heater going and somebody's jack hammering outside well the jack hammer it's hard to take out but like i get these i get these files and i can look at them in the program i use to denoise them which is isotope rx6 um and it actually shows you like a big orange stripe that is like oh that's the heater or that's where the air conditioning came on or whatever

and this is these are the environments people are in and uh i want everybody to sound as good as they can because what ends up happening is you're listening to a podcast and one person talks and suddenly there's a hum and then when they they stop talking, the hum goes away. It's really and there's hissing in the background and stuff. It's really disconcerting. So I denoise these files. And that is a there's an amazing plug in in isotope that does this. And it is multi core, multi threaded.

It will use as many processor cores as you can give it. So I use that. I did some encoding encoding of video which tends to peg the processor i used a couple of tools by marco arment because marco is obsessed with filling the processor cores to their fullest too so i use sidetrack and forecast um i did a bunch of stuff and the reality is that the iMac pro can do all that stuff in half the time as my um old iMac and I would say in 60 percent of the time as the 2017 iMac that uh stephen hackett had so it's 40 faster than somewhere but yeah well i mean okay there's a the the you could say that i i would say it does it in 60 of the time because there's a great debate about it but yes you would say that okay you you could say that one that it's twice as fast as my old i mac for these tasks and a little less than twice as fast like a third but you know at least you could

say like it's a third faster this is the problem is there's as fast as and there's faster than and it's and i get angry letters when i when i phrase it a certain way but the bottom line is it is there is a significant speed increase no matter what you're coming from well a denoise of a three hour long file took a minute 34 on my old iMac it took 86 seconds so a little bit less on Stephen Hackett's iMac and 49 seconds on the iMac Pro and that's consistent across all of the other things I did uh you know a handbrake decode that took uh 1270 seconds on uh to encode a 1080p on my uh on my old imac 1276 and 674 on the imac pro and in between 1095 on steven hackett's imac so it's faster but not nearly as fast as the iMac Pro. And this is consistent. For stuff that's really multi-threaded, the iMac Pro is, even the base model, is incredibly fast.

This is not one of those like, well, you could see it in these numbers. Between 2014, when I bought my iMac, and 2017, Stephen Hackett's iac that he bought before he returned it there was definitely a speed boost the the imac got a better screen it got faster ssd and it got faster processors that all said the speed difference there was you know an improvement of what uh 30 seconds in my spectral denoise test and the difference between that iMac and my iMac pro is another like 40 plus seconds on that one test so this is a much larger jump in performance than a normal like iMac update would be. So that's four years, four years of iMac improvements do not match the difference between the current iMac and the iMac pro it's,

it is, you know, and that's what you're going for here is you want a leap in performance to pay a leap in price tag and it's there. It's real. All right. So look, I'm just asking you questions here.

I'm not, I'm not trying to like uh purchase shame you but oh no i want to you know i have like i i if you had gotten me before i gotten this i would be i would have been very vulnerable but now i've used it for two weeks i'm yeah i'm okay but let me ask you then right so like you know because i just want to dig into that a little bit more so some of this stuff it's it's twice as fast as your previous mac right like it's doing it in half time it basically i by spending five thousand dollars it is twice as fast but it's saving 40 seconds right so yes my question to you is like on a daily basis how and if are you feeling that and how is that worth it well what i would say is

that when i'm prepping see i don't do one of these when i'm prepping files sometimes yeah sometimes i'm literally doing seven and they're all three or four hour long audio files and it's not something that i can automate because you actually have to there is an auto setting but it's just not as good you need to find the um noise and and uh learn it and then apply it and it removes the noise so it's a manual process with multiple steps and this is the problem is if you're doing that with a lot of this and the steps all require you to wait two three four five minutes to get through it and i didn't even mention like also going also going on here is that the SSD performance is way faster, which means I can, and honestly, all that RAM, I can open more files at once. I can have multiple files processing or saving at once.

And what it means is that this long, slow process to prep a set of files for me or for an outside editor to use used to take like an hour and now it takes like 15 minutes and that's so it's cumulative yeah or video encoding is a similar thing where i'm sitting down and i need to convert this final cut that came out final cut export that came out of 1080 but it's enormous and I need to do a podcast version which I know I want to be small and 720p and I want a 1080 version I can upload to YouTube and I don't want to upload the 10 gigabyte version to YouTube because I'll be there forever I want to do that that's that's a common thing for me I can run that through handbrake and have it be done quickly and then move on and post them as opposed to what I

used to do which is start them in handbrake and leave and go do other things maybe go to bed come back in the morning and upload them that happened a lot and that was fine I mean the overnight task is a thing that can be useful, but it's nicer to have that task be so short that I can just do some other stuff and then come back and it's done instead of like completely breaking because I know this task is going to take hours. So there are two things here that are interesting to me. One of them, a lot of this stuff, it's like, it's the quality of life for you and your work right so like you're getting less frustrated and then that's it the other thing that i find really

interesting is that it's not just the raw power of what this machine can do it also has a lot more headroom right so like you're saying okay so i save i save half the time on an individual process but i can do two times more of those processes than i could do before so it's all of that time savings is adding up so whilst it's doing it like in half the time you're actually saving three quarters of an hour right like because you're doing more at once right like that's really interesting to me and that i hadn't necessarily considered that where the storage comes in is the big one for me with isotZotope, where I'm opening multiple files and the memory, I think. I think the RAM is a part of that, too.

I'm opening multiple files and getting them to process and saving them out. And my iMac, I gave up. I would just do one at a time. But on this, I can do that. just i i gave up i would just do one at a time but on this i can do that and then what that means also is that it's now processing yes it's processing three files at once four files at once and it can't really go any faster because it's filling up the processor cores but what it means is my menial task of starting those processes going has is all done in a block. And then and then my attention can move elsewhere. And this is one of those things that even if you're only saving a little bit of

time, if you can go from a task that is do something and wait, then do something and wait, and then do something and wait, and replace it with do those three things all at once, and then do something else while the waiting happens. That's way better. That's way better because I can turn my attention elsewhere instead of having to just basically sit there and wait it out because I know there's going to be another step along the way in two minutes. And the added storage, the SSD speed, and I the the memory too is feeding into that as well so that that's that was a moment of realization for me because i was like oh great it's faster and i was

like i wonder if i could just open more files the answer is yep i can do that it's fine it totally works um then again to get back to the single processor thing isotopes d reverb plugin which is amazing if you've got somebody in an echoey room runs on a single processor core and is it and it it takes me i tested it against my old imac within a second of one another doing a d echo a d reverb effect and it's what it makes me want to do is send a um friendly but somewhat sternly worded email to iZotope saying, why are all your plugins not better optimized for multiple processor cores? Please. But the one I use the most is, and that's one of the big reasons why I bought the iMac Pro.

So that's the important part of the way, in my opinion, right? Which is like the performance of it let's talk about the looks so i mean from a visual perspective the biggest change is the color and then maybe secondary to that is the holes in the back right the vents yeah how do you feel about those two things i mean everything else is like if you like the imac you're gonna like this one because it's the same it is so much the same um that I just you know it's not like my I'm using a 27 inch 5k iMac suspended on an arm above my desk it's literally not any different from what I've been using for the last four years the only difference is that the aluminum is darker and it's way faster but like just in terms of the visual of it

um i a lot of people are very excited about the darker aluminum i my issue is what my issue always is with this stuff which is space gray seems like an amazing cool idea and it is nice to have some variation but you know when you've got a space gray something next to a a regular something it really is just a darker shade of silver like i mean it's not and out of context you get used to it really fast so um i actually think that's one of the reasons why they do the dark uh peripherals and everything is like it it extends that um makes you feel like everything's a little bit something a little bit more like my my macbook pro is space gray and i could swear to you that every macbook pro i've ever had was that color exactly no i think i think there's i think there's truth in that um i think the gold one now my gold macbook 12 inch right now that's that's

that's different yeah exactly i'm not saying they should make a gold imac but you know don't necessarily rule it out just like because get a gold trackpad my word and you have yours mounted on the vesa yeah yeah so there's an extra unlike the 5k imax and the modern imax but exactly like the previous generation model where you could pop off the the stand and put on a little extra purchase mounting bracket that turned it into a visa mountable thing um iMac Pro has that it's it's literally they just brought it back and i don't know why they took it off of the last generation iMac and i i i'm not entirely sure i i think they brought it back because they know that

for a lot of professional applications people do want to put these these things on walls or on arms and i do too so i was able to do that so now i have yours mounted to your desk right yes anybody want a space gray imax stand no i have to keep it in case i i want to convert it later but uh yeah it's just on an arm floating on my uh the arms clamped to my desk yeah i might do that next time um next time i i get a machine although i was just saying on connected today so i'm just repeating myself now i've been thinking about this jason especially when i was preparing for this episode and i think that then my next computer will probably be a mac pro like a new mac pro because for what i want out of a computer the idea the perceived idea of what that machine

will be as like parts upgradable over time is more appealing to me as i am less interested in cool mac hardware but want the thing that i can use the best like it is the best workhorse for me and over time that might make sense if it is truly upgradable so that's what i've been thinking about but um i wanted to ask because i don't know what is the io like on the imac pro do you get more ports uh there are more ports okay um you have four usb a and four thunderbolt slash usbc so okay um and that's two controllers on the thunderbolt so you've got uh potentially a lot of really high speed uh external stuff on there and lots and lots of ports it does mean though that if you have thunderbolt peripherals or displays that are external on your existing

setup if you get an iMac pro you're gonna have to buy some dongles because there's no you know there's no uh Thunderbolt that matches mini display port uh or if you've got a mini display port or Thunderbolt 2 to VGA or DVI or whatever else you've got like those adapters don't work anymore really I mean you may be able to adapt to them i don't know don't do it you're gonna have to buy some thunderbolt 3 adapters usbc adapters so um but they are there's a lot of uh a lot of io a lot of ports on the back plus um that uh what is it uh 10 gigabit ethernet which is my understanding is it's uh sort of like how gigabit ethernet was back in the day which is esoteric and only for like really high-end applications but if you want basically

network storage that feels like local storage um and if you're in something like video or anything that's crunching through huge amounts of data um they want that and that ethernet will let them have it but you know i just have gigabit in my garage so alas the stickers you know it in your uh kind of first impressions the stickers were black yes just like on the mac pro the poor fools who bought the mac pro i just wanted to mention that they are i have still have one i kept one oh nice uh i used one kept one uh they were black there too i had the trash can mac it was a tale of woe um i fix it gave the imac pro a three out of ten on repairability as always just a beautiful thing to just look through

right like what just wonderful images i want to to break down a couple of those things though jason um so from looking at the teardown the ram and cpu are modular and upgradable you can do it um the ssd is modular but it is custom so you're kind of stuck there but taking well you know like it's it's not it's not stuck but it's not you can't put anything in it right you have to get right something that fits what apple just get anything what apple did with the ssd is they did these um their their um nand modules they don't have a disk controller on them the t2 processor which is the arm apple built arm processor that's inside this thing it's the disk controller along with the system controller and a lot of other things. I wrote a whole article in Macworld about it.

But the – so they're NAND chips. there are companies out there that will make a great effort to build apple compatible parts that were were apple only when they came out and um i you know there are a bunch of companies that do that sort of thing and so in two years if you wanted a much larger SSD in an iMac Pro, could somebody pop off the glass on the front and take those chips out and put new chips in? Maybe? I wouldn't recommend that people underspec this thing and then plan on immediately speccing it up because it is that complete disassembly to do it. So you should spec this thing if you're going to buy one with all the ram you want and all the discs you want but i'm kind of optimistic that in two or three years if you decide well i really need to refresh this thing and give it more ram more ssd that there will be opportunities to potentially do that i fix it do

note that taking this thing apart is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of very careful disassembly yeah uh so you know bear that in mind it's for a a repair shop professional yeah an apple store to take apart not for you to do not for you not user upgradable but upgradable but just not you know you gotta leave it to the professionals and they did note that there is no gpu upgrade possible because of the way that it's like sorted to the board or something like right you just won't you just can't that you can't take it out so that when they talk about it being modular like with a ram and a cpu it means you can take those things out but yeah the gpu you cannot remove so yeah and the cpu is is removable but it by all accounts is a custom part being made for intel

for apple by intel so i think that's one of those same thoughts of like okay well maybe in two years or three years when you want a faster processor maybe you could find one but probably not like again don't count on it um but but you never know like it's possible but i wouldn't bank on it so uh i guess one other thing this machine is so powerful and it has a bunch of holes in the back how often do you hear the fans so i don't hear the fan at all unless i stick my ear right up to it in which case the fan is running. Even when you're doing six simultaneous processes of isotope? Here's one of the interesting things.

This computer seems to have been designed to run the fan all the time. Okay. And really quietly. time okay and really quietly it's these two i think enormous kind of blowers suck air in uh up by the by the where the uh stand connects and then uh or blow it out there and suck it in down below um and they've got this whole like all this space is devoted to that but it's quiet was designed to be quiet it seems to be designed to basically run all the time and so when i tested this thing out and and when i stress it out the volume doesn't change if you it's not to say that there might not be scenarios where it cranks up but i've not heard

them um like i said if you listen carefully in a quiet room and you put your ear close to the computer you can tell that there is a fan sort of syracuse style if you're that sensitive but in a normal room environment in my office i can't tell i have to be i have to go looking for it in order to hear it but it's the same sound all the time so it's consistent it doesn't you know you're not sitting there doing work and suddenly the fans blow blow like um like the imac 5k where that absolutely happens and if i put my hand back there in normal operation i feel air blowing out and it's uh cool air and then when heavy work is going on the air is warmer but that's about it like what's changing is not the sound of the fans showing that this

thing is laboring what's changing is the temperature of the air being blown out the back now on a 14 core system where the all the cores are hitting and the gpu is maxed out um does it crank up the fan i don't know how hot is the air coming out of it i don't know but on the base model i tried to max out the gpu i certainly maxed out the cpus um it sounds like the gpu is a bigger issue in terms of power and heat than the cpu by the way like that gpu is a you know it's it's throwing off a lot of heat i think the thermal the thermal stuff in the imac pro is basically more concerned about the GPU than the CPU. But regardless, I found the fan a non-issue. It's quiet and constant.

And it's built to just keep blowing air through the system, whether you're taxing it or not, and as quietly as possible. So for people who need absolute silence it's i guess not going to work for them but i i don't think that most people will notice or care and the beauty of it is that when it when it um when it's really working hard i still can't hear it it's just it's just keeping on doing what it was doing so i think overall sounds like you really like this machine yeah it is um i just keep coming back to the disclaimer which is if you don't know if you want one you don't want one like the imac the 5k imac is a very powerful computer and you can spec it up pretty far and in terms of single core performance you're not going to get much of a benefit out of this

thing you're not going to get any benefit out of it versus a new iMac pro basically or a new iMac 5k iMac so um in talking to Leo about this last weekend I mean he said it and I immediately agreed with him which is if you know if this computer's for you and if you don't know it's not for you and it really is that simple like you need to know when you hear people talk about it if you're going oh my god i need one now it's for you well otherwise you're probably good because i suspect that the people who know that they're using high performance stuff that taxes the GPU and taxes the processors across multiple cores, like, I feel like those people know who they are.

That if you're somebody who is just working in a word processor, you really don't need this, right? But if you're somebody, so for me, it was like, oh my God, I have those iZotope plugins and the video encoding, and they could really benefit from all those cores and the faster SSD and the extra RAM, like, all right, let's do it. But that was what did it for me. If I was just thinking, you know, I've had my iMac for three years and maybe I should get a new iMac, for three years and maybe I should get a new iMac, then I would just get a new iMac, new 5k iMac. But I, you know, I, instead I was thinking about all of this stuff that I've started to do for audio and video. And that was the difference. So it is a really fast Mac. Uh, I like it a lot.

Um, it's got some quirks because it's got that t2 processor so like the startup is different and um rebooting onto other volumes is a little bit different uh but it's all carefully thought out on apple's part it's just different from the previous mac experience i suspect that all future macs will probably have something like the t2 in them and that this will be a new way for Apple to build Macs with this ARM chip doing most of the controller stuff and security stuff. But yeah, I like it a lot. And strangely, I'm now running the 10.13.3 beta. And it feels to me like everything on this iMac got a little bit faster and a little bit better when I went to the 10.13.3 beta. So, I feel like it is, this is, in Apple dialect, iMac Pro 1,1. So, this is the first of its name, and I suspect that the os is still i mean they're going to be some quirks too because it's brand new and it's got a bunch of stuff that's kind of new like the t2 so um the beta

seems to have moved things along the the logic and final cut pro updates that came out are kind of directly addressing this system and have made improvements there and i think there'll be some more of those along the way too but yeah i'm loving it it's great it is like my old iMac except for a lot of the hardest um uh processor intense stuff i do twice as fast so that's not bad all right let's take a break and thank our friends over at Squarespace for their support of this week's show use the the offer code UPGRADE at checkout and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move with Squarespace.

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but you can try it out for free with no credit card required. Just by going to squarespace.com, you can play around, make sure it's right for you before you sign up. Then when you do, use the offer code upgrade to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this show. We thank Squarespace for the continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So with all of the Apple battery stuff, there was a Goeman report from our friend Mark Goeman over at Bloomberg that kind of got lost in the shuffle because it basically happened on the same day. And of course it got covered, but I don't think maybe to the extent that it would have otherwise, because the whole battery thing was bigger news. I think it was actually

something that was definitely happening and was affecting people. But there's nothing to speculate about on the battery problem anymore. There is stuff to speculate on a unified app platform between iOS and macOS. According to people familiar with the matter, in 2018, developers will be able to design an app that works on both iOS and macOS, and this may be announced at WWDC this year. at WWDC this year. So Apple would, in theory, be joining Microsoft and Google as platform vendors that are trying to get their developers to bring mobile apps to the desktop or do write once run anywhere or some variant of that, right? Like Microsoft have tried it. Google have tried it because they're like, you can put Android apps on Chrome OS computers. So what's going on here? What are the ramifications of this are we gonna have a truly universal app now do we just buy one app and it's everywhere so um gonna do a little

follow-up people if they don't listen to atp all the time listen to episode 254 they did a really great job of covering this story so i want to throw that in there um because i kept nodding as i was cooking dinner listening to them um i don't know this is an interesting report right because on one level it's obviously something that is in the works and um people give uh german a lot of guff for some of this stuff where he says it could it could happen this year or it could never happen. And they're like, wow,

that's really hedging your bets here. But the problem is, the problem is he's not a prognosticator, right? He knows that people are working on this at Apple. Now, the people at Apple don't know if it's going to be approved, if it's going to ship,

or if they're just trying it out, his leak is telling them that Apple is working on it. And so when people are like, Oh, he reported this thing and it didn't happen. He wrong doesn't mean he's wrong because he didn't say it would happen he said people at apple are working on this thing and it might happen but it also might get shut down they might work on this and then some executive at apple looks at it in march and goes no we're not going to do this this was a bad idea and then that'll be the last

we hear about it so up front i wanted to say. This seems, he was very good in this report at disclosing, like, this may not happen. They're working on it, but it's unknown whether this will actually happen or when. And good for him for doing that, because the irresponsible way to do this story is to say, I had somebody tell me they're working on this project. This is what Apple's doing. Because you don't know that. You don't know. This is not far enough along that you know that Apple's going to commit to this line of thinking.

You only know that people are working on it. Maybe they'll commit. Maybe they won't. Is this good or bad for developers? So, let's assume that this is going to happen in some way, right like that that there is going to be some kind of new platform uh maybe it's some extension of of what they use to make photos with let's let's let's break down why you do this if if you're if you're apple like number one reason that you do this if you're apple is because well there's there's some possibilities here one of them is you're frustrated that there's so much

ios software and there is so little mac software that would be one reason and the idea there is we have a thriving platform for apps on ios and it's not and then we've got this other platform and we have no way for those people to write for that platform. They have to work very hard and do something very different to get to the Mac because the Mac is using a completely different approach than iOS is. So what if we made it that writing apps for the Mac was a lot more like writing apps for iOS? Would that and there's a real open question there, which is like, would that make any difference? Are the people who are writing iOS apps going to then say, oh, well, now let's invest some time in bringing those over to the Mac because it presumably wouldn't be compile once run everywhere. It would presumably be like, you'll still need to do a Mac version, but it will be, you know, you can base it more on the

code that you wrote for iOS. So there's some skepticism there about it. But I could see that, I mean, if anybody who has listened to ATP knows, like Marco as an iOS developer looks at developing a Mac app and is like, maybe I'll do a command line app instead right and finally he's done a couple he you know forecast actually has a ui although it's a very stock ui but like there's not a lot of comfort in being a long time ios developer and looking at the mac even as a as all developers on ios are a mac user like the mac is just a is disconnected from uh people use the mac to develop on ios but developing on the mac it's like totally a different world so i get that that might be apple's motivation i also kind of think that apple if you look at the big picture

apple it doesn't make a lot of sense for apple to have many platforms with many completely different ways of writing software like you'd like the apple platform to feel like a platforms to feel like a family where there's a bunch of stuff that is shared well especially when there already is except for one right like writing for the watch writing for the tv ipad iphone they're all similar they're all similar but not the same you have the mac similar and then mac because mac because of the legacy there so uh so this is the question is would they do that do they think people would take advantage of it and what does that look like do they want it to be like because one level would be like i feel this way i have apps on this is my frustration is i have like great video apps on ios

that'll do picture in picture and they have access to all this content and on my mac i have to use chrome with flash in it and then there's no picture in picture support to watch videos on my mac because they didn't write up they didn't bother to write a mac app they're like just use our website but on ios they wrote a great ios app so i understand the appeal of just saying look the mac can run ios apps now like you want to be in the mac app store guess what check the box say mac it runs we've done the work we we you know i don't think that's realistic because like a mouse and a keyboard is not a finger unless they're going to start making touchscreen macs that all the touchscreen is for

is for ios mode but i don't think that's a good idea like i don't think having that's a real that's a really weird mixed metaphor that would be a very different way for apple to go so more likely apple's going to say here are the tools here's a new development environment for let's say the mac that is much more like the tools you're used to using on ios so you've got um you've got uh uh all the the you know the stuff that you would use on iOS, it's basically the same, like with photos, like you mentioned, with UXKit, right? Instead of UIKit. Okay, maybe, but you're still requiring those developers to do that extra work. And it's like, is Slack going to do extra work so that they can take their iOS app and

move it to the Mac when they've got a Mac app that's just a web instance and it's fine is comcast going to take their video tool and you know their video app with all of those streams or they just going to be like why would we do extra work we've got this stupid website that works fine in flash and we're just going to leave it there until flash dies in two years um that's i think it's a real question like if you have to do extra work do they want to do that to get on the mac and maybe some do and maybe that's i think it's a real question like if you have to do extra work do they want to do that to get on the mac and maybe some do and maybe that's good enough um so that's that's possibility one possibility two is that this is not about that that this is about starting a process of doing the next generation app development environment that's got stuff that is neither

mac nor ios as we know it today but it's like a new set of frameworks a new way of developing apps that you can then deploy across all of apple's platforms um and i feel like when we start talking about this we come back to the question of what's the future of apple's os strategy because i feel like it's the same thing which is what does apple do they've got ios and mac they're very They're, they try to bring them together when they can, but they're very different things. And are they just going to, is Apple going to invest in these two different platforms for the long run? Or are they going to let the Mac kind of fade away and focus on iOS? Or are they going to do something that's new that is going to be unifying? That's a little like, you know, capable of doing desktop Mac-y things and phone-in-your-pocket

iPhone-y things, but is a new platform. And in the end, I'm not sure whether there's a huge difference between evolving iOS to evolving ios to be more capable and replacing ios and mac with new os you you could do either apple's going to be strongly motivated to keep all of its app developers who have been working on ios for a long time and use that that is a very huge asset of apple to have those have the app store and have all the developers to develop for iOS and are familiar with it. So from a pragmatic standpoint, it seems more likely that they would want to kind of keep evolving iOS and evolving the app development tools.

So maybe that's what this is. It's not about getting iOS stuff to run on the Mac, but to kind of like create a new set of frameworks that are a little more independent and say, this is our next gen, just like with Swift being a new language, like this is our next thing that we're doing. And it's not a new OS yet, but it is a way for you to write for these different platforms. I don't know. I think what's fascinating about this story is I don't think there's one clear right answer. There's whatever Apple may be doing, but I just, when I try to put myself in Apple's shoes, this is hard. Like, I don't think there's an obvious solution because if there was, Apple would be doing that and we would know it, right? I think it's a set of hard decisions about how do

you evolve? How do you keep the Mac going?'s a set of hard decisions about how do you evolve how do you keep the mac going do you keep the mac going how do you evolve ios do you do that where are your platforms in five or ten years how are apps being developed for them because the fact is there's a huge swath of apple platform developers now but almost all of them are ios developers and then there's this other platform because i see there's like a couple of other reasons to do this you know so you started this discussion was like what what are the reasons you know one that i see is you have an app store which is mostly a laughing stock in the community which is the mac app store right yeah but yet you

have another app store which is i know it's the only game in town but it's considered to be pretty good right like i think people tend to like the ios app store um and maybe it would be good if you could try and get some of those people that like that app store to make applications for the overall one as well and the other thing that i see is if you are developing the tools to the point that they could run on the Mac as well as iOS, right, you're kind of like bridging the gap between them, it could be an interesting way to allow for more powerful iOS apps to exist. You know, like people may push iOS further because this tool also runs on the Mac. So here, I mean mean i've talked about and written about the idea of doing

an ios laptop or one day doing an ios desktop and like part of the stumbling block there is you're really going to do that like there's no there there's no pointing device you're going to be are you just going to be keyboard and touch are you going to add a pointing device to ios that's really weird if if apple starts down a version of this path what they're telling developers is look think about your app in different contexts think about it in small screen contexts and large screen contexts think about it in context where there's a keyboard like ios developers can do some of that now there's a there's the the big ipad and there's the um iphone se right like there's a huge gap between them different sizes different use cases if you're on iphone 10 it's different all of those things are happening right then there's things that also

ios developers have to deal with like is there a keyboard like ios developers can now say oh there's a keyboard i've got keyboard got keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard on the screen slides away. I've got more room to put other stuff. That's a thing that they could do. Well, you go down this path further and you say, what if there's a pointing device? What if you're on an iMac size screen? And the answer for now would be, guess what? You can make an iMac app now. You can make a Mac app. What is it on a laptop what is it on an iMac what is it with a mouse and a keyboard versus touch and you're building one app ish that that you're thinking about all these different scenarios that of where it might run across Apple's platforms

that opens the door not just for that app to run on the mac but for that app to run on ios in a context that doesn't exist right now like a laptop with a trackpad or a imac shaped ios device with a keyboard and a mouse or a trackpad i'm not saying they will do that but like that's that's one of the ramifications of something like this and and that may be the long game for apple is rather than like ripping off the band-aid and saying in two years we're getting we have a new os everybody go to it say we're adding these tools and then we're going to add these tools and we're going to just kind of incrementally push toward the point where it won't matter whether it's a mac or it's running ios because it it's capable of doing either and um and and the apps that you

write can run on either in the proper context that's kind of the dream i just i keep coming back to the fact that i'm not sure if i'm a random ios developer maybe they don't need the random ios developers but part of the goal is like if i've got a game on ios and apple says here's some things you can do to make it run on the mac and i look and i'm like well what's the size of the goal is like, if I've got a game on iOS and Apple says, here's some things you can do to make it run on the Mac. And I look and I'm like, well, what's the size of the Mac audience? And does my game really match? And it's touch-based. And do I really want to change it to be something different?

And they just all kind of don't bother. But for people committed to Apple's platforms, I think that is, I think, in the end, it may be just a sneaky way of getting Mac developers to move to a new, more, you know, modern framework that allows them, allows a transition to happen down the road where the Mac is something very different or goes away and is replaced by iOSos doing everything the mac needs to do which could happen i i kind of see it slightly differently but but similarly like this seems like a logical step to me as the first towards like apple os like the de-unified os so like it's not ios but it's not mac os either like it's both right and that's what i meant by saying that that i'm i'm not sure there's much of a difference between saying will apple do a new os that's neither ios or mac os or will apple just keep evolving ios until it can do all the things the mac can do the answer may be yes right the answer may be that

apple is not going to like i said rip the band-aid off and say new os is here but just here's a new framework here's some changes we made to ios and just keep pushing everything up to the point where the distinctions don't matter anymore yeah like i don't know if we're going to see this this year but this certainly feels like a sure thing to me eventually. Like, I really think that. And in terms of what it would mean for users, because we've been talking a lot about it from the developer side, my gut feeling is that if this happens at WWDC this year, what it's going to be is we've got a bunch of great new frameworks. We've got a whole new framework that lets you apply your knowledge of writing on iOS

and apply it to the Mac. And for Mac developers uh who are also working on ios apps this is a great way for you to make your apps uh more understandable across platform as a developer like you can you know there'll be a spiel like that there'll be a sales job of we made a new thing for developers from a user perspective it may be invisible like i think people jumping to assumptions like oh this means means iOS emulation is happening in the Mac or the Apple's giving up on Mac app, the Mac app environment at all. And in the future, the Mac is going to be 15 pro apps, and then otherwise, it's more likely that it's going to be a developer announcement about tools that'll be a first version that you'll be able to use uh experimentally in the fall but that full support won't really be there for another year and it'll be a long slow

rollout creeping toward a new thing i think it's i just i think that's more likely from apple they they surprise us but that feels the most likely to me is that they'll just say good news everyone we're finally going to make it so that either mac people can use a lot of the same concepts as ios people or that uh we have a new thing that you can use for both um which again may be pretty much the same thing it depends better in abc ways yeah yeah and that's and and the big sell selling point will probably be ios developers who want to bring their apps to the mac but find that it's very confusing because there's a whole different paradigm over there guess what there isn't now yay um that may That may be the sales pitch, regardless of how many people

actually pick up that sales pitch. It may end up being that it's a lot of people who, just the people who care about the Mac who look at that and say, okay, well, I'm going to, this is where they're going, so I'm going to go there. But we'll see. But I think that's the most likely thing is it'll be a developer message and it's not going to be that apple is suddenly injecting um ios apps into into 10.14 yeah and uh i i think the key thing now is to see which one of us will pick this in the draft in our keynote wwc keynote draft sure yeah that'll be we'll see there's so many options to choose from too so. So that'll be good. All right. Today's show is also brought to you by FreshBooks. Freelancers, you know how important it is to make smart decisions for your business. And in my opinion, there is no smarter decision than signing up for FreshBooks.

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Try them out. It is awesome. Thank you, FreshBooks. All right. So it is time for us to return to hashtag ask upgrade. Hooray. we're back rajiv asks is there a shortcut of any kind on the apple tv remote to mute the television audio this is like the only thing that an apple tv user needs the a regular remote, right? I could watch all of my television just using

the Apple TV remote, except for something like muting. Yeah. I don't think there is. I think it's mashing the down button until it's quiet, or pausing. Pressing and holding, and eventually it will go down. If there is some magical command, I've yet

to come across it. I don't think that exists. It's just a shame. Mark asks, can you recommend a charging station that can handle three or four USB devices or cables at a time? So I'm not completely sure what Mark means by charging station, but I have a product that I think will probably suffice, which is something that Anker makes. And they make a couple of different versions of this, some that have USB-C and some that don't. But I use it.

It is the Anker 6-port USB wall charger. You just plug one of these into a power outlet, and you get six USB ports cabled to like well usb ports that you can plug cables into uh this is part of my permanent travel kit whenever i'm traveling i typically need at least three usb cables right like i need one for my iphone one for my apple watch and one for my ipad and to carry around three different adapters, all with different country adapters and all of the cables is too much. I just have one little kit that has one of these Anker things and the three cables and a US or Europe power adapter, and I'm good to go. Big fan of this product.

Yeah, I did for a while until actually we got iPhone 8 and iPhone 10 and switched to wireless charging to the inductive charging pads before that we actually had a um uh we i replaced one of the outlets in our wall with one that is a four usb outlet instead oh nice instead of plugs it just was for usb and we used that for a while um but uh i i'm not using that anymore because we're back to that but i have that i have that anchor thing and it is part of my travel kit when i travel and it otherwise it's actually by my bedside so that i can charge my ipad and kindle and apple watch overnight i i use that rather than having three separate plugs they're all plugged into the anchor scott asks jason what standing desk do you use and what arm do you have your iMac on uh i am looking excuse me while i search my own site because the answer is there's an article called what's on my desk on six colors that I wrote in 2014.

And it details everything that's on my desk, including I bought a desk from it's a desk from beyond the office door. The wire cutter raved noticeably cheap. from beyond the office door the wire cutter raved noticeably cheap uh but lex friedman had one and he uh and it's a convertible standing sit sitting desk and so he recommended to me if i were buying it today i would not buy this desk uh because there are nicer desks and i was buying it thinking it might be a home office or it might be my workspace and here i am three years later and i'm still using it i wish it was a little bit bigger i do wish it was a little bit nicer but it's fine and it came with an arm which is the hover series 2 from a company called right angle it was it was just sort of bundled with a desk and it supports weight up to like 24 pounds or something like that so it supports an

iMac just fine. So that's what I use. But I also recommend the Wirecutter. They have some nicer choices than this one. This one's okay, but I would probably buy. I've actually thought about, now that I'm in here all the time, I've thought about replacing this with another desk. And we're about to go visit my father-in-law down in LA and he has a, an adjustable

sit-stand desk. Um, and he bought the wire cutters selection and it's really nice. So I'm going to spend a few days down there looking at that and that may tempt me, but, um, but I, I do like the adjustable desk. Um, and I really like having my monitor or in this case, iMac on an arm because it gives me the entire desk space to put stuff on instead of working around and with that stand on the iMac it kind of blocks. It's low. It blocks what's behind it and I used this iMac Pro for a week-ish with just with the normal stand and I hated it. It reminded me once again of why i prefer the arm plus you can like just make the screen higher or lower or tilt it or whatever and that's actually kind of nice so

those are my answers but just check out the uh what's on my desk story it's more or less accurate even now right down to the um right down to the ipod hi-fi that i still use and the orange and the orange brain the microphone is not is the same that's true it's it's back it's my old setup look at that with the yeti and the little pop filter no good times all right uh todd asks any guess as to why apple doesn't offer free trial versions of logic pro and final cut how do they expect to bring in new users my answer to this jason is I think that the free versions of Logic Pro and Final Cut are GarageBand and iMovie. Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. I have heard in the last month or two from a couple people who said, I read your stuff about Logic and then I found out that the only way for me to try Logic is to buy it and I'm just going to go try this other thing and use it instead.

And I think they make a good point i think it's stupid that apple doesn't offer a trial well but they can't now because they're app store apps well that's right that's why i mean that's the technical reason in my response in my response to one of those people i literally use the phrase hoist on their own petard because that is what's happened here is apple apple made the rules and now they have to live by the rules and that means no free trials now what i would argue is maybe logic and final cut should be free within that purchase or they should be a subscription app it wouldn't surprise me can they can you do subscription apps on the mac yet if you if they

if they introduce that if they if they introduce that that'll be the first thing that they do right uh but i think they like that it's a differentiator and that they're competing against products that have subscriptions and they don't but um i will know like just just as a point i mean this doesn't make it better but they brought the price down significantly and they put those in the app store they were like three or four times at least more expensive than they are now no they're they're way cheaper um than than they were it used to be like 700 or something yeah but still i i think this is a good point which is it's very hard to commit to a brand new piece of professional software sight unseen it is it took me a while to be at this like you know i i think you're right though

garage band is essentially a cut down version of logic it's just so cut down it is and and it's where you learn and then you can make the jump but like the the real like you know non-tongue-in-cheek version the real reason is because apple cannot give you a free version if they want to put it in the app store because i would also expect that those applications are so complex especially logic they're trying to break stuff out into in-app purchases it will probably be impossible at this point without a significant underwriting like a rewrite of the underpinnings of the application so you must be layers and layers of old code now surely a final cut maybe a bit newer they maybe could have done it there but they decided not to

jordan asked final question today how do you guys wake up your iphone 10 do you race to wake do you tap on the screen or do you use the side button jason i generally raise to wake. Raise, it sees me. Flip, I'm in. Generally, that's what happens. Sometimes I will tap to wake. If it's already in my hand, I don't lower it and then raise it again. I will tap it. But generally, that's what I use is raise to wake.

I use raise to wake and I use tapping a lot more than I expected. Like my phone's kind of just on the desk or it's like on the sofa next to me and i'm like playing a video game and i just tap it and you know what i've realized i've started doing in the last few days can you guess what i'm doing tapping on your ipad tapping on my ipad it's really annoying me too i'm like hey let's tap hey buddy what are you doing oh i don't know where mike i don't know where to slide to get control center anymore i'm i i can't tell you how many times i pull down notifications that Hey, buddy, what are you doing? Mike, I don't know where to slide to get Control Center anymore. I can't tell you how many times I pull down Notification Center on my iPad and I'm like, why is this?

Oh. That doesn't happen to me as much as other people. It does happen. I do do it, but most of the time I know where I'm going. All right, if you want to submit a question for Ask Upgrade, just send a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade and we and we will provide hopefully a good answer for you at the end of the show or an answer good maybe an answer probably uh if you want to find us online as a few places you can do that you can go to at jay snell on twitter you can go to sixcolors.com

the incomparable.com or relay.fm shows jason hosts a great selection of shows here or relay.fm slash shows. Jason hosts a great selection of shows here at RelayFM including Liftoff and Free Agents and Download as well as Upgrade. So you can go and check those out. I am at iMike I-M-Y-K-E and I host a lot of shows at RelayFM.

Go to relay.fm slash shows. Find something new. I bet there's going to be something in there that you will enjoy. Thanks to Squarespace and FreshBooks and Mission U for their support of this show. And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Happy New Year, everybody.