Upgrade - 379: They Feed on Memory Bandwidth

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

We're joined by Apple VPs Tom Boger and Tim Millet to discuss Apple's chip-design philosophy and how it factored into the company's first high-end Mac chips, the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Also, Jason and Myke discuss Apple's latest record quarterly results and Myke takes delivery of his new MacBook Pro.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 379 today's show is brought to you by fitbod doordash and texexpander my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell hello mike hurley congratulations on returning to greenwich meantime thank you so much it's my favorite time it's the i'm back in the one true time zone it's the most wonderful time of the year or ever well you know it's the most correct time i see i would say is probably a better way to put it uh i have a hashtag snow talk question to start off today's episode and it comes from carsten and carsten wants to know do you think Ted Lasso would be equally as good if the plot was reversed an English soccer manager traveled to the U.S. to save an NFL football team uh no no I don't think the quaintness could exist and I think

the quaintness is part of what makes the show what it is I think that uh to say that an NFL team would be like AFC Richmond is a stretch just because of how franchises work in the United States and how much money there is. Whereas I feel like you could have a team that was rambling around in the, in the lower echelon of the premier league or the upper level of the championship. That was kind of as delightfully ramshackle as AFC Richmond is and have it

be sort of like, I don't know. I mean, it's not like an NFL team couldn't do, um, uh, something as dumb as hiring Ted Lasso was, uh, because they do that all the time. I just think that the, the way the NFL, the NFL is too, too corporate in some ways. And also, you don't have the international flavor that you have in international soccer, European soccer, where there's players from all over. American football players tend to be almost entirely from North America. You know, if I was pitching a Ted Lasso version that was set in the U.S., I would probably have it be like minor league baseball or college football, maybe, or college basketball, something where there's a little less of a kind of monolithic corporate thing. I just wouldn't buy it, I think, for an NFL team. I mean, I'm sure you could make

a pitch that way, but I don't know. There are other sports, but I don't think the NFL would be the right fit. If you'd like to send in a hashtag snow talk question for us to open the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag snownellTalk or use question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. So we have a big show coming up today. We are going to be talking about Apple's quarterly earnings report, which is an interesting one as it tends to be these days. And also coming up pretty soon, we have an interview with a couple of VPs over at Apple. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But before we do do let's thank

everybody jason who bought uh an upgrade logo t or hoodie at upgradeyourwardrobe.com i will just say if you're listening to this show basically immediately when it comes out you've got a couple more hours to buy if you want uh so you can go to upgradeyourwardrobe.com for that uh thank you to everybody that did upgrade merch we'll be back again next year i got my macbook pro oh how is it how are you like i love it so much oh man i love this computer so first off the design i just love it i love how boxy it is it's got like a real serious look to it it's like like i feel like it's business computer like i don't know what it's got like a real serious look to it. It's like, I feel like it's business computer. Like, I don't know what it,

it's got like a kind of retro, it's that retro vibe, I think, you know, of like the PowerBooks and the titanium, you know, the titanium PowerBooks. So it's got that kind of like serious vibe to it, which I really like. The screen is fantastic.

Just overall, I think the computer, when you're using it, feels more modern, just much more modern. You know, the bezels being super thin. The notch definitely does that as well, I think. Like it just makes it feel like a current modern computer. Pro motion, you know, I'm not the first person to say this. It is very inconsistent.

That was the surprise that i had was other than some catalyst apps i found very little that actually supported promotion yeah i think there was been some reports of like just like a bunch of apps not accurately supporting it yet but i feel like i see it in the operating system you know sure which which i enjoy and i think this is i don't know if this is maybe just the thing that's unique to me but i'm very happy to have a lot of ram in my machine again because i think i mentioned this on the show but i would get quite frequently a pop-up telling me that i had too many apps open and was the system was demanding i close apps and now i don't need to

do that and now like i keep opening an activity monitor, and I'm like, ooh, 32 gigabytes of RAM being used. I love it. I just, I like having lots of apps open. Like, when I'm using a Mac, I just like lots of stuff open, and I just click around to what I need. Like, maybe this makes me a weird Mac user. I don't know. But, you know, that's just how I like to run my Macintosh.

So I'm very happy to have more RAM, like, just tons more RAM. You know, I'm just doing some tests. My tests are the same as everybody else's. Like a lot of the audio stuff that I do is kind of around 20% faster than I was actually doing against my M1 iMac. That's why I was just running some tests today because it's the machine that I'm using most.

So like for processing audio, bouncing stuff out of Logic, it was about 20% faster than that, which means it's kind of around that, honestly, for my iMac Pro as well, because the M1 and my iMac Pro were shockingly similar at a lot of those tasks. Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's so cool. I mean, I'm really excited just to use this machine more. I think it's just a fantastic computer and I'm so happy that Apple have gone in this direction again. So it's really, really fantastic.

Yep, I agree. Mac OS Monterey is out. I keep thinking in my mind, Monty Ray, like it's a person, you know, like it's Monty Ray's operating system. It's not Flying Circus. Monty Ray's Flying Circus. It's not available. i think we're gonna come

back to monterey on a future episode that's spanish for what the king's mountain i think sure yeah great timing the monterey release was last monday right after upgrade of course i've been working all summer on my monterey review and then i got a MacBook Pro, which was great, but it meant that I moved that to the side. And so like Monday and Tuesday was my, can I please just finish this Monterey review? I spent a lot of time with shortcuts. So I'm sure we'll talk about it more in the future. I wrote a couple of pieces last week on Six Colors

about shortcuts and getting shortcuts to work across platform, which you can do. Yeah, I want to talk about that specifically in the next coming weeks is talking about shortcuts. i figure we're gonna we're gonna have time to talk about stuff the next few weeks because the the fusillade of apple product releases has slowed down and we can pick up the pieces uh all this stuff that we haven't really talked well unless we have i don't know some real big like meaty HomePod color coverage. The colors are coming back. Talk about those.

Like a color episode. You have to do that. A bunch of new e-book readers came out. Maybe we should just have Scott McNulty back and do a whole episode about Kindles. I have in my Apple note where I keep links, I've been collecting links of different e-readers that you've been putting on Six Colors.

I do. I have all the Kobos, and I'm getting the new Paperwhite from Amazon, and I am going to do a big e-reader roundup. So maybe we'll just dig in. Don't forget, while we're talking about what's coming, I was looking through my to-do manager today, and I saw a very ominous task, which was prepare for the upgradees. Yeah, I've been thinking about the upgradees the last few weeks, actually.

I've been thinking about it. Again, amid all the other things going on, I had this light finally turn on in my brain like three weeks ago that was the upgradees. And I was like, I'm ready. I mean, I'm not prepared, but I'm i'm already working on thinking about what the stuff is for uh for the upgrade ease so that's going to

be good we have to work on what our process is going to be and all of that but we'll um we'll do that we'll figure that out we'll put our heads together yep and uh figure that out this episode is brought to you by our friends over at TextExpander from Smile. Do you ever type the same thing over and over and over again? Whether it's customer support, answers to emails, maybe sending out some sales contacts or editing documents, typing things repetitively or using copy and paste can be a burden. And that's where TextExpander comes in. With TextExpander, you and your team can keep your messages consistent, save time, be more productive, and be accurate every single time. The way we work is changing rapidly,

and you can make work happen wherever you are by saying more in less time and with less effort using TextExpander. I really love the TextExpander team system. We have a bunch of people here at RelayFM that have shared TextExpander snippets that go between them and so what this means is if somebody's got some great language that they're using for an email or whether it's maybe advertising copy for our sponsors

it's all saved in this one place and we can all access it in just a couple of keystrokes as a listener of Upgrade you can get 20% off your first year by going to textexpander.com podcast you'll learn more about TextExpander there and you can sign up and get that 20% off your first year by going to texexpander.com slash podcast. You'll learn more about TexExpander there and you can sign up and get that 20% off your first year at texexpander.com slash podcast. Our thanks to TexExpander from Smile for their support of this show and RelayFM.

So a few days ago, we got to sit down with our, I will say friends of the show, Tom Boger, who is the Apple's VP of Mac and iPad product marketing, and Tim Millay, who's Apple's vice president of platform architecture, to talk about the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. So we've had Tim and Tom on before to talk about Apple Silicon stuff. And so it seemed just about right that we would have them on to talk about these new chips. So without further ado, here is our conversation that we had with Tim and Tom. I would really love to start off by hearing a little bit about how the M1 Pro and M1 Max were developed. Like, was this an expansion of the existing M1?

Or did you have to go back to the drawing board to basically start again to get to these incredible chips? It's a great question. And the answer is, as you can imagine, it's a little more complicated than yes or no or one or the other. It's actually an interesting hybrid of the two. We absolutely started with the foundational

building blocks of M1 because we've invested in those building blocks. They're tremendous. Architecturally, we wanted to make sure that software written for M1-based machines was going to translate over, that software developers would see something familiar when they looked at the M1 Pro and M1 Max, but of course, familiar only in the sense that their applications ran without a snag. The performance, we wanted to blow their minds. And our goal was really to just blow the doors off what we could pack into these beautiful enclosures that the Mac system team builds. And so really it was about, okay, how do you do that? How do you take those fundamental building blocks that made M1 great and scale them up? And really

that required us to tear it all apart and put it all back together in a way that enabled this massive memory system that we're able to deliver with M1 Pro and M1 Max, getting to 200 gigabytes per second and stitching the CPU complex, the GPU complex together to get access to that bandwidth. And what's interesting about a unified memory system is the CPU is desperately interested always in lowest possible latency to memory. The GPU, all it wants is bandwidth. Give it to me. It can tolerate a little bit of extra latency. Building one memory system that does both has interesting properties. One of them is it provides the GPU with an interestingly high

capacity memory system that actually has a pretty good latency picture. And the CPU, all of a sudden, your multi-threaded applications are seeing bandwidth they've never seen before. And so tackling that, that was our target. And doing that really did require us to do a lot of invention, not necessarily in some of the fundamental cores that we use to build our impressive CPUs and GPUs, but really the fabric, how you stitch it together and connect it to the memory system, along with all the other goodies that come along with M1, the video accelerators, the machine learning accelerators, the display engines, all the things that give M1-based systems the amazing battery life. Those are all translated over into the M1 Pro and M1 Max. This is, again, I'm sure one of those questions where the answer is, it's a little bit of both. But was, is it fair to say, was it more work to get the M1 Pro and Max to where they are

than to get the M1 where it was? Was there a lot more that had to be put into from your teams to get it to where we are now? Yeah. And as you predicted, it's a complex answer. M1 was standing on the shoulders of a decade of effort, a decade of work that was done across starting with the phone, transitioning into the iPad Pro, and every step we took in that direction got us closer to M1. So you could say it was a decade of work that got us to the point where we could deliver the M1. But, you know, going from the previous step was not as much work as it took us to go from M1 to M1 Pro and M1 Max.

We did that in a much shorter time period. It required us to really scale up our engineering team, bring in some amazing players to extend Johnny Struji's amazing team. And really, we packed in a couple of years a lot of amazing engineering work. With M1, we had the luxury of time to really progress through Apple's product lines until we finally got to the point where we were ready to deliver M1. As impressive as M1 is and as impressed as we all were last year with it, I think it might be fair to say that it was familiar in the sense that it felt like it, trying to do some similar things to what iPad chips had done in the past. The, you know, the X chips, these two M1 Pro and Max chips feel like it's a place that Apple's silicon design had not been at all before. Like you're really going out into a brand new space in a way that the M1 didn't so much. Would that be fair to say? Absolutely. I'll let Tom talk about the goals of the Mac

and our focus on the Pro workflows, but we absolutely work closely with the Mac team to identify, okay, what are the essential pieces? If we're going to focus our energy and reconstruct this thing, what are the workflows that matter the most? What are we trying to achieve with the pro? And it was that effort between the industrial design team, the product design team, the system team, our amazing pro workflow team, and then really getting all of those targets working together with Silicon Engineering, my team, the architecture group, and putting together a story that we, you know, when we put it down on paper, we said, yeah, this looks like it's going to be exactly what we want. And so then it was execution and driving it through the amazing silicon designers and DB and the fabrication process and packaging. I mean, the whole thing

is just this huge, huge effort to achieve it. But yeah, it was really different. We clearly were targeting something beyond the phone, beyond the iOS systems that we had been targeting in the past. And even though M1, like you said, was a breakthrough product for the entry level, our most popular Macs, getting to the pro was different and it required different focus. One of the things that we've talked about on this show with you guys in the past is the tremendous, I guess, luxury would be the right term for Tim and his team to know what systems we are designing for in advance right we're not a merchant chip vendor we design our silicon for our products and so we knew that we wanted to create the world's best pro notebooks bar none and from the

very beginning his team along with a system team product design team industrial design team, software teams, every part of the process were in lockstep designing these chips specifically for these systems to deliver what our customers are now experiencing right now. I'm not going to ask Tim to comment on how luxurious it was, because I'm sure it was hard work, but I get your point. In fact, one of one of the questions i wanted to ask was about some of the specific designs we focus so much on you know

how many cpu cores how many gpu cores but and as an example the pro res encoder and decoder and i know apple built the whole afterburner card for the mac pro that was specifically designed for pro res obviously this seems like a really good example of building things into the chip, into the processor that's driving your systems because of professional workflows you know that the users of your products want. And if you could talk a little bit

about the thought process that goes into saying, this is so important, we're going to put it on the chip. You know, it's a great question. And you've had a chance to see my boss, Johnny Sruji, up on the screen a few times now. Hopefully, you got the impression that he's a serious individual. And he is. And he holds us accountable for every transistor we put down there. We recommend putting down there.

And ProRes is absolutely one of those things. You know, you can do ProRes on a CPU. You can do ProRes probably on the GPU. Why do we need to put a dedicated engine down? Well, when we look at our Pro workflow users and we look at the things that they want to do with these machines and we look at these machines and what they're capable of, we realize, hey, we can put down a relatively modest investment in silicon to be able to have a dramatic outsized impact on the performance of the machines. So much so that this is a number Tom shared with me, the 28 core Mac Pro with the afterburner card is left in the dust by these new systems with M1 Pro and M1 Max. And part of that is the integration in the unified memory

system, moving that engine, which was, you know, very similar to the engine we put on our afterburner card, you move it into a unified memory system, it breaks all the bottlenecks. And when we do that performance modeling, and that's a big piece of how we justify a lot of these things, and we demonstrate what's going to be possible, yeah, we say, yeah, this is worth it. It's going to cost us some area, but the benefit outweighs the cost. And as Johnny said in the keynote, this is a perfect example of the advantage that we have in being able to design and build our own silicon, is to do things in our silicon to enable things for our customers that you simply can't do on any other notebook. I had a question about memory, and I know we've touched on it a little bit, but obviously between the M1 to the M1 Pro to the M1 Max,

the unified system memory, although it's the same in some ways philosophically is really different and the bandwidth that's going on there is different. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about how that comes out in the day-to-day experience, what will the users see, and also the difference between sort of like what you see on the Pro and what you see on the Max in terms of getting that extra, because I know you're going between sort of like what you see on the pro and what you see on the max in terms of getting that extra, because I know you've got, you're going from sort of two pools of memory to four pools of memory. So you're getting twice the speed. You know, how does that when I'm using one of these systems day to day, or I'm deciding whether I need a pro, an M1 pro

or an M1 max chip in my MacBook pro, what goes into that? How does that reflect in the world? So I'll talk a little bit about what we were targeting. And I'll let Tom talk about how that translates to the different kinds of customers and what they might think about before they're choosing it. But one of the motivators around M1 Macs, let's talk about that one, 400 gigabytes per second. This seems like a lot of bandwidth. But if you're a customer of a Pro notebook and you're used to integrating some of the highest performance GPUs, discrete GPUs, you see memory systems that are like this. You see memory systems in that 400-ish gigabytes per second range. And so you're a pro customer who

has expectations that you're going to get a GPU with that kind of memory system so you can get the performance out of it. We know GPUs are large compute engines, but they feed on memory bandwidth. If you keep them fed, you can keep the computers happy. But if you starve them, they will fall over and they'll just get stuck and get slow. And so if you are a serious pro user interested in making sure that GPU is unconstrained, you're gonna be very happy with M1 Macs.

You're gonna be someone who says, this is fantastic and I can't believe I have this in a notebook computer. That said, the unified memory system in the M1 Pro is also fantastic, and it's scaled appropriately for the GPU. So we're always tracking the GPU and the memory system to try to make sure we have the bandwidth appropriate for the GPU that we've got. And if you go down one click and you look at M1, it's the same story. You can even go back down to the phone chip and you see it again. We're always trying to make sure the GPU that we put down has enough bandwidth to be unconstrained or reach that balance point that makes the most sense. And that's what you said before about the voraciousness of a GPU and just how a GPU behaves at once at all, as fast as it can get it. Absolutely. It's just, you know,

you want to get it to the point where it's got so much bandwidth that it can't keep up and you find that balance point. So you design your GPU balance with your memory system. But this great memory system is also available to the CPU and it will show itself in an interesting way. If you're someone writing heavily multi-threaded applications, it is not unusual for these applications to stall out on a traditional PC architecture because the memory bandwidth isn't there to keep the CPUs happy. And we see these applications all the time. On these M1 Pro, both M1 Pro and M1 Max systems, there's more than enough bandwidth to keep these amazing CPU cores going. And so you don't see a slowdown. You don't see a slowdown for two reasons. We don't run out of bandwidth and we don't max out the power, which is the other key story. But from a, how do you choose it? Maybe, I don't know,

maybe Tom has thoughts about who are the customers that are going to go one way or the other. Well, first I just want to comment on the impact of the unified memory model, because as customers are finding out now, it is profound, right? It is profound in the way that we've changed the whole architecture for a pro notebook with these systems. And we try to explain that in the keynote of how traditional pro notebook is architected and how these are so different. And we gave a few examples in the keynote of how they have dramatically changed what these systems can do. One of my favorites was when Shruti was covering performance and she talked about the fact that, hey, in the competitive space, PC laptops top out at 16 gigs

of video memory. But with this unified memory model, our GPU has access to up to 64. And so it allows things you simply couldn't do. And the example that she had on the screen behind her was a real scene created by our pro workflow team in Octane. It was the scene of a spaceship and it had 137 million triangles. And the amount of memory it takes when you open that in Octane is nearly 35 gigabytes. So you literally cannot even open that project on any other notebook. It simply won't open. And not only can you open it on both the 16 inch and the 14 inch MacBook Pro, but it's buttery smooth, completely interactive, and it's in HDR, by the way. So

you're taking advantage of the amazing screen that it's paired with. The other example that Shruti gave in the keynote was color grading 8K ProRes 444 HDR video while on battery, which is the amazing thing, at 24 frames per second. And Unified Memory Architecture makes that possible. It's simply not possible before, especially on battery. On a competitive system, you unplug that notebook and you're going to drop by 2 to 3x in terms of your performance. So I think the unified memory model is a profound change for our users and our products. And we're just beginning to find all the ways in which it's going to make things possible that weren't possible before or faster and better than they were before. So the M1 Pro and the M1 Max have two efficiency cores rather

than the four that are on the M1. I'm interested to know how you settled on this balance and ratio between performance and efficiency because there's a difference there. And do you find that for most typical workflows of just standard work, that this work is being done just on the efficiency cause? And it's only really when heavy work kicks in, which is when the performance cause kick in? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's one that, you know, as you can imagine, again, we don't take anything lightly. We don't make decisions without a lot of consideration. And in this case, I think this was really something we thought about really with regard to the pro. This goes to the, what's

our focus for these systems? We know that in our phones and our iPads, and even frankly, in the entry level, our most popular Macs, those efficiency cores are workhorses. They're taking care of a lot of background tasks. And it's only when you have the most demanding workload that we fire up those P cores, performance cores. When you look at these more capable machines, when you look at the pro, and these are sized differently, and they're bigger machines aimed at the bigger applications, they're trying to tackle bigger problems. The trade-off is different. The trade-off is different. You know, they're trying to tackle bigger problems. The trade-off is different. The trade-off is different. Now, we know that our performance cores, if you look at them and you look at those curves that you saw in the keynote that Johnny pointed out, they start in the lower left and they go up to the right.

Well, at that most efficient point, which is at that lowest voltage point, the lowest power point on those curves, those processors are operating at an amazing efficiency. There actually is overlap. The top of the efficiency core actually overlaps with the bottom of the performance power curve. And so we know that if we really do need in these more capable systems, highly efficiency, we don't necessarily have to use efficiency cores to achieve great battery life in these smaller systems. But we know that those performance cores are more than twice as fast as the efficiency cores. And the pros and the pro users are going to really appreciate that. So this went into our

decision to say, you know, we want to maintain some efficiency cores for architectural consistency, because they are very, I mean, they really are excellent for a lot of background, a lot of utility work. And, you know, somebody who is simply reading their email, because pros sometimes read their email, sometimes they're just consuming content. And so the efficiency cores are there to make sure that they're having a really nice experience in that case. But we wanted to make the trade-off for performance. And so that's why we chose to double down on the performance cores. And we recovered a little bit of the area from the efficiency cores to be able to pay for that. So much of your decision-making watching these systems is it seems like it

goes in multiples. And so that was a choice that jumped out a little bit and that it wasn't sort of double the M1. A decision was made there to do a different balance. So thank you for answering that. There's just a nice balance between the M1 Pro and the M1 Max when you look across the spectrum of various workloads and types of work that our pro customers do. Let's say you're in the music production where having a monster of a GPU that M1 Max has isn't as important to you. And so M1 Pro is an awesome chip for that. But let's say you're into 3D work and having a incredibly capable and powerful GPU is something that is really germane to what you're doing. Then we have M1 Macs.

And so that's one of the things that we looked at as we were configuring these chips is the spectrum of workloads that our customers are using and making sure we have a great solution for that whole spectrum. great solution for that whole spectrum. I have another question for you, Tom, which is because it's a little more end product focused, which is, I think Apple has over the years been really disciplined in terms of how it communicates battery life and also when making the products and sort of targeting battery life and positioning different products with different levels of battery life. The battery life is great as we would expect on these systems that are running Apple Silicon. I did notice that they're a little bit less than the rated battery life is great, as we would expect on these systems that are running Apple Silicon. I did notice that they're a little bit less than the rated battery life on the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro that was released last year. I'm curious if there was anything in the decision-making of how you balance battery life versus the weight of the device versus the needs of the user of the larger systems and how you kind of work through the math to get a great result at the end, but have it be different for the different computers? Well, it's a little different between the 16-inch model and the 14-inch model.

With the 16-inch model, as we've done in the previous generation, we're putting in the biggest battery we possibly can. Right. Take it on to a plane. That the law allows. Yeah, exactly. biggest battery we possibly can. Right. Take it on to a plane. Exactly. And so, you know, the key here was to make it, to take advantage of that existing battery as much as possible. Now, one of the things that helps that is promotion, right? With promotion, it steps down the refresh rate of the display so that in those moments where there's not a lot going on in the display, we can actually save battery life. And so unlike the M1-based systems where it was

a lot of things that were, in general, in terms of typical usage of those systems, very similar, with these systems, the workloads can be dramatically different in terms of how they affect battery life. And so we did a bunch of testing and measurements of various workloads and your mileage is going to vary, to be honest, between the workloads that you're doing on these systems in terms of battery life. It can range all the way from the everyday thing, like watching a movie, where on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, you get the longest battery life we've ever offered. You broke 20 hours. I was predicting that.

I'm checking myself for not actually drafting that in our draft. I was like, 20 plus hour battery life claim? Is it going to happen? And it did. It did, 21. And then there are other things where you're not going to get 21 hours of battery because you're doing something really performance intensive. But I guarantee you, if you compare the battery life you get

with that performance intensive workload compared to the previous generation, you're going to get two to three X the battery life. So, you know, we gave a couple examples. You know, if you're ingesting, editing and images in Lightroom Classic, you'll get two X the battery life. If you're compiling code, you can compile four times as much code on a single charge. So it does vary via the workload. And it is a range of battery life.

And then on the 14-inch, you know, we size that battery. It's a bigger battery than the 13-inch. It's about 20% larger. And we size that battery appropriate for the system. So battery life and power efficiency is the secret sauce of these systems right we have been trained for years and years and years you have to sacrifice one for the other and with these systems you get amazing performance but you're not sacrificing battery life and not only that your performance on battery is the same as when you're plugged in, which is unheard of in this space.

Which is a very Apple thing. Like that's a very Apple thing to do. You know, like, oh, it's a little bit faster when you're plugged in. I hope you're all okay with that, right? No, that's not going to work. That's not going to work. I remember when we spoke last time about the M1, we asked you about the ports. And I think that we had a similar conversation when talking with colleen about the m1 imac about the m1 having a maximum amount of thunderbolt ports that it could cope with now obviously with the new machines with with the new laptops you have more port options than you had available before so we see sd card and we also now have HDMI as well. Did you have to do specific work to cater for pro customers in this way? Like when you sat down to work on creating these chips, again, because you're able to work together on this, was it like for our pro customers,

we want to bring more port options back. And so does that have to go into the work at the beginning to make sure that you're able to have this amount of IO on the machines? Yeah, it's an interesting question. And obviously, you know, we've been talking about, like you said, last year, we talked about the ports and it being a chip limitation. And then just I'll dwell for just a moment back to what we talked about before. The system did not need more ports than the chip actually produced. So putting extra support in the, we look at the chip and say, well, the chip didn't have the support, but you actually kind of have to flip it around at Apple from a chip developer's perspective, because they decide what they need, what the work of art is going to look like,

what electronics are going to, how they're going to fit in there. And then we get the, we sort of get the list and say, hey, give us the stuff. If we were to put extra stuff into the chip that wasn't used, boy, that would, like I said, we're held accountable. So we want to make sure we're designing it. So absolutely, when we looked at the pros, Tom provided a lot of great guidance on the kinds of port structures we want, what makes sense, how do you want to scale those across the different platforms, how many displays is the right number. And so yeah, we go back and re-architect and re-engineer and make sure our IO system can scale and we can add in those extra ports and the extra capabilities. If there's acceleration that's needed, we'll go in and look at that. But a lot

of the work that was done in M1 to, you know, we talked about iPad Pro. Well, iPad Pro didn't have Thunderbolt 4 ports in them. And so, yeah, there's engineering that had to go into just get M1 to the point where it was the right set of IO features for the Mac. And then with M1 Pro and M1 Max, we made sure we were hitting those targets that the system team was trying to achieve for IO and extensibility. When we look at these systems, and I know that in the last week, everybody's been pricing on them and buying them and talking about them, clicking around on that configurator on apple.com. There are a lot of available options on these systems. We've got different CPU core options, different GPU core options as well. And then of course, there's the Pro and Max toggle, if you will. What was the

thinking behind offering a menu of choices for users? And is this something that you're able to more easily decide and allow for since you're the supplier, you're your own chip supplier now, rather than having to build based on what's on offer from your old chip supplier. Now you are both of those things. So what's the thought process that goes into what, obviously, too many options might confuse customers. So you've made some very specific decisions in offering them different options for these systems. Yeah, I think you have to strike just the right balance in terms of the number of options that you offer versus, like you said, you could offer too many. And what we try to do is look across the spectrum of workloads and applications that our pro customers are using

and make sure that we're checking all the boxes, so to speak, in terms of if you're depending on this particular workload, we got a configuration that's really great for you. And the customers who purchase these products are very savvy. They compare notes. They talk to each other about their various experiences with the different systems. And usually the way it works out is that you end up with some sweet spots in terms of, hey, if you're a video editor, this is a great system for you. If you're into music production, well, this is a great configuration and so forth and so on. And so we want to make sure that we have just a variety of choice for those customers, optimized for those workloads that we know our customers run on MacBook Pros.

I think you struck a pretty good balance this time of having options without it being too confusing. At one point a few years ago, I thought, I wonder if this is going to be a world where you get the chip that's in the system. Like you don't spec out an iPad, right? There's sort of the iPad Pro has the chip that comes in it. And there's more choice than that for Mac users without it being maybe overwhelming. Exactly. That's the approach that we try to take with these systems. On that sense of overwhelm, in the overall PC industry, GPU, CPU, system-on-a-chip branding,

it's a little overwhelming. I think it can be a series of numbers. And I think to most people, mostly meaningless names, like here's the same set of letters. And this time it's actually better than the last time. And when we were all pontificating what you might be doing, there were like a lot of the names that were being banded around or like M1X, M1Z,

that kind of thing. But you went with M1 Pro and M1 Max. What went into this branding decision? And like, was it to try and make it just easier for customers to understand and be able to tell between what was on offer? Well, we spend a lot of time thinking about our naming and obviously it has to be scalable and meaningful, but most importantly, easy to understand. And I totally agree with you when you look at the rest of the industry in terms of the branding and the naming, I mean, you need a decoder ring. And no, we just wanted names that people were familiar with. Obviously, we're building on a tremendous, tremendous success of M1. And I think it's really easy to understand. We have this family of chips now, the M1 family

of chips, M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max. And you really understand it very easily and succinctly. And it's just a very simple way to communicate the capabilities of the three chips. We also spend a lot of time thinking about product branding at Apple. It's just that we don't make any decisions about it. That's the big difference there. We think about it maybe as much as you do. It's just that, you know, then nothing happens when we think about it. I do want to say that Mike and I have run into this already. That's when you're talking out loud about M1 Macs, various computers running M1 processors,

and then you talk about M1 Macs, a processor, you're making it hard for us, I guess. But I do think that in general, it's better to have it be called something with words than the 3200CZ or something, right? Where it's like, oh, well, those numbers don't mean anything to me. Yeah, we don't particularly expect you to make decisions for how it might sound on the Upgrade podcast with me and Jason saying. And at the end of the day, it's all about the MacBook Pro. And, you know, that's what the ultimate the ultimate name if you will for the product that's what people are buying they're buying they're buying the chip is in there but they're buying

a MacBook Pro and that's a very familiar brand that they understand exactly yeah nobody's talking about it as much as we are no one says you know like typical the typical buyer is not saying and one max like 16 times in an hour as we have been doing so I wanted to mention something and and talk a little bit about something that doesn't get as much love as maybe it should, which is storage and storage speed. And the storage speed on these systems is so much faster. And when we moved from spinning hard drives to SSDs, I thought that was the sort of last time we would ever need to talk about storage speed. But of course not. I have an iMac Pro with a very nice SSD that was fast when I bought it, and it hasn't slowed down. But this is two and a half to three times as fast in terms of reads and writes. So I'm curious sort of what goes into the process of looking at the storage and the

storage speeds that you're going to put on these products. And when you're thinking about the users, what kind of enhancements are you thinking of in terms of boosting the storage and the storage speeds that you're going to put on these products. And when you're thinking about the users, what kind of enhancements are you thinking of in terms of boosting the storage? Because I know when I tried it out for the first time and I pressed save on a very large audio document and I could not believe my eyes as the progress bar flew across the screen that the SSDs are so much faster on these systems. We started doing our own SSD development, you know, goes back probably close to eight, nine years. Interestingly, the original work was work that we did integrate into one of the early MacBooks that came out. And so this, when I think about the storage system on the Mac, we architecturally try to figure out, okay, what is our fundamental core building block? And then how do we take that core building block and scale it to the appropriate dimension for the target that we're trying to hit? And so for the phone, we have a, we think, a fantastic solution and we scale that up for the iPad Pro. For M1, we feel like we really kind of dialed it in and folks were extremely happy with the performance they're getting on their SSDs.

Again, it was about going back, looking closely at the workloads. You know, you talk about those big files. Our pro workloads team tells us all about the pain that their customers feel when they have to store big files or load large things or, God forbid, paging in and out of the memory system because their workload is too big to fit into the memory. And so, you know, we pay close attention. We try to figure out, OK, how are we going to go and make sure that the storage system is in balance with the rest of the system? Because it'd be a shame to have a really fast computer and a terrible IO system. But it all really, I have to say, it goes back to the fundamentals. We invested in the technology. We brought the experts in-house. We revisit the storage architecture. And there's people on my team who drive the architecture for our storage controllers. And we look at it and revisit it whenever we need to

to make sure that we're tracking technology. We work closely with the core technology partners who develop the NAND technology that we use for our SSDs. We make sure that from a competitive perspective, we're watching the new technologies, the new interfaces that people are using. But ultimately, we want to make sure that we can deliver in these platforms

the fastest that technology allows. And that's kind of, I'm glad to hear that you're happy with what we've done, because we leave no stone unturned, I guess, to make sure that the system is delighting everybody in a balanced way. Well, the last thing you want is to have a really fast computer that you can't use because the storage is too slow. And there was definitely a period back, you know, a decade or two ago where I felt like, you know, most computers were being held back by really slow spinning drives.

And SSD has made that less of an issue, but it definitely, I felt it on the MacBook Pro. It wasn't just processing. When you process a file and you can do that, and it happens incredibly quickly, and then you choose to write it out to disk, and that's when you need to go get yourself another cup of tea right like that's the worst you want it all to

be kind of a kind and and uh i i definitely sense that balance on these i also think that with a system on chip architecture you have to make sure that every single block of that system has to be world-class, right? If you're going to take on that responsibility of designing an entire system, you know, from the display engine to the IO to, you know, in this case, the SSD controller, every single thing about that chip has to be world-class because you're designing it all in. And so, you know, that's a tremendous responsibility for Tim and his team to make sure that every component is world-class, industry-leading, and therefore the entire system itself is amazing. And because we

build these things in a unified way, an architecturally consistent way, when we target a particular platform and we hit that target, every other platform benefits. We don't have to do it for every chip we build. We can do it in a way that we know is going to lift up everybody, all the systems that we build chips for. So to wrap up today, I want to think back again to when we spoke about the M1 chip. And I remember we were having a conversation about how there was some surprise at first

about just how powerful it ended up being. And I wanted to know if that's happened again this time around, because looking at these MacBook Pros, to be incredibly impressive, they didn't need to be as fast as they are again. And so I wonder, was there any of these moments when developing these products where you were like,

oh boy, look what we've done? You know, I think for these chips, for M1 Pro and M1 Max, I have to say there is less surprise because our effort was so intentional. You know, all the other chips that we had built up to these has been fantastic. But we knew that we had to prove ourselves here with M1 Pro and M1 Max. We're entering into a different arena. This is the pro space. These are the fastest machines out there, not just the fastest machines Apple ever built. And so we wanted to make sure we came

out and people weren't chuckling about, oh, isn't it cute how they took a phone chip and put it in a computer? I would talk to my team about this and say, hey, we're going to re-architect this and we're going to blow the doors off this. And so I would say less surprise, but it's always a pleasant surprise when Tom and his team go and figure out what the actual ratios and deltas are. Because we don't always know where we're going to land relative to where previous systems were, where the competition is. And definitely, wow, you know, very satisfying to see that we did. And I feel like to some degree, what we have demonstrated is this is what technology allows today. We feel like we have left nothing on the table. And to some degree, it's not that, you know, we did something unnatural. We did something that was possible. We just leaned in on the technology and enabled the performance in our great platforms that should always have been able to.

The Mac should always have been able to achieve this on this date because the technology was there to enable it. And I would make the comment that we've talked in the past about the pro workflow team. That team consists of people who are award-winning photographers and videographers and 3D artists and music production, et cetera. And for the kind of things that I personally do on a daily basis, I'm not going to push these systems, but the ProWorkflow team does. And so as these systems got into their hands, they were absolutely blown away and just thrilled and just giddy

of taking the most demanding parts of their workflow, throwing them at these machines and just seeing them respond and be able to do things that prior till now, they needed a incredibly high spec Mac Pro to do. And so, you know, they, and just putting these systems through their p. And so, you know, they, in just putting these systems through their paces were tremendously, you know, obviously we knew what we were working on, but to see it actually

perform is for them game changing. And really that's what it's all about with these systems. It's being game changing in this space and game changing for our pros. Now customers are getting these systems in their hands. One of the things we love to see is when people are, you know, making videos, et cetera, where they're trying parts of their workload and they're just shocked at, oh, my gosh, I can't believe the system. Did I have the settings right? Like, let me let me apply that again, because I'm not sure I had the settings right. And then it happens instantly. And, you know, that is the reward for us. That's why we all come to work every day

and work so hard on the Mac because we know that our pro users, I mean, their livelihood depends on the Mac. Their life is on that Mac. And so we want to make it the best it can possibly be in every way it can possibly be as much as we can. And so that is the reward for us. And that's what we're thrilled to do when we make systems like this. Tim, Tom, thank you so much for joining us again. It's always

such a pleasure to talk to you. We'd love to be able to prick your brains for a little while. So thanks for joining us. Yes. Thank you. Hey, it's been a pleasure thanks for having us back it's fun to be on the show okay that was great but mike my favorite part was when you asked um was this were you surprised at the performance of the macbook pro and uh tim's response was basically like no we did that on purpose it's like that's that no we knew that we knew it would be like that. That was what we were shooting for. Not a surprise. I was really happy to get to talk to them again.

I think it's really exciting. You know, the Pro Max chip stuff is really exciting. And I genuinely love to hear about what is going on inside of Apple and how they approach it. Because, you know, like we touched on this. I think we are at a pretty important time for computers again,

which is like such a weird thing to think about. But like desktop computers are a point that they've never been before and are continuing to change and evolve. And I'm just really happy that we get to hear a little bit more about the inside as to what they're thinking about when they're putting this stuff together.

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I'm aware there's an exercise coming up that I know what to do, I don't need to look at my phone. I don't need to see the video. I could just see it on my watch and I could advance, you know, next. I could go forward and back. Also change the sets and reps, all that kind of stuff, just right on my Apple Watch so I don't get distracted by my phone FitBot is available on iOS and Android you can get started right now by going to fitbot.me upgrade and you'll also get 25% off your membership that's fitbot.me upgrade you can try it out for free and get 25% of your FitBot membership thanks to FitBot for their support of this show and RelayFM. So Apple had posted their Q4 results for 2021.

This is, what is this, calendar Q3? Calendar Q3. It's their end of their fiscal year because their fiscal year begins with the holiday quarter because you want to start off with a bang, I guess. And Q4 always includes the iPhone. Well, if they deliver on time. If the iPhone comes out on time, this is the iPhone quarter.

So usually a big quarter, and this one was a big quarter. Keep in mind it's the end of the quarter where the iPhone comes out. So it's only like that little launch portion of the iPhone revenue, and then it rolls into the holiday quarter. But you've got to assume that's a big chunk of it. But yeah, and then it rolls into the holiday quarter. But that you've got to assume that's a big, big chunk of it. But yeah, and then it goes into the holidays. $83.4 billion in revenue for the quarter, which is a 29% year over year increase, makes it the biggest fourth quarter ever. Yeah. And they've been breaking quarterly records for a while now, every quarter, it seems.

This was interesting to me also because I looked back at the year-over-year growth the last two fourth quarters, and they were like 1% and 2%. So I think that's actually kind of interesting, that this wasn't just a record quarter, but it was a lot more than they made the last two fourth quarters. So for what it's worth, Apple's business is kind of seasonal, but there's a lot of pickup here over the last couple of years in terms of this late summer, early fall quarter. The iPhone was up 47% year over year. I think a big jump like this during this quarter would suggest that the iPhone has done really well. And it seems like the 13 has done really well, which is interesting to me because it seems like so much of the general conversation about the 13, like you see in videos and articles

and you see in like just comments from people online is that it's a boring iPhone. But people were buying them, it would seem. Yeah, and also that Apple is getting really good at maximizing revenue. Although I'll point out that during the conversation with analysts, the analysts like to freak out. Every quarter they freak out about it, especially this time of year they freak out about

the fact that the product, they talk about product, the margins on products going down. And they get really concerned. They're like, why are your margins going down? And every year they have to say that this is how Apple does it, which is when a new product comes out, at first the margins are a little lower because it's more expensive to make them.

And then over time, the margins increase because it ends up being cheaper for expensive to make them. And then over time, the margins increase because it ends up being cheaper for Apple to make a product nine months into it being on the shelves or a year or a year and a half than it does on day one because they're getting up to speed and they're buying the components and all that.

And then it kind of smooths out over time. So this is a case too, where this is a new product and to have the revenue be up that much, assuming it's driven in part by a lot of those initial iPhone 13 sales. Keep in mind that the margins might be down a little bit, but they're optimizing the revenue. The revenue is Apple's getting more money out of everybody for these sales and they're selling a lot of them. And that's part of the story here too, right? It's not, it's not just that they're growing the iPhone, which is still growing,

but it's also that they're growing how much money they make. Cause keep in mind, they don't, they don't share with us the numbers of unit sales anymore. It's all just about the revenue, but that means that the, there's, there's more cash coming in for iPhones. So every time I read a story that, um, that talks about the iPhone, it puts Apple's moves in the context of the iPhone running out of steam or something like that. I just sort of shake my head. I'm like, no, not really. It hasn't really run out of steam.

It's not increasing by – like the business isn't doubling or anything every quarter. That doesn't happen. But it's still growing and throwing off just enormous revenue and profits for Apple. So I've just realized that it wouldn't have been hard to be up 47% because the iPhone 12 wasn't out at this point. Yeah, well, that's true. I just realized that. What is that? It's a tough compare or it's a good compare? I think it's a false compare, right? Right, which means that they have more to do to make up for it in the holiday quarter. To what I just said about whether people were interested in the phone or not wasn't correct.

We'll know next quarter. Yeah, and I'm always a little hesitant to ascribe too much iPhone to this quarter because if you think about it, again, we're talking about a quarter that ended at the end of September or near the end of September. And the iPhone was just out. And it's always about how many can they make as well, right? Right. So that'll- Which is a story we're going to get to in a bit. Anyone that they could ship, I believe the revenue is counted for this quarter.

Anything that was backordered into the next quarter goes to the next quarter. So always, I think you got to take it with a grain of salt. And yes, you're right. This is, this is the proverbial tough compare or good compare, whichever one where they, I guess it's the, it's the, it's the good compare. It's the beneficial compare. They would say, I don't, I don't, I'm not using that phrase. I think it's ridiculous, but they use it. And it's when the events of last year and this year don't overlap. And so you can't do a one-to-one comparison. And you're absolutely right. Two of the iPhone models got delayed a lot last year, and two of them got delayed a bit last year. But they all got pushed into October and November, which means they're not in Q4 of 2020. We'll make a financial analyst out of you yet, Mike. We're trying. We're trying hard over

here. Then you're going to have to get on the phone and try to trick Tim Cook into telling you what the next iPhone has. He'll say no and it'll be fine. The iPad is up 21%. Yeah, this is a business that seems to have really settled down for Apple. Remember, remember you and me talking about, oh, what's happening with the iPad? One day it will improve. One day. I'm sure one day it will improve. And I was looking. So in terms of revenue, the average, the little four quarter rolling average has just kept going up. And so at this point, Apple is making on average $8 billion a quarter on the iPad, at least for the last year. So $32 billion almost,

I think it was 31.8 or something billion dollars on the iPad in four quarters. And so it's a much more stable and growing uh product line than in that period where it was sort of really trying to find its way and apple was kind of redefining what an ipad was and stretching out its product line but if you look at it now it's what six straight quarters of double digit growth for the iPad year over year. It's 10 out of 12 of growth for the iPad. And 14 out of, what is that? 18 is growth. So the iPad is in a good place right now is I guess what I'm saying. And,

and, uh, it wasn't, you know, like three years ago we were like, what is happening with the iPad? And is there a bottom? And it hit,

it hit bottom and it has since come back up from the bottom. Now keeping in mind, the bottom was sort of like still kind of five, four or $5 billion a quarter, but now it's $8 billion a quarter, and that's happened in the last four years. Yeah, and I think at first it was easy, I think, or possible to try and prescribe this to different things, right?

Like, oh, that's because of this, that's because of this. Sure. But now I think there's been enough potential reasons that have come and gone you know like i think at first it was maybe oh this is uh coronavirus related which i think definitely contributed but at this point you would have assumed that most people that wanted one for one of those reasons would have gotten one but yet they continue to keep selling them so i will say that um so holiday quarter last year, Apple made $8.4 billion on the iPad.

Apple has forecast that they will not make that much. So there will not be a, uh, seventh straight quarter of iPad growth. Yep. Apple says that's entirely because of what we'll talk about in a little bit, I'm sure, which is, uh, supply chain issues. They feel like the supply chain issues for iPad will mean they can't make enough to have it be a growth quarter for iPad. Not that they won't sell probably like 8 billion worth, but it won't be what they think they could sell. It's going to be as many as they have, but no more. It's the one category where they say that

they're not going to be able to grow next quarter because of supply chain issues. The Mac is up 2% to $9.2 billion this quarter, which is their all-time record quarter again. Yeah, this is literally the best Mac quarters of all time are the last five Mac quarters. The last five, because the holiday, Q4 last year was 9 billion. And since then it's been 8.7, 9.1, 8.2, 9.2. So this is not only the best Mac quarter of all time, beating the one like two quarters ago, beating the one a year ago, like those in that order. But still still it's just the mac is going really well right now and they obviously ascribe that to the m1 i think what's going to be interesting is holiday quarter is when all of those macbook pro sales are going to hit and i think they're going

to be a lot of them that's a lot of expensive computers yeah they'll probably be constrained a bit because that's the world we live in um we're already seeing things getting deferred out by a month or two but uh those are expensive computers with a lot of pent-up demand and i think it's gonna be another you know huge mac quarter next time for them services up 26 percent year over year they're just it's just obscene it's 18.3 billion 18.3 billion and the number um just goes up um even sequentially it almost always goes up a year over year it always goes up yeah it was funny i saw like a couple of articles where it was like apple's best quarter ever i'm like this is every quarter like a that was it was weird to me like i think it's only been one there was like one blip but otherwise pretty much every single quarter

for services is apple's best quarter ever for services because it as you say it's just it doesn't go up and down they just add new people in and it just continues to increase because it's not seasonal they keep charging your credit card over and over again and so all it does does is just keep growing. And there's churn where people drop out. But basically, they're able to keep that growing in a way that doesn't require individual product sales. And yeah, this entire fiscal year, services grew by more than 20% every quarter, year over year, spend 20% every quarter, year over year, which is bananas. And if you look, my chart goes back to 17 and there's not a below double digit growth quarter in that entire span. So it just keeps going up, like up, up, up. Yeah, that's what it's doing. That is a business that in the first quarter of 17 was an $8 billion business and is now an $18 billion quarterly business. That's a lot.

So services accounts for 22% of quarterly revenue now. Yeah. The iPhone's 47. And they've doubled it in four years. In four years, that business has doubled from Q4. Literally, Q4 of 17, it was a $9 billion business. And Q4 of 21, it's an $18.3 billion business. So that's how quickly it's doubled.

Doubled in four years. So my question is, in four to five years, could it be more than the iPhone? Could they do this again? That a long that's a that's a long reach well here's another better question then do you think at some point services will make a larger revenue uh split than the iphone in a quarter i don't because i think that there's i mean never say never it could happen eventually but there's a huge gap between services and iPhone. And of course, devices also drive services revenue. So at some point, that would be a weird world to be in. It's possible. It's certainly possible, but it's a long way off because of the fact that one, selling products for Apple does drive the people into the services. And two, the iPhone is just so far out there. Cause the, I keep in mind, the iPhone is throwing out, I get really excited that the iPad is throwing out a billion, a quarter, you know, the iPhone does way more than that. So like, like that's, that's, yeah, it's, it's good. It's really good. But you iPhone is 40 and the iPad is 8.

And then services is, what did we say, 18? So your question is basically, in four years, will it double again and surpass the iPhone? And I doubt it, but it's going to be, I think, safe to say, an increasing percentage. How about that? I think at some point it could happen. It could. It could at some point. Like, even if, you know, it could hit one of the lower quarters, right, for the iPhone.

Sure, sure. That's more likely, right? Yeah, because the holiday quarter of the iPhone is usually doing, you know, 50 or 60 billion. But in one of these lesser, quote unquote, lesser quarters where it's only like $39 billion. Sure. I mean, that is part of it. Services is fascinating because I think at its core, Apple is not a services business, although they're trying to be more of a services business. But services, when we talk about financial financials services is the thing that makes wall

street happy because it keeps growth it's the growth area right it's the whole reason it exists and it's like 70 profit so that it's just it's they like to hear it and they put it in their reports and i think what apple views it as is more that this is the ongoing you make your money of selling the widget but you also make money ongoing from the person who bought the widget. And that's how they're kind of viewing it. I think that's a little bit dangerous because if you're a maker of premium hardware like Apple is, you risk turning your hardware into an empty box that you have to buy in order to pay more money to fill the box and like that's not a very good product so i think that that's the danger that apple always uh faces in an era of growing services is if services is becomes super important to you at

some point do you skimp on your hardware or make your hardware product inferior either because you are not worried about it over services or because you want to get more of them out there to sell more services? And you might end up in a situation where the product is degraded. And I think that's something that if I were inside Apple in a position to look out for that, that would be a thing that I would want to be really vigilant about is sort of making sure that while we're making money on services, that the product is all good on its own. Because that, I think, is a real danger is you lose track of the products because you're so focused on services. The last category is like wearables and home. so focused on services the last category is like wearables and home it was up 12 year over year which is the smallest year over year increase since q2 of 2017 yeah yeah since q1 of 2017

it's four plus years then since they that was the last time that this category, back when it was probably called Other, was down year over year. It had a lot of quarters of 30 plus percent growth. And then this was only 12. I think I know why. Why?

I mean, I think this, I believe this segment now is like the AirPod segment, by and large, or the Apple segment now is like the AirPods segment by and large, or the Apple Watch segment. It's AirPods and Apple Watch primarily. I would expect that people were awaiting the new product in this category, especially the AirPods. I'm not going to sound an alarm about 12%. I saw somebody refer to this as decelerating growth, which is, you got to describe it that

way, right? Because the sales weren't down. It was up 12%. 12% is great. It was just up by less than it's been up every quarter for the last four years. And so what I would do is say, put this on the watch list of, let's see how they do next quarter, because it's a holiday quarter. And they could, AirPods, the new AirPods 3, the new Apple Watch, they could blow out the

holiday quarter. This is a more seasonal business. Wearables, the holiday quarter does the best by far for this category. So let's watch it and see if it matches the $13 billion or how much it exceeds the $13 billion that they did in the holiday quarter last year. But I'm mostly tagging this and saying, I wonder if wearables after four years of just enormous growth, I wonder if it's entering a period where the growth is more modest. That's sort of it. Because it sort of surpassed services for a while there in terms of the rocket ship inside Apple that was growing the most. But this last year, it settled down a bit.

And then this number at 12% being the lowest in this whole four-plus-year span. Again, still growing, but is it calming down? And I think I'm not ready to say that yet because I think that the holiday quarter will tell all. So let's talk about next quarter. Yeah, so quite a thing. So Apple continues to refuse to forecast and then gives a forecast, which I love. They forecast that it's going to be a record quarter. It's going to be an all-time record, the biggest quarter Apple's ever had, which is not that shocking a forecast because it's a holiday quarter and almost every holiday quarter that Apple has had over the last decade has been the

best holiday quarter ever in Apple history and the best quarter in Apple history. Just to state how obscene it's going to be, the current record is $111 billion. So they're saying they're going to make more than $111 billion in a three-month period. Yeah, exactly. So it's going to be a record. And they said that, even though they wouldn't specify exactly what it was because they're unsure because of COVID. But they said, really, it's the supply chain issues.

And everybody, you've seen those stories about containers stacking up at ports and you go to the store and your favorite cereal isn't there. And like all of these things that happen with supply chain issues. And we've talked about it here about Tim Cook blaming the legacy nodes. Darn you, legacy nodes. The legacy nodes, they're the worst.

It's one of those things that's interesting, right? Because we've been talking about it for most of the last year. And ultimately, to this point, Apple has kind of gotten around it, whatever it was, right? Like, they've gotten around it. They said they had some cash, right? They had some inventory on hand to protect against, you know, because we talk about just in time and like literally every component comes in and then it goes right back out. We talk about just in time and like literally every component comes in and then it goes right back out. But the truth is that's an ideal. And what all tech companies, especially Apple, have tried to do is just reduce the amount of time you've got parts sitting in a bucket somewhere.

You want them put into the process. But they do because there's like, well, what if the truck doesn't come one week? What if that factory that we rely on for this part has a blip? And on average, they ship us the right number, but one week it's down and the next week it's way up. What do we do for the down week? Do we shut down and not make? So they build

in an amount of cash. But what they warned three months ago when they did their report is that the reason that they were able to not have a drop-off in terms of availability of a lot of their products is that they burned through the were able to not have a drop-off in terms of availability of a lot of their products is that they burned through the cash.

They used it all. And that meant that now they were on the razor's edge in terms of manufacturing. And what we saw with this quarter is that the shortages continue for Tim Cook's favorite phrase, legacy nodes, which is basically COO speak, which he's a former COO for old stuff,

old stuff that everybody buys because everybody's just buying a cheap Bluetooth chip or a cheap, you know, whatever, some little part to put in their car or their washing machine or their computer. And those Apple sort of treated as totally available and fungible and just like, we'll get the legacy nodes, who cares? And in fact, we have a new bit of Tim Cook speak to put into the jargon file, which is leading edge nodes.

Normally, Tim Cook says, primarily, we buy leading edge nodes and we're not having issues on leading edge nodes. We buy leading edge nodes and we're not having issues on leading edge nodes. But on legacy nodes, we compete with many different companies and it's difficult to forecast when those things will balance. So the end result is Apple is having supply issues. And while they said they think that all their products other than the iPad are going to be growing next quarter year over year. And that's, again, year over year from the holiday quarter last year, which was the biggest Apple quarter ever. Two pieces of information that I think set a chill through the Wall Street analysts. One is, even though this was the best quarter ever for Apple, or best fourth quarter ever for Apple, this last one that they're reporting on. They say there's about $6 billion of sales that they didn't make because of the supply chain. So they say, I know it's great that we made

83.4 million in revenue last quarter, but it should have been more like 89.4. And it wasn't because we couldn't sell those products. We just didn't have them on hand. And the Wall Street analysts are like, that's not good, right? Because they're also looking at the broader tech sector and this is a story from all over. It's not just Apple. Phase two though is then they said in the call

and I thought this was the moment where everybody leaned forward. They said they expect it to be more next quarter. And there was a question that was like, what do you mean more? Do you mean more than subtracting this from this? Do you mean more proportionally? Or do you mean more than $6 billion?

And Tim Cook was like, yeah, we mean more than $6 billion. Next year, we're going to leave more than $6 billion. Or next quarter, we're going to leave more than $6 billion on the table because we can't fulfill those orders because of the supply chain. And that's pretty wild. That's a very large number. Yeah. So if you're wondering why was Apple stock down, this is why.

Yeah. And it's not limited to Apple. This is happening everywhere. But Apple came out and said, we're going to have our best quarter ever next quarter, but it's not going to be as good as it could be because we're going to have demand that is unfulfilled. And they said also, and I think this is a good peek into Apple's thinking, but also if you understand the holiday quarter and how huge it is, what Tim Cook said was, it's not that our supply isn't going to grow.

Our supply over the next quarter is going to grow a lot, but demand is going to grow more, right? Because it's the holiday quarter and the demand for our products is going to be greater than the growth in supply that we're not going to be able to make. Now, I think philosophically, the question is, are those sales that just get deferred or are those sales that go away? And for this past quarter, I would say it's probably deferred, right? A lot of that is probably like, I want my iPhone and it's like, we can't ship it to you in October. And so they look at the books and there are all these pre-orders for things that they can't fulfill in time. And they do some math and they say, that's about $6 billion that we left on the books. And then it probably has already come off the books. Those sales probably were made, but of course now they're backed up and they're going to have new set of things rolling into January where they're not going to fulfill. My only hesitation there is at the holidays,

hesitation there is at the holidays, there is stuff that only gets bought if it's available for the holidays, right? It's gifts. It's something you want. It's the proverbial present under the tree. I know there are lots of different holidays, but just to use that, it's like, if I can't buy you an Apple watch for Christmas, let's say, well, I'll get you something else. And then that Apple Watch sale may never happen. So I do think that there is more of a risk for Apple in the holiday quarter to lose sale, some percentage of that sale than it was in the existing quarter. But just to step back, this is the kind of weird stuff that's going on in the supply chain right now. And Apple, even with all its preparation and all the stuff it buys in advance and all of that stuff that it puts on the nodes

that are less that are less legacy the nodes that are more leading edge uh the legacy nodes still are biting them that's just the bottom line of what's happening right now and tim cook you know i will bet you tim cook is waking up in the middle of the night and going, I need a legacy nodes! And that's just where they are right now. This episode is brought to you by DoorDash. Maybe you're looking for Chinese tonight. Your flatmate wants pizza. Your friends, they want fario.

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This is happening live. I'm going to order a burrito right now. High-tech burrito. Let's see. What. I'm going to order a burrito right now. High-tech burrito. Let's see. What do I want at high-tech burrito? I think I want a... Let's go with the grilled chicken burrito. Oh, man, that sounds good.

Right? Grilled chicken burrito sounds good. I'm going to say... Any extras? Well, I'm going gonna choose because it's gonna let me i i have i have bean options that's one of my options here is good is is bean options uh and i have a bowl or burrito choice i have what kind of salsa i'm gonna go with the uh sub-nuclear salsa that sounds scary'm just going to keep the normal salsa there.

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in the morning as we're recording this um i'm just going to get a burrito in a couple hours it's just going to come to my door somebody's going to knock and there'll be a burrito laid at my door like magic and that is the magic of doordash for a limited time our listeners can get 25 off and zero delivery fees on their first order of $15 or more. I guess whether you order burritos or not. When you download the DoorDash app, enter the code UPGRADE2021 if you're in the US, upgrade AUS for Australia.

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Subject to change, terms apply. Our thanks to DoorDash for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. First comes from Adrian who asks, as someone who prefers dark terminals and code editors, what does white text on a dark background look like on the new MacBook Pro screens? How visible is a glow around the text, if at all? What do you think?

Have you tried this? Yeah, because I am, I mean, I have everything in dark mode all the time. I haven't noticed any glow at all. I think this is the bloom, right, that people were talking about? Yeah, of a mini LED. I saw in a bunch of reviews that I've been watching, people were saying that there was, you know, you could see bloom in certain circumstances, usually for movement,

but there seems to be less than there was on the iPad Pros is kind of the overall consensus that I've seen. So it seems like maybe Apple have tweaked that technology for the mini LED for these screens. And I see it on my iPad Pro, but it doesn't really bother me because it's bright text in the middle of a field of black. And so a little bit of a glow, I'm like, oh yeah, it's bright text in the middle of a field of black and so a little bit of

a glow i'm like oh yeah it's glowing right like that's sort of a almost like a natural kind of feeling but yeah i haven't noticed it on the macbook pro either and i am a green this is a thing we haven't talked about have we i i my terminal is green on a black background because i want that old school monochrome terminal vibe, not the white text. I want the green text in there. I mean, I'm not in the terminal. I'm just like in the notes app. Sure.

Sure. No, it looks pretty good. There's a photo in my MacBook Pro review of the notch that was taken with my camera, my iPhone camera, because you can't see the notch in screenshots. And there's no bloom in there either. So I don't know. camera, my iPhone camera, because you can't see the notch in screenshots. And, you know, there's no bloom in there either. So I don't know. I think it's fine. But if you're super sensitive to it, maybe it'll bother you. I don't know. But it certainly doesn't feel like that to us. I haven't seen any of this. I mean, I would recommend, I guess, if this is something you're

particularly worried about, they have them in stores now and go look also i would imagine the bloom is like the screen is so bright way brighter than if you're working in a darker environment and in dark mode you're not gonna if you turn the screen up all the way i bet you there would be a lot more visible bloom but also the each individual pixel that's lit up would uh sear itself into your retina because you're probably not going to run it at 100 nits while you're in the dark or whatever a thousand nits thousand nits full full brightness 100 brightness not going to happen because like i i think i run it at like 20 brightness most of the time it's such a bright display and i bet you that that's part of the uh part of the issue too brilliant asks you mentioned that you use jason a usb-C magnetic MagSafe alternative for your MacBook.

Some of the early ones that this person used did not work very well. Which brand do you recommend? So, yeah, I used one that was a first initially that was like this little block that plugged into your USB-C. And then it had a little magnetic-y thing that came off of it that you plugged onto a USB-C cable. magnetic-y thing that came off of it that you plugged on to a USB-C cable. And that was okay, but it was a little bit chunky and it came apart after three months of using it. The pieces, it kind of fell to pieces. And then I bought what John Syracuse recommended,

which is basically, it's a very nice fabric-wrapped cable with magnet on the end. And then it comes with a little tiny metal USB-C thing that you plug in to your USB-C port. And it sticks out a very tiny amount with the magnetic connector. And that's great. We bought two of them. So Lauren's got one, I've got one. That's great. We bought two of them. So Lauren's got one. I've got one. It works really well. It is unfortunately, and we'll put the link in the show notes, but it's out of stock on Amazon right now, I think because I mentioned this last week. And I don't know if they're making them anymore. And I can't recommend another one because I couldn't find one that's similar to it. I found some that do what it does, but the cables look kind of crappy. And this cable is really good. that do what it does,

but the cables look kind of crappy. And this cable's really good. So we'll put the link in the show notes. It's from a no-name company. But John Syracuse liked it. I like it. I hope they make more of them because a lot of us don't have new fancy MagSafe laptops.

And having MagSafe is, it's nice. It's nice to have it on the old laptops too. Kevin asks, do the new mac pro spell the end of dongle town it's a good it's a good question i've been thinking about this a lot kevin and mike and i have been thinking about what the future of our dongle town merch is right like i mean you it's still usbc and people still have issues with it but the usbc anger is abating because usbc is taking over and usba was terrible and even though we had a lot of us but the usbc anger is abating because usbc is taking over and usba was terrible

and even though we had a lot of usba cables usbc connector is way better every time i have to plug in a usba connector and i still always get it wrong the first time i have to flip it over and i'm reminded that usbc doesn't do that but kevin dongle town ab. Dongletown is always with us. Yep. Anywhere someone has a USB-A cable, Dongletown is there. Anywhere someone needs to convert VGA or some other monitor standard to HDMI, Dongletown is there. Anytime you need to plug in a hub in order to get more ports and connect to a monitor and all of those things that you're doing, you're in Dongletown.

Mm-hmm. to get more ports and connect to a monitor and all of those things that you're doing you're in dongle town anytime you need to connect wired headphones to an iphone or ipad dongle town is there dongle town will never really ever leave us but it is receding into the distance a little bit for now on at least the MacBook Pro. And Brons asks, do you think Apple will ever release AirPods or AirPods Pro in a color other than white? I don't know about this one, right? Because the AirPods Max, they come in a bunch of colors. And I think one of the reasons this is because it's mostly aluminum and Apple's really good at aluminum color, right? And I thought maybe they would release different color AirPods, but they never did with the iPhone and iPod earbuds.

They were always white. I think I could imagine them saying always white. They just like that statement of the always white. Yeah, I'm of two minds on this. This is a very much a hashtag colors are question. The white earbuds thing has just been a thing for a very long time. And I think Apple likes it. And these are, I don't know.

So I think, wow, ever is a long, long time. And I keep thinking it would be, Apple is experimenting with all of this color in all of the other places that its identity for consumer products has changed to have more color in it. The HomePod now is coming in orange and blue and yellow. So I'm going to hold out hope, Brant.

I'm going to hold out hope that Apple is moving in a direction where offering color options of AirPods will one day be a thing. But it's going to be, I wouldn't give it a huge amount of, of a chance of happening just because they seem so committed to the white earbud thing. When I think it would be so easy for them to say, um, you know,

what about, what about blue? What about red? But even when they made the iPod nano in a million colors, the earbuds were still white. So maybe that's the fate of the AirPods too. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of Upgrade,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you can get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you'll be getting yourself longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single week.

Thank you so much to everybody who supports the show this way. I want to tell you about another show here at RelayFM before we wrap up today, and that is the wonderful Roboism, hosted by Alex Cox and Kathy Campbell, serious friends of the show. And on Roboism, they explore how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital assistants

are affecting our culture. You can explore the humanity behind the bots that are becoming a part of our everyday lives at relay.fm slash roboism or search for roboism wherever you get your podcasts.

They are wonderful people and you should go and check out their show. Thanks so much to our sponsors of this week's episode. That is the fine folk over at DoorDash, TextExpander, and FitBod. If you want to find, I don't usually

say this, but if you want to find show notes for this week's episode, they should be in your podcast app of choice or at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 379. I say that on some of my other shows, Jason. I know. Mostly the pen addict gets that one. Click on that MagSafe thing, and I'll get all that sweet, sweet affiliate revenue

from a product that is out of stock and may never return. Incredible. You're going to be rolling in it. It's going to be wonderful. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com, and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I'm at myke, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be back next time.

Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Early.