Upgrade - 398: I Thought About the Ultra, Then I Laughed

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

John Siracusa joins Jason to talk about the Mythical Mid-Range Mac Minitower, the distortion of the iMac over time, the modular possibilities offered by the Apple Studio Display, and other fallout from last week's Apple announcements.

for relay fm this is upgrade episode 398 brought to you this week by bombas new relic and memberful i'm jason snell i don't usually read the introduction of upgrade because mike hurley does it mike is in transit he is caught between the moon and New York City. Actually, he's caught between Memphis and London. It's Arthur who's caught between the moon and New York City. Anyway, old reference lost on younger listeners. I brought in John Syracusa to join me because he's not on enough podcasts, I thought, and this is a big week for Mac stuff. So John is our special guest co-host this week. John, hello. Yeah, you brought me on to be the co-host and also to be able to hear that song in my head as soon as you made the reference.

I know it's crazy, but it's true. It's something like Christopher Cross. It's Yacht Rock, people. It used to be just uncool music back when it came out. But now it's Yacht Rock. And my daughter likes it because there's just a little bit of irony that but the irony breaks down and then you're just listening to soft easy listening rock from the 70s and 80s it's powerful what labels can do they can take that

like that uh unusable old uh soft rock and and you slap a label that says yacht rock on it and people are like what i like yachts let's do this it's amazing it's a 20-year cycle of nostalgia because that was like from the 80s and the 80s or 20 years ago makes perfect sense yeah it yeah 20 years you drop a decade like merlin says perfect or two it's perfect i had i had the shocking realization that we're coming up to the 30th anniversary of my college graduation. Oh, man. No, just no. But that's okay.

We're also coming up to my daughter's college graduation in a year. So I guess it all worked out. Let's do a hashtag Snell talk question, even though Mike's not here to ask it. I thought this was almost like a little miniature robot or or not a podcast that John and I do together that's every other Monday on The Incomparable. You should check it out. It's not just about robots. It's about all sorts of stuff. It's fun. The last batch was really good, I thought.

I mean, like, they're all good, but the last batch was kind of going into unexpected areas and they were all a little longer. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, John, this question comes from listener Andrew who says, do you pronounce it read receipts or read receipts do i is this this thing is phrased as do you pronounce it not asking how should it be pronounced or what is the proper pronunciation or what is the correct pronunciation uh yeah we have a stupid language where we've got words that not only

sound the same but sometimes they're also spelled the same. Is there a word for that? Words that are, you know, homonyms sound the same, right? Symmetries mean the same. But what about when they're spelled the same and sound the same, but mean different? It seems like there should be a third word for that. There probably is. where there's L-E-A-D can be lead or lead, but lead like the element, not lead like the other form of lead, which would be L-E-D. Although people sometimes spell it L-E-A-D, but it's, yeah, there's, I'm sure that there's, are those homophones? I don't think they are. They're identical spellings with different pronunciations. Anyway, in this case, what I say most often when I have occasion to speak this out loud to someone, usually when telling them about settings on their iPhone, I think I generally go with the path of least tongue resistance, which is to use the long E in both words and say read receipts because read receipts is a little bit rural juror. You know what I mean?

Like just slightly different E sound with two words that both start with r right next to each other but i also think that i flip-flop on that depending on my mood or you know who i'm talking to or whatever so i think i'm all over the map but read receipts um which makes less sense than red receipts i acknowledge that but i think someone would have to sort of you know go into some sort of investigation to figure out who was the first person to use this term and can we find anyone who's still alive who remembers what they intended it to say back then not that that matters that much but at least then you'd say it was originally this but i think it's all over the place now i think there is no consensus and i think it would be a pretty tight race if you sort of surveyed the entire planet about this. By the way, I think, believe it or not, the old school word homonym, which we were all taught as kids, and then they said, no, no, it's homophone.

It sounds like homophone is the word sound the same. There's homograph, which is that they're spelled the same, but they're different. And then homonym, it seems, probably means that they differ in pronunciation and meaning, even though that they're spelled the same, which they're different. And then homonym, it seems probably means that they differ in pronunciation and meaning, even though that they're spelled the same, which is what this is. I say read receipts too. No, I said- I mean, read receipts. I don't say, see, no, it's confused me now. I call it read receipts because the idea is it is a receipt of if it there if it was read did jason did jason read this i get a receipt for when jason did jason read this and i get the answer you got to be right in the right tense otherwise it it is broken because it's did has jason read this but that's

not how it's a reading status and so i that's how i why i pronounce it as read receipts is because it's a reading status and we're but read receipts makes more sense because it's a receipt about whether something has been read. Which means it's in past tense. Yeah. But I don't say that. I feel it, but I don't say it. The point is the setting should be off. Mine's on, by the way.

Mine's on. That's madness. You're giving too much of yourself so thank you to andrew if you will have a snell talk question just uh i don't know how mike tells you how it's hashtag snell talk on twitter and i i think it's question mark snell talk and the relay fm discord just send email to robot and the incomparable whisper into a coconut and throw it in the ocean and the birds will find it and whisper it in my ear. That's how it works. Something like that. I've got some follow-up. I know you like follow-up on podcasts, John.

I do too. That's why we do it on this show because I hosted The Incomparable for like many hundreds of episodes and realized I could never have follow-up on it, but I can have follow-up here. In The Incomparable, you have full follow-up episodes. Well, that's the only way to do it though.

You can't have a letter commenting on the previous week because things get recorded out of sequence. There's no continuity. The same people aren't on every week. But we can follow up whole episodes, in fact, especially if I have forgotten that we already did it. Because after 600 episodes, that's really easy to do. I want to go back to what we've been calling the rumor roundup, just little bits here and there. what we've been calling the rumor roundup, just like little bits here and there,

things Ming-Chi Kuo has been reporting about. He's on Twitter now about what's coming up. And there was a report recently that said the base model iPhones for this fall, the iPhone 14, the base models will just have the A15 again, that only the iPhone Pro models will get the A16 and they'll keep the A15 in the lower end models, which I read this and I thought, or read this, I don't know, and thought this actually

kind of makes sense. And that if they were going to do this eventually, they need to pick a year where they hold one of the phones steady. And then after that, they can keep them in lockstep again. So this doesn't sound that surprising to me, that they would do that, and that they would create more differentiation between the iPhone. It sounds like it's going to be iPhone 14 and 14 Max, and then 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max,

and then the Mini is going to become... It's a good thing Apple hasn't confused any of their naming by introducing any other new products that use the pro and max suffixes in a totally different way. iPhone Ultra coming soon, I guess. So what do you think about splitting the iPhones this way? I mean, it's kind of a bummer

that they didn't make this decision before they shipped a bunch of years of phones where the pro and non-pros had the same system on chip in them because you know from a consumerist perspective for the most part this is a downgrade from what we have now it's been exciting these past few years to say uh you don't need to get an iphone pro and sue just get the regular iphone 12 or just get the regular iphone 13 don't worry it's got the same system on the chip it's fine the parts that are missing are parts you don't care about

right it just made the decision so much easier and not just because people like oh that why do people need a faster thing or whatever it's also that depending on the year there also could be you know things that people do care about like battery life benefits to being built on a smaller process or whatever so when the iphone the iPhone chip steps up to three nanometer or whatever it's gonna be, the old one will still be on five. That will take more power as in battery power. And that is a thing that regular people

actually do care about. Makes perfect sense. You know, pros should have more better stuff than the non-pros, but we had several years where that wasn't the case. And now they're sort of taking that away. So there'll be a little bit of a, oh, bummer, it was cool the way it was feeling.

But then once they settle into it and people forget, it will be fine. Yeah, I agree. And also just as a side note, as somebody who bought an iPhone 13 mini, I'm going to be like, great. Like I'm not going to be – even though there will be an A15, I won't feel quite as out of the loop because the lower end phones will still have the same processing power, presumably as the iPhone 13 mini that I have. So that makes me feel less bad about the mini not getting an update. 9to5Mac says that Apple has no plans to release a bigger iMac, that they talked to their sources and they say no current plans. Now plans change. And it feels like the plans on the larger iMac, that they talk to their sources and they say, no current plans. Now plans change. And it feels like the plans on the larger iMac maybe have changed. And I'm really unclear, talking about Ming-Chi Kuo, he said something also on Twitter about a lot of products that we

might've thought would have been happening this year or not going to happen this year, which is interesting. Not entirely surprising, but in the get used to disappointment category, for those who are like, oh, yeah, there's a bigger iMac coming, 9 to 5 Mac sources anyway say they are not currently planning to release a bigger iMac. Yep, that's what I heard as well. I mean, you know, here's the thing with Apple. As very recent history has shown what people want apple to produce especially in the mac line and what apple actually does produce don't necessarily have to overlap as much as you might hope in fact they can go many many years not making a bunch of products

that many of their customers say that they want uh i think that's bad for apple to do that but in the end what actually happens is well people grumble and they buy whatever it is that apple offers so if apple stops making a 27 inch iMac people won't buy it because it doesn't exist and they will choose one of the other Macs to go with. Just like when Apple didn't offer the kinds of machines that people wanted, they just chose from what was available and grumbled a little bit. So in many respects, I feel like inelastic demand or whatever, like it doesn't matter that much what Apple does. In the end, people will buy what is offered as long as it is reasonable. But I'm not sure if this is one of those cases where popular sentiment will just kind of like fester where people feel kind of bad. As I said, at ATP, they sold a lot of 27-inch iMacs.

And the reason they sold a lot of them, like not relatively speaking, because most of the things they sell are like, you know, 80, 90% laptops. But the 27-inch iMac has been a product in their lineup for many, many years. And those machines tend to last a really long time because they're good, right? You can use them for years and years. A regular person can use a 5K iMac, you know, for 5, 10 years easy. That's a lot of computers that are out there in the world. And at some point, those are going to get old or break or they're gonna want a new one and it's gonna be weird for those people to go into a store the people who bought and enjoyed a 27 inch iMac and realize that they have a weird uncomfortable

choice to make where they can't just get me a better version of the thing I had which is something they've been able to do for a long time especially if let's you know the 5k iMac's been around what for almost 10 years now close to it yeah it was 2014 i want to say yeah uh and in between there maybe maybe someone bought an original one and then it got a bunch of years old and they got a new one and it got a bunch of years old and they're gonna go and they're gonna be like oh there is no one for me to get that's like this and they're gonna have to make a different choice not necessarily a bad thing but that is kind of uh you know apple's done this many times where you can't get a computer that's just like the one you had, only a little better. You have to make a different choice now. You have to make different tradeoffs.

You know, whereas my mother went through it when she was so used to getting laptops with optical drives. And eventually she got to the point where her laptop with an optical drive was really old. She went to get a new one, went into the Apple store. None of them had optical drives not that i'm saying this is the same thing in terms of optical drives going obsolete but like that sort of comfort level where you can just go into the store every x number of years and get the newest version of your whatever that you feel comfortable with that changes over time um it remains to be seen is the 27 inch iMac like the optical drive where it's like, oh, people grumble, but we've all moved on? Or is it like, let's say, the laptop with an SD card slot where people grumble and they don't stop grumbling and they literally never stop grumbling and then eventually Apple ships another

computer with a laptop with an SD card slot on it and an HDMI port? I have some feelings about where the iMac product line has gone in the last 15 years that I want to talk about in a little bit. But I will say here that I believe that Apple will release a larger iMac. And I know you made this case on ATP that they will do it at some point. I'm not convinced that Apple is going to release an iMac Pro or anything like that. But making a version of, think of it this way, of the 24-inch iMac with a larger screen, maybe with the panel that's in the studio display and has been in the 5K iMac, and having it still be based on whatever processor is in the 24-inch iMac at that point, an M1, M2, whatever, as essentially the same iMac, just with a bigger screen, I feel like that is almost inevitable because the panel's there.

It's a nice experience. People are used to it. And I think it's a different argument to say Apple is going to make a high-end iMac that's for pros, because I think you can look at this past week and say they make other products to do that, and they don't necessarily want that to be the case but I don't think that that's required to have just a bigger iMac for people to use. Yeah, and as I've said on ATP worst case scenario, even if Apple never makes that decision and they just stick to their guns in this thing

eventually the 24-inch iMac will not be 24 inches anymore. Screens get bigger over time. We are not yet at the practical limit. It was 21.5 inches for many, many years. Then it became 24 inches. Several years in the future, that machine will be replaced by a 27-inch version of itself, simply because 27-inch is still within the realm of reason for a home computer. It's only a little bit bigger than 24 and in general if you're buying an iMac you're doing that because you want a bigger screen than a laptop can offer and you want an all-in-one uh so that'll happen eventually too but like whether that whether we get a 27 inch iMac in three years or in seven is makes a big difference uh to the people who may be pining for that machine but hey we waited a really long time for laptops with keyboards that work and the ports on them we wanted. So I guess we Apple customers are used to waiting sometimes. Yeah, it just doesn't seem like a huge deviation from

Apple's strategy to say everybody loved the 24. I mean, this is sort of my prediction is that they're already they actually are already working on it. And it's just going to be the 24 inch iMac with a second version that's a little bit larger. it's like people like it here's a little bigger bigger one if you want it that's it like it's not a thing it's not a big major shift in their strategy it's really just like we made two sizes of the one iMac that's it one more piece of follow-up which is the baseball major league baseball ended its lockout. The players are in camp. They're going to start the season. It's going to start a little bit late. They have to add some games to the end of the season and in the middle of the season, but they're going to

play them all. And that means for the purposes of this show, that Apple TV Plus's Friday Night Baseball is indeed now coming in April. I wrote a post last week on Six Colors all about it. I went into a bunch of detail about this last week on, as a matter of follow-up on this show, right after the Apple event. So we're trying to process all that information. I said, I thought, I mentioned that ESPN had packages that they were losing. This is a new package. This is not what ESPN left on the table. I believe Peacock, owned by NBCUniversal, is picking up the ESPN package, which is for national games on Mondays and Wednesdays, I think, and Apple's doing Fridays. And my understanding is that Peacock deal is for exclusivity as well. And I know you sent me a note

from a friend of yours about why these deals are difficult for fans and i agree with it and i included some of that in my post on six colors the idea that um you're used to your team on your team's channel basically and some teams have a cable channel or they've got cable and some broadcast but you're used to seeing it there and seeing every game, basically. And in recent years, there have been occasional national exclusivity windows. ESPN Sunday Night Baseball is one of them. Fox had some exclusivity on Saturdays. But the big one is Facebook. Yeah. Facebook had a baseball game like every week and you could only watch it on Facebook. And so every local TV channel and radio channel would have to be like, we don't have the team tomorrow. You'll need to watch that on Facebook. Good luck.

And it's jarring for fans and it's upsetting. And it totally is. It sounds like there's going to be more of that, that the Peacock deal does this too. So there's just going to be some games for fans of a team during this season where the broadcasters are going to say, tomorrow you can't see it on our channel because it'll only be on whether it's Peacock or Apple TV Plus. Now, the thing that I said to you, because your friend said, you know, baseball, that's the rhythms of the game and you know the broadcasters

and all of those things. It was more than that. It wasn't, obviously, it's the things you just said of like, there's the place that I'm used to watching it and it's a local thing or whatever. And the next level is, oh, the people who call the game

are the people who I like to call the game. But I think these sort of, and that's just like, well, you know, people who call the games, regardless of what deals people do people you know get old retire die like that changes over time as well although you know baseball announcers may have very long careers but the the sort of categorical thing that my friend brought up was like he's he's used to and prefers uh watching a game where the people calling it are unabashedly 100% biased in favor of his home team. Right.

Right? That they are rooting for the Red Sox to win, and that's the experience he prefers. And regardless of who retires and who calls what and who does what, you're not going to get that in a national broadcast because they can't have the announcers being 100% one-sided towards one of the two teams. That's not how a national broadcast works. In fact, they aren't going to be biased against either. And in fact, they're going to explain lots of things that the fans of those teams already know

because they're going to be trying to reach this third audience, which is this theoretical. I think there's a question of who that audience is and if they really exist. But theoretically, there's also an audience who is just tuning in to see a baseball game between two random teams and wants to learn about those teams. And so they have to tell anecdotes that the fans of the teams have heard a million times or they're telling it wrong. And I think that's absolutely true. One of the things that your email brought to mind for me, and we don't know exactly how this is going to go. Major League Baseball is producing this for Apple.

Apple's not hiring announcers, right? Major League Baseball, part of the money that Apple is paying to Major League Baseball involves Major League Baseball producing these games for Apple. By the way, it's $85 million a year over seven years, although Apple has opt-outs after year one and two in case this is a flop. But they are saying that we're going to pay you over seven years almost $600 million. One of the things Major League Baseball is going to do is produce the games for Apple. Now, my initial thought when you showed me what your friend had said was, would it be clever for Apple to do something like offer the ability to switch to your home team's radio broadcast if you really want to hear your home team announcers

who really just want your team to win. In Red Sox country, apparently, just for details, I asked my friend about that, and he said, well, the guy who does the Red Sox radio calls around here is, like, super famous and no way to dislodge him, and he's different from the TV people. He is different. There's no way that, you know, there's so much, so many entrenched

traditions that no, you can't get those guys in the radio because the radio is taken. And this is the bottom line that I think is fascinating is, is the, um, so maybe they'll do that. And, and, and somebody asked me interactivity, like, will they, will they do, since it's a Apple TV plus only broadcast, could they do interactivity? There's questions about what the ad breaks will be. Will they go back to like the, the highlight desk and show highlights of other games are they going to have you know rolling ads for apple tv plus i don't think they're going to sell commercials but

they have to do something because quite frankly if nothing else the announcers have to be able to go to the bathroom from time to time so there's there's lots of questions about that um and and we don't know you know we don't know how they're going to handle any of this. But the exclusivity thing in broad strokes, I think, is a frustration. I get why Apple wants to do it. I get why Peacock wants to do it. Fans are going to be irate. As every broadcast of a team comes up where their team is not on the local TV because it's on Apple TV+, fans will be irate,

not just because they have to pay for Apple to see their show, to see their game, but because it won't be the same because it won't be their announcers and it won't be the thing that they're used to. I understand the reason why they do the exclusivity thing because they kind of think, the primary audience for this thing is going to be people who are fans of those teams that are playing and and so we really don't want them to be able to seek it out on cable we want them to have to go see it at the same time i'm kind of uh sympathetic as a fan of a team i am sympathetic to the idea that you end up watching this game and it's like this isn't the same i don't it. This is not how I prefer to watch my baseball team. And why don't you just let me watch my broadcast locally and the rest of the world can get your Apple TV broadcast.

But they didn't pay for that. They paid for exclusivity. And so we're entering a period after being in a period for a few decades where basically every game is on tv on your local cable or broadcast now we're entering a period where there's a bunch of streaming games that are just not going to be available yeah that's major league baseball selling the fans to another company to make money that's kind of the way this works this happens my local team so the golden state warriors of the nba um i don't, I don't have on my over-the-top TV service, Fubo, I don't have any of the Turner channels, so I don't have TNT, which has NBA games, national NBA games. And so there are games that the Warriors play that are just not on for me.

They're playing, but I can't see it because there's a national exclusivity window. And like I said, Sunday Night Baseball has been like that for a long time. But I think your friend would probably complain about Sunday Night Baseball, especially since he's a Red Sox fan. And ESPN takes the Yankees and the Red Sox and puts them on Sunday Night Baseball practically every week. So you're losing a lot of games where you'd really rather just be watching Dennis Eckersley and Dave O'Brien, whoever the announcers are for the Red Sox. Don't ask me. I've just pulled it out of my hat there. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see, but everybody get ready because starting April 7th or whatever it is, I guess April 8th, people will be complaining about apple stealing their home teams baseball

games away it will happen guaranteed be like what do you mean apple tv we'll see all right i want to talk about the mac a lot because um nobody cares about the mac but us but we do care john it's a reference uh but first let me tell you about our first sponsor this episode of upgrade is brought to you by Bombas. Bombas' mission is simple. Make the most comfortable clothes ever. Match every item sold with an equal item donated. So when you buy Bombas, you're giving to someone in need.

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on The Verge today by me because I wrote an article about the XMAC. And Neelay Patel, who runs The Verge, basically dm'd me and said would you like to write an article about the x mac now that the mac studio has been announced you want to tell people a little bit about what the x mac is what did you reply to neil and say what the heck is the x mac oh no i know he actually said the mythical mid-range mac mini tower and i was like oh yeah i know because i think he has memories of all of those articles that Dan Frakes and Rob Griffiths used to write

about the MMMMM. Yeah, so the X-Mac, the term X-Mac is, you know, has its origin as far as I've been able to determine in Ars Technica forum stuff from ages ago, in the early 2000s. But the idea, setting aside the name, the idea is very common. And Apple sort of but the idea setting aside the name the idea is very common and apple sort of created

the idea by choosing to sell macs uh with you know with no product in this category so they sold big fancy super big super expensive professional giant uh macs of various kinds and they sold you know consumer models that were smaller, less powerful, more limited. And they never really sold a thing that sort of tech enthusiasts wanted. You know, Ars Technica is the, I forget the tagline, is the PC enthusiast resource or something like tech nerds. What tech nerds want is they want all the whizzy things, you know, the best of everything they can get, but they also don't want to or can't pay the

thousands and thousands of dollars for the super duper high end professional things. And that's, you know, in the PC market, there's lots of big part of the PC market that's like this. Like, say you're building a gaming PC, you're not going to build a $10,000 gaming PC, you could if you wanted to. But people are buying gaming PCs. What they want is to be able to say, all right, here's what's important to me, big GPU. So I'm going to, you know, get the best GPU I can get. That's going to be a big part of the price of my computer. And then I need the fastest CPU and, you know, for the fastest CPU for gaming specifically, I need this amount of RAM and this SSD, and I want this size case. And that's all that matters to me,

right? And if their only choice was well if you want those things that you listed you have to pay ten thousand dollars for a computer the size of a car because that's the only one we make that has those things and it's like well i don't need 12 pci slots and i don't need you know after burner card no it's optional but you know i don't i don't need all these other things and i can't afford ten thousand dollars can't you just give me what you said a quote-unquote mid-range computer that has the good things that I want about it and that I can upgrade those pieces but doesn't have all that other stuff that's not important to me, right? And for, you know, basically the entire life of the Mac, Apple has never really made that computer. That's not a consumer base they were interested in, sort of the hot, I want to a hot rod, and I want to be able to wrench on it myself.

I want to be able to go in there and upgrade the parts that I care about and maybe swap in a new graphics card. It concentrates a lot on gamers. X Mac is not particularly a gaming Mac, but a lot of people who are interested in gaming would want that type of thing. It's like, I need power, but I just need it in these areas. I don't need ultimate expandability. And Apple, as time went on, Apple seemed to get farther and farther away from making that. As you noted in your article, there was a time when Apple made desktop computers

that were not the biggest and baddest, but that was from a time when desktop computers were sort of the prime kind of computer, right? You know, especially like before the PowerBook or whatever, you'd had a Mac 2 and a Mac 2X and a Mac 2FX, and they looked exactly the same, but the 2FX was the big bad one, and the 2 and the 2X were the more limited ones, and you had your 2CI and 2CX, and they were like, well, they're not as big as the 2FX,

literally, they're not as wide, right? They're a little bit smaller, and they're almost as good, right? They're a little bit smaller and they're almost as good. And, you know, and the reason they did that was because everybody bought desktop computers. It needs to be big enough to hold the CRT. So there was one size, you know, one limiting factor to its dimensions, but they sold a whole bunch of those.

And in the Power Mac era, what you ended up with was the good, better, best thing, right? Where there were three Power Mac desktops and there was the tower, which is sort of what you would think of as the Mac Pro today, but there was also the pizza box. And then there was the one in the middle. And the last, the way I pegged it was the last modular mid-range Mac desktop was probably the beige Power Mac G3 desktop. There was a tower, but there was also this desktop configuration. It was not all that.

It was a little bit less. And when Steve Jobs came back, one of the things he did was say there are way too many Macs. And he was right. There were. He was absolutely right. There are way too many Macs. We're going to simplify.

But one of the ways they simplified was by making a single pro tower. And then when they brought in another desktop, it was a single consumer desktop and it was the iMac. And people don't remember this now, but the iMac started as a low-end consumer computer, right? It was not powerful. I remember the eye rolls from everybody who was a power user when the iMac came out. It was cool and it was maybe going to save Apple, which it did, but it was not a computer that a power user would want to use. And the thing is, even when the Mac Mini got introduced in 2005, which I know your post was sort of from that, like in the wake of the Mac Mini, is this the mythical mid-range mini tower? Is this the X-Mac? And the answer is no, not really.

But like Apple has just steadfastly said sort of like, no, we've got these way over here and this one way over here. And that's it until like last week, basically. So I think it's interesting that they used to do this all the time, right? And that time passed, and that was when people bought desktops instead of laptops. But still, that to me is the

source of the grumbling and the seeking of the X-Mac, the mythical mid-range mini tower, is that Apple sort of said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to make a tower and then some other little desktops, that's it that's that's all you get a thing to keep in mind about the time when they did make you know desktop computers kind of in the middle was that was back in the time when all macs were just horrendously eye-bleedingly expensive like if you translate them into today's dollars you would not believe how much 2cx cost with the monitor like you just it would cost as much as a car right so and most people don't remember that era because they weren't mac users and you're saying wait a second that's mid

range it's like well in the grand scheme of things it is because it didn't cost as much as a 2fx but the power mac 7100 which was the first non-pizza box non-tower power mac that was i had one on my desk at Mac User. That was introduced at $2,650, which in today's money is $4,600. That was the mid-range Mac of 1994. And that wasn't the good one, right? The pizza

box was the quote-unquote cheap one, and the good one was the $8,100. And that was, for the Power Macs, they kind of did that. Pizza box was the low end, and then you had the middle for the power max they kind of do that pete's box was the low end then you had the middle one and then you had the vertical one which was more expensive uh you know it's but that was such the reason that's not relevant to most people's memories of x mac is like well nobody was buying macs then because they were all so expensive it's just when the mac started like in particular in the age of the imac the imac another thing about

it people don't remember is that from the perspective of an Apple fan it was cheap from the perspective of a regular person it wasn't cheap because everything from Apple was expensive but I remember being shocked at how little they were charging for the iMac in terms of historically what does Apple charge for new computers so you know it was like imagine the Macint LC, but so sexy that everybody wanted it, right? It was cheap for Apple cheap. $12.99 in 1998 money. And so once you started getting more people into the Mac camp, then you started getting people saying, well, I don't want the iMac because obviously that's a silly thing for consumers or whatever I can't afford the big fancy one but I do want one where I have the flexibility to spec it the way I want and you know I didn't have graphics cards back then to speak of but upgraded the way I want and as as

time march on especially for the few eras where uh not so much the the PowerMax because most of those towers even though they had good better best the good ones still are pretty expensive but there were a couple of years there, especially like, I forget what years, maybe Marco said on ATP, like the 2006 Mac Pro or something where the entry-level Mac Pro was $1,800. There's a brief moment in time where it's like,

well, how about this? How about we still just make a monster computer that nobody can afford, but the very base-based model of that is exactly the same size and shape as the expensive as the expensive one it's just got cheaper guts in it is that an x mac and that's pretty much as close as apple ever got but i think where that falls down is i don't have room in my house for this thing because they're huge and heavy uh could you make something a little bit smaller maybe yeah it's definitely one of the effects of what happened in the intel era is that

and we watched it at macworld back in the day is they kept ratcheting up what the mac pro was and it became very clear that apple was saying the mac pro is a high-end system it's really not for people in the mid-range and you went from people being like oh it's expensive but if i get the base model i can make it work to i can't get the base model, I can make it work, to I can't get the base model. It's too expensive. And they had nowhere to go because then it's like, do I get a Mac Mini? Like there are – you could – and in those days, you could trick out – like that Mac Mini that they released in whatever, 2017 or whatever, that one was – had some power to it.

But the Mac Mini in those earlier days was really not a very powerful computer. And of course, in terms of expandability, it was also incredibly limited. And in terms of graphics for gaming, forget it, with the integrated graphics, there was nowhere to go, especially before eGPU support. Like there was a thing about the low-end Mac Pro.

For the entire life of any computer with the name Mac Pro on it, it has been huge, like physically huge. Just the type of computer that to commit to that much square footage, you know, cubic inches in your house being absorbed by computing, you're already over some line. And as you noted, if you chose not to do that, your next step down was something the size of half a tissue box. It was like, just even just forget about what's in these boxes.

Physically speaking, you can say your choice is giant suitcase, half tissue box. And that was, you know, the X Mac is, even if you know nothing about computers, you would say it seems like there should be something in between there that doesn't have a built-in screen. And Apple didn't make it. Yeah. So the Mac Studio is a big Mac mini, right? It's not expandable. Although, as you pointed out on ATP last week, like times have changed. And you said to me last week,

and I put it in the Verge story, like, you know, you hold onto your dreams for 16 years and you look at your dreams and say, hmm, no, these are not my dreams anymore. Eventually they stopped making sense yeah that it was you've had the same dream but then like it loses relevance in the world because like if you have some particular dreams like i want the x mac and here's what defines and you list out the things that define it like you haven't you never got to the root of what you really wanted like i want a computer that i can afford that does the things that i want well but that's not what you defined it as you said like i'm a computer nerd so it has to does the things that I want well. But that's not what you defined it as.

You said, like, I'm a computer nerd, so it has to have X and Y and Z. And you lost sight of what you really want is a solution to your problem. And your problem is, I don't want to spend a huge amount of money, but I do want games to run faster. I want a computer that lasts a long time, or I want something that's very powerful in these particular aspects, right? But instead, you said, no, no, no, that's not my goal. I have specific like spec demands i need and those specs those ideas those sort of you know it has to have upgradable ram it has to be i need to be able to swap the graphics cards like why why do you want

those things well because they allow me to do this if they allow me to have a computer for a certain number of years without spending too much money they can play the latest games or whatever whatever your goal is you know you lose sight of the goal and you just say, I want the specific solution to that goal. And eventually that solution becomes irrelevant to the goal. And even if you're offered something that says here, this, this does what you wanted to do. And you're like, yeah, but it's not exactly what I was asking for. I wanted this specific thing. It's like, but, but didn't you want it to do these things? And I think at a certain point, you have to say, well, yeah, if you give me something that can do the things I

wanted to do, even if it doesn't do them using the exact technique I described, it's still solving my problem in the end. Yeah. And you pointed out that, you know, we can't upgrade the RAM in Apple Silicon Macs. You have to buy it in the configuration it's going to live in. But there is quite a benefit from the way Apple has designed this. And it's not doing it to be mean. It's doing it to get the performance that has impressed us all about the Apple Silicon Macs. So it's just, you know, you got to, not everybody's going to be happy, but the Mac Studio, to me, I look at it and think, actually very similar to what I thought about the iMac Pro when it was announced, which is, all right, this is a powerful Mac at a level where I want to buy it, where I'm not going to buy it.

Because I was like, I'm not going to buy a Mac Pro. I'm not going to do it. I'm just not going to do it. And then I look at the Mac Studio and I think, okay, that I could do. That price for those features, that I could do and that that is sort of in the mid-range although dan moran wrote a piece on six colors this week uh about how you still are in this there's still a gap right there's still a gap where with a 27 inch imac being removed that you've got kind of the mac mini down there and the mac studio up here and i wonder if the answer is actually going to be that they're just going to make a,

they're going to make a more capable Mac Mini maybe later this year or maybe early next year that creeps up a little bit so that you've got a little more kind of fine gradation between kind of Mac Mini and Mac Studio and Mac Pro. But there is a little bit of a gap now where, and Dan is in it, which is why he wrote about it, which is he wants more than the 24.

But right now you can't, you know, if you want to get something other than an M1 in a desktop, you have to get the Mac Studio. Like that's where it starts because the iMac doesn't have it and the Mac Mini doesn't have it. I can't conceive of that being the case at the end of next year, let's say. But it is where it is right now. Yeah, I mean, there's two gaps. There is a pricing gap that's obvious if you just look at the base prices of the machines. There's a big gap between Mac mini pricing

and Mac studio pricing. So regardless of, you know, if you have a nice product line, it's nice to see even jumps from going up the line and there's this big chasm in the middle, right? So now the question is, okay, there's a pricing gap, what product fills that pricing gap, and you could choose a more powerful Mac mini, which Apple will inevitably make that will fill that gap, it'll probably it'll fill the price gap easily, because it'll probably be a little bit

more expensive, because it's got, you know, the M one pro in it or whatever, instead of just the plain old M one, so it'll be more expensive, but it will be less than a mac studio problem solved but the second gap in there aside from price is the form factor gap if you want an all-in-one computer apple sold one with a 27 inch screen for many many many many many years and now they don't anymore and so even if they slot something into the price gap and say hey there's no gap in our lineup look at this smooth gradation of prices if you are accustomed to a 27 inch iMac and that is the form you prefer there is still a gap where you say I used to be able to get a computer shaped like this and size like this and now I can't anymore yeah you could get a studio display and a Mac mini but they aren't the same they are not the same because now you have one thing being

plugged into another box and and it's more expensive like they don't have they don't have a price competitive they don't have anything that is price competitive with a 27-inch screen with the iMac. And that's why I think we both believe that these holes will also inevitably be filled. I think it's pretty, I mean, Apple's going to do what they want. And there are maybe some areas

where they're going to be like, yeah, it's not worth it for us. But I look at this and think it's the proto Apple Silicon lineup. It's the M1 part of the transition and that there's another, you know, there's another generation coming and another one after that. And I think that in the next generation, they're going to have a little more latitude to spread things out in their product line as they want. But this was take one. And this is where we are now. I think I just, I'm, I'm pretty confident that they're going to do more, um, now that

they've gotten this generation out the door and, you know, but the thing is it's all changing and moving around. And so like, does it make total sense right this minute? And it's like, well, no, not total sense. It's it's, there's a lot of good stuff in there, but I don't think they're done. I don't think they're just going to iterate on these slots for the next five years. I don't think they are. I think there are more variations. The fact that there's still an Intel Mac Mini for sale, right? There are more variations to come. My understanding is that Intel Mac Mini is there in part because there are a lot of industrial uses like server racks and things. Maybe that Amazon contract they've got where they're like, we don't want your Apple Silicon. We want your, we, we, we, we standardize an Intel. We can't

move yet. Um, but that obviously they're going to kill it at some point here. And I would think that there will be a story that isn't just the M2 or just the M1 at that point, but we're not there yet. Yeah. I think, I think it's's clear the decision they made for this rollout is 27 inches not differentiated enough from their offering so they're dropping it um i think the faster mac mini is part of this year's plan and that is coming that's not going to be a reaction to this guy when they come out with the more powerful mac mini don't write any stories that say oh see they saw the 27 inch iMac app and they made app. No, that's been coming no matter what. It's all part of the plan. But next year is the time to reconsider, okay, like you said,

all right, now we're doing the M2 machines. Do we want to make a different choice? Should we make a 27-inch version of the 24? And that's why my $1 bet with Marco and ATP was for a three-year timeline because this year, forget it. They've made their decision for this year, right? Next year, probably too soon to expect anything. but maybe the year after that is the time they

either say now it's time for the 24 to graduate to 27 or now it's time for a 27 to appear as an option alongside the 24 and i think we're pretty aggressive if i would have been more uh you know if i hadn't just done it on the spur of the moment i would have picked five years and would have been much more guaranteed to win that dollar three Three years is aggressive, but I hope that's the decision Apple will make. Certainly, they'll have the flexibility to do so. I'll back you on this. I think that they'll probably have a larger iMac by the end of next year, but three years, I think you're giving yourself enough room, honestly. I think that it'll be easy, but I don't think it'll be like a high-end iMac.

I don't think it's going to be that, but I do think that there's going to be one all right I want to talk about more about the iMac a little bit and some other Mac stuff because we do care but first let me take another ad break this episode of upgrade is also brought to you by new relic if you're a software engineer you've been there 9 p.m unwinding from work your phone buzzes with an alert, something is broken, your mind is racing, what could be wrong? Is it the server? Is it the cloud provider? Did I do something? Did I deploy a bug? Your whole team is scrambling. They're messaging people all over the place to try to find it and fix it. That doesn't happen if you get New Relic. It combines 16 different monitoring products you'd normally buy separately. So engineering teams can see across the entire software stack in one place. More importantly, you can pinpoint issues down to the line of code so you know exactly why the problem happened and can resolve it quickly.

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You can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigs of data for free forever with no credit card required. Sign up at newrelic.com slash upgrade. That's N-E-W-R-E-L-I-C.com slash upgrade. The URL one more time, newrelic.com slash upgrade. Thanks to New Relic for their support of Upgrade and all of RelayFM. And thanks to the CFO, CTO, CEO of that Fortune 500 company. I know you're out there. One of the points, John, that I made in my Verge piece, and I also wrote a Macworld piece about it in detail like a couple of days before, is about the iMac. And I'm curious your thoughts about this.

Observing the iMac over the course of since this introduction, basically, the arc, and I know I mentioned this earlier, but I just want to hit this point again. It went from being the cheap, in quotes, consumer computer, underpowered, scoffed at by power users. And it feels to me like it became the vehicle in which all people who wanted a powerful or not powerful Mac desktop, who were, because the Mac Pro was getting sort of priced out of the range,

it became the vehicle everybody else got stuffed into, like clowns in a clown car. I don't know. And you ended up, I think, actually making the iMac in some ways a worse product because they started to chase the high end. And so you ended up with like, again, not to pick on it, but that last Intel iMac, like it had the nanotexture display option. It had these i9 processors that made the fans just scream when they did stuff. Like they were so loud

because they weren't really engineered for it. There was also the iMac Pro, which was a different kind of more complex diversion where they're like, well, what if we just. There was also the iMac Pro, which was a different kind of more complex diversion where they're like, well, what if we just made the Mac Pro and iMac? No, no, forget about it. Forget about it. We're not going to, oh, well, we'll sell it, but we're not going to do that after all.

And it struck me that in some ways, looking at the iMac now with just that colorful 24-inch iMac, it feels to me like the iMac's actually back to being more of what it was meant to be when it didn't have to bear the load of a bunch of user needs that were maybe not what the iMac was meant for. So this heading in the notes here, and it might have been one of your articles, it listed as the distortion of the iMac. And I think that's – I know what you mean.

Like, obviously, the way the iMac was originally launched and produced is very different than it is now. But distortion implies that it is like a spoiling of something good and pure. And I think, actually, there's an interesting analogy with the road the iMac has taken and the Mac Studio stuff we were just talking about. Obviously, the iMac being introduced as a consumer product, that was an important part of the uh the original idea of that product because if you're going to save the company you're not going to save the company with the computer that nobody buys you're not going to save it with the super high-end one it's not it like and and you laugh but like you can imagine if you had made some tech nerd ceo they would say the way to save apple is they're going to make the fastest computer that's ever made

like that's not how you save apple like even if you did that success we to make the fastest computer that's ever made. I was like, that's not how you save Apple. Like, even if you did that, success, we've made the fastest computer known to man, the fastest personal computer known to man, right? This will surely save the company. And it's like trying to like save a car company by making the fastest supercar, right? That's probably not going to do it because not a lot of people buy those. And it may be cool to people who are into cars or computers,

but in the end, you need to sell computers to make money. So wisely, when they made the iMac, they made it cheap for an Apple computer and the mass, the most mass market thing they could make. It's cute. It's adorable. It's attractive to even non-computer people. This is the computer that's going to save the company because it's a consumer computer,

right? Now, but what happened is, of course, you have a success on your hands. The iMac name gets a lot of cachet. In fact, it gets so much cachet that Apple starts putting i in front of all its freaking products, right? Including ones they had to buy from other people like iPhone. The name, I mean, not the phone. And, you know, it lasts for a long time. And kind of what happens with the dream of the X-Mac is if you keep, you know, doing something for a long time, the surrounding context changes. And the thing that changed about the iMac um yes there was the thing that you mentioned where Apple seemed very it seemed very clear from the outside that Apple

was going to say yeah we're not doing the Mac Pro anymore and we think we can get by with just making like an awesome iMac and they did make an awesome iMac iMac Pro but they changed their mind before they even released it so forget about that there was that that happened but the other thing that happened setting that aside over the course of many many years is that it became plausible for everything about a computer to be everything about a good computer to be in a fairly small self-contained package right that it was essentially inevitable and reasonable and good for the thing that started as a consumer computer to move up market because technology changed in such a way that it was no longer a terrible compromise to take all the things of a computer and stick it to the back of the screen, essentially, right? It wasn't that way in the beginning. In the beginning,

it was a bit of a compromise and it was sort of a consumer play and especially you know we did the one with the the uh iMac G4 where they had the base and the thing and then they glommed it on the back and but as time marched on it became clear that the march of technology miniaturization SSDs all that other stuff made it possible to make a new kind of computer and the new kind of computer was beautiful screen powerful computer one thing all in one and that wasn't possible back in the days of the iMac there was no like plausible iMac like computer that had the guts of the giant suitcase size tower and the technology wasn't there for that and the analogy i make with this is look at the insides of like the original imac or the mac 2 fx or mac se or whatever um and compare them to current macs like the mac studio where you have a system on a

chip that has the cpu the gpu all the memory everything put into one big square you can put it up on a slide the thing that's on that slide when they show like the you know the m1 ultra with all the ram around and everything that's like the entire motherboard practically of other computers the usb controllers are in there the thunderbolt controls are in there the video controller is in it like everything is consolidated into one and why didn't we do that why weren't computers always on it but you couldn't you couldn't put all that stuff in there the transistors were too big there was no way to package that together. So everything was separate. There were buses to slots where you put in the RAM chips. There was a CPU, there was a Northbridge, there was a South

Bridge, there was a Thunderbolt controller from Intel. There was all these different chips all around there. But as technology marched on, we were able to consolidate it all. And it's inevitable and good that we do that because you get lots of benefits, lower power, everything is faster. It's physically closer together. It is closer metaphorically, you know, in terms of latency and everything. So the iMac just traveled that same path. Wait, we have the technology now to make a reasonably powerful, good computer,

but also have it be fairly quiet and also have it be on the back of this slim thing that just looks like a monitor. And that turns out to be a product that is attractive to a lot of people. It's not as fancy as a mid-sized tower. And you can look at it as like, oh, but you've changed. The iMac used to be a consumer thing. It's like, yeah, but now we can do a thing that we couldn't do before.

That the all-in-one computer suddenly becomes something that is not just for the lowest of the low end. But that someone who's in the middle would look at it and not sneer and not feel bad that they're getting it because once they get their very first one and i think we all have this experience like well i never thought of myself as an imac person but like once i got one i was like you know what this computer is quiet this screen is gorgeous and it's really fast and i love it and that's why people love these computers because they didn't realize i never thought of myself as an all-in-one computer i always thought i had to have a tower how many people do we know like that i always thought i had to have a tower because i do serious development work or i work on photoshop but once they get that first imac

especially the first 5k imax and they say wow i thought i could never do my work as a designer with photoshop on an all-in-one mac but now apparently technology is there and i can do that and the imac pro is the ultimate expression of that is like if Apple really tries and does a good job at it setting aside the stupid nanotexture you know 5k iMac if they do a good job of it you can even make a pretty passable good pro-ish computer on the back of an iMac that is the wisdom of that is still questionable but in the middle range there I think it is inevitable and good that the iMac had to travel upmarket as technology changed in the same way that all the guts of the Macs have consolidated into a single system on a

chip because technology allows it and it has advantages. It is attractive. It is a natural and good evolution of that form. I agree with you, but I think the challenge, and when I say the distortion of the iMac is, I feel like the iMac needed to be too many things for too many people. And what you saw was Apple straining where they would have their, you know, they had their non-retina model for a while, and they kept the spinning hard drive for a while. And one of the consequences of keeping the spinning hard drive, whether it was the default or whether it was the default

and the Fusion drive was also there, which was their hybrid approach to try and have SSD speeds with the storage instead of like embracing just all SSD because they couldn't, because this was meant to be an introductory, you know, level computer and had a price to match. And so you ended up with like the iMac Pro didn't need to go down there. And so they had the new cooling system in the iMac Pro, but they couldn't do that in the iMac because they needed to have space for the spinning hard drive. And I think that was when I say it was distorted, I would say that it ended up being a computer that was really trying to cover a vast range in the middle ground of the Mac, sort of the middle to the bottom. middle ground of the Mac, sort of the middle to the bottom, and that it could have been a better computer if it had just been the bottom or just been the middle, but it had to be both because Apple had no other options. Like that was literally it. And I think that I look at the 24-inch iMac and I think that maybe there's a little bit of freedom in them making the decision. I mean,

time has moved along and they have embraced SSDs now and there's no spinning hard drive option anymore, which is great, but like, it's just a fun computer and, and it just seems like simpler. It doesn't need to bear the weight of the world on its shoulders. Like maybe that other iMac did because Apple wouldn't surround it with other products. Whereas now we can have this debate about there's a studio display and can you attach, what do you attach to it? You know, if you don't want to get an iMac, you can buy a display and then you can attach a Mac Studio to it or a Mac Mini to it or a laptop to it. And it's just a little bit more of a conversation than maybe was had by people like me when it was like, I guess I'll just get the 5K iMac. I love the 5K iMac. I'm not saying it was a bad computer. I'm just saying that it led to this very kind of awkward area where the iMac was kind of it. Like you really just had to buy an iMac. That was about your only option for a certain class of user.

that they didn't want to give up the name. But when the opportunity presented itself due to the advance of technology to make a pretty darn good computer that's an all-in-one, they took that opportunity, but they didn't want to give, they didn't want to sort of give up the name for the low-end.

And they said, well, you know, they decided to call that iMac, which is like, hey, we've got it. We're going to make computers and we can make increasingly powerful and amazing computers, sort of culminating in the 5K is the ultimate. Like, we've done it.

We've made an all-in-one computer that is good enough that people who would formerly never think of themselves as all-in-one customers will not only buy, but they'll love. They're like, great. And, of course, that's an iMac, and that name is going to come along with it. But they never gave up the low end and so once they sort of made that commitment to this is what the iMac is you can't really make a really cheap and also good low-end computer using the philosophy of the 5k iMac that's why you had these machines well how do we keep it the low price well I guess it'll have to be non-retina and I guess it'll keep the spinning disc and those were not good computers but they had committed to the design of the thing they were going to call imac because it was just one name it would be weird to have you know the 5k imac be a totally different strategy of building a computer than the cheap imac but they just refused to let go of the low

end and refused to not take the middle end and even the high end with the pro thing and so yeah i think the consumer side suffered now that they've sort of reassigned the imac back to be just the the low end it's kind of ironic that oh and by the way now we have all the technology to make that low end one pretty fantastic because it's so thin and it's got ssds and it's retina and it's like this would have been the fantasy high-end imac of you know five ten years ago right but now that's the low end, you know, and it's good that it got the freedom. And now you can have colors and it can be fun and it can be less expensive. And it is divorced from the need to sort of say, oh, well, but remember, we also have

to have one of these that the fancy people want to use for their power things. No, we don't. We can just be for low-end. So it's nice to have the name not stretched as far um that if if they had been able to give up on that branding and had called the 5k imac something other than an imac that would have solved a lot of their problems and then they could have sort of concentrated on well it's probably too late by then because they'd already committed to that form factor i think the imac pro is actually an example of like i think we've

stepped through some of the rationale that probably went into the creation of the iMac Pro. But that was in the era where they were like, well, no, we're not going to do a Mac Pro anymore. And this is what we're going to do. But the iMac Pro is, what if we made an iMac and didn't worry about the low end? And it's like, well, okay, we're going to embrace SSD and we're going to put in a good cooling system. But even then, it was like literally physically exactly the same size and shape as the 5k it just so happens that it was an amazing feat of engineering say can we fit a pro computer in this exactly this and the only reason they were able to do it is like well the 5k iMac was designed to have a three and a half inch disk drive and if we say we're

never going to have that we have a little bit more room but it's not as if they took the iMac row and said clean sheet of paper iMac pro what does it look like they just started with the 5k iMac shape. They were going in that direction anyway, so it's not too much of a stretch, but like, I think that, that contrast will live on for a long time, that there were two machines that were physically exactly the same size and shape, but one of them was a little bit darker and one of them was amazing. And one of them not sucked, but one of them was just like terrible. Like the loud fan i9 yeah nanotexture whatever monstrosity compare that to the iMac pro which was just silent and competent and amazing and not that we would have all been happy with it instead of a Mac pros it does not

fill the same needs as Apple discovered before they even shipped it um but it just shows like two different philosophies one is taking the consumer iMac and trying to like, you know, crank it up to the nth level. And the other is saying, what if we say we're going to make a pro computer and we don't have like this? It's going to start at $5,000, right? We don't have to worry about making the base version of this available for, you know, home users to buy. home users to buy i think that um this is why in some shape or form the imac will come back because i i do think i mean we've already said it we think it's coming back like there there's there's room in here for something that is not like we're not going to make a huge effort because the mac studio exists but there's still some some room in there for imac to still be a good computer to have. And maybe there's options. And maybe in the end,

you can get even like an M1 or M2, I guess, Pro at the high end. But it's like as long as it fits in the envelope. But the goal is not to get you up to an iMac with an M1 Ultra, right? Like, no, that's not going to happen. It has a copper heatsink. We're not designing an iMac to do that. And I think that's not going to happen it has a copper heat sink it's not we're not designing an iMac to do that and I think that's good they shouldn't don't do that and so I think I think

that if we see a larger iMac and as the iMac evolves I think that they're gonna be able to draw a line to say no further than this which is you know a line must be drawn here see I make a movie reference now. Look at that. Apple's biggest problem with this whole iMac thing is they spent many years convincing people that they can have an all-in-one computer and it will be satisfactory for them. The 5K iMacs did that over the course of many years. Those are people, like I said, who prior to the good iMacs, they would say, well, I'm

never going to get an all-in-one. That's for other people. What I get are desktops or mini towers or like whatever, you know, I'm a Power Mac customer, right? Apple did that. Apple convinced those people. You might not realize it,

but technology has moved on to the point where actually if you buy this computer, you will love it because you don't think you care about all-in-one. You don't think you care. It's like you have a giant suitcase next to your desk. You don't care about desk space. It's not like you care about it being all-in-one. You don't think you care. It's like you have a giant suitcase next to your desk. You don't care about desk space. It's not like you care about it being all-in-one.

But then the 5K iMac came along, and it was one of the only options for people, and people loved the screen, and they bought it. And fast forward a few years, and now they're not convinced that they need a separate box to connect up to the thing. It turns out, after all these years, I've been using just this iMac, and it's been great for me. For the people who never were convinced, who always, like me, have just been buying these stupid suitcases or whatever, that's great. We love the Mac Studio.

We love the Mac Pro. But there's a whole bunch of people that Apple convinced otherwise. And now I'm not sure those people are going to, like, be relishing the idea of switching back to the more expensive, it must be noted, Mac Studio and external display, or even the, let's say, equally priced, better new Mac Mini plus Studio display, now that they've lived in the all-in-one life for a while. We will see how this evolves, but it's fascinating to have the Mac Studio to let us have this conversation now. I think that's great. And honestly, and this is a sort of tangential topic,

but I wanted to mention it, is like now that the studio display exists, and I know that there were other displays before, but to get an Apple branded display that is the using, in this case, it's using the familiar 5K panel, which is a great panel. I know it's old.

It's been out there since the 5K iMac, but it's- Does it sound like, this is a great panel i know it's old it's been out there since the 5k iMac but it's like this is only something i need to check on maybe it is the panel it is exactly the panel and the reason the only reason i questioned whether it was the exact panel is because i kept seeing that it was 600 nits instead of 500 but i don't actually know what the 5k iMac was the 5k iMac screen go to 600 nits yeah i think maybe um but but i can tell you i i uh i can't tell you who told me but you know who it was uh it's the same panel okay it is that is what it is so it's familiar it's not cutting edge but it's familiar and it just opens up all this possibility and i had that moment john when i started to think i actually don't know i ordered I ordered a display and I ordered a Mac Studio.

And I assume that that's where I'm going to end up. But I had a moment where I thought, well, you know, those Apple Silicon laptops are all pretty good too. And all the Apple Silicon, all the M1s are the same computer essentially. So we could probably assume that the Mac Studio is going to behave a lot like a similarly configured MacBook Pro, right? So if that's the case, you know, I just had that moment where I thought, should I get a MacBook Pro? Should I just keep my MacBook Air that's an M1, but it's pretty good. And I could just get the display and the MacBook Air for a while or maybe buy a MacBook Pro. And it is a lot more money.

It's like $700 more to get the same configuration in a MacBook Pro as in the base model Mac Studio. It is a lot more to have it be a laptop that you can take away with that beautiful screen. But I did have that moment where I thought, how committed am I to the desktop life, given how good Apple Silicon is at docking to a display? And that this display makes it, and with the ports and all of that, it's basically going to be like an iMac for me, except I could hang just a laptop off of it and then unplug and take it away. The desktop laptop thing, I guess, is what I'm saying. off of it and then unplug and take it away the desktop laptop thing i guess is what i'm saying yeah when i found out that uh as far as i've been able to determine the uh the the chips aren't even clocked any different in the desktop right it's the same if you get a like a macbook pro

with an m1 max uh obviously i think that like this must less likely to throttle in the studio but they're not even clocked different so when i was pricing all this stuff out i did i had that thought and i said hmm this is looking kind of. And if it really is just an M1 Max, Apple already makes computers with an M1 Max in it. You know, I can get a 14 inch laptop or a 16 inch laptop with an M1 Max and it's the same exact M1 Max. And if you don't want to pay for a Max, you can get the Pro, which you can't get on the studio. Exactly. Right. But then I priced it out and I realized, oh, okay, well you do pay more for the laptop i don't like laptops i was just thinking is this a way to get a cheaper sort of m1 max

desktop system the answer is no it's not a way to get because they because it comes with a whole screen and a keyboard and all the stuff that i don't care about uh and you pay for that so it's kind of weird that like if you if you want that if you want uh the laptop with a monitor it costs more which i think is is appropriate it costs more, which I think is, is appropriate. It costs more because you're getting, again, you're getting a whole other screen, a good screen on top of that and a keyboard and a track pad and a case and

miniaturization, all that stuff that you don't get with the studio. Yeah. I came, it came down to a couple of things for me. One is I could use my MacBook air, my M one MacBook air for a while. And that allows me to kind of put off until maybe the

next chip generation, a decision on this. But you know, how long is it going to be before there's another Mac studio model, right? It's going to be going to be a while, right? So next year around this time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I do. I do think that the cadence is going to be Apple's just going to refresh everything with the same thing the next year. And that's just how it's going to be. Now, once they get this all up and running, but, um, so I could do that and I could put off making a decision for a little while. Uh, or I could roll down my MacBook air to someone else in my family who has an Intel MacBook air, and they would get all the delight of having an M one MacBook air. And then I could buy a MacBook pro. I don't use the laptop very much at all. I am not a laptop person. And I think I've just

decided the studio is a better fit for me because I have the MacBook Air, which I use a little bit. It's enough for using a little bit. It's going to be disappointing if that's my only Mac because it's not that fast at some of those higher end like audio plugin things that I do. So I'm going to be disappointed. Would I be better off doing what I've been doing for the last few years, which is have a lot of power on my desk and a little underpowered, but perfectly fine laptop for when I really need to travel somewhere. And for me, I think that's probably the right decision. However, what strikes me about the existence of the studio display and how good Apple Silicon laptops are is I think for a lot of

people, that's not the right decision. I think if you use a laptop a lot, but you also sit at a desk a lot, you kind of go back and forth. Like an Apple Silicon laptop and this studio display seem to be like the right combination. That's a really strong combination if you do need a laptop. But I'm not sure I'm convinced about the desktop laptop thing, at least for me, because I don't use the laptop enough. Yeah, a point that I meant to bring up on the last ATP but neglected to. It's a little bit mind-bending for to think about but the do you remember the uh the dtk that apple shipped to developers for developing their their uh mac software and arm before the r max were actually out right um that had an a12z in it uh the apple studio display has

an a13 in it yes uh that apple studio display not the way it is now, but like with a similar parts list, that Apple Studio Display could be an entire Mac that runs macOS. It would need storage and I.O. It's not like you can just take the product and run macOS on it. What I'm saying is they put an A13 in there, which is more powerful than the process of the system on a chip that they shipped with their ddk for developing and testing your applications on arm uh you know and i think that's why a lot of the rumors were confused that they thought that display itself was a new fancy imac with a new 27 inch imac with no it's got no chin you know it's because hey it's got speakers it's got a it's got microphones it's got a camera on it's got a processor and it's got no chin. Hey, it's got speakers. It's got microphones. It's got a camera on it.

It's got a processor. And it's got an A13 in it. And we said like, oh, the Apple Silicon, this, that. It has an Apple Silicon chip in it and not a particularly slow one. It's not as fast as the M1. The M1 is based on the A14 cores and it's got a lot of them. I'm not saying it would be a speedy computer, but I had one of those DTKs. And Mac OS run ran surprisingly well on an A12Z. Many things it did

faster than my 2019 Mac Pro that it was sitting right next to just because it was ARM and they do certain things a lot faster for whatever reasons. So it's, you know, it's kind of, if you're thinking like, could Apple ever make a 27 inch iMac, you know, where would they put all the computer guts or whatever? Like, the A13 is already on their monitor. And yeah, I know, you need I.O., you need the ports, you need an SSD in there. But, you know, if you look at how the guts of the 24-inch iMac are currently packaged, they're all in the chin and it's almost nothing. It's really all about the screen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cheers to all the desktop laptop people out there but i think mac studio

is in my future i haven't canceled that order i'm gonna get one i think i'm gonna be happy with it i i i thought about the ultra and then i laughed and didn't order it because i don't i don't need that you need to be able to go get a cup of tea while your isotope things are running. Yeah, right. Like, I don't want to have to, like, get a cup of tea, make a whole pot of tea, and then bring it back for the isotope thing to finish running. I want it to just be, like, to get a cup of tea. I want it to be that much. But you don't want to be halfway through making your tea and the thing is done.

No, I don't. No, that's true, too. That would be outrageous. Yeah, no. No Ultra for me. Forget it too that would be outrageous yeah no no no ultra for me forget it that would be that would be crazy uh okay we are going to do some ask upgrade but first i have one more sponsor this episode of upgrade is brought to you by our good friends at memberful memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on

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Thank you, Memberful, for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. Okay, it is time for Ask Upgrade. John, you ready? I am. This is a little like Ask ATP, except we did it first. It's true. Steven says, does it bother you that the new studio display is basically just the same 5K display panel that was released in October of 2014 on the 27-inch iMac?

We've established it is. I think the nit rating is higher. I think maybe it's just that the backlight is a little bit brighter, but the actual panel itself is the same. Does it bother you that their brand-new 2022 display is the iMac display that has been around for many, many years? Well, that's the thing about it. We were saying if it's the same exact display. Do you remember in the early days of the 5K iMac display that has been around for many, many years. Well, that's the thing about it. We were saying if it's the same exact display.

Do you remember in the early days of the 5K iMac, there were two different manufacturers of the display, or one of them had image retention issues? Yeah. Right. I think even though we say it's, quote unquote, the same, I think even just over the life of the 5K iMac, there have been revisions to that panel to improve it in various ways, whether it's avoiding image retention, or maybe maybe better color reproduction or better viewing angles, because panels like this get revised, right? So even if it is more or less the same, I'm thinking that

this is probably the latest evolution of that same 5K panel. But spec-wise, yeah, it's not HDR, it's not high refresh, it is a 5K panel. If you went back in time and put this on the original 5K iMac, no one would notice except that maybe it didn't get image retention and it's a little tiny bit brighter. And that's why I think it doesn't bother me because for the longest time, everyone's been saying, you know, I love the 5K iMac. I would love to have, but I don't, you know, I have a tower computer or I have something else or I have a laptop. I would love to have that screen hooked up to my laptop or my tower Mac or whatever. Why can't I do that? Why can't I just buy that screen? And then LG came along and said, here you go.

You can buy that panel in this terrible case that has many problems that seem like they shouldn't exist, but do with like flaky USB ports and a terrible stand and it interferes with your Wi-Fi and all those other things. And so I feel like, you know, it doesn't bother me they did this. This is what everybody wanted and Apple delivered it. And they delivered it in a straightforward way by saying, by not introducing essentially a 5K display that is, you know, proportionally less expensive than the 6K. This is a 5K display that is way less expensive than if you took the 6K and scaled it down

to 5K in terms of price. And that's what people wanted and that's what they got so i'm not disappointed or bothered i'm happy because i think it makes perfect sense and for tons of people like to this day that 5k imax screen is still a gorgeous screen i have no complaints about it um you know and for what it is uh and once i got rid of the image retention issues and all that other stuff it's you know it's what it is uh and once i got rid of the image retention issues and all that other stuff it's you know it's it's still as good as it ever was yeah it doesn't do hdr and like i have no doubt that there will be a display panel technology that puts it to shame and that apple itself will probably release at some point a more expensive but nicer panel that maybe uses mini led um like the oled yeah i exactly i i love

quantum dots and all the other quanta that are out there yeah there are so many other technologies and of course whether it's in six months or in two years there will be i think an apple display that outdoes this one this one may still stick around even at that point and then there'll be one above it. Um, but it doesn't like, does it bother me? No, because it's good. It's good. And it's what I wanted for a long time. And I think it'll last a long time. I'm not, um, so desperate for HDR or anything like that. HDR is nice, but it's not necessary for my workflow. And if it was, I guess I would have bought a studio display XDR. So I'm, I'm happy with it too. I I'm, I would have been okay if it had had other fantastic display technology in it, but the fact that it's got center stage, right. And that it's got its microphones and its speakers and all of that. And we'll see when the reviews come out, how it actually is at all of those things. But like, not just we we threw a panel in a box and gave it to you it is a lot

more than that and it's an apple display so like i'm i'm okay with it actually i'm kind of desperate for hdr but the thing is like the reason it's not disappointing is like so show me the other 5k high refresh rate hdr display for an affordable price that you would get otherwise. Like, it remained to be seen whether it was feasible for Apple, whether that technology existed. Like, because they put the laptop screens out, and laptop screens are phenomenal. It's like, wow, if they can do that in a laptop screen, maybe they can make a 5K screen that has all those things. But they didn't, and no one else has either. Like, if you look for screens that

come close to these specs, they are very expensive. They start, you know, thousands of dollars through two, three, four, $5,000 for screens that do those things that are essentially 5k IMAX size screens, but also HDR and high refresh. Right. And that's a totally different product. And we've already basically got that with the XDR. Right. So it if Apple came out with this but everybody else had you know 1600 nits high refresh uh you know monitors at the same size in like the PC world for example yeah then we'd all be disappointed but I don't see how you can be disappointed because it's like well what should they have done instead like there are no alternatives at this price and Apple should have a monitor at this price and now they do yeah it'll come it'll happen but yeah this is this is i'm not disappointed by the existence

of this product right at the moment um and i bought one so there you go i'll be happy with it and the next one won't cost what this one costs right it'll if it if it is an hdr display if it's whether it's 27 or it's larger it's it's going to be it's going to be more expensive probably but i i can point out adp there's that uh it's not dealt alienware but delbot alienware um there is the alienware qd oled gaming monitor um it's not retina i forget what the resolution is it's weird, like widescreen aspect ratio curved thing. So it's not like, it's not suitable for Mac use because it's not this sort of DPI in proportions that we're used to, but it is less than $2,000.

It's like $1,300 or something. It's a 34 inch wide aspect ratio, $1,300 QD OLED. If that's how these things are going to be priced it is conceivable that in several years time this this 5k screen could be replaced with a screen that is hdr high refresh uh you know perfect blacks qd oled thing for exactly the same price as it is now like that's the magic of technology we just have to make the next leap to the next screen tech mini led is not that tech million led is a tech that has its own compromises but is also more expensive than this qd oled seems like a pure win kind of like the m1 where it's

like oh it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be better and it's going to be faster and it's going to take less power qd oled seems like it might be the display technology equivalent of that if uh if current trends continue well when that happens then we hand down our studio displays and they live another lifetime somewhere else. It's okay. Different Steven wants to know, this is with a PH. The first one was with a V. What are your Apple TV frame rate settings? Do you bypass the TV's processor and let the Apple TV do the upscaling for non-4K content?

This question presupposes that I have a 4k tv and i do not so my apple tv doesn't need to do any upscaling and neither does my tv it's just since the 10 you don't have 4k or hdr you just have a plasma the great the last great plasma i'm working on changing that this year um but yeah i don't do that in terms of the other settings that what i the main thing i have it set to is the feature that i wanted for a long time which is the what do they call like match uh frame rate setting or whatever so that i can watch uh 24 frame per second content and actually display it at 24 frames per second because my television can do 24 frames per second so if the apple tv outputs it my tv can display it it's one of the advantages of plasma over some

of the early uh led lcd stuffasma over some of the early LED LCD stuff is that many of the early LCDs only did 60 hertz refresh. And if you have 24 frames per second content, the math doesn't work out very well there. But my TV can literally do 24 frames per second. And now Apple TV can output that with the match frame rate thing. And so that's what I do. Yeah, I match frame rate and I do match and I have Apple do the resolution, I want to say. I think I've got Apple TV doing the resolution and then I'm also matching HDR, which the problem with matching HDR is I was having some issues with certain shows basically turning purple. having some issues with certain shows basically turning purple, but it turned out that by replacing my receiver and a bunch of my cables, the matching HDR actually seems to work now.

So I'm, I'm back to just sort of matching whatever is getting, uh, whatever is in the content and it seems to work. Okay. In terms of upscaling, um, if,

if you don't have a very, very very fancy tv like a read as an expensive tv chances are good that the upscaling that's being done in the apple silicon that's in your apple tv is better than what's going to be done by the you know low-end media tech chip in your you know uh like reasonably priced television right i mean you can try them both ways and see if you can tell the difference you can't tell the difference, who cares? But I'm like, Apple's image processing in general is pretty good. And they they share their, you know, system on chips across their phones and their iPads and their Macs. And yes, even their Apple TVs. And so that Apple TV is getting the benefit of an image processing section of its system on a chip that was developed for an iPhone several years ago.

Joey asks, I know it's not going to happen, but an M1 Ultra GPU better than an NVIDIA 3090 deserves to play games. What's stopping macOS from being able to run Windows games in a translation layer, a la the well-regarded Steam Deck handheld? I think Joey must be talking about a product that I haven't heard of because I don't know what the well-regarded Steam Deck is. I know what the actual Steam Deck is and it is not well-regarded. Here's why this is a problem. So when you have, Steam Deck runs Linux, right? But it wants to run Windows games that run on Windows. So it has this translation layer where it translates like the DirectX type APIs that are available on Windows and tries to make them available on Linux. And so the games can run, even though they were not originally written to run on Linux, you can take a Windows game and run it on Linux. That's super hard to do. The game developers,

if these game developers are not totally on board with you, which they probably aren't, they didn't develop their games against running in a Windows translation layer on Linux. They didn't QA them against running on Steam Deck, steam deck right you know to get the game sort of certified and sold on steam is a lower bar than actually developing on that from day one it's really difficult to chase that around because you don't control the platform that you're imitating windows changes all the time um and you have to constantly keep up with like oh here's my shim layer on top of linux or on top of mac os that runs the windows games and all i've seen from people using steam deck is that it's not as reliable an experience as running playing a windows game on actual windows or on the xbox because that's what the games were developed against it's kind of a miracle and amazing that

it works and the performance is usually pretty good too but things like bugs where it gets frozen or there's a glitch or you can't make progress at this part of the game or it crashes like those are things that are very frustrating for gamers and it's very difficult as you know the creators of steam deck to know how to handle that because what are you going to do chase down every bug in every other game and then talk to the game developer and say hey we discover and when you run your game on our weird emulation layer it does this weird thing can you please fix it for us repeat that by every single game that has some kind of bug that runs on top of steam deck and then add to that the fact that valve games are their bread and butter they love games they're all about games they understand games

apple that's not true none of those things are true of Apple. Apple doesn't understand games. They don't really love them in the same way, at least not these type of games that are on Steam Deck. And so Apple is not inclined to do that type of thing. And I think it's a bad idea to even try to do that thing. It's a bit of a fool's errand. I don't think Valve and Steam will be successful at doing that. And I think Apple and other companies should not even try.

You either get people to develop games natively for you or you don't. But trying to build and field a commercial platform where you're imitating another platform is a sucker's bet. We have a friend in a Slack that we're both in who regales us with tales of using Crossover to play Windows games on his Mac. And he's a positive guy and often says things like, ah, there was an update released to this game

that fixed the issue where it was all weird and blocky and now it's playable. And it's the, you know, on one level, I'm very happy for him that he can play these games and that he considers that a win that he can play these games on the Mac. On the other hand, every time I look at those things that he says, I think, no, no, no, no, don't. Cause it's a crossover is using wine. So it's, it's a windows code translator. And they, apparently I saw a very funny tweet that, that even though you can't use 32-bit apps on modern macOS,

Rosetta will actually emulate 32-bit code and they use it. You know, it's a fun thing, but like you don't build a platform on something like that. I hear what Joey is saying here, which is look at the GPUs on these things. Let's use them for something. I get it. I totally get it. Let us use it for something. But I think it's going to need to be native for iOS or Mac, one of those. I mean, I think Apple Arcade games will run really well.

Really, really well on these things. Oh, yeah. And it kind of opens the door if someone was inclined to make an Apple Arcade game whose graphics scale up to be much more impressive on the Mac than they are on the iPad. I'm not sure if anyone has taken that opportunity. Most of the Apple arcade games that I've seen look more or less the same. I mean, higher res on the Mac maybe, but there's nothing drastic about them. Whereas PC games, even just within a single platform, just within the realm of PC, most games have historically come with settings so you can crank them way down for a weaker PC

and they look ugly or way, way, way up for your super high-end one. And it would be nice if the games that Apple actually is, you know, does have a platform for, basically iOS games, it would be nice if we saw more iOS games doing that. And I say Apple Arcade because Apple Arcade games have to be available

on Apple TV and iPhone and Mac, right? That's a requirement to be an Apple Arcade game. Otherwise, like for the most part, iOS developers don't care about the Mac. But when Apple forces them to, they do. And when they do that, it would be neat to see a graphic style

where you could crank it up to ultra and it would look really good on an M1 Ultra. All right, this question is silly, but I think there's something behind it that I think is interesting. This is from Jeff. The year is 2036. John Syracuse's Mac pro dies. No Macs run windows in a fashion that play games decently and streaming games is still subpar. Would John consider buying a windows PC?

Now, John, I'm going to let you answer, but first I just want to say, John won't even buy an Xbox. So I think this is really unlikely, but you have talked about using bootcamp and I have a bootcamp thing set up on my iMac pro that, you know, when I switched to a Mac studio, I'm going to lose it. So how are you feeling feeling about that about the having a system that you can boot into to play windows games if you no longer have an intel mac uh well to be clear the mac studio that i'm thinking about buying would not be for me it'd be for my wife okay you're gonna hang on to your mac mac pro yeah at the very least i gotta see what the the mac pro that apple teased at the end of its event okay what is What is that going to be like?

What will happen in 2036 then when your Mac Pro dies? Yeah. Well, so in 2036, will I be running a Mac Pro? I'd be running a Mac Studio by that point or some other thing that's not a Mac Pro. But either way, the real question is what kind of calamity would have to befall you to get you to buy a Windows PC? Yes. And the real problem with that is like i don't like windows um i'm familiar enough with it to know that that hasn't changed over the years as i've installed various versions of windows you know xp windows 7 i don't

think i've ever had vista windows 8 and now windows 10 i i purchased these windows you know oh yeah copies of windows and install them in boot camp and use them in various macs and i use them to play games. I don't think I would get a windows PC though, because especially with the way Microsoft is running its gaming business lately, I'm not interested in windows at all. I'm only interested in the games. And most of the games that are available on windows are also available at the

very least they're available on Xbox, but they're also very often available on other platforms as well. Like that's the strategy is Microsoft is pursuing to not sort of to be less about the exclusives or whatever. So it just so happens so far, there haven't been any games that are exclusive to Xbox that have caused me to buy an Xbox and the games that are exclusive to PC. I've been able to play on my Mac, but I think in the grand scheme of things, if current trends continue, it's less and less likely with every passing year that there's going to be a game that I just must play that I can't play, you know, that I have to get a Windows PC to play. And you mentioned Crossover makes perfect sense. Because if you're like, if my choice is I have to buy a Windows PC or I could get Crossover and just see how it does, you know, a Crossover running on an Apple Silicon thing where it's doing translation and translating from x86 to ARM just for this one game I want to play, I'd try that product out. And, you know, if it works at all,

it's kind of amazing and it saved me a lot of money because it's way cheaper to buy a crossover and one game than it is to build a, you know, Windows PC. But, you know, I can't do the math in 2036. The real problem is, you know, even if I had made the decisions like, well, there's this game that I just have to play and there's no x86 computers in my house anymore

except for in the attic. And I really need to play that game and it's not available on an Xbox console so I have to buy a Windows PC. The real thing that's going to prevent me from doing that is that I have no place to put a Windows PC in my house. Like literally, I don't have like a desk with a chair in front of it to put it on.

And in the end, that will prevent me from buying a Windows PC because I'm not going to displace my Mac or my wife's Mac. I currently have no place to put a Windows PC. Maybe in 2036, all my kids left the house and I can recommand one of the rooms, but I'm not sure how that's going to go. And maybe we'll move to a house without bedrooms or whatever. I just don't have room for it. Would you buy an Xbox ever? This is like green eggs and ham now. Would you? Yeah, I would buy an Xbox before I'd buy a Windows PC just because, like, the Xbox is so clearly a gaming thing. And I don't have to deal with Windows, right?

I don't like Windows. I don't want to deal with Windows. I'd rather it just be more plug-and-play or whatever, and the Xbox is that. Right. All right. Let's go to this next question then which is related andy asks i know that john usually archives his old macs in the attic but would he consider selling his 2019 mac pro to fund the purchase of an apple silicon equivalent i would sell it if i needed to do it financially. But if

I didn't need to do it financially, the my 2019 Mac Pro has tremendous sentimental value, considering I waited 10 years for Apple to make this computer. And they finally did. And I'm super happy with it. It's one of my favorite computers that I've ever owned. I know it's silly and ridiculous. And no, I don't quote unquote need it for what I do with my computer. But it makes me happy. And it made me happy after a long wait of me not being happy with the computers that I was selling. So in the absence of me desperately needing money, this one's definitely a keeper.

All right. Nathan asks, will a more powerful Mac mini with an M1 Pro be possible with the existing cooling have you looked inside the m1 mac mini it's like a lot of empty space it's a lot awful yeah but the thing is they say with the existing cooling so i think um i think yes yes like here's the way to think about it look at the cooling that's in an M1 Pro-based laptop. Is the cooling in the Mac Mini beefier than that? Yeah, it is.

The fans are taller. They move more air. You can do it. That said, I feel like if you were going to put an M1 Pro in a Mac Mini, and I think Apple probably will eventually, it's an opportunity to fill some of the empty space that's inside if you keep the case the same. If you don't keep the case the same, because the rumors are that it's like a lower case with a glass top and all this other crap, right?

But if you kept the case exactly the same and put an M1 Pro in there, it would be an opportunity to maybe think about. Maybe we could, you know, because you've got all that empty space or whatever. But I don't think you need a bigger case. And like I said, if the rumors turn out to be true, that the M1 Pro pro based mac mini will actually be smaller than the current model show offs just a bunch of show offs brian and brooks uh wrote in with a related question which is where's the m1 pro chip in the desktop more specifically what's the option when m1 is enough power but more than 16 gigs of ram is needed it's quite a jump from the mini to the studio or a macbook pro does this come when the mini is upgraded to the M2?

This is that kind of missing piece. And like I said earlier, I feel like there's a, it's, you know, it's a factor of the fact that Apple is undergoing a chip transition. Because I do think that there will be an option, probably in a Mac mini, whether it's an M1 Pro Mac mini or an M2, if the M2 allows for more RAM, I think it's going to happen. But yeah, it's a fair question right this moment, which is, you know, you either have the straight up M1 or you have to go all the way up to the M1 Macs in the Mac studio right now. Yep, that's one of the big downsides of everything being packaged in a 1.on-one thing is you don't get to scale the sort of CPU and the RAM separately. They're of a piece, and Apple makes a decision about what they think is an appropriate combination. And if you disagree with that decision or it doesn't fit your needs, tough luck. This is, for me, one of the most important things that I'm looking at in the M2 transition is does Apple make a different choice

about the max RAM on the M2? M1 maxes at 16. If the M2 also maxes at 16, that to me would be, I mean, it's not the end of the world, but it would be slightly disappointing to me. I feel like Apple would have more flexibility in the max that it sells

if the M2 can hit 32 gigs. It's not a deal breaker. It's not a big deal it would be fine if it maxed at 16 but i really do hope that the m2 maxes at 32 just because it will it will make it less that that tie between the cpu gpu and the ram it will make that tie feel less painful if there are more more choices you know that it doesn't you know that you don't have to make that leap to a whole larger big thing if you just want a little bit more ram yeah but i also think that the mac

mini came out when the m1 was the only m1 chip you know it was its family it was itself and now uh i think i'm actually a big proponent of this i think you're going to see m1 Pro or M2 Pro or whatever it is in a bunch of systems that currently are M1 only. Not the MacBook Air maybe, but like the Mac Mini is a great example. And I think that, again, I think that iMac, like Apple takes a little more money to give you a little bit more of a processor and sell you a little bit more RAM and all of those things and increase their profit margin. Like I do think that that's going to happen. The first round all came out when it was just the M1, and so it's more limited now than it's going to be down the road. It's that same trend of with the iMac, the technology became available to make a pretty darn good computer that was all-in-one. Apple will continue to be tempted in that direction.

When it becomes possible to put an m1 pro or an m2 you know or m2 pro in that very same 24 inch iMac case it's very tempting for the same reason you said it's tempting to do that because Apple can say look well we made chips and they fit in that cooling envelope and we've already got the design we'll pick different colors but like why would we not do that we can charge more for it we get really great margins on these optional extras or these upgrades or whatever. And that's, that's the path that leads you to eventually, you know, the, the, the 5k iMac with an i9 and an architecture screen.

So Apple needs to keep itself under control because eventually, you know, if, if current trends continue, it may be possible to put like, I mean, we've seen this already. It used to be that the laptops would have tremendously weaker chips than desktops and as technology has marched on the gap between desktop and laptop is power has shrunk to basically almost nothing in apple's line i mean they're not even like they're not even clocked differently you know you can get you can get a uh you know a macbook with a with an m1 max and a desktop with an m1 max and they're just as powerful maybe slightly more thermal throttling on the laptop right what that means is that eventually it will be possible to put the spiritual equivalent of the m1 ultra like you know or the m5 ultra or whatever

into the 24 inch iMac form factor and the only thing stopping Apple from doing that will be hopefully some semblance of having sensible market segmentation because it will still be expensive but like but we can fit it should we make that an option and someone needs to say no let's have products that make sense and are more coherent i know you can fit it but like then what's the point in having the rest of our products right i say the same thing about the potential new mac pro right if it's got the same if the best chip that is in the mac pro is an m1 ultra then why do you have the m1 ultra what differentiates it from the mac studio it's like well it's got card slots but you can't put gpus in them i'm like i feel like they need to you know the the beauty of steve jobs simplicity of that grid you know consumer pro desktop laptop i'm not saying a four quadrant

grid is the correct grid for apple's current products, but boy, that simplification going down from a thousand performers is very clarifying. And I hope somewhere inside Apple, there is an equivalent master plan of the Mac line that is equally sensible. Yeah. It's a little, it's a little discipline that needs to be exerted to say, you know, what, where do we want to place our bets? And I think if, if anything, I would say that this, apple silicon mac product transition has shown a lot of discipline i feel like they are making some calls and they they can't do everything but it seems to me like they got a plan and they're executing on it and you know the challenge is always going to be the does the plan start to unravel when you kind of move on

to round two and round five five five years from now. Yeah, we'll see. When you're able to do so many more things and you can start to mix and match even more. Like the discipline to keep the M1 to the low ends and like M1 Pro and Max to the middles and the M1 Ultra, like we look at them, you know, because it is plausible to put an M1 Ultra

on the back of an iMac. They have the discipline not to do that because they'd be like, well, we could fit that, but it would be way thicker than the 24 inch. And what are we saying about the iMac? The iMac is supposed to be the thin all-in-one that disappears on your desk.

And even though we can make an M1 Ultra iMac, that would not be the thing that we said, which is the really thin computer disappears on your desk because it's not going to disappear on your desk with an M1 Ultra. It's like, but it would still be thinner than the old iMac.

You need to keep that discipline. You need to keep the discipline of the name and the product, you know, aligned, whatever, like a sort of a vision statement or a mission statement for the product. And keep that in mind, even when it becomes technically possible to do all sorts of fantastic stuff. All right. One more before we go, John. I want your take on this.

Mike and I have been laughing a lot at Apple's very strange color situation. We've really gotten into talking about what colors are on what products and that they've introduced these new non-color colors like midnight and starlight. Eshu writes, how would both of you fix Apple's color situation? Midnight, starlight, silver, graphite silver graphite space gray black all the things what do you think about where apple is with its uh defining colors for its products right now part of picking colors for products is inevitably fashion um as in what kinds of colors are trendy or what kinds of color trends do we want to set by choosing those colors and the complex interconnected reason why let's say these these kind of muted

pastelly but not really pastelly colors that apple's been using you know like the what was the midnight green the the blues that are kind of dusty and chalky. They've been doing that for several years. That's a fashion choice just as much as the teal iMac was, just as much as the Lifesavers iMacs were, just as much as the fall colors, sage, things like that's fashion, right? And so I don't necessarily think that it is a problem that Apple has been picking these colors. I think it is just a fashion trend that we are in the midst of and it will it will pass like all fashion does and there

will be different choices in the future that's why i'm mostly just excited that we have colors at all and i can't really it's hard to push back against a fashion trend when you're in the midst of it it's like being you know in the 70s and saying you hate mustaches. It's like, well, wait a little bit. It'll clear up, right? But for now... It's like being involved in podcasts and not having a beard. Well, yeah, we all have beards now. It was our home with COVID.

We don't have to shave anymore. So I don't think it's necessarily something to fix, although I would actually, as I joked on this week's ATP, introduce a color called dishwater and see if anybody notices because i feel like a lot of the colors i mean if you it's midnight and starlight are like have these beautiful aspirational names but honestly that's what color dishwater is like it's what you've made a dishwater product um and the name of the silver and the space gray it's been a joke forever that there's been 700 colors that are called space gray

and space is not gray number one and number two all these colors are different from each other so and they're all basically silver unless unless you hold them next to each other you just say it was silver and then you're like oh it's a little darker silver great yeah yeah although i i feel like i can tell the difference without a comparison but uh most people who don't know the intimate details of the shades of gray might not be able to tell um but i i do like the new colors of the imac and i think that is a to tell. But I do like the new colors of the iMac. And I think that is a, to show that things change over time, the iMacs, particularly the back of the 24-inch iMacs,

are way more saturated than products have been, while still not being candy apple red, like the product red ones are, right? And I think, again, if you didn't like the sort of midnight starlight, emerald, midnight green type thing, and the very muted blues that basically look black, if you didn't like that, the iMacs are a sign that the fashion is slowly changing. So I would say just wait a few years

and hopefully the colors will change. The only thing I would fix is I would say, bring back the Apple that wasn't afraid to make its pro products in more fun colors. Yes. Well, people who've listened to Upgrade have heard me rant about this a little bit, but I have two points I will make here

since Eshu asked, how would I fix it? One is, I would really like, this is why Mike and I started talking about how there needs to be a color czar at Apple. It's like, I want, you talk about discipline and having a plan. Like, color is fashion,

but I want somebody in charge of it and I want some consistency. So first off is, if it's named something, it should be that color everywhere i don't want there to be that's that's asking a lot i i mean i don't want there to be a well if it's named something that's not like green you know i know there's different greens but if space gray should probably mean something that isn't whatever we want it to mean space gray is a lost cause anyway i already pushed back against that rule i already say your rule number one of the colors are i reject it you know

why because i feel like colors just want to be free man space gray at this point is a branding thing and i don't want if i want to make my like so far gone it's gone but every individual product should be able to choose the shade of quote unquote space. They're all, they're all fragile flowers. It looks good on their own because shade of gray. Cause, cause making,

picking the color for something as vast as like a 27 inch iMac versus the color of the back of a phone. You have to make different choices there. And if there was one corporate thing called space gray, they would either force people to eschew the space gray branding and say well we have a gray but we couldn't call it space gray because space gray actually looks bad on our phone or it would cause them to choose the standard space gray that is a poor fit for either the very large iMac or the very small phone I mean the other alternative is to do what the car industry does where no two color names are ever the same with the rare exception of things like Ferrarirari where there's

like a traditional color name or whatever if you look at like what is what is the blue color called on the honda accord over the past decade they change it every single year right it's never the same even if it's almost the same color blue it's like mattresses every single year it's alpine green iphone it's the alpine green it's totally different than the midnight green. It's Alpine green. Car paint colors are the most hilarious, like, you know, word soups that mean nothing, but they, they tend not to just want to call it blue, especially in the high end. So I would like some consistency, but I get what you're saying, but I would like a little more consistency. Um, but my overarching point is colors are fun. Computers can be fun. I would like Apple to continue what it's done with the iMac in other places.

And while I understand that professional users often want it to be not the center of attention or they want something that's color neutral and that there should be options for them, I would like Apple's pro products to also be fun because computers and phones and stuff can be fun. And so I just want more color options in more places. But the iMacs are a good start. Put it that way. The iMacs are a good start. And I love my iPhone mini in blue. I think it's great. So, you know, personality, adding personality, having an orange iMac, right?

Like, it's great. More of that, please. Yeah, and if I had to convince Apple of, like, why, you know, because Apple obviously has a very straightforward reason for not doing that. Like, well, they're professional. It's more professional. It should be more formal. It's not as, you know, frivolous, right? right they should learn from the you know past analogs where there have been companies that have had extremely high-end expensive products that have made the unexpected color of their products

part of the branding look at sgi sgi sold computers that cost as much as you know a fleet of cars right there were huge amounts of money and they would come in like eggplant purple uh or you know like the colors that you would not expect a very expensive computer to come in and that became part of their branding that you'd see them in the server room or whatever and you could pick them out from a mile away ah that's an sgi or that's a sun with its pale blue and even you know even if it was a subdued with a pale blue feet with it with the gauge you could you could even in a blurry terrible six-figure party picture you can pick out which of the sudden computers and which of the SGI is color can be part of your branding. It doesn't even need to be a particularly

attractive color. If someone, you know, whatever color they pick, obviously you could pick black or something. I know Apple hasn't made a pro black computer in a long time, and that's an easy one. But even if you just made them like deep orange or something, whatever color they picked, when people would see them, they'd be like, oh, that's one of those Mac pros or that's one of their whatever's. Color can be a powerful signal for your highest end product if you pick a good one. And it's also fun. I'm not saying you have to, you know, make them in candy colors. Apple did that in the very beginning of the Power Mac days, post-iMac Power Mac days, where you had the iMac, and then they made the blue and white G3 that was essentially an iMac tower. And then they subdued it a little bit for the G4, where it got a little bit darker.

And then they made it silver with the Quicksilver and the Mirror Drive doors. And then just color was gone. It was like, no sparkles, no nothing. It's just going to be space gray or whatever. They made a black MacBook once, and that was gone it was like no not even no sparkles no nothing it's just going to be space gray or whatever they made a black macbook once and that was about it um so i'm i'm ready for any kind of stronger visual branding for the pro products and i think it would help differentiate them it's one of the advantages you get when you're going to sell a computer for an obscene price throw in the silly surface treatment right it's the same way you can get supercars with paint

colors that cost as much as another car that's that's where you can get away with that when you're selling someone a fifteen thousand dollar computer already you know tack on an extra hundred bucks to have it to be like sparkle yellow like if that's your if you've decided that's your branding for your high-end one whatever you pick i trust that apple could pick a tasteful color i'm sure. People work and people will start to recognize that color as meaning that color equals expense and power. The reason I'm hopeful for this

is that Apple actually has shown that they understand that people like colors and they like fun stuff because the iPhones do have colors and the Apple Watches do have- Even the Pro ones, but the Pro ones are a little muted. Yes, yes.

And the Apple Watches have many different bands and fashion colors and the iMacs come in colors and I feel like we're getting to a better place where there are more colors. And I am very much looking forward to that rumored MacBook Air that will be more like the 24-inch iMac and will come in different colors because I have thought about a blue or orange laptop for a long time. It would be a lot of fun. Like in the old days when it was the iBook and they had a blue and an orange. Maybe. And they just did it with the iPad Airs, right? The new iPad Airs all come in nice colors too. Again, slightly muted, slightly chalky. Yeah, I wish they were a little bit brighter. They should be a little more fun.

But they're getting there. They're taking their time. All right. Well, if you have a question for Ask Upgrade, you can tweet at us at hashtag Ask Upgrade or question mark Ask Upgrade in the RelayFM member Discord. This brings us to the end of this very special episode. I want to thank my sponsors for this week, Bombas, New Relic, and Memberful. And most of all, I want to thank John Syracusa for dropping in on this episode with Mike in transit.

John, it was a pleasure to talk to you about things that are more than whether something is a robot or not. Yeah, we got to talk about Macs max i'm always available to do that although these days mike has become more of a mac fan as well so i don't feel like it was necessary for me to fill in for uh this ipad it's true it's true but we go back a little bit i mean this was i of all the weeks for me to talk to you about max when we get the first sort of like brand new mac model type in a long time um this was a good time i thought thought, to get caught up, you and me, about Mac stuff. So I'm glad you could be here. I was glad to do it. And we will see you all next week.

Mike will be back. Thanks to our members who support us. If you're not a member, go to getupgradeplus.com. Become a member. You get ad-free versions of the show with extras. Mike does that better than me, but I'm out of practice. Anyway, we will be back next week. But until then, say goodbye, John Syracuse.

Goodbye. Goodbye, everybody.