Upgrade - 325: Johny for the Chips

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Three new Macs have arrived, and they've brought the Apple-designed M1 processor with them. Myke and Jason break down the new chip, the new hardware, and what it all means for the future of the Mac. And did they both buy new Macs after the event ended, or did they resist temptation?

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 325 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile pingdom and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hi mike hurley we. We're three for three in our weird new world of monthly Apple events. Probably the last one. No, probably the last one, right? It's got a... I reckon we'll have one

within the next three or four months, but I don't think it's going to be until 2021. No, there was a subtle sort of like... I appreciated that Tim Cook came out right at the beginning of this event and was like, wow, hard to believe this is our third event in two months. And I'm sitting here thinking it's not hard to believe, Tim. We've been living it.

But yeah, I think that there's some implication there that it's going to be a little bit. I actually have a Snow Talk question of you of my own doing, as I like to do on these events, because I need something that's timely, I feel. We opened this presentation today with Tim Cook in Cafe Max. So that's like Apple's employee cafe with those incredibly large doors, those massive glass doors. What do you think Tim Cook had for breakfast

before the presentation began today? I don't think he had anything because clearly the entire place has been cleaned out. Nobody was there, so they didn't make any food. I did think to myself, is that a day where they're just like all right no one can get lunch today tim tim's shooting in there i don't know who's at at uh apple park right now and what the food situation is and how they handle that in terms of keeping safe and all of that is it little box lunches that you go get or whatever but it? But it was immaculate, like nobody had ever been in that spot before.

Just Tim. That's Tim's personal. He has hundreds of chairs to choose from. All right. We have obviously so much to get to today. But let's start with a couple of notes, programming notes, really. This has been an interesting week and not only do we have an apple event today iphone mini and max reviews dropped yesterday and they're available

for everybody to buy on friday you have both the uh 12 mini and the 12 pro max don't you i do yeah actually i think i saw you published a little note about them on six colors i've been taking pictures of them and stuff yeah i'm sure you're working on a review of some kind maybe or at least some kind of article about them uh yeah i mean amid all the other things that are going on sure yeah work i'm working on it in the sense that i have been using the phones and then all this other stuff happens so we'll see but yeah sure yeah and my i i was able to order the phone that i wanted and it's coming on friday which is the gold pro max which i know is what you have actually i have i have it in my hands right

now and you're gonna love it yeah you've said that to me and also call it out in the little article that you wrote which makes me very excited um so but because of we have so much to talk about today uh we're just gonna both give our full impressions slash review of these uh the devices that we have next week um so on next week's episode that's when we're gonna talk about that because then i will have had time as well you know usually the way that we do this stuff is one week i'll ask you and then the next week i'll follow up with my impressions but we're just going to do them all next week uh instead yes right uh which will actually be a part of a bumper episode because we're very excited that next week we're going to be welcoming back friends of the show tim malay and tom boga from apple

to talk about the m1 so you may remember a few weeks ago we and Tom Boga from Apple to talk about the M1. So you may remember a few weeks ago, we had Tim and Tom on to talk about the A14 and looking forward to what we were calling Apple Silicon. But we're going to be bringing them back to the show again next week. And we're going to be talking about the new M1 chips. We are recording this in advance, so we don't have a ton of notice. But if you have questions that you would like us to ask, please send those in with the hashtag AskUpgrade. And we may be able to pick a few to ask Tim and Tom. If you're related to either of them, free to send in questions. Sure, that's right.

Any surprise sibling questions, throw those in the mix but just do it just do it quickly because we have to pre-tape that so as you hear this if you have any thoughts immediately send them to hashtag ask upgrade and we'll uh we'll use them if we can all right let's talk about the draft okay what do you want to know do you mean what do i want to know like you forget how these things go every time uh so you won you want to go the same every time you won the draft again congratulations thank you i did have this feeling today though where because sometimes sometimes i'm like gosh darn it can't i win just one of them you know i have that feeling every now and then but i looked at the scores and we're so close. I know.

That like, you know, you beat me 5-4 today. We can go through them a little bit maybe. But I kind of, I felt a little less bad about the fact that typically these competitions

are pretty close and you tend to win by one or two points. So it's like, all right. It's not like it's 5-0 every time, you know. I'm getting close. Yeah.

You're 0 over 2020 though right uh yeah zero for 2020 you have four for 2020 we all know this jason you don't need me to say it but you want me to say it so i've said it congratulations but they were all close they were all close they were all um yeah the big the big ones so yeah we we scored at five four um i got the tiebreaker but it didn't matter because it was a short, it was a 45-minute presentation. The big ones I missed on the A14X because we ended up getting the M1. We'll talk about that. Yeah, that's huge.

And then I threw in Greg Joswiak and over-the-ear headphones. And then you lost out on a demo of iOS apps on the Mac. It was more like an image that they exist. And then goodbye. When this happened, I was annoyed at myself. And the reason I was annoyed at myself is they have not done any demos in any of these events. Like looking back at it previously, it was like, well, surely they're going to.

They had the game studio guys for the iPhone, right? So they did have that. That was a moment where you could go get yourself another drink while they did those demos. But they didn't do that on this one. I thought you had a good chance of getting that, that they would actually show that experience. They didn't. So we still only know sort of vaguely. It's going to be one of the things that's very interesting when people can first start reporting about what these machines are like.

One of the things is really going to be what is it like to use an iOS app on the Mac? Supposedly, it's very Mac-like, but, you know, we haven't really seen it in a huge amount of detail. Anyway, you also said the return of the MacBook, which didn't happen. Yeah, I knew I was going to lose this draft on Tuesday because Mark Gurman published a report. Right. And he named the machines, mostly, that were going to lose this draft on tuesday because mark german published a report right and he named the machines mostly that were going to appear and the macbook was not one of them and that was when i knew i was losing the draft you didn't mention the mac mini so we could have picked the mac mini and

that would have been a heck of a pick but that didn't happen and then you mentioned apple tags and new airpods and it was a mac only event so so five four i'll take it i'll take the win i thought that uh i i i honestly thought that you were going to get this one but it didn't happen so we'll lose gracefully we'll move we'll move on to 2021 yeah i wonder how many there'll be in 2021 i don't know yeah i would say overall uh you know it it was a good i've actually really enjoyed doing as many drafts as we have been doing i think that's actually been pretty fun um but yeah i think that i think we did we did pretty well right like we both did pretty well on the mac stuff uh it was on non-mac picks because there was no non-mac anything mandatory yeah and and the ones we got right were literally just a person will appear and you know i took craig for for a

big sir and you took johnny sruji for the chips and we got those so yeah just as a couple of like meta things um this event ran fast uh again uh faster even i used it was it wasn't that much of an event in time um it's about 45 minutes but i didn't feel completely overwhelmed or confused uh in the same way that i did with the iphone event right even though again there was still a lot of data a lot of numbers uh but this one felt much easier to digest um again it's like it looks fantastic i'm sure you really loved the like when they were going through the uh like what looked like some kind of i guess like magical elevator where they had all the six color hallways yes when they were going down to the chip lab and they obviously spent the vast majority of the presentation i think in the chip lab or in front

of that screen in um steve jobs theater that was kind of the the whole kind of thing yeah there were some lengthy transitions right like the the one that got me was where they, they like show Tim far away and like a crane or a drone flies all the way up to get to Tim. And then he just turns and he's at the place where we see him before. But there are a couple of those things there.

They're experimenting and getting more comfortable showing off. Who knew that when they spent those billions of dollars for Apple Park, for the campus, that the number one thing that they would use it for would be as a set for their video Apple event. They're pretty lucky that they do have such a beautiful campus, right? They are, and they're showing it off.

But yeah, it's true. Because it is essentially a set of its own right like it's not just a building you know like infinite loop was fine but like it didn't it would not look the same uh if they would have had to have shot everything at the old campus like the the apple park campus really does lend itself to these very beautiful uh landscape shots that they do all right let's take our first break jason and we can we can start talking about the m1 to these very beautiful landscape shots that they do. All right, let's take our first break, Jason, and we can start talking about the M1 chip itself.

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was i was flabbergasted by it but i am so happy that i no longer have to say apple silicon max yeah to do it anymore it's the m1. My initial thought was when they said Apple Silicon at WWDC that there was going to be a brand name that came, that they wouldn't just leave it like that. But it was a real debate. And I actually picked that they were going to use an A14 in our draft because I just sort of had given up hope that they would do something different. I definitely suggested using the M name. I think I suggested they just call it the M14. And I heard from a lot of people who said they can't use M because they used it for the motion coprocessor. And I guess what I would say is if Apple wants to use it again,

they just will and they don't care. So M1 it is and uh the motion co-processor fades into oblivion because that's the mac chip now m1 uh start from the start there's no parity with with the a14 it's just the m1 and uh it's good because we can talk about the m1 and presumably in the long run we can talk about the m series chips which is a better way to do it probably once we get to m2 m3 or whatever we won't need to refer to it anymore because intel won't be around anymore so we won't talk about these chips in the way that we have been for the last few months of oh when it's apple silicon when it's intel like that's going to fade away. But I just like that there is a brand for it,

which is more than calling this Apple Silicon Max, M1 Max. And I like as well, because it became obvious to us, I think we spotted this in the last presentation, that Apple started referring to Apple Silicon in the Apple Watch, for example, right? Which is not a phrase that they had used before. It was just their own chip or their own custom silicon, but they started calling it Apple Silicon. So that's clearly going to be the overall name

for their chips, right? And then they're going to start breaking it down. Something I want to mention about the M1, and like, is it an A14X? Is it something like that? There are a few things that, that, uh, the developer transition kit, which was an eight 12 Z Mac mini couldn't do right. There were certain things involving virtualization and involving,

um, what was it? There was, there was different, like, um, like Thunderbolt. There was no Thunderbolt where there is on this.

Um, so the question is if this if the m1 is kind of the a14 and x and i think it could be very similar i think that they probably won't but it's even possible that they might use the m1, follow me here, in the iPad Pro. Oh, Jason, don't do this. That would be really weird. They probably won't, but they could. Because, you know, but there are some differences. So whether there is a third variation or not, there are things that they had to do for these models that the existing A12Z that was in the developer kit didn't do. So it is appreciably different in that way. I don't think it's fair to say it's just an A14X

because the A12X couldn't do a bunch of things. It doesn't necessarily mean that the M1 isn't also basically an A14X that will be used in other things uh we'll have to wait for those people who take chips off of motherboards and sand them down and x-ray them and do all those things to find out but uh in the meantime you know it is the m1 at least we know that i think there's a couple of important things about this which is one apple isn't saying that right like so like you know the marketing message at least is this is its own series of chips right like they that's where they started they were quite clear about that and i think for me it's like what this isn't is what we thought it was going to be right and what we thought it was going to be is this is the a14t or the a14m or whatever it's not that right and with my layman's

view on this these chips are all made by the same company so yes they share a similar foundation but we're not going to start saying that the chips that are in the apple watch are like the chips that are in the iphone they're just not right it's like how right you know tv os is technically ios but we don't think of it that way right that said these these cores are essentially the same cores that are in the a14 right like they're not that different but they are building up from there to a different product and yes we'll find out again i don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that if there's an A14X and the M1 and people compare them, they discover that they are almost exactly the same. That wouldn't surprise me, right? They're all in the same family, I think, the M1 and the A14. They're all part of the 5 nanometer process from Taiwan Semiconductor. They're all in the family. One of the things I really like about unhitching the Mac chip from the A series is it allows for growth in the Mac side that is not necessarily in parallel. And vice versa. Well, yeah, and vice versa.

You don't have to have A14 and A14X or A 15 a 15 x like year over year right you can iterate them at different frequencies which is important especially now when they're when you're rolling out new models for the mac you may be iterating a bit more but i do think that there will still be some criminology because it's apple there always is criminology but the you know where we're like is it an a14 is that an m1 where's the m2 map to is that a15 is that a16 watch the signs look look to the skies people right i don't know i started as batman and i ended up as fox malder there but you know we're still gonna do that right but it does allow apple to have a little bit of freedom to say, you know, this is the M1, right? Like it's not, is it related to the A14?

Well, I mean, it's Apple Silicon, but we're not going to tie it that closely. And that's, I think that's a good thing. We were very aware that no matter what they did, the chips that they were going to produce were going to have some very impressive specs. We knew that, right? Because we knew that if they took an iphone and hid it inside of a mac it would go great it would be great right like we knew that so the the things that they have given us information have given us

whilst for me i still expected it i am still really surprised at some of the capabilities of these ships. So there was a lot of comparisons to PCs, but also comparisons to other Macs as well, which I appreciated. So it's lots of three times, four times, five times best in class. And we'll go into some of those a little bit more when we talk about the computers themselves. but one of my very favorite things is you know it's got that eight core design so it's four high efficiency uh high four high performance right we've seen this this kind of like split for a while yeah this is the literally the ipad pro model here which is eight cores four performance cores for efficiency cores yeah

but the stat that really i couldn't believe was that like the the four high efficiency cores so the the less powerful cores the ones that are working on battery life energy performance they have similar performance those four to the current dual core macbook air yeah i i so it's like oh so there's a lot of headroom in this machine there right that was amazing if you take the fast ones away and again you know apple would tell you these aren't the slow ones right these are these are more efficient ones. But the more efficient cores on their own, those four, will get you performance equivalent to the, I'll grant you, two-core existing MacBook Air. But of course, the MacBook Air doesn't come with just the four efficiency cores. It comes with them

plus the four performance cores. And there's a lot of... I mean, we've been doing... We'll talk about the models more in a little bit, but we've been talking about... There was that one chart there was the saddest there are lots of charts in this first off lots of charts if you like charts this was the presentation for you but there was the super sad chart that was let's look at how mac models have have gotten faster over time recently which again they they didn't they didn't mention intel except um i think our friend steven hackett's thing said that in the universal apps thing they mentioned intel but they they almost didn't mention intel but here is they talk about pc performance a lot but like they did that chart the super sad chart that's literally like look the mac got slightly faster year over year and then you know here we went to apple silicon two and a

half times as fast as the old model and like when was the last time apple released a model that updated a previous model released within the last couple of years and it was more than double the speed like that doesn't happen it doesn't happen and this is what we were saying all along about how apple isn't going to make the move to apple silicon unless it can go across the board and say, look how much better our own processors are. And to say the MacBook Air that was sold last week is, you know, this much slower. It's less than 50% the speed. I know, okay, 2.5 faster, the new one is. Like, that is much more than we've seen in the kind of slow march of performance improvements that um the mac has seen under intel and then and a little bit more like

you know the pace of some of apple's progress um by five years ago ish with their own chips but like by making that jump you're gonna more than double performance that's uh that's pretty spectacular is this a bigger performance jump from power pc to intel like in in numbers i would have to go back i i think it's in the ballpark i think this is a little bit more than that i think my memory of the intel stuff is that it was sort of around 2x and they're claiming you know sort of two and a half here but well it's more than that i mean it's two and a half well just on this but when we start getting the actual computers i think they're all around three to five there's also three four five yeah it's true it's true yeah

no it's a big it's a big jump and that's what that's why they're doing it right that's why they want to go out there and and do it this way and and boast about their like they had the whole thing about how the the core in the m1 like a processor core performance core is the world's fastest cpu core i thought that was a funny little detail for them to throw out there yeah i found that interesting i'm i'm going to be intrigued to see um coverage from more pc led right outlets to see what isn't that good right i want to see what that means fascinating i really like linus tech tips it's a youtube channel that i've really gotten into um over the last year or so ago because it's a whole other world of technology that I enjoy. And this is their bread and butter, right? Speeds and feeds.

And I'm really intrigued to see what they make of this and what the benchmarks and stuff that they do on these machines when they get them. And I want to see that kind of coverage from a market that is more focused on what these CPUs are actually doing than we are right right you know like we have a base idea of what's out there but we don't really know it in depth so like I'm I'm intrigued to see for there but I mean I don't believe that Apple is lying but I want to see what that means right Apple frames things in interesting ways right like they frame faster than the best

best selling computer in the class which i always thought was hilarious because that's not faster than the fastest or faster than 98 well that two percent uh could be a lot of machines and and it's and it's it's 90 of pc sold which means that the impression i get anyway unless they want to tell me otherwise, is that they're using market size as a part of that. So, you know, if it's not 98% of all the PC models, it's 98% of the PCs that were sold are models that are slower, which is again, Apple's job here is to make them look as impressive as possible. And then it's our job to look at that and go, what does that really mean? What's the actual, like in framing it in a way that we care about, how does that work as opposed

to the way that they do it? Because obviously they're going to pick the ways that they look best and they're going to use those. So we're going to have to see about that, but it's still, you know, they're not making these claims without good reason. We'll just have to see what, you know, what the details are when we get our hands on them. And you're right, though, the PC, seeing how PC people or people who view the PC industry as a whole, we're going back to the pre Intel Mac days where it's a different chip architecture, and it starts to look different. And how do they judge it? And what are they looking for? Because Macs and PCs are diverging again. And so how are they going to read what Apple is doing now

that it's not doing it on Intel? That'll be interesting. Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of other features that the M1 chip has. Of course, there's a big focus on the machine learning performance. This really isn't something that I feel like I can quantify for myself uh like I appreciate that Apple say they get better at it and I know that more and more of computing is being powered by this type of stuff but it doesn't mean the same to me as when you tell me CPU GPU stuff like that I can you know like I can get my head around that I I know what that means. But the machine learning stuff, it's not so much.

The integrated graphics are quite an incredible thing. It's eight cores. It's the most powerful Apple's ever made. They call it a class of its own. And it's the fastest integrated graphics you can get, is what they're saying. And there's a bunch of stuff there about the uh the shared memory and and which is quite complicated but seems kind of interesting uh about the ways whether they

click unified memory so what it's called unified memory uh and apparently that can really help with the with the graphics performance as well right we no longer with these systems they don't have video ram and then processor ram there's just memory that's shared and it's an integrated system. The whole thing is integrated and Apple, you know, built their own GPUs and they're pretty proud of them. So that'll be, and it's important. We're going to get into the details here in a little bit, but like, it's also important to remember, this is the first drop of systems using Apple Silicon. These are the first M1 Macs and the first drop of systems using Apple Silicon. These are the first M1 Macs and the first Apple Silicon Macs. They fill very particular niches in the Mac product line

and not others. And I think it's instructive to realize what Apple picked for the first go and what they didn't pick. And they're going to be people who have some hot takes when what they're going to say is, well, but what about this? But what about that? What about this? It doesn't do this. It doesn't do that. And the answer is, well, you know, they only replaced three models and they didn't even really replace them entirely.

So, like, it's not it's the lowest end MacBook Pro, the low end laptop and the Mac mini. the low-end laptop and the Mac mini. So, you know, there's more of a story here about things like graphics, right? That they didn't replace the higher end systems. Presumably that's something for 2021, but it's not step one. That's step two or step three along this process of, uh, of having the whole product line get overhauled and turn into M series processors. Well, on that note, so these machines support USB 4. They have USB 4 ports and USB 4 ports. This is very confusing. It's a USB-C shaped connector, but USB 4 has capabilities for Thunderbolt. It's now gone the other way around.

Yeah, it's like Thunderbolt and USB 4. Thunderbolt is sort of USB 4. USB 4 encompasses Thunderbolt. And this is the future because everybody's so frustrated about USB-C and Thunderbolt and some stuff works on Thunderbolt, but not USB-C, even though they share a connector with Thunderbolt 3. The idea here is the next generation of devices, and this is it right here, is using this unified Thunderbolt is USB 4. Thunderbolt is the, the Thunderbolt spec is, I believe, the basis of USB 4. And the idea is if you have something that's Thunderbolt slash USB 4, it's going to work with USB peripherals and with usb peripherals

and with thunderbolt peripherals it'll work with all of them so this mess of like is this usbc or is this thunderbolt do what how do i need to work like that's going to go away when we move to usb4 and that's what we have here every machine that apple has for sale uh with an M1 chip in it has just two ports. There are two ports. That's not true. That's not true. The Mac Mini has two USB-A ports in addition.

Sorry, I meant two USB-4 ports. Right, right. So, right. And my understanding is that the M1 has two Thunderbolt controllers in it, integrated into it. It comes with two Thunderbolt controllers and

each one can control one port. And then those ports can do things like drive the Apple Studio Display XDR and other ridiculous stuff that you can do over those two ports. So for there to be more, right? So if we're going to go to a four port model like the 13 and 16 inch or the imax or whatever it would appear that they could not be m1 powered it would be it would appear there would need to be a different chip variation as far as i can tell which is probably why the two port 13 inch macbook pro is what got replaced. Yes. And the USB-A is on the Mac Mini.

There's probably some PCIe bridge or something that goes out to give USB-A to toss those in there. But, yeah, the two Thunderbolt controllers that are embedded in the M1 are the ones that are controlling those two ports. And that's why you're seeing the family resemblance where all three of these machines have those two Thunderbolt ports. Secure Enclave is now a part of the M1, so there's no longer the need for a separate T1, T2 chip. This is, again, like the iOS, iPadOS devices, all of that stuff is now dealt with in the system on a chip itself.

And one thing I found interesting is that during Craig's portion, he was talking about instant wake from sleep, so that these machines will wake instantly. And I was reminded that that was one of the big things about the MacBook Air, right? Was that steve jobs as so the story goes uh turned on an ipad and was like why point it to a mac was like why can't this do that yeah um and you know they got much better at it but i'm intrigued how much more instant is this instant wake from sleep i want to see that yeah that's exactly my feeling is didn't we already get this like oh look you turn on it wakes it wakes right up with the i think think when they introduced the MacBook, right? They're like, oh, look, from the people who brought you the iPad and it wakes up instantly and all that. But it didn't really, right? Like the screen came on and then you sort of waited as everything kind of shook its head and rubbed the sleep out of its eyes. And finally it was ready for you to use it. ready for you to use it. And, you know, they've made a new claim of instant wake from sleep with Craig Federici getting down and on one knee and listening to some Barry White and then waking up

the laptop, right? So we'll see. But that would be great if that was one of the things that they really focused on in Big Sur on M1 Max was, you know, getting it to be more or less an instant wake. Because, you know, when you wake up or less an instant wake because you know when you wake up your ipad you don't sit there and wait for everything to refresh generally right it just is back awake and you continue to use it uh before we get into the max themselves apple did do a recap of big sir uh they i like that they started using the line which i expect they're going to use all the time now when it comes to the mac is this idea that apples have for years of the hardware and software working all together where this is like completely true with the mac now because they build the chips now so they're

not just taking advantage of what they can from what intel have they can really build with features in mind on both sides which i think is great um big sir is available on thursday yay not 24 hours notice this time but 48 hours developers but i think it was tail end of last week apple started uh taking submissions um for big sir anyway so that yeah it's a very different very different scenario and they've all obviously had their developer transition kits this summer in order to work on things and so i think that'll be a much more orderly kind of kind of thing going on but thursday is the day for big sir and one of the things that i found really interesting is when they were talking about rosetta 2 which is the uh the ability which is the function that will allow for applications that are

not compiled to run on m1 that are previously Intel applications to be able to be, I don't want to say emulated, but you know what I mean when I say that, right? Translated is what the code translation, it sounds like what they do is when you launch them or when you download them from the Mac App Store, they, and we learned this at WWDC, they run, Rosetta runs on them, I think via Gatekeeper

and basically first launch or before it runs this translation process where it's looking at the code and trying to build like the translation version of it. And then it runs that. And so I think there's an initial hit that they don't want you to take, which is what happens on download from the mac app store and then that runs so it's not quite emulation where they're running an intel binary and every command gets translated and and you know and they're running it on a virtual intel chip instead it's this sort of other thing where it's you could my understanding

is you could almost think of it as like a cached version. Like they're trying to cash as many of the commands as possible so that they can run them most efficiently. But anyway, it's, it's Rosetta 2.0. We'll have to see how it goes. I'm looking forward to finding it out.

Cause this is again, one of those things where Apple's just going to say, Oh yeah, it's great. And then we all have to determine for ourselves if it's great or not. But, but as with funny, as with the last two chip transitions on the Mac,

um, there are these quirks about how your app is built. So like they said in this presentation, if an app is built using metal, Apple's graphics frameworks, the frameworks will be native. So you could have an app that's not native, an app that is an Intel app. But if it's a game and it's using metal, it's calling on these frameworks. The frameworks are native. And that's why they said there'll be

some non-native games that have higher frame rates on M1 because they're really not, all their graphic stuff is running natively because the graphic stuff isn't Intel, it's metal, it's using Apple's frameworks. Any framework that you call that is native is native. So that's a good thing for them, which is the opposite of what it was in the PowerPC transition from 68,000 class ones where they're like,

there were whole parts of Apple's frameworks that weren't native. And so you could have native code that ran slow. This is the, this is better. This is better. So we'll, but we'll have to see the details, right?

And all of us are going to have different apps that we're going to be like, oh man, this is the app I love. And it's, and it isn't out for, for Apple Silicon yet. And what happens then? And is it good or is it bad?

You know, Apple isn't going to talk about that because Apple just wants everybody to be happy. Yeah, because more than just game stuff, they're saying that because Apple Silicon, the M1 chips are so much faster than the chips they're replacing, a lot of applications will perform better in Rosetta because the chip is so much faster.

So that's going to be a very different story to the original Rosetta, which was great, but you knew, right? Like you opened Word and you knew, right? It varied. I would say, and this is something that Apple, I think, actually hinted at today, which is if you're upgrading from a system that's three years old or like our friend Dan Morin, right? Dan has had a MacBook Air non-retina that's been kicking around for a long time, and he's really wanted to buy a new one. But first it was the bad keyboard on the retina MacBook Air. He wanted to wait.

Then they got the good keyboard, but there were the rumors about Apple Silicon and a pandemic. And he's like, I'll wait. And today he bought a MacBook Air, right? Not to steal Dan's thunder. Dan's not on this podcast, so I'm going to do it. He bought a MacBook Air. That's great. Well, for him, Rosetta 2 apps are going to run faster than on his MacBook Air, right? Because that's an old MacBook Air. It's a little bit different if you're coming from a one-year-old Mac than if you're coming from a four-year-old Mac or a five-year-old Mac. So it's all in your perspective, but we'll see how it compares. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Pingdom. Do you have a website?

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so there were three macintoshes um today which was a big surprise um they you know on the whole they look the same um i think that you noted in our document i think you said it to me too this is just what they did with intel as well it started with here is a bunch of macs you know what these things will look like but they're all different on the inside yeah like literally i think unless you've got the serial number memorized if you look if i laid down two MacBook Airs, two MacBook Airs, an M1 MacBook Air and the previous Retina

MacBook Air on Intel and all you could do was look at them and even pick them up and look at them, no difference. They are literally the same. And the same is true of the 13 inch two port MacBook Pro. They are no different

funny difference with the mac mini though it's silver did you know that yeah yeah the there's in fact here's a funny thing already a conspiracy theory oh that this opens up the possibility of a more powerful Mac mini with the next generation of chips. Or just a small professional Macintosh. Maybe. Maybe. But, yeah, the Mac mini, we'll get to it. I think there are a lot of questions about what they did with the Mac mini that are... It feels like this has happened to the Mac Mini before where Apple sort of come in with a new version that makes some people

go, well, wait a second, that's not as good in some ways as the old version was. But we should probably start with the laptops because those are most interesting. Or in fact, we should probably start with what these all have in common. We've been speculating on this show for a couple of years now about the potential future of Apple Silicon Macs. And what would your options be, right? Like, what are my buying options? Is it literally just MacBook Air? It comes as is.

Next, MacBook Pro comes as is. Next, right? And to a certain extent, that's true. But we do have some options. If you're buying a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro or a Mac Mini, you have a few choices. You have storage. You have RAM. Well, unified memory.

Although only 8 and 16, the unified memory. Yes, well. So it's interesting. You go to the product pages and they have two configurations for each of them. And this was confusing to me when I was going to the product pages. It was like, I was not expecting this. And you kind of dig through them a bit.

And for the MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini, they are basically standard configurations. They have different unified memory and storage between them. But the MacBook Air, the cheaper one, has a seven-core GPU. It's the only machine in the lineup today that has that. If you remember when we spoke about the A12Z processor, which gained an extra core over the X in the 2020 iPad Pro,

I learned, along with many of our listeners sure about a thing called binning which is where as chips are made some are better and some are worse based on how good the chips are made and there's like a yield thing uh you can get rid of them or you can use them in different ways and what it seems like is being done here is that the good but less good chips that have seven g cores that they can say, yes, these are great. Apple are using those in the very base model of the MacBook Air. Everything else has eight cores in the GPU. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a I mean, it's literally like, well, we've got to put these ones that didn't pass the test somewhere. We'll put them in a low endend MacBook Air, which is fine. Why not? Well, spoilers, I think plenty of people will look at that and think, I do not care. pro and the 2020 ipad pro is so little as to i think make you feel okay if you want to buy the low end macbook air like yeah you know it's only oh it's only got seven instead of eight gpu cores it's fine and again depending on what you're coming from which is like if it's any macbook air in the past this thing just literally so it's not going to be an issue um you know i think that from the configuration

this isn't the minimum i expected it's kind of in the middle like the the minimum level that i expected was these are your two options choose one right yeah i could have seen or it was hey choose your storage which would have been the iphone ipad right but there is a cut you do get a couple of options uh in these m1 chips and i expect in the future there will be many more options i expect so now to be clear as far as we can tell though like the memory is what it is this is not a computer this is not a in a most there there are very few macs left where you can install more memory yourself i check this on the website if you if you um in the configurator there's a little i button if you press it it's like you cannot change the memory on this if you think you might want more get more it's effectively paraphrasing

yeah no this is this is the world that at least we are in right now with these Macs, which is you can have 8 or 16. That's all you can have. Those are your choices. And once you've made it, that's it. These are closed machines. It's an integrated system. We don't think about the fact that, you know, oh, I would love to put more RAM in my iPhone. You can't do that.

There will be pros and cons of moving to Apple-made chips, and this is going to be one of those things. I mean, outside of maybe Apple Silicon Mac Pro, maybe an iMac, maybe, but

especially in the laptops, you're not going to be able to get in there and change anything around. This is how they're going to be. Yeah, I would say even if we end up in a situation where you can choose 8 16 you know 32 64 um i would not be surprised if it's literally the same as it is right here which is congratulations that's the choice you made you're buying you're literally buying a package that's got an amount of memory in it and that's it that's not a thing that, I know that on the way

that we used to make computers, you could change that, but not the way we make computers now, right? Like, I think that's where they're headed. Storage is a little bit different and there's more variation in storage. You can go like on the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro,

you know, you can go up to a terabyte or two terabytes. Like you can do all of that, but the memory thing is a very limited selection. In fact, to be honest, I'm a little surprised and kind of impressed that they even give you the option. I was kind of assuming the MacBook Air would just be like, no, 8, that's it. You want 16? Get the MacBook Pro.

But those options are there, but they're very limited. So I guess it's in between we we amused about the idea of it will apple just have these very segmented models and each model has its own set of specs and that's it and it's not quite that but it's very close to that and also notice these are new computers that have no clock speeds attributed to them in any way. Oh, I didn't notice that. Right? Nope.

They're just all M1. It's all M1. Yeah. Because there's no comparisons to be made, so why would they give you them? And in fact, we're going to get into the MacBook Pro here in a second, but when we talk about the, and the Air, but like one of the things that Apple talked about was the cooling system.

So the MacBook Air has no fan. Yep. It's still got vents. It's got all the, like, again, you can't tell it apart if you just look at it but there's no fan in there anymore they used to be one if you didn't know yes yeah yes oh yes and if you if you worked your macbook air hard you would hear it blowing right the macbook pro still has a fan and what apple said in the event um if you missed it is that you get the impression that they both have exactly the same performance,

the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, because they're both using the M1. The difference is in cooling. So for like a quick spike in performance, doing something that requires a big processor burst for a short period of time, they'll both perform the same. However, if you're, let's say, encoding video, doing some other job that is going to have a huge amount of performance required for a very long period of time, 20 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, the MacBook Air is going to have to throttle itself because it doesn't have a fan. It's going to have to it's going to slow everything down to stay cool and the macbook pro because it's got a fan won't and that's and so it's it's a case where the macbook pro for certain kinds of tasks is going to be faster but it's not really about clock speed as we

normally discover when we talk about chips right it's it's about thermal throttling and um if you remember the first uh wave of touch bar macbook pros back in the day there was this whole thing about how they they seem to be slower than expected because of thermal throttling and like this has been an issue in computers for a while now but i think this is a fascinating example where the pro and the air have the same chip it's the same, unless you get the binned one with the seven GPUs. But if you get the 8 GPU model, it's literally the same. The difference in performance is entirely attributable to the thermal envelope, to the fact that the Air is going to have to cool itself down by slowing down, whereas the Pro

won't because it'll just blow that fan. slowing down, whereas the Pro won't because it'll just blow that fan. So to dig into the computers a little more, I'll give some highlights and we can talk about them. So the MacBook Air is 3.5 times faster than the machine that it's replacing with five times graphic performance, 15 hours web browsing battery life. They called out two times longer for video conferencing, which was a good statistic, but I will follow it up with a less good statistic for video conferencing. Improved image signal processor for better video,

but no new camera. These machines do not have improvements to the actual cameras. They're not going up to, I think, not even going up to 1080 cameras, but Apple are saying that there are improvements there. There's still 720p cameras. Also, my understanding is that that's a WebEx video conferencing task. So it's still out there. We can all test it out with Zoom and see how that goes. But yeah, the webcam didn't change. They are using an ISP, which they've been talking about for a while now, that if you use the iPhone-esque image signal processor, you can make the lousy webcam look better.

Still lousy webcam, though, and that's disappointing. But again, I think there was probably no way for them to do it without changing the shell, right? And they didn't change the shell. These are the same laptop shells as they were before. And I think maybe that's the reason why, because surely Apple is well aware that that webcam isn't very good. And I would imagine that a new generation of laptop would probably have a better webcam in them, but these aren't that and they don't. So that's disappointing. But the battery, the battery, I mean, this was one of your draft picks, and it's right on.

We've been saying, whoa, what will an ARM Mac look like? And what will the battery life look like? And we've got it, right? Which is we're talking about, in many cases, two, three, four times faster. And they're quoting battery life that in some cases is twice as long as it was before or half again as long. These are claims. You said a lot of battery life improvement, like with sort of your draft pick. We left it as just like, suffice it to say, it'll be big.

I think what we said is, we'll know when we see it. And it's like, yeah. And I had that moment where they were talking, I was like, oh, battery life, they haven't really. And then it's like, oh, okay. Yep. That's it. That's substantial. Substant substantial battery life improvements for sure

because as i think we've been talking about for so long especially when it comes to battery life it's like do not do this like if you cannot achieve these kinds of numbers be like this is the thing this is what people care about, right? Most users, I think even sometimes me to a point, there isn't so much that I care about with my GPU performance. What in my laptop? What I want is the most battery I can get. That's what I want. And that is what they have done with these machines, it seems.

I do wonder if at some point, because they didn't announce much to a certain co-host of yours, sadness, a low power mode in macOS, but I would not be surprised if we get there. And this is sort of like how Marco Arment runs that app that changes the chip profile so that he can eke out as much battery life as possible on his MacBook Pro. I feel like once you've got Macs with four efficiency cores and four performance cores,

you are a software update away from letting the user say, please just maximize battery life at the cost of performance. The system controller is going to try to do that. But I could also see that with this hardware, you could definitely make that a user option. at the cost of performance right the system controller is going to try to do that but i could also see that you know with this hardware you could definitely make that a user option to just say please please please never turn on the high performance course just yeah i want this to run like last year's macbook air please right like i just want because i but i wanted to last for 24 hours because that's what you know that's a good point, right? Just look, I loved my network here.

It was great. Let me run this thing for a week. Yeah, right. Well, because the computer, like the system controller is going to know, oh, you're doing a big job. You're doing an Xcode compile, whatever. We're going to ramp up.

The system controller doesn't know you just got on an airplane and are going across an ocean and well you might and you might have charge but in some cases you don't have charge or the ability to charge you're somewhere where you don't have the ability to charge you know that so you could be able to i i just it's an interesting direction the mac has never had something like this before right these these two banks of course so there's a lot of interesting stuff that could potentially happen on a feature like that but they didn't need it to be today because they've done such incredible gains in the battery like don't don't blow it all at once exactly exactly and they did have to get an entire

operating system running on a new chip architecture this summer so yeah p3 color display has come to the macbook air so you'll get a better display nice gray silver gold sorry jason no green or blue boring boring where's the blue macbook air next time not yet maybe $999 uh yeah you can order it today shipping next week yep pretty good pretty good they did the uh make them all look the same and cost the same with a couple quirks here and there but i think remember the 9.99 thing is what kept the old macbook air around for so long because they couldn't do a retina macbook air for 9.99 they couldn't do it and they finally have gotten it there and they weren't gonna abandon that price point because that's that's why it's the best selling mac that they

make it's because it's 9.99 so they hit they make. It's because it's $999. So they hit it, and good for them. They need to hold that down at $999. So I was very intrigued. I was like, ooh, yes, I like the sound of this machine. But then I got to see a MacBook Pro, and I was like, aha, I want you more. 2.8 times faster, doesn't get the same kind of gains

because the MacBook Pro, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is obviously more powerful, but it's still good gains. Three times faster, basically. Five times faster graphics, but this is where, again, we've got an interesting,

this is interesting, I don't know why it is this way, but I guess it's just a bigger battery. 17 hours web browsing battery. It's a 10-hour increase in battery life. This is the one that doubled so like you can see it on apple's um compare your mac thing you've gone from typical 10 hour battery life to typical 20 hour battery life yeah from best best mac battery life ever it's pretty good

it's pretty good right and little again this is a heavier larger laptop it's not it's still only a three-pound laptop, but compared to the MacBook Air, it's the heavy laptop. But that weight, there's a lot of battery in there. And this one's $1299. This machine, like, you know, MacBook Pros, they're great, right? They're nice and powerful. People like the 13, like the 16. People really like that're great, right? They're nice and powerful. People like the 13, like the 16.

People really like that new 13, right? We thought we were going to get 14 or whatever, but the 13 came out. People really liked it. Nice and powerful. Improved on the previous generation. This machine is going to make a lot of people really, really happy.

Yeah. So, conspiracy corner here oh yes please first off it is replacing the low-end two-port 13-inch macbook pro yep that's the word slots in remember there's still the four-port 13-inch and you can still buy that so yes and you can and again not a surprise apple's going to keep some intel max around for a while because they're going to be some buyers who who need intel max for their fleet of computers and they'll keep those around for a while and it's fine they do that all the time but first off i will wager that this 13-inch macbook pro will be faster than the 16-inch macbook pro the the high

end macbook pro will be slower than the low-end MacBook Pro. Which is fun to think about. What a chip transition it's like. That just seems like if that wasn't the case, I would be more surprised, I think. Right, yeah. And then Conspiracy Corner really is what happens to the rest of these systems

because obviously you've got this two port 13 inch and we talked about how the the m1 is has the two thunderbolt controllers so presumably we talk about the other shoe dropping with like there's got to be an ipad pro coming obviously there's got to be an m1 something coming next year maybe probably that is going to enable that four port model on the 13 and the 16 and a little extra bonus conspiracy this may be where that 14 inch macbook pro rumor is the yeah the-port 13 and the four-port 13, which has been, and remember it was the MacBook Escape before it got the touch bar. The idea that Apple for a few years now has had two 13-inch MacBook Pros, which is just dumb and confusing.

Well, what if the four-port model running on Apple Silicon is a 14 and not a 13. And then you've got 13, 14, 16 for MacBook Pros. And you have three models, which you already have three models. It's just two of them are the same size screen. So maybe that's what we'll see next year. I could imagine that machine is the best part of a year away.

It could be. It could be. We'll see. I mean, who knows what pace they're going to take here um now that they've got these laptops out there yeah they said two years again today they could they could overshoot that i mean last time in the intel transition they happened it all happened faster than they they claimed um but laptops are super important to apple so i wouldn't put it past them to roll the rest of the laptops over sometime next year. But based on what we know about the M1, it does mean presumably another variant chip.

And when is that going to be ready and how are they going to roll that out? Because one of the things that I'm sure is going to hurt a lot of people is 16 gigabytes of RAM maximum in this machine. Exactly. And this is something that is also true of the Mac Mini, which used to go up to 64, right? But this model only goes up to 16. That's part of the missing piece here, right? This is the low-end model. And even though it's a MacBook Pro, it's the low-end model. It it's the two port and it's maxing out right now at 16 so presumably an M1X or whatever you want to call it a variant that has more ports probably supports more RAM that's far more likely to go into a higher-end MacBook Pro that's not what we got today those those systems and those slots remain, you know, that's a test to be taken at another time in 2021. Like, we'll get there. But until then, it's just, it can be an object of speculation, obviously. But that would seem to make a lot of sense that more RAM, more ports, all of these things are,

they're something that you put in a higher end product and they're starting out with the M1 and the M1 is the base, right? And then they'll presumably start to build a stack of M1 related processors in 2021. And when we look at it this way, we look at it as this m1 and we can draw a line between you know all the macbook airs the base level macbook pro it makes sense that the mac mini would slot into that kind of product offering even though i don't think any of us were like me and you were not expecting a mac mini today it just wasn't no really something i'd thought we would see although on one level it kind of makes sense because of the the dtk right and like the idea of

it doesn't require anything like obviously because the mac mini they already did this with an ipad chip so why don't they do it with the with the new m1 and stick it in there it wasn't rumored um but you know it it makes it makes sense it makes a lot of sense now that we know what we know about the m1 chip especially right where it's like okay right like i see why you would do do this. But it does take a step back. Like, okay, so the Mac Mini is a weird one, right? Because the price went down. The base price went down to $699. And if you remember, the Mac Mini originated as a $499 Mac. And then the next year, it went up to $599 and got Intel. But $699 is down from the $799 that the old model started at. So that's good. I really like that the Mac Mini is a little bit cheaper. But as has been pointed out by a bunch of people,

our friend Christina Warren did it, you know, where does this thing go? Like if you're a high end person using a Mac Mini and you want to have it in a, you know, wherever you're going to use it, you want to load up with RAM and all of that. Like it, you can't load it up with RAM. It is a 16 gig RAM max system. It's faster than the old Mac mini. There's no doubt about it, but it's also got this RAM limitation. So it's sort of a low end Mac mini that is faster, but it's also kind of limited in that way. I have to imagine that there will be a new Mac mini at some point in the next couple of years in fact i think now that apple's making the chips maybe it's easier for apple to update the mac mini but um and so maybe it'll happen more often but um but yes if you're

somebody who like uses the mac mini in a very particular way where you want a lot of ram in it this one's not going to do it for you. There are also a lot of people who don't use the Mac Mini that way and use it in all sorts of other contexts where this is going to be just fine, plus it's $100 less to get started, which was one of the big criticisms of the old Mac Mini. So I think it's like Apple give and Apple take away happening here. But I love the Mac Mini. i am uh kind of thrilled that they have these uh on day one for apple silicon i also have to wonder if maybe this is what everybody who every developer who got an apple silicon uh test system is going to get as a replacement for that

like can they can they turn theirs in and get this back or something like that we'll see uh this is three times faster in performance six times faster in graphics and is a hundred dollars less than the machine it replaces 699 yeah our um another comment from twitter that i liked uh steve trott and smith um who seemed thrilled about this because he said, you know, with bumped RAM and a terabyte of SSD, um, he's, he can pay about half of what he needed before to price up a competitive model to replace his iMac. Um, he says 16 gigs of RAM is a bummer, but with the increased IO, I'm not worried. Apple should have performance per dollar charts. So like, I mean, what he said is that the power of the M1 in affordable Macs cannot be emphasized enough. And I think he's right about that. So it's in the eye of the beholder. But I think there's a lot of things to be excited about about that Mac mini,

while understanding that for some people, they're gonna look at its limitations and be sad because they there are people who spec up the mac mini an awful lot and there's only so high up you can spec this first apple silicon mac mini yeah and here's my thinking on that patience you don't have to i mean i know look we all want one right we all want one because we want to see what this thing is like. We just don't have that option yet. I believe it will come. And the reason I believe it will come is because you can still buy the old one, right?

That's there for a reason. Apple clearly knows people want more from these machines. So they will continue to allow you to get them until they have a bigger offering. And the reason that I feel confident in this is you can't buy an Intel MacBook Air because the MacBook Air has been fully replaced, right? The capability is enough.

You can buy an Intel MacBook Pro and you can buy an Intel Mac mini. So this is, I think, a very clear signal that Apple are like, look, we know that there will be some of our customers who need more than what the M1 can provide. you can buy an intel mac mini so this is i think a very clear signal that apple are like look we know that there will be some of our customers who need more than what the m1 can provide from an expansion perspective right from like from what the ram can do that kind of stuff or from how many ports you might want to have on the machine uh just wait right for that but for

everybody else you're going to get a lot out of these machines so that is why these various intel models remain available but yeah the mac mini was the biggest surprise for me i was expecting macbook pro i was expecting a consumer laptop whether it was the macbook or the macbook air i wasn't expecting the mac Mini. It just, you know, I just thought this was going to be a laptop event. I wasn't expecting to see anything other than these, right? Like, and I'm not surprised that we didn't see the iMac, for example, because I think,

as probably you would agree with me, the iMac will most likely to be the first new Mac. I think the smaller iMac that has been untouched for years and is sad is crying out for a rethink.

I would probably put money down that early next year, first half of next year, that smaller iMac anyway is going to get an M series treatment and not look like the old iMac, but we'll see.

And it'll be interesting to see if it's M1 in that one first. Right, I mean that's the question right, is are we going to see the next wave be M1 variants with more ports and stuff or are we going to see the next wave be m1 variants with more ports and stuff or are we going to see more m1 based machines or both maybe maybe both who knows we've never seen apple roll out a mac product line with their own chips before this is our first time and they've

got lots of choices to make that they made obviously years ago but now we get to see what those choices are so it's going to be very interesting to watch the next couple of years as this rolls out. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Smile. If you are searching for a powerful PDF editing tool for your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone, look no further than PDF Pen. Whether you're on the road or you're at your desk, you need advanced editing features, or just want to sign an email back a contract, PDF Pen has you covered. The ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac now includes even more powerful features like page label support in multiple formats for documents

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That is smilesoftware.com slash podcast. Our thanks to PDFPen from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM. Just as like an overall thought of this event, I was the most excited for this event that I have been for any of the events this year, of the three that we've had. So the September, October, November events. And overall, I have left this event feeling the most excited.

I was excited about the products that they showed off. I'm excited about what we have now, and I'm very excited for the potential of these products in a way that the other events, not that they've left me lacking, but that there's less to grow immediately obvious to me than what I see in the Apple Silicon Mac chips. So I don't know how you feel, but that's kind of where I am with this event today.

Well, yeah, in terms of the three fall events, what we got is a lot of incremental improvement, right? It's the latest Apple Watch. It's a little better than the last one. The latest iPad Air. It's better than the last one the latest ipad air it's better than the last one a little more like an ipad pro the latest iphone models they're better than the last one i think the most interesting things about that are there's now a little one and that's very exciting um but it's still just an incremental iphone update and then on the mac

side it's these macs that look like their previous versions and therefore shouldn't be exciting and from a design standpoint it's not exciting at all but it's an entirely new platform and these macs are going to behave like no macs before them and these huge speed benefits and huge battery benefits and uh a whole chip transition that's happening. And it's the start of a two-year process where every Mac is going to get turned over. Like, I just, it is to me as well, the most exciting thing that Apple has done all fall. This is the story of 2020 for Apple, I think, is announced a chip transition and started to make it happen.

Like those are the big moments for Apple. Remember in the spring, you know, we got the iPad pro that wasn't really new. And like, this is the big one. I think this is the, the number one event of 2020 for Apple, other than, you know, the global event of dealing with the pandemic and how do you do that? But in terms of like their product releases and their strategies and all of that, I think it would be hard to look at this and not say this was their big move is going to their own chips and shipping a new version of mac os that supports the new chip design and and uh starting the migration you've got to imagine that there is as well for apple themselves like a feeling of monumental achievement here, right? Like a history thing, you know? Like, you know, we are the Mac company. That's where we've come from. And then we've had these great successes with these products that we've made that we have controlled the whole thing

on, even more than we've ever controlled products in the past. And now they're able to take those successes and bring them back to the mac and take the mac further by fully owning it and i imagine that that makes this similarly when you say it's a big event for apple i'm sure for many of the people that have worked on this stuff it is important and i think as an observer and as a fan one of the things that i am so excited about for this is because show me what you can do. You know, and that excites me because even step one, what we have seen today is I'm blown away by. I think it's amazing.

I wasn't expecting the sheer results that they have shown today. results that they have shown today, you know, like the doubling, tripling of performance and doubling battery life. I didn't think we'd get both of those. You know, I thought there was going to be a little bit more tuning of that, right? Like, hey, this is faster and gets more battery. I didn't think it was going to be like, you want all of it again? We'll just give you it all again. It's like you have two computers now. It really is. I was very, I'm very excited about it.

I really, really am. I think they blew me away today. Yeah, you say, show me what you can do. I think that that is a big part of this is apple obviously has a huge amount of pride in the quality of their chip design team and i have to think that within the chip team there's probably been a let me add it kind of attitude toward the mac looking at what intel is doing which is has been not much and thinking like we could do better than them. You know, we are doing better than them. Let us do better than them on the Mac too.

And, you know, this is their chance to shine. This is their chance to show our way is better. Our way is best here. And the Mac is going to be improved because Apple can control that part, which is, you know, such a dramatic change from the Intel transition, where it was very much like the Apple-IBM-Motorola alliance had kind of foundered with PowerPC, and that Apple had to go to Intel for help. Here, it's Apple taking the ball back from Intel and saying, no, no, we make our own chips now, and they're better than your chips. And that's a huge thing, because in the long run, in the the short run it's battery life and performance and all of those things that we talk about about computers

but in the long run it's also Apple controlling all of the pieces and able to plan what it wants its computers to be based on Apple's priorities and not based on Intel's priorities and you saw them straining with something like the T2 where they're like can we just

put our own ship in there to do a bunch of this stupid stuff instead of relying on anyone else? And now they've got the whole thing. how they build the neural engine and they build the image signal processor for the photography in the iPhone. Like they're able to on their, um, on their charts of like, where are we going with this product? And what do we need in terms of software and hardware and processor functionality? They're able to plan it out and take the product where they want it to go. And the Mac, they couldn't because in the end they had to get apart from intel and probably intel told them it would be available on x date and it turned out to be later like always later and that's gone like they know when they're available they know what they want to do and so the macs are going to be faster and they're going to have better battery

life but what i think is really exciting is the next step they take, which they didn't take today, which is adding things to the Mac that Apple thinks are important and would make a good experience for a computer. And they don't have to worry about anybody else being involved in that. They can just prioritize that themselves and that will probably involve some things that it believes in general are important and that they're pushing on the ipad and the iphone and the mac and probably some things that are specifically for the mac because you know they do have to do some things that are a little different on a mac than on an ipad or an iphone so the whole thing is yeah super exciting exciting. Very important day in the history of the Mac.

Very important. But it's also day one of a process that will probably take, you know, five or 600 days to complete. So there's more to come. I'm not trying to get soppy, but there's something important to me here that this is my first

full processor transition i came to the mac for intel oh there you go now i get to say goodbye and there's something kind of for me personally there's something nice in that um like you know my first mac was the first intel iMac. That was my first Mac. And that was a long time ago. 15 years ago or something. There or thereabouts. And there's just something nice now where I can move on to the next transition.

It makes me... It just feels good. I like that. Yeah, it's coming up 15 years. It'll be 15 years in January. So it's been a long time now. It makes me... It just feels good. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's coming up 15 years. It'll be 15 years in January. So it's been a long time now. I was 18 years old.

That was a big... Somebody posted a couple of Macworld covers from that period. And I was like, yep, I remember making those. And here we are again. But this is... And these transitions are exciting, right? If you're a developer, it can be really frustrating and a lot of hard work. But as a user, if you need to stay behind, you need to stay behind.

But if you get the chance to step forward and try something new, that can be really exciting and you get the benefit. Like people are going to buy MacBook Airs for $9.99 not knowing anything about Apple Silicon, right? That's the funny thing is this winter, people are going to buy MacBook Airs for $9.99 and they're going to get something that is twice as fast as the computer that they would have bought if they had bought one last month. That's pretty cool.

That's pretty great. I would hope that you will have some of these products to review. I hope so. But are there any of them them just on the face of what we've seen today that you may want to buy oh i already bought one oh you did you see this you know why because okay usually like so like i'm connected we just start this conversation with what did we buy and usually it's pointless having this conversation with you because you tend not

to buy things like you will try them out one right now right because presumably i'm going to get them to try out so you usually you don't have to send them back so and by then i'll buy one and all of that this is a surprise to me well i mean i could have waited and i could still cancel it i suppose but i decided a little while ago that I needed a MacBook Air, an Apple. So a few things. First off, Mac product loans, when they happen, are for a short period of time. You can hang on to an iPhone for a while. If you need it and you want to test it and you want to test it against other iPhones and stuff like that, they'll let you hang on to that for a while. They will want it back eventually, but you can hold on to that for a while.

iPads, you can hold on to it for a while. Macs, you can't. They will want them back. And so I know that I want to have an Apple Silicon Mac in my house to write about this stuff. And I'm going to have to give those back after a few weeks, right? So I know I want one. And I know I want one this fall. And on top of that, I have spent the last month or so in a few cases where I've really wanted to work on something not at my desk. And it's something

that only works on a Mac. And I love myad and i use my ipad in the rest of the house and if i were to travel which i haven't um i would use my ipad as much as i could but there is some stuff that i would like to do elsewhere that i can't do on my ipad because the app doesn't exist on the ipad and uh made me think okay well now i've got two reasons that i kind of wish i had a MacBook Air. And then the third reason is I think about me going to New York. Back in the day, I remember I'd fly to New York and then we'd do an interview or I'd do an interview with somebody

and then we'd put it together and we'd do the show and all those things. And I would have to bring a Mac for that because it was too many pieces to leave it to just an iPad. And I thought, okay, my MacBook Air is so old at this point that I don't think I trust it for stuff like that anymore. It's an old 11-inch MacBook Air. So for all of these reasons, I thought I should get another MacBook Air. And maybe somebody else in my house, maybe Lauren gets it eventually to replace her MacBook Air because she has a first generation Retina MacBook Air. But I could put it to use. Plus, I don't want to be writing about the Mac without

having an Apple Silicon Mac in my house, right? And I'll have one, presumably a review unit for a while, right? But not that long. And then what? And then I really need to have one. So these are my, these are my reasonings for doing it. And the reason I chose a MacBook Air is because I want it to be a laptop. It doesn't need to be a MacBook Pro. So yeah, I bought a MacBook Air. I bought a 7 GPU core, but upgraded to 512 storage and 16 gigs of memory macbook air and uh the order is in so it'll get here in a couple weeks i guess i ordered two laptops today you win you got me so i see your laptop and raise your laptop okay so uh edina has been using a and has continued to be using a 2013 MacBook Pro. And that thing, if it was a car, it would have fallen off by now.

At this point, it needs to stay plugged in. She cannot use it on battery because the battery drains so fast. not use it on battery because the battery drains so fast and it was unfortunately she was caught in that cycle of having a husband who pays too much attention to computers and telling her no no there's you don't want this computer right like we've all been there you don't want this macbook because the keyboard's bad and you and she's used it and hates the keyboard right so it was also her decision as well she didn't want their keyboard and then they and hates the keyboard, right? So it was also her decision as well. She didn't want no keyboard. And then they finally replaced the keyboard, but then it was like, ah,

but I know they're going to do something. It's just around the corner, right? And Apple Silicon has been just around the corner for unfortunately a little bit too long. So we went with the seven core gpu model because if you're coming from this is what i was talking about earlier if you're coming from a 2013 macbook pro you do not need the eight core gpu uh you're probably good and uh we increased the storage i think we did 16 gigabytes of ram and the 512 gigabyte ssd that's coming uh at the end of the month basically and then i ordered for myself a 13 inch macbook

pro uh and i went with 16 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte SSD, and it's coming next week, which is interesting because even though it was build-to-order, I think that that is a build-to-order specification that Apple probably assumes it's going to get enough of. It was saying it was going to be two weeks, and when I changed it to a terabyte SSD, it changed to 17th to 18th of November to arrive. And my plan is

this machine... Well, okay, I have a little bit of a secret. Over the last few months, I have been doing the vast majority of my work on a Mac. Because in my studio setup, it's just

easier for me to work on a Mac, uh, because I'm still actually pretty far away from getting the full setup that I want for an iPad workstation. Um, just because I've, you know, part of it is actually the fault of these Macs because I have what I've had this idea in my mind for how I'd have my studio set up, but I was waiting for an Apple Silicon Mac before I could make the setup exactly the way that I want.

But now I've been doing it for so long that when I'm at the studio, I'm using a Mac. When I'm working at home, it's as I have been for the last week or so, mostly, or if I'm spending a day at home or whatever, I'm using the iPad a lot. And there are certain tasks where like, for example, preparing for this show, I find it my workflow is much better for doing this on iOS. So I'll take

my iPad, and we'll use that at the studio. But the vast majority of my work recently has been done on a Mac. And so I've kind of had this feeling of like well imagine if i could also get all my favorite ios apps on a mac that might be kind of all i need because it's the apps that i love most um right on on ios and ipad os so you know basically i feel like now i am more in the jason snell camp than the federico for teacher camp team both rather than team ipad um but i'm gonna wait and see like there's still a lot there's still a lot of stuff that's gonna change for me work-wise like with work setups and stuff over the next few months uh and i wanted to have a this machine was always

going to become like this is the machine that i will record from and eventually not yet i'm not trusting the podcast it's too big sir for a while so i would just be using this machine as like a machine to use and i'm gonna see but like basically i have rediscovered a love for the mac over the last three or four months and and now very very intrigued by an apple silicon mac because if it can run all the ios apps that i want as well it kind of feels perfect so So I don't know. So I went with the MacBook Pro. So it's really, and so I'm very excited about that machine.

And I kind of like the idea a lot of having these more shared experiences between my iPad and my Mac. So when I do, because what I do notice is when I do move between them, I do feel the differences a lot more. And I think from a visual design perspective and from a functionality perspective and from what apps I can use,

I think it's actually going to be just a much nicer computing experience for me to be able to, what I feel would be more seamlessly move between iPadOS and macOS. So os so i am really once you've got everything that you rely on presumably and this is something that we're gonna have to follow starting next week which is what apps opt out of being what ios apps opt out of being on the mac because there will be some that'll be very frustrating um but you eliminate what we currently have, which is this schism where

a bunch of stuff is just not on the Mac and it's on your iPad. And you're like, well, wait a second, I need to go back to my iPad for that. And then now it doesn't feel like home because if the iPad is your home or part of your home, and then pieces of that just are not available or not easily available, it gets frustrating. And so having it be feel like a little bit more of a hole is uh it's a good thing i i agree i'm not going to start just carrying around a macbook air and using it everywhere like that's not going to happen but i have you know in buying this i want to have the ability to especially you know for for certain stuff that is not available on the iPad, to be able to do that and to have that flexibility. I don't even know why I'm being oblique about this.

I'm using Descript to edit 20 max for 2020, and it doesn't work on the iPad. And so I really did not want to, on a warm day, we don't have those anymore because the weather has turned now, but we had our late summer warm days and I really didn't want to be sitting in my office. I wanted to be in the backyard, but I needed to edit 20 Max for 2020 and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I did not have a computer that could work with it. And so now I will. And, you know, will I use, does that mean I'll use my Mac more than, you know, than I use my MacBook Air? It would be hard for that not to be the case because my poor little MacBook Air never gets used.

But yeah, so we're both, you know, I think it'll be interesting to see where this takes us, right? Like this is the unification of so many iOS apps with the Mac is really changing the meaning of what the Mac is. And I've seen a lot of old line kind of Mac fans. And I mean, I'm one of them in a way, but like bemoan the idea that this stuff is going to come in. But I would imagine that there's also going to be a huge audience who like the Mac okay and all, but now they're going to be able to get their favorite apps on the Mac too. And that's going to change how they use their Mac.

So we'll see how it goes. I'm very excited. The next week is going to be a big week. We've got a new iPhone on Friday and a new Mac next Tuesday or Wednesday. Yeah. So yeah, it's incredibly unlikely that I will even be able to give first impressions of

that Mac on the show next week it's probably going to have to be the week after that right because we'll be releasing the next episode on the 16th of Monday which by the way we give you a reminder on that episode of the show we will be once again joined by Tim Millay

and Tom Boga from Apple to talk about the M1 from people responsible for it. And so if you do have any questions, get them in fast with the hashtag AskUpgrade. But if you have any questions for us as part of the regular course of the episode, maybe stuff focusing on the new iPhones, the HomePod Mini, I don't know when mine is coming,

but I did order one of those as well. Man, I'll tell you, I'm pleased that I haven't had to pay for any airfare this year because it's really helped with the very expensive final quarter of this year as all of the technology has been released. So that's been nice. At least it's the silver lining, I suppose. So yeah, if you have regular Ask Upgrade questions, you can send those in as well. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade.

I hope that you've enjoyed our coverage of the event. If you would like to get longer episodes of Upgrade with even more wonderful content and without any ads, you can go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up. And thank you so much to everybody that supports the show this way. And I would also like to thank our sponsors. That is Smile, Pingdom and Uni

for their continued support of this show. But most of all, thank you for listening. You can find Jason's work at sixcolors.com and he's at Jason now, J-S-N-E-O-O. I'm sure Jason will have many words written over the next week, so make sure you keep it locked to six colors. And I am iMike, I-M-Y-K-E.

We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Early.