Upgrade - 399: The Mysteries of Thunderbolt

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Jason's got the new Mac Studio and Studio Display and it's time for his complete review. We also discuss where the M2 chip might appear, and what the Mac will look like in 2023.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 399 today's show is brought to you by squarespace doordash and memberful my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike hurley welcome back to the upgrade program i'm very happy to be here. And I come with me bearing a Hashtag Snail Talk question that comes from Peter, who says, Jason, you did your cord cutting when you went through that and you cut all the cords. Did you add a cord, an Ethernet cable to your Apple TV box? Okay. Or are you just using your home Wi-Fi? I just want to clarify, when people talk about cord cutting, it's a metaphor because you don't actually cut the cord.

Yeah, I sure do. There's still a, well, I did cut the cable, TV cable, but there is now a fiber optic cable running into my house. It's not like I actually cut the cord. It's a metaphor. And my Apple TV boxes have been wired with Ethernet for a long time now because it's more reliable. ethernet um for a long time now because it's more reliable and if i've got any device that can be wired with ethernet i wire it with ethernet because it's more reliable than wi-fi and faster and so yes my apple tv has already had ethernet i didn't add it it already had it and uh that is for reliability from the outside and also for speed on the inside because i do have a plex

server so it is going to be you know the plex stuff can come down faster than stuff from the internet so yeah that's why i've never even thought about plugging an apple tv into ethernet like it's just honestly i forgot that it even had the port oh yeah but it's cool i mean it's it's it is i mean that's the truth is that wired is going to be more reliable than Wi-Fi. Even if you have reliable Wi-Fi, it's going to be a little bit faster and it's going to be, you know, weird things happen with Wi-Fi. Weird things can happen with Ethernet too, but it's much less common. And again, I've got a whole Ethernet like connectivity thing.

Like there's so much Ethernet in my, in where the Apple TV is that why would I not plug it in? in where the Apple TV is, why would I not plug it in? If you would like to send in a question for us to open an episode of Upgrade with, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk or use question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. Saddle up, Jason Snell,

because we're going to mosey on down for the rumor roundup. And I've got a big one for you today, my friend. We've got like a lot of categories we're going to get through because it's been a busy couple of weeks. There's been a lot going on. I'm going to start with a Mac mini. 9 to 5 mac is reporting that apple is working on an update to the mac mini which will feature options for an m2 and m2 pro

chip the m2 will still feature eight cpu cores like the m1 but it will be bumped up to 10 gpu cores the m2 pro will have a 12 core cpu, and I'm assuming a 10-core GPU. They didn't specify that in the article. Reading from 9to5Mac, according to 9to5Mac's sources, Apple had plans to introduce high-end versions of the current Mac Mini with the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, but they were probably scrapped to make way for the Mac Studio.

And Ming-Chi Kuo is reporting that this Mac Mini is set for 2023, and it will feature the same design that we have currently, which I guess kind of makes sense, given the way the Mac Studio looks. Yeah, yeah. I think what's interesting here is that we're starting to talk about what the M2 generation is going to look like. Yep, got more of that coming up. Yeah, and there is a question of like, well, are they going to do a higher-end Mac mini since they have the Mac Studio? But a lot of people have written about, Dan Morin did it in Six Colors last week,

like there's a hole in the Mac desktop space between an M1 in a bunch of computers and the M1 Max in the studio, and that's the base. And it's in that kind of like pro level. Why isn't there a, a pro M whatever pro chip desktop and the Mac mini is the logical place for it. I think it might be in the iMac too,

but like the Mac mini is a logical place for it. And it sounds like this is just going to be a next generation. Maybe they set it aside. As Ming-Chi Kuo suggests that maybe they set it aside um as ming chi kuo suggests maybe they set it aside for the mac studio and thought let's get this thing out the door this year probably these computers are not going to be updated every year right so maybe it's like okay we're going to do the studio this year we'll see we'll see maybe they will well i mean saying that the m1 mac mini as ming chi kuo saying is for 2023, that would be like way over like an 18-month span at least, nearly two years since the Mac Mini received any kind of update.

You got the M1 Mac Mini, and then in 2023, they come back in early 2023, let's say, with the M2, with an option for an M2 Pro. And I think that's what Apple wants to do, right? pro and then you and and that i think that's what apple wants to do right i think we've seen um we've seen generation one of apple silicon now more or less and you know it is their first attempt and they've got a lot to do so i think it's not surprising that maybe um we're gonna see a more full well-rounded set of products when they get to m2 because yeah the m2 pro is a really great example of like there's just no desktops with m2 pro why is that and i think it's because they revised a bunch of their lower end desktops for the m1 and then put them aside because they had other stuff to do and they haven't gotten back to it yet i mean and it's also possible that apple just think

that that's laptop territory like i know that's maybe not what you're asking for, you know, what people might be asking for, but maybe for them, they don't feel the need to cover every possible chip variant in a desktop machine. I don't know, right? I doubt it because Apple, the modern Apple, we talk a lot about Tim Cook's Apple being really good at like keeping old products around. The other thing that I've noticed in the Apple Silicon era, especially with modern Apple, is modern Apple

is really good at reusing parts. They make their own stuff and then they use it everywhere. And so I think that we will eventually get to the point where there's M1 Pro stuff in desktops, just like there are in laptops, why not it's an opportunity to upsell a mac mini user i think it probably will happen but it's not surprising that it didn't happen this round because i think the laptops were the priority yeah talking about laptops the macbook air now we're going to move on to so nine to five mac is also nine to five mac's got a lot of reports at the moment. They've stumbled across something. They've got some new sources.

You know, we spoke about the fact that they were bang on with the Mac Studio and both that Mac Mini and this MacBook Air report they're saying come from their sources. So 9to5Mac is reporting that a new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro will come later this year featuring the M2 chip. We will not be getting the updated MacBook Air until the M2 is ready. They are also reporting that Apple is considering dropping the Pro from the 13-inch MacBook Pro,

making it just the MacBook. Whether that will happen this time around or not, they're not sure, but that is something that Apple is apparently considering, which I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that would certainly make it a lot less weirder of a lot of sense. Yeah, that would certainly make it a lot less weirder of a product. Correct.

Yeah, definitely. And Mark Gurman, the sheriff of the room around up, added to this saying that the new MacBook Air was originally expected to be a late 2021 product featuring a new design, MagSafe, and the M2 chip, but it's now expected in the second half of 2022. I guess this would, you would then assume there has been some kind of hold up on the m2 it's probably because of all the shortages around you know like around everything at the moment so maybe apple was

held off from m2 products because mark also reports that an m2 pro update to the 14 and 16 inch macbook pro is now not expected until 2023 so what it seems from these reports so far is that we will see the m2 this year but the m2 pro could potentially be 2023 right because now the mac mini and the macbook pro is not expected to get any updates until 2023 and it looks like what we're looking at here, at least for now, is an 18 to 24 month cycle of updating these products. And I wonder, in the long run, I'm wondering what that means in terms of core, like the base core of the M chips. And where, at some point, you'll be way behind the A series. where at some point you'll be way behind the A series. So I wonder if they will have a skip year where they go like based on like the M2

is based on the A15, but the M3 is based on the A17 or something like that. Like I do wonder if they'll get there at some point. It's hard to gauge given the supply chain constraints and everything else, exactly what Apple wants this to be. I have a hard time believing that Apple wants a two-year

cycle for upgrades. I think that it probably wants something more like 18 months and maybe even annually for some products. But I don't think, I mean, what Mark Gurman's report suggests more than anything is that they really did want to have a new MacBook Air about a year after the first one, and they just couldn't do it. And so now it's going to be second half, which I had somebody in a Slack that I'm in say, oh, see, Mark Gurman says now that the MacBook Air is not going to come out until the fall. And it's like, well, second half starts in July 1st, right? You could announce it at WWDC and ship it in july if you wanted to and that's technically second half yeah fall is probably more likely but we don't know yet i'm sure they

would love to get it out before back to school if they can right i think that would be pretty prime i think apple would love to announce the m2 at wwdc right i think they would love that so we and maybe we will see that um yeah interesting to see that and and the um the macbook pro being less weird is an interesting wrinkle i've been wondering for a while now if they would bring back the macbook name that's one way to do it um but yeah so i think the question is just when does the m2 cycle begin now that the m1 seems to be kind of gliding to its end ross young display analyst has some obviously some display reports a 27 inch mini led standalone display is still expected by young for june and he's referring to it as studio display pro and has now corrected a rumor that he was talking about earlier in the year about an iMac Pro with these exact specs, 27 inches of mini LED.

What Young has said was that his supply chain contacts may have misconstrued what this panel was for or what he was told. Basically, it was expected this panel is going to be for an iMac Pro, but there is no iMac Pro it's going to be its own more expensive display um 27 inches is odd to me I will say because that's exactly what the current studio display is I would have expected larger same and the rumors were for a larger iMac too right so that would actually... There are lots of things for me to be skeptical about this report.

And I don't know Ross Young's track record, but I'll just say that like, this feels like something that may be in flux, I guess is what I would say. Is Apple working on a mini LED standalone display or a mini LED display to put in a large product, whether it's a standalone or an iMac. Undoubtedly, right.

I mean, I'm sure they're working on a replacement to the Pro Display XDR, which is mini LED, right? That makes sense to me. Absolutely, right. So what I'm saying, though, is I don't know if his information is going to get the ship dates right. It seems weird to me that apple would follow up the studio display with a pro version uh three months later that seems very strange to me um and also he that means he's suggesting that they're going to announce the mac pro at wwdc basically and then ship it um maybe i mean all of that if it's possible to me like it's possible to me that

i can imagine them launching a new display alongside the Mac Pro. The thing I would struggle with is if it's the exact same size as the one that they just announced. Right. That would be weird to me. It would be weird. I will throw this out there. Putting a display, pairing a display with a Mac Pro announcement, that's XDR kind of stuff. Yes.

You do that when it's really expensive. And that may be the story here is Apple is doing a standalone. Maybe it's even a 27. It's going to be XDR, mini LED backlit. It's going to be beautiful. They're pairing it with a Mac Pro because everybody's going to scream bloody murder when they find out that it costs 3000 bucks. Yeah. Right. That's the, that's, that's the, they're going the gonna be the trick there so if they do it so for people who are like and i know we're going to talk about the studio display a little bit later um for people who are saying i can't believe it like oh i bought this thing and now they're going to do this other awesome thing and i can't believe that they would do this to me just wait

till you see the price of it right because like that's right now if they do that the what is rumored it's going to cost a rumored, it's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to cause way more than $1,600. Let me tell you. And, um, a lot of people are going to look at the, uh, the studio display and say, oh, I'll, I'll stick with this. It's a good deal.

It's a nice, it's a, it's a, it's a, well, that's, that's one of the arguments about the studio display is people are like, ah, but you can get other monitors. It's like you can, but really there's only the LG Ultra Fine. And everybody, you know, did not embrace the LG Ultra Fine. It's okay. And people have bought it. But now you've got this Apple monitor and yeah, it's more expensive. But like, what's the competition in terms of Apple, really Apple focused monitors?

There are other displays that always have been. Apple, really Apple-focused monitors. There are other displays that always have been, but that's the problem that I have, is, like, it is fulfilling a specific need that at $1,600, given that it's from Apple, I actually was surprised that it wasn't $2,000. So, yeah, you pay extra, but you get an Apple display, and that's why.

But the next one, if it's this one, it's not going to be $1,600. It's not going to be $2,000, right? It's going to be $2 this one, it's not going to be $1,600. It's not going to be $2,000, right? It's going to be $2,500 or it's going to be $3,000. It's going to be really expensive. And they're going to talk about all the pro and dynamic range features for video and all that kind of stuff. And pro motion. Sure, all of that stuff.

And they're going to put it in a pro context because no regular person is going to buy it for what it's going to cost at the outset. And then maybe next year it is in an iMac Pro and that iMac Pro will also be $5,000 or whatever like the old iMac Pro was. Maybe. And finally, Mark Gurman has published his expectation of the Mac lineup by the end of 2023. Keep in mind, 23. This is next year this is uh 20 months away yeah so pro macbook pro 14 and 16 inch with an m2 pro and m2 max imac pro with an m2 pro and m2 max max studio with an m2 max and m2 ultra mac pro with an m2 ultra and m2 extreme. That's what me and Stephen said, remember? A couple of weeks ago, M2 Extreme. And Apple Pro Display 7K.

Whatever that is, right? It's the XDR replacement, right? It's the $5,000 display, yeah. And then consumer, MacBook Air with an M2, MacBook Pro 13-inch with an M2, Mac Mini with an M2 and M2 13-inch with an M2, Mac Mini with an M2 and M2 Pro version to replace the Intel model, iMac with an M2,

Apple Studio Display. Seems pretty reasonable, right? He's filling in the gaps there of what exists already and what seems like it will probably exist, and then filling it with M2 processors so they finish the next turn of the wheel.

I think that's all pretty reasonable. The things that make you raise your eyebrows are iMac Pro, right? Because they don't have something like that now. And that would be, and I think our guess that we just made is probably right, which is if you do that, you really make an iMac Pro and you put the good display in it and you offer the same stuff that's in the Mac Studio and it costs. It costs, right? Maybe it doesn't start at $5,000, but maybe it starts at $3,000 and then the Ultra version is $5,000, something like that. But I could see it. I could see it. And then on the consumer side, yeah. I mean, that's basically just everything that's obvious plus the Intel Mac Mini being replaced, which is also obvious.

I think that's right. I think Apple's consumer story is actually pretty clear right now of what they're going to do. We need to know some of the details, but I don't think anybody really expects a giant revamp of it. They'll update the MacBook Air and they're going to fix the MacBook Pro 13 inch so that it isn't what it currently is and maybe rebrand it when they do that. That's an interesting idea. And then we're still too early to settle on exactly what Apple's desired cycle is for this. I really am fascinated by that. Are they going to try to turn this over every two years or every year or every 18 months? But there's less surprise, it looks like. Of course, true surprises are surprises.

But I don't know. I feel like we're getting in the shape of it now. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Squarespace, the only one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. You can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, your products, services,

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That's squarespace.com slash upgrade and when you sign up use the offer code upgrade and you'll get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of Upgrade and all of RelayFM. So the Mac Studio is now available to the world and of course you wrote your review which was published late last week and so we're going to talk about it. Can you remind the Upgradian listeners, the Upgradians out there,

the configuration that you have here and also the configuration that you ordered for yourself? The one that I've got here from Apple is the 3199 version. It's got the 32-core GPU. It's the M1 Max, 32 core GPU, 2TB of storage, 64GB of RAM. The one I ordered was the

24 core GPU with 32GB of RAM and 2TB storage. Okay. So it's storage is the same, less RAM, and yours is the base M1 Max, is that right? The 24 core? With 2Tabytes of storage.

Yeah, but that's the base configuration. I almost went with the base base, but my iMac Pro had one terabyte of onboard storage, and I decided I wanted more than that because I was hitting right up against it. I wouldn't say it's cheap because you're being practical with it. This is already more powerful than the machine you know that is replaced yeah what i'm saying is more that

like when i got the imac pro i got the base model yeah and when i got the mac studio i got the base model plus a little bit but mostly i got the base model because for me i am one of those people who's like i'm tempted by those pro kind of features but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go venturing up into the high-end configure to order expensive it's like for me getting to the base model is the is the place that you know achieves my goal and then i don't need to go beyond that yeah one of the things i find interesting right now like i've just been poking around on apple's website and basically the only machines that are available for pickup anywhere are the base configurations.

Like you add any kind of build to order spec and it's like unavailable and it's 10 to 12 weeks. Like anything that you change. I mean, usually, I mean, in the past, you know, we've experienced this. There are like certain configurations that you keep in store. Now, and I don't know if you go to an Apple store,

maybe that's, maybe it's different, but for the pickup at least, like, like you know sometimes maybe if you bumped up the ram one and bumped up the ssd one you might be able to get it but at the moment it seems like everything is really really back ordered i mean just in general like i know that it's been tough like my display we're going to talk about display in a bit um isn't coming still like i've had no update sometime between the end of march and the beginning of april and i ordered it immediately but that's because i didn't go for the regular one like which you can you know you can pick those up in store but if you want one of the

stand options you know like even the face or the adjustable stand you you have to get it online and you are going to be waiting so i don't know what's going on there but well i mean shenzhen the the um the factories in shenzhen shut down briefly yeah for covid so everything else you know so like you know it was already delays i'm sure before even that all started to happen again so uh do you have any having used a machine which is going to be a bit more powerful than the one that you have ordered do you have any regrets about the order that you made no okay i'm not ever stressing the gpu really of anything and 24 24 core gpu yeah it's fine it's okay i'll be fine i'll be just fine with that ram is definitely going to be enough too yeah i think so like i yeah i think so that that's that's i have a hard time justifying the cost to go up to 64 and i'm

not sure that it really is again one of those things that is necessary for my use yeah like i've told this story before on the show right like i've got 16 gigabytes of ram on my first m1 machine uh because it was all i could do right and i have 16 gigabytes of ram on the imac in front of me now the macbook pro was a problem like i was it was always telling me it was running out of ram so when i got my new macbook pro like the second generation mac pro went up to 64 gigabytes and that's what was more than more than needed like i could have got away with 32 and i reckon i'd be absolutely fine yeah there was just something going on with their macbook pro because i never get those like pop-ups telling me i've run out of RAM on my iMac. And I put my iMac through way more than I put that MacBook Pro through.

So I don't know what was going on. Something weird was happening. Going on. But whereas the terabytes on the SSD, it's like, I live with this thing. I have big projects. I have had those moments where I've needed to clear things out. I'm not always running right up against it. to clear things out. It's not, you know,

I'm not always running right up against it, but it's enough for me to be, to decide I'll pay some money to not be bothered by it anymore. Yeah. Like this one here has two terabytes and I have 1.05 terabytes available, right? So you can see I'm right up against it and I'd be happy to not be right up against it oh

for sure like i have a terabyte on my iMac and i have 286 gigabytes available i don't like that yeah like that's closer than i need to be considering you know i have things that can get very large in size very quickly like projects that i'm working on you know so i would but again it was all i could do with the M1. Like, I don't think I had much more of an option, at least for this machine. So I agree, like storage, I mean, because how long did you have your iMac Pro for?

Like four or five years? Something like that? Well, since it came out, so what is that? That's 2017, wasn't it? It was December 2017, so four plus years and so again the expectation would be that this that's what this mac studio will get from you so yeah if there was anything you were going to change i would completely agree with you that ssd storage is the one to bump up for yeah i think so i want to read a quote from your article this

is a computer designed to be used not to be looked at as a piece of art. When you choose to stick ports on the front of a computer, you are choosing function over form. That is the story of the Mac Studio. Yep. It is a very utilitarian computer. Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that's what it is.

It's telling the story of itself, like in the way that you mention it, right? Like they have built a computer to work good. And that's what it does, i i refer to some people complain because i refer to it as homely which is it's a it's a slur right i am saying that it's unattractive in appearance but also i will point out that there is this other meaning sort of like or at least vibe from that term and i know in the britishism homely also means sort of like uh comfy like not fancy but cozy and comfy and and unpretentious that's another kind of phrase of homely and that is also what i mean like it is a tool it is designed to be used it is utilitarian and is it is it beautiful and an object of art no no no no it's not and that's the point and it's okay and if you if you like how it looks great but like i feel like it it is it it is it's supposed to look like something that you actually

use and and if they put the ports, the ports of the story, right? Like they put ports on the front and a slot on the front. You do that when you don't care about the form because you really know that people want ports on the front for the function. And that tells the whole story of this product. And that's good. It's a good thing. good that's a it's a good thing it's not we've just spent five years or more with pros especially telling apple stop making my life harder for aesthetics i don't care about when i'm doing my job and also like by putting ports on the front of it there is a demonstration of saying we are

proud of the way this thing looks because we want you to put it on front of in front of you on your desk right sure you know like but putting the ports on the front rather than say like on the top, like they are on the Mac Pro, right? Which is like, oh, we know we are going to put this thing under the desk, so we put them on the top so they're easy to get to. But putting them on the front,

that is saying like this thing sits on the table and that's where all of Apple's shots show, right? Like it's on the table in front of you. Day one, I had plugged into the front ports and put a card in the card slot day one i was doing those photos for the verge and i was just sticking the card in the slot uh from out of my out of the sony camera and then the um when i was pairing the wireless uh like track pad uh i just plugged it into the front because it was right there right like why reach around to the back to just plug it in right there and it's like oh now this track

pad is paired and i can i can continue the startup process i kind of wished i had one usb c port in the front of my iMac like i really do like i don't know that sounds silly but like i have to do that similar thing because of the way i mean anytime, anytime, right? You use one of their keyboards, Apple's keyboards, every now and then you've got to plug it in to charge it. And I kind of find it awkward to reach behind there, you know? And with my iMac Pro, I used to have one of these things, I think SanDisk made it maybe, where it would put some ports on the front

and it was color matched with the iMac Pro. So you could have some ports on the front. And I like that. I think that that's good. Or like David is saying in the chat, on the side would be nicer even, right? Because you're putting it on the back. It's like a little awkward.

I have to like move the iMac, which luckily this 24-inch iMac is so incredibly light. It's very easy to just swivel on the base that I got it on. But, you know, there is something to be said for having ports on the front of your machine. All right. And especially this machine. This is meant to be a creative workhorse machine.

That's what it's for. And so exactly that. You want to put an SD card port on it. Great. Put it on the back. You'll just annoy everyone. Everyone will be annoyed at you if you put the SD card port on the back of the thing. Absolutely.

And if you think about it, whether it's's in a um like a lot of us are individuals but like if it's in a studio environment where it's locked down by a bunch of it people or it's an education environment or it's a video lab in a high school or something like that like it people people are going to come in they're going to have everything plugged in the back and it's going to be all zip tied off and locked down and have the security uh bolt on it and all those things. Right. And then the kid comes in with a camera and they're like, all right, well now I need to import my footage or the person in the, in the pro, you know, a pro studio environment. It's like, well, that's what the ports on the front are for.

Right. Like that's, you don't need to, you don't need to mess with it. It's, it's mounted, it's locked, whatever it is. Doesn't matter. Use the ports in the front ports in the front or right there. And that's, that's, it's just utilitarian and it is good. And I,

like I used it immediately. So I thought that was, I thought that was great. By the way, as an aside, since you're talking about your iMac, putting an Apple Silicon computer on my desk

also meant that I initiated Operation Be Like Mike Hurley, which is I now have, I now have a secret button underneath my desk that I can place my finger on to unlock things via touch id and no one needs to know that there's a whole keyboard under there isn't it velcroed to the bottom i just have a little secret touch id button like i could like i'm like a james bond villain and i'm dropping somebody into a pool of sharks and

it's like there it is i feel like i'm a specter agent, you know? Yep, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I'm thinking about getting like carabiner or something and like blocking out all the other keys on the keyboard so that I don't accidentally miss and type things. I've never done it. I've never done it. Once you locate where it is in your mind, then you don't do it.

But I did the first day i i did a whole bunch of like nonsense the only thing i've ever done is like if for some reason i don't know why like i've arrived right maybe messed around with my chair a little bit like the arms on my chair or something if i kind of uh just shuffle a little in my chair i can lock my mac because it hits the power button on the keyboard and so like it just just locks it for me uh but you know most of the time not an issue but yeah you can go wild if you want to you can type as much as you like and i'm i'm sad that it's only the silver version that's available online but then again i can't see that keyboard so it's fine it's fine i have

a beautiful yellow keyboard stuck to the bottom of my desk. Yeah. Talking about your desk, you reference it being cluttered, and that you now have an Apple Silicon computer on your desk, right? You've got a monitor. We're going to talk about the monitor in a bit. But the machine is sitting on the top. Yes. What do you feel about this, having this big machine, big, quote-unquote, like sitting on the desk?

Is that, how does that feel for you? Yeah, keep in mind, with the iMac, both the iMac Pro and the iMac 5k before that it's been since I first moved in here and I had a Dell monitor on an arm and I had a MacBook Air dock to it right that I've had something on the desk because with the arm it's floating above the desk and if people want to look at this I mean I guess I can get an image for the show notes we did a a video, Dan Morin and I did a video after the embargo dropped for about 90 minutes and we answered questions and we talked about it. And one of the shots in that for most of that video is an overhead shot of my desk.

So you can see the Mac studio and you can see the display and you can see all the cables. And that was a, so it's a change because I have this thing on my desk that didn't used to be there. What's nice about it from a cabling perspective is that most of the cables go into the back of the mac studio which is over right now i've got it over by the cable port on the top of the desk the whole the cables route through and then only two cables right only two cables power and the thunderbolt cable are running to the display so it's less cable cluttery in that way and when the arm when i get my vase amount version with arm those two cables will run down the arm i see and but but i do have this square because when when with the imac all of the cables have to run freely to the machine itself, right?

And then they're on the arm and you need some slack on them so you can move it around. Yeah, exactly. But most of the ports, you can just put them all the way in the corner if you want to because they're attached to the Mac itself. Right. How do you feel about having the computer on your desk, though? It's going to take some getting used to, and I'm not sure I will get used to it. I'm open to the idea of mounting it under my desk. Honestly, I'm thinking about that. Like if somebody would make, and it hasn't happened yet, there are companies that make

under desk mounts, but they are, have not made one that is for the essentially Mac mini dimension dimensions, but four inches high, which is what you need for this thing. I'm sure someone will, right. If they haven't already, they will be announcing those products soon. But I would be open to doing that. I would probably want to mount it toward the front of my desk so I had access to the slots and stuff. But getting it off my desk might be nice

just because it would give me more space on my desk because I like my desk to be uncluttered. But it's okay. It's just fascinating to me because I just got used to the all-in-one life, right? And now I'm not in that all-in-one life. And so I've got this other object that has the pro is all the cables just feed into it. And then the one cable comes out and goes to the monitor from the computer. That's great. But the other thing is there is this block of aluminum sitting on the top of my desk,

and that's a different kind of feel. So I'll be interested to see how I adapt to it over time and if I do end up mounting it underneath the desktop instead. We'll see. I've been kind of perplexed a little bit about the M1 Macs in the Mac Studio after reading your review. And it's kind of about performance and how that performance is extracted in the machine. So I want to start off just by getting your thoughts

on the performance of the machine so i want to start off just by getting your thoughts on the performance of the machine in general and for you how it compares to the computer is replacing so like how have you felt about the performance improvements compared to i think the most important thing the previous pro mac that you had sure i think so first again to be clear apple did not supply me with an m1 ultra configuration wish they had but they didn't i honestly jason i'm actually kind of pleased they didn't and the reason is it's like i feel like there's been too much all the reviews that i've seen focus on the ultra which is not the machine most people will buy right it's the news though but it's not the machine most people yeah i understand maybe from your perspective

of writing the review, maybe you'd want the biggest. But me as a reader, I'm happy you actually got the more realistic one. In doing that, though, what I realized in having the M1 Max is

I compared it to the M1 Max MacBook Pro that I reviewed last fall. I ran the same tests. And since this is the first time we've had two non-M1 Apple Silicon Macs that ran the same chip. Now, I know that was a lot of qualifiers,

so let me phrase it a different way too. We've had a lot of M1 devices, right? Mac Mini, MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, far as so let me phrase it a different way too we've had a lot of m1 devices right mac mini macbook air uh 13 inch macbook pro and then the imac ipad pro now the ipad air they all have the m1 and if you do tests on them they're all the same like they're all the same because the m1 is the m1 and apple silicon computers don't have a lot of variants they're not like cranking up the clock speed on some and cranking it down on others. There's a little bit of variation, especially when the things that aren't cooled and they are running hot that they will crank

down a little bit, but like they're pretty much just what they are. And I know we've talked about this before. An M1 computer is an M1 computer and it's just, you buy what shape you want. Do you want a standalone little Mac mini thing? Do you want an iMac? Do you want a laptop? Which kind of laptop? We've got two. Do you want an iPad?

We got two of those now, too. So M1 is M1. Now we get an M1 Max Studio. Okay, well, we already know about the M1 Max from the MacBook Pro. And what I found is that the same holds for the m1 max an m1 max is an m1 max so if you are thinking of a roughly i think i priced it 3200 macbook pro with the same configurations as a $2,000 Mac studio, they're the same.

One of them is a laptop with a really awesome screen. That's why it costs more. And one of them is this hunk of aluminum that sits on your desk. But in terms of performance, they're exactly the same, especially the 16, because the 16-inch MacBook Pro has a little bit better cooling and stuff,

so there's a little less throttling. But the truth is, even in most circumstances, the 14-inch MacBook Pro has a little bit better cooling and stuff. So there's a little less throttling, but the truth is even in most circumstances, the 14 inch MacBook Pro is it's an M1 Max and an M1 Max is an M1 Max. We'll see where Apple Silicon goes in the future, but right now, like if it, if it has the same specs, it's the same computer. Um, and so there's no surprises with the Mac studio in that way. It is a, uh, an M1 Max MacBook Pro you put on your desk. Now, keep in mind, that's the high-end MacBook Pro, and this is the base model Mac Studio. So it's not the, like, I bought my son a MacBook Pro last week because his computer hilariously died or was dying hilariously.

And I bought him the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro. That's an M1 Pro. That is not what is in the Mac Studio. The Mac Studio is better than that. But if you spec it up to be the same, it's the same, that MacBook Pro and the Mac Studio. So that's my first thought is it's just interesting. And if you're somebody who is a MacBook Pro person and you're looking at the Mac Studio and comparing it to your laptop and thinking, should I buy a Mac Studio? I think it's worth saying that if you're putting money into a

MacBook pro with all those specs, maybe you should just, if you're not going to get the ultra configuration of the studio, maybe you should just get a monitor if you don't have one already and, and dock it. And you're going to get the same performance like that, that $3,200 MacBook pro attached to the studio display would be basically identical to the Mac studio. It costs more, more than a thousand dollars more, but it would basically be identical. So that's one lesson that I learned is,

is we have reinforced the M one is an M one is an M one M one max is an M one max. That's just how it is. Now, I had an eight core Xeon 2017 iMac Pro. So for me, like it's, it is, there were some things that even the MacBook Air M1 was faster than my iMac Pro, but there were some things where it wasn't. But with iZotope, which is my high-end, you-end audio plugins that I use all the time, doing their Apple Silicon version, and then running it on the M1 Macs, like, okay, everything is a lot faster. Final Cut exports are faster. The SSD is twice as fast, because remember,

SSDs keep getting faster. And the iMac Pro was no slouch. It was a $5,000 pro level iMac that was meant to replace the Mac Pro. It's no slouch, but time moves on and now we're in Apple Silicon land and everything is better. So I just had that moment, everybody out there who's gotten a new computer, which is everybody out there, you know that feeling, right? Where everything seems the same, but it isn't like everything's just smoother. And you're like, it's different. It's like, everything's just a little faster and a little more responsive. And like, that is the feeling I've had for the last week plus that I've had this is I've migrated my whole system over and I've been using it as my regular system. And it's just, everything's nicer. Everything about it, um, coming from an older iMac pro.

Um, but yeah, it's, it's delightful. It really is. But just, just to keep in mind for people who are MacBook pro people, um, there's no inherent desktopness that is brought by the Mac studio. Uh, the MacBook Pro has all that stuff too. And if the difference is you pay an extra thousand plus dollars because it's a laptop and it's got the screen, et cetera, et cetera. But this is the thing that's been so intriguing to me. Well, one, I will say I'm happy that you're feeling those gains from the iMac. Oh yeah.

Which you would obviously. But once there's just some stuff that was interesting, like you mentioned that there is a persistent fan noise that this machine yeah puts out it's quiet pro does not do this and so like i just what is intriguing to me is like it seems like this machine was built for the ultra right but then they put the Max in it, like the M1 Max in it. But then because they built this huge fan and the heatsink and everything for the Ultra, the Max version also gets it

and everything that comes along with that, but it therefore produces slightly different characteristics for ultimately the same performance. Yeah, it's a different heatsink, right? It's a material, but like the Max chip does not need that heatsink to perform because the MacBook Pro doesn't have it.

Well, except that the way that the MacBook Pro ventilation is designed versus the way the Mac Studio ventilation is designed, right? Yeah, because they want an unbroken top. And so they're pulling the air in from the bottom and then shooting it out the back. And, you know, it is is the fan is always running um i will say that what's nice about that is that the sound is consistent i couldn't get the fan to change sound the fan runs the way it runs the fan

is also imperceptible unless you're in an absolutely silent room but my room was absolutely silent at one point didn't have music playing i had nothing else going on nobody the the roombo wasn't going in the other room like it was absolutely silent and i just had a moment where i went oh because i could hear it yeah very quiet very quiet i i think you would if you if you're one of those people who's like everything must be silent you know i i have to report it that like there isn't there is a sound there the The studio display also has a fan, by the way, but I can't hear that at all. That's that's completely silent. But the Mac studio, it has it has a little bit of a little bit of a fan. I don't think I don't think it's a big deal, but it was another one of those like having

a computer on my desk. It was one of those adaptations where I'm like, oh, this computer sounds like something when it's on and you have to listen carefully. Whereas it's not like the iMac Pro fans didn't blow all the time, but they were pointed away from me behind the whole screen. And so that sound didn't really reach me. I had to go around to the other side and put my ear to it. And this one, I didn't have to do that. I could hear it. It was very quiet and it's subsumed

by literally any other noise. It's just a very, very low, quiet, white noise sound, but it's there. Just, it's worth, I'm not complaining about it. It's much more like a warning label because I know some people are like, it must be absolutely silent. I'm like, well, it's not absolutely silent.

That's not the case. And I'm not one of these people either who cares about that kind of stuff i my my kind of thing i'm pointing out is just i find it really interesting that the mac studio and the macbook pro have basically the same performance with the same guts in the max version but they are just built very differently they are they're just really intriguing to me it's like a thing that that it will do and the mac studio is cheaper let's again i want to point that out that that because i think this goes into that other thought which is the thing that i i have definitely gone back and forth on which is do i want to buy a mac studio or do i really want

to buy a macbook pro because i do sometimes need a mac laptop and attach it. And that's when I configured out the MacBook Pro for $1,200 more or something. And what I realized was, personally, everybody's different here. What I realized was, I would rather have a desktop Mac that meets my needs for absolute day-to-day use and then spend $999 on a MacBook Air I can travel with that is not going to be as powerful, but that's fine. Rather than spending, you know, more than $3,000 on a laptop. And I just, that's what I decided. And I know that, because like literally you add the MacBook Air and the Mac Studio together, it's about the cost of the laptop. So I could unify, but then I can get a new MacBook Air down the road and Mac Studio will still be here.

And they're not yoked together in any way. And I just decided that I would rather have that lighter, lower cost laptop experience for when I travel and not have it be a no compromises. I'm bringing my whole setup with me, but everybody's going to be different. Yeah. And of course, right? Like the MacBook Pro is partly more expensive because it has a display, et cetera, et cetera. But you would need to have a display for the Mac studio. But then if you were going to be using the MacBook Pro on a desk you would also want a display for that which then makes it even more expensive well that's basically my argument is I'm going to have a 27 inch display on my desk so the question is do I attach a

Mac Studio to it or do I attach a MacBook Pro to it and everybody's going to be different I decided that I would rather have the thin and light little laptop to take with me and have that power on my desk rather than the other option which is to have the laptop that does it all that lives most of the time plugged in but it was you know it was a close call honestly but i think in the end i'm i'm just happier this way yeah i have no idea what my future lies at the moment with my recording setup i mean you know i know now for my main working setup it's going to be what exactly what i have now just of a different monitor right so

instead of having the og display that i have i'm going to have the apple studio display but there was always a question of like what happens on the desk that I'm at right now where I have the M1 iMac and I have like just a Dell display on the side just because I need a bit more screen space. And, you know, I have no idea what it's going to look like for me. You know, I was wondering,

would it be the Mac Studio? But I don't think so. But then like, would I just use, should I just use my MacBook Pro? Should I just move it from machine to, like from desk to desk? Like one inside of my like sound isolated area where I record, like do it and just have two displays.

Like I have no idea right now what I'm going to do because my original thought was, oh, I'll just put an iMac Pro in here. But maybe I wait, right? Like maybe I just keep running this iMac for like another year which it definitely could do my only problem is every time like i travel i realize just how much quicker that my macbook pro is doing the tasks that i'm doing every day when i'm here on my m1 machine

and there it is i'm noticing significant differences in some of the tasks that i'm performing now, just from a time perspective that I miss when I'm doing all my M1. But yeah, so last thing I wanted to ask you about the Mac Studio is was this a hard computer to review? I think because I didn't get the Ultra, it was not as hard. In fact, I mean, my display review is longer than my max studio review i did more tests but i always do tests the fact that the display review was longer was what made

me think of this question yeah so i i would say it wasn't harder to review because it was completely full of things we knew in terms of performance. So that, that is sometimes a harder thing, right? Cause you need to quantify performance. And instead I really was able to say it's a MacBook pro and one max, right? They're the same. There's no surprises here. And in the end then, I mean, cause these reviews aren't easy to do, but in the end, then it becomes like a couple of different essays. Like it's an essay about using all-in-one versus using a modular computer and Apple's history with that.

And I wrote, you know, I wrote that review and I also wrote a piece for Macworld about it and I wrote a piece for The Verge about it. So I like, I wrote a lot of words about Apple's history with modular Macs and then not making them and with the iMac becoming kind of like the replacement for modular Macs.

So another kind of essay about that. And then an essay about the choices that you make in terms of a laptop versus a desktop. And do you hook a laptop up to the external display instead of the Mac studio? And like, that's part of the, so, so in the end, studio and what it means to have it on your desk instead of in an all-in-one stuff like that all right this episode is also brought to you by our friends over at doordash do you want chinese tonight maybe your flatmate wants pizza someone else is craving forio it doesn't matter because there's something for everyone on DoorDash because they connect you with the restaurants you love right now and right to your door. You can also get grocery essentials that you need

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the us upgrade aus for australia and you will get 25 off your first order with doordash subject to change terms apply our thanks to doordash for their support of this show and relay fm so now we turn our attention then to the apple studio display 27 inch display what are your i want to get kind of like top level stuff the looks the stand you know the model you got is the the regular model right what are your like overall i got nano texture but yes standard stand oh yeah i missed that in your review i i'm sorry i mean i feel like i've already written about nano texture it is what it is i wouldn't buy it but then again i used to i used to work in an office where I had to have a window behind me. And I would have desperately wanted it for that office.

But my current office, I'm never going to. I don't have to put the window behind me. So it's unnecessary. But it's nice. I mean, it is your glare-free option if you are in a place with glare. But otherwise, it's the standard, you know, unadjustable stand kind of thing. And I,

I tried not to get too fussy about it. Cause I feel, I feel like the people who listen to this show already know the story here, but like the story here is it's an Apple display. It is not an LG display. The panel is very similar to the most recent 5k iMac panel. That's also the LG ultra fine panel. It similar to the most recent 5K iMac panel that's also the LG UltraFine panel. It's not the same.

I asked about that. And because it's 600 nits, it's not the same. It's a brighter panel than that. But it looks very familiar. Like in front of me, I couldn't tell the difference between this and the iMac 5K and then the iMac Pro panels that I had in front of me all this time. I think the iMac 5k I originally had, didn't have the white color gamut, but the iMac pro panel in this panel, like it feels exactly the same. The, the thing that the people like upgradians will understand is, um, LG's monitor is not an Apple monitor, right? It's, it's not, It's okay. But this is fully Apple look and feel.

And I know it's like there's no logo on it. The black bezels are much thinner than the IMAX bezels. And they look really good. It has the aluminum foot. So it is full-on Apple design language. And it feels good. It's not junky in any way and like part of the context of some reviews of this display is there are other displays and it's true however there aren't other displays other than the ultra fine that really hit the resolution

that apple wants for the mac it turns out, turns out that Apple abandoning the display market did not create a great influx of displays to serve Mac users the way they chose to be served. Didn't happen. It's just, we all know that. And so I think it's pretty rich to review this monitor and say there are other displays. Because the answer is really there are other display one if you want what apple wants from a display which is something like that 27 inch iMac

not a curved 4k 30 inch display that's way lower resolution than apple would prefer you use on a mac and and so you you have all always had those options but for the people who really wanted the Apple-like thing, there was just the LG UltraFine. And this is much nicer than that in a lot of ways. And so I think it's important for some people. Obviously, it's not for others, but you can turn around and bump into a podcast where the hosts are complaining about the LG UltraFine display and have been for years now and it's not that it is terrible and but it's been the only option and there are

things about it that people would make people pine for what would Apple do if they made this display and here's your answer is it's it's way more expensive but it's nicer and are we surprised that that's the ultimate answer I liked what what nilai patel said in his review um which was kind of like there are people that these specific things mean that this monitor is worth it and you kind of know you are one of those people already right like the idea of the resolution being just right and that kind of stuff is like that really is a thing that is important to some people like that i am i like, but I'm not one of those people. Like I've used and I've been using an LG display for, I don't know, best part of two years.

And I really like the display. The problem I have is the unreliability of plugging the thing in and it doing what I want. And I do not expect to have this issue come three weeks from now, or whatever, when I get mine, right? My expectation is, I will just plug it in, and it does exactly what I'm expecting it to do every single time, where at the moment, it doesn't. And it requires a lot of plugging and unplugging to get it to work properly, you know? Yeah. No, I think that's it. This is, and again, you know, look, there are a lot of competition out there, but it is, and I know we've talked about Apple's whole desire of like, how many first party things can we make? Because we get you in the Apple store and then we upsell you on all these other things and they've all got Apple product margins and Apple makes a lot of money. And there's a reason Apple makes a lot of money. They do this sort of thing. That said, there is also value in getting the Apple thing that Apple is built for its, its products. Like there are people trying to use this with PCs and stuff and, and yeah,

they, it will work or some aspects of it will work, but like, this is a display made by Apple to be connected to Macs. And that has value to a lot of people, not necessarily to everyone. Again, I have a friend of the show, Scott McNulty, who's been on before. Scott has a 5K iMac and a big curved fancy display. And the 5K iMac, he doesn't even use. It's off on the side because he uses the big curved fancy display. And he bought Mac Studio because he's like, all right, I can just hook it directly to my big fancy display. Right. Great. Right. Like if you have one of those displays and you like it, you know, great, but there is definitely an audience for, oh, it's just a 27 inch display. Like the ones we're familiar with and it's from Apple and it has been built to work with all of Apple's products. And everybody's going to have

a different idea of the value of that, but I can feel it like when it wasn't there, that there was a lot of feeling of like, wow, I have to compromise somewhere. It would be a lot easier if I could spend a little more money and just get an Apple display that does it. Because it turns out only Apple has our best interest at heart. I mean, they also want to sell us something for a lot of money, but you get what I'm saying? Like the rest of the display market is not like,

but what about the Mac? They're just not like, or if they are, they're doing it to the minimum amount, like, because they're thinking about, but what about gamers? And what about people in offices with PCs?

And then, oh yeah, we should make sure it does the Mac work with us it does great and and that's fine but it's really nice to have something that is built for us it's made for us and when Apple does a display that's what it is and that's why it costs more but it's good to have it and I'm glad it exists so speaking of features for the Mac, there's been quite a lot of brouhaha about the webcam and maybe partly because of some of the decisions that Apple's made around making Accent a stage,

that kind of stuff. So there's been lots of reviews published by people all over the place and there's been vastly varying results on people's opinions of the quality of the webcam inside of this display yeah hell yeah you seem to be pretty happy so i not to tell tales out of school but like embargoed reviewers talk sometimes uh-huh you see something weird and you're like okay what did you see you want to make sure you're seeing the same thing right so you're not way off yeah so so I don't know if we're supposed to do that or not, but it happens, right?

There's some talk that happens in the back channel. And I had somebody back channel me and say, are you seeing bad image quality with the studio display? And so here's the thing. I got the heads up about it. If I had wanted to be running with the pack, I could have put in verbiage about questionable image quality even if i didn't see it but i didn't see it and that 90 minute video

i did with dan moore on the day the embargo dropped is entirely my side of it shot with the studio display camera and it looks fine so if I can't duplicate what they're seeing, I can't report it. Like I can't report what, because the cool kids saw it and I didn't see it. So there's a few options here. One is hardware variants and I just got a good panel or I got a good camera.

I don't think that's it. Software variants, we all checked our firmware. It's the camera. I don't think that's it. Software variants, we all checked our firmware. It's the same. Okay. Well, what is it? I think this is a software problem. I think it's an Apple said that there's a bug that they're fixing. We'll see if that really fixes it or not, but they did a little statement of like, oh no, no, no, no, no. It'll be fine, folks. It'll be fine. Just trying to do some damage control there. We'll see if it actually is fine. But I think two things are happening. I think one is,

I think it behaves differently in different lighting conditions. And I think that there are certain lighting conditions that are better and certain that are worse. And that is lighting and background lighting and foreground. It may even be face detection that like my face

is better at, at, at being, you know, detected. I don't know, but I, I, my spider sense is tingling that, that there's a problem going on in certain circumstances and that I didn't have those circumstances. Now I will be, I'll be honest. I did not turn off all my lights and close my blinds and get in the worst situation possible. I just use it at my desk like I use every webcam that I've ever used and compared it, and it seemed fine. So I think that's one of the things that's going on here. Yeah, because I watched the video that you made.

It looks fine, right? Your image is soft, but fine. Sure. It's fine. Yeah. So that's one thing that that i think is happening and that is real and even though i didn't have much of an experience with it i i believe the other reviewers that it's an issue the other part is context and that is trickier because that's about the eye of the beholder that is about the person doing the review. My context is the iMac Pro webcam, which is a 1080 webcam.

It's fine. And also as an iPad Pro user who has been using Center Stage since it came out for weekly Zoom calls with Lauren's family and weekly FaceTime calls with my mom. So I've seen the same center stage camera and center stage software work on the iPad a lot. So first off, the center stage camera is kind of grainy in certain circumstances. It's a byproduct of the fact that they are taking a big 12 megapixel image and they're cropping and skewing it in order to make it seem like there's the ghost cameraman back there shooting you. It's not always a great picture. That's true. That's been true all along. And maybe I'm just so used to what a center stage camera looks like that I'm not taken aback like some people are.

And second is, what are you comparing it to? I'm comparing it in terms of context. I'm comparing it to the center stage camera. I think a lot of them are comparing it to 4K webcams that are static, or I saw some pictures that were still photos taken with the front and back cameras of iPhones. It's like, well, okay, of course it's not better than that. But does it compare and i put it up against center stage on my ipad pro and i was like i don't know i think that the studio display camera actually looks better than the center stage camera on my ipad pro in the same position i think the ipad pro is zoomed in a lot more and so it's even more grainy whereas the studio display i think that

the algorithm is a little different and it's a little wider out. So I don't know. My guess is you've got people who are familiar with higher quality image capturing devices, some of which are webcams and some of which are not, looking at a possibly degraded in certain lighting camera and saying this camera is garbage. Whereas I have familiarity with center stage and I'm in a well-lit environment and I look at it and go, yeah, that's exactly what I expected. It's center stage and center stage has other issues, right? It doesn't quite center you aggressively enough, in my opinion. And I know that they're probably trying to prevent it from being this really

queasy, like as we bob and move the camera is endlessly tracking you because that would be unpleasant but i know there's an art to it and i feel like it leaves me as the only person in the frame it leaves me off center for a long time before figuring out that i'm not centered and centering me and i think that that is a center stage problem they need to fix. Do you think this could be, because I mean, my understanding is this is being powered by the A13 chip, which is found inside of the machine, right?

Inside of the display. I assume so. I assume that, we don't know, but I assume what's happening is the A13 is doing all of this processing and then just sending the picture out to the Mac. And that's partially because there are Macs that are compatible with this that are not Apple Silicon. And so they wouldn't be able to process it as well theoretically as the A13. Although I did think that one option,

if you want to make the quality better, is to check and see if you have a superior chip on the outboard side and just send that send it there and have that doing it but they'd have to write software for it but it may be that ios running inside the a13 in this monitor because it does run a version of ios uh is doing it because they didn't have to write extra software for the mac to do it then maybe that's the case i don't know but because maybe the a13 is not powerful enough or it's just not as powerful as the other processors that are running center stage. I don't know.

I think if you compare it to center stage on the iPad, my opinion is that it's no different than center stage on the iPad. I don't think that's it. I don't think it's like the M1 versus the A13, and it's inferior. Maybe in certain circumstances. The problem is maybe in certain circumstances it is, and I can't duplicate all the circumstances sure um the short version is is there an issue with the webcams like i don't know depends on your context depends on what you're expecting by it

apple says that they're going to make software changes to it i wouldn't count on that um if you want to hold off and see what happens by all means do so um in my circumstance it's not been an issue and i i am not i mean like if i want a really good webcam i will use a really good webcam and i i think at the root of the complaints about it that some reviewers have had is they what they want is a 4k static no panning and zooming center stage webcam like they consider the state of the art of webcams today instead of what Apple did. And I don't think I agree

because I really like center stage and I think that it is appropriate for a product like this because you are moving around. I mean, some people aren't, some people are. I am moving around enough that I really like the idea that this thing that's sitting on my desk can track me as I'm talking to somebody. I think that's great. Other people would say, well, no, Apple has gotten too high on its center stage product. And even though it doesn't look as good, it's got this zooming feature that I don't care about. And what I really want is a still really nice 4k webcam. I think that's a legitimate argument to make, even though I'm not sure I agree with it.

So yeah. And we'll see, there are bugs. There are lots of bugs. They're whitelisting video conferencing apps. It's very clear that they put something in Mac OS that basically says, if it's these apps, turn it on,

which they'd sort of did an ipad too right because the developers didn't know about this um i'm sure there will be an api at some point um you can control it with center stage and turn it on and off but there's very weird behavior there too i opened photo booth an app that has not been touched by an apple engineer and who knows how long and it gave me this ridiculous grainy super close cropped to way too high like top of my head and the wall behind me shot that is not the shot you get when you go to um to control center and turn off center stage in zoom that said when you do go to control center and turn off center stage and something like zoom, you do get a weirdly framed shot that is way too high up. And it's clearly not what you actually would get because

it's actually cutting off stuff that was visible in the center stage version. That's a little lower down. Um, and, and I don't know why they do it that way. And it's really dumb and you can't, you can't set it. So when you turn center stage off off you have to like tilt your monitor down because it's too high which i don't i don't i don't get that so i think that there are lots of issues with the with the camera but not the ones that they're that the other people are complaining about speaking about hi how would you get on with the stand on this monitor if it was yours i mean i have an adjustable desk so i can survive i would change the height of everything else you know change the height of my um my keyboard tray and change the

height of my desk and i would get it to work um i don't think i think that a lot of people would find that it's too low um i again places where i'm out of line with a lot of other other reviewers like this is an example where i know why apple did it and i appreciate that the adjustable version is probably a very well engineered piece of kit that said you should not have to pay i i would say you should not have to pay extra for good ergonomics that a good display should be adjustable and that you certainly shouldn't have to pay 400 for it to be adjustable i think it's ridiculous so boo i'll let you know just how ridiculous it is uh soon when mine yeah i just i don't like i when the imac came out the m1 imac i asked apple why is this not adjustable and they said blah blah blah we did it was on the show right they told us that we they they tested it out we did ergonomics and this is what our experts

said was the right height and i'm like i don't know everybody i know puts these things on books i have my own stand i have a stand for my i'm looking at right now yeah so i don't know um i i just i believe as a matter of principle that ergonomics is not a 400 upsell i think i think you should make an ergonomic display i think that it should ergonomics should be figured into it. I do too. And if you do need to do it as an upsell, you should not make it as ludicrous a price as that upsell is. $400 for a thing to let it be a couple inches higher.

Like, come on. The problem that this is like Apple kind of designing itself into a corner like i think they refuse to make a design like other companies because the other companies they make things that aren't as attractive yeah only the best they want the they want a perfect beautiful well-engineered uh lifting display mount they do and that's what they made and it required them to charge $400 for it. And I get it,

but it's very frustrating to me. So you could also get the VESA mount version, which doesn't cost any extra and then put it on a stand or arm of your choice at the height that you want and it's adjustable.

So that's the other way to go. And I'm pleased that they offer that though too, right? Because it's like, well, then you can get it much cheaper as an option and or you may already have the thing like you do right and like i have a i have vesa arms that i was using before i have a face around using with the dell monitor that i'm using if i wanted to i could have gone with the vesa mount for the studio

display but i was happy to pay the extra because i wanted that i wanted apple's adjustable one because i think it looks nice um and i want to have a little bit of a better experience a more free experience than the uh than my face or arms allow for me so we'll see yeah we'll see is there enough io on this on this on the studio display do you think i mean it's a display and not an imac i i will admit that i had those thoughts which is you know it's got four ports on the studio display do you think i mean it's a display and not an iMac i i will admit that i had those thoughts which is you know it's got four ports on the back but there's just the upstream thunderbolt and then it's three usbc i do wish they were thunderbolt not usbc yeah and i get that i get why they maybe can't be right now um but it i'm okay with it. Clearly, this is a room for improvement.

Like I said, I feel like most of the stuff you're going to attach to your computer is going to be attached to your computer. But if you're using this with a laptop, you're going to want to hang IO off the back. And this precludes you hanging Thunderbolt off the back, right? It only is going to be USB-C off of the back of this thing. So if you have a situation where you want to have a one cable

attached from a MacBook Pro to this display, and you've got a Thunderbolt dock or a Thunderbolt hard drive or whatever, I don't think you can. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that, well, maybe you would go through the Thunderbolt dock, and then if it's got Thunderbolt out, you would put that to the monitor. Maybe that would work. But it's complicated is what I'm saying, and I wish that it was

less complicated, but I also kind of get it that in Mac Studio terms, it's easy because the Mac Studio has all the plugs and you don't worry about it. But if you've got a MacBook Pro, and I'm a big fan of this, like the whole idea here is it charges your MacBook Pro or your MacBook Air. It doesn't matter. It'll charge your laptop and provide IO and provide the display. So you really do want to live the one cable lifestyle. And that's going to lead to hubs and docks and things probably because it's only got those three usb ports there i have a cal digit thunderbolt dock that i use right now and i am intrigued to find out what happens when i plug that into my display my hope will be that

it will just function as usbc because i only have i don't have anything incredibly powerful and i have a bunch of like usb a things any thnet cable that kind stuff. My hope is it will work, but I will have to find out. I don't know. Yeah, I feel like you, like the mysteries of Thunderbolt. And that's why I want it to be Thunderbolt in that display, so I don't have to have this thought of like, am I going to have to get a new dock if I do? What do I even get? Because all docks seem to be Thunderbolt now and not USB-C. I don't

know what's going to happen when I plug that thing in. And it will accept USB-C as an input because you can attach a Mac or an iPad Air to it and it will use it. So it's possible that even if you

sent USB-C out from a dock to the display, it would work. But again, I don't know. And it probably varies. And then I don't really know what I'm going to do because I have a bunch of USB-A things that I guess I'll just have to get USB-C to USB-A port thing, adapter thing.

We'll find out. Back to Dongle Town, but now monitor related. Last thing I wanted to ask you about the speakers. I am going to say about the speakers and the microphones exactly what I've said about them in the MacBook Pro, which is I think Apple is justifiably proud of what they've done to put pretty good quality speakers and microphones in a very small space. In this case, in a display. But also they've done this. It's the same kind of engineering that they've done for the MacBook Pro.

They are justifiably proud of that. The microphones are okay. They sound pretty good, although a little echoey. But remember, the microphones are far away because you're sitting at a display. You're not right up against, like I'm right against my microphone here. I'm touching it with my nose right now, right? Like it's right here. Display is far away. So even a good microphone at that

distance, it's going to be a challenge. They got the three microphones, they got the beam forming, they're trying to make it sound okay. And you know what? For a video conference or something, it does sound okay. It sounds pretty good. Not podcast level good. Although if you wanted to make it podcast level good, what you do is you'd go all the way up to it and be like, hello, I'm very close to that. And then it would probably sound great. But be really awkward because you'd be like putting your face against your monitor and nobody wants to do that. The speakers, similarly, are they good for monitors that fit in a slim speaker? Yes, they are.

They sound nice. There's some stereo imaging going on there. They talk about it being spatial audio. I don't believe that really. It's just a fancy word for calculating the stereo images on the fly. It's fine. My problem is that Apple then talks about everything as being studio quality and amazing and like i think it is amazing engineering for what it is but uh that said like it is not a replacement for better speakers or headphones um i use my since i got rid of the um ipod hi-fi as my external speakers i've been using the iMac Pro internal speakers to edit podcasts. And so I edited a podcast using the studio display internal speakers instead. I don't think they're as good.

Honestly, I don't think they're as good as the iMac Pro speakers. And the iMac Pro speakers were pretty good because they had space in the case. But even if they're as good, like, I don't know, they are what they are. Don't, I think Apple gets, lets the hype run away from them a little bit.

And they translate amazing for where they are, amazing for the small space they're inside to just generally amazing. And they're not just generally amazing. They're utilitarian. If you listen to

music on your computer's built-in sound now, you can do that on this and it'll be fine. But if you're led to believe by Apple's marketing that, oh, throw away your microphones, throw away your external speakers, all you'll ever need is the stuff that's in the cinema or the studio display yeah no that's not that's not what it is that's it so it's fine it did not blow me away but it's it's good for what it is and in such a small space it is impressive that's it this episode is brought to you by our friends over at memberful the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web so you can generate sustainable recurring income while diversifying your revenue stream. Maybe your business's financial situation has changed over the last couple of years and you

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who asks can external speakers be attached to an Apple Studio display via the USB-C connection in order to maintain a single cable connection to my M1 Pro MacBook Pro? Is this possible?

Oh, new audio device detected. Okay, so you're trying it right now. Yeah. And if I go to System Preferences, Sound, I now have studio display speakers as an output and USB-C to 3.5 millimeter headphone jack adapter as an output wow so so yes is the answer yes it you plug a usbc audio adapter and it just shows up as a usbc audio adapter and you can choose it as an output great that's it i guess i don't know if usbc

powered speakers exist but i guess if they do it will work but the idea being that's it i guess i don't know if usbc powered speakers exist but i guess if they do it will work but the idea being that yes it's possible you can plug usbc something to something yeah you just use this i mean i'm using the little the one i use for my ipad pro yeah the little apple usbc to headphone jack adapter and at that point you take powered speakers and a headphone jack you know one of those cables and run it and and it'll do that so yes you should be able to lead the uh the one chord lifestyle for your speakers too but remember there's only three back there so we'll see but yeah that works so that was fun and uh i i've been meaning to check that out so now we know morkey would like to know did either of you play instruments and did one of you compose and play the theme song

for Upgrade? So this is Morky from Morky and Mind, I think. I knew you were going to do it. Every time. This is a different person. Mork and Morky are different? Yes, I think so. We have someone who writes in under the name Mork.

Yes, this is not them? I don't think this is the same person because this person's Morky. Is this Morky Mork and the Fonky Bonch? Yes, that's it. You nailed it. That's who it is? Okay. What was the question?

Do either of you play instruments? One. Did one of you compose and play the theme song? Two. All right, take the second one first. Theme song of Upgrade is composed and played entirely by Christopher Breen. Chris, it's a Breen theme.

It's a Breen theme. You can go to chrisbreen.com and he's got, I think he even has them all for download there. So you can do that. Chris works at Apple now. If you want to pretend to be Upgrade, you can do that.

Sure, I guess. Chris works at Apple now, so he can't write about tech anymore, but he still composes theme songs from time to time and he composed the upgrade theme before actually when he was at mac world still so before he was behind the the rainbow curtain he was he was able to do that for for me and a bunch of my other the incomparable theme is a green theme there are a bunch of green themes out there um but uh yeah that that's that do either of us play instruments i took piano lessons in school and um and uh or when i was in school and i can very poorly play the piano

um that didn't stop me from there are a bunch of robot or not theme songs not the main one but there are there are like three alternate robot or not theme songs that come up every now and then that were performed by me but that's a lot of i've got a usb piano keyboard and uh there's also a lot of logic loops involved in those um but that's my so that's my story but but i wouldn't say i play any instrument competently i play no instruments i only included this question because I wanted to point out that many Upgradians noticed the theme song difference. Yes.

For last episode, because Jason, for some reason, decides that every time he edits the show, he plays the alternate version of the Upgrading theme. Not every time. Just sometimes. Most of the time, I think,

when you edit. You use the alternate version. It's an Easter egg. It's a little Easter egg. And the irony is that I asked Chris to change it from the synth to the guitar. This is how I remember it, because this is what annoys me about this every time. It's people like, yay, Jason's music. It's like, no, this was, I liked this one, and Jason changed it initially.

I think episode one may have used this theme, and then it was changed. Or there was the synth version, and then Jason wanted the more guitar-focused version, which became the upgrade theme. And then everyone's like, oh, down with Mike. He plays the bad song.

Jason plays good songs. Mike wanted this one. But it's the fact that it's rare and an Easter egg that makes it more special. If it was the other way around, everyone would be like, hell yeah, rocking out with Jason. Well, Mike, I'm just going to say this. Next episode is episode 400. We could just decide to use the synth version for 100 episodes or something if you wanted to.

Just switch. Do you know what? Now, though, I don't think I could. I think so many episodes, it would be weird for me now. It's just ingrained in my head. It's a special just like we have the upgrade draft theme and the holiday theme.

The summer of fun song. I just wanted to get it on record. This isn't like Jason saving us, he's finally using the synth version, which is what some upgradians treat it as you know they like look forward to when i'm away so they get the good music but i just want to make it none like mike isn't keeping that good music where he is now because jason just now i'm keeping it

from you yeah from now previously down with mike again now you can say down with mike because mike has made the decision that the old theme stays but But I just want to tell the truth from the past, you know? People just like that it's different. Although I did appreciate Listener Brian on Twitter saying, woo, it's the good intro or something like that. And I was like, mm. Honestly, it was Brian's tweet that set off this rage. Yes, yeah.

Yeah. It's just different. It's a little Easter egg. It's fun. That's all. I thought about not doing it, in fact, last time, but then I did it.

It's like a smoke signal, you know? It's like an if you know, you know kind of thing. It's special. Uh-huh. Yeah. JJ Aparo asks,

would you pay extra for a colorful MacBook? So if Apple made you pay more for colors, the colors that we desperately want would you pay similarly how you used to have to pay extra if you wanted a black macbook yeah yeah i was thinking about like how car makers will say we'll give you a boring color but you can pay a thousand dollars more and get an interesting color that kind of thing um i wouldn't pay a thousand i want to do

that for a more interesting car for a more interesting color on a MacBook. No, that I wouldn't. MacBook Air $999 in blue, $1999. Wow. Apple are geniuses. How did they come up with that one? Would I pay extra? Well, I'll say I had a black MacBook.

There you go. Although my business bought it for me, but I wanted it and I got it. I liked the white one. I had the wanted it. I liked the white one. I had the white one. I liked the white one. I love the black MacBook. That was great. Would I pay extra?

Yeah, probably. I would. It would just about what though? Like would I pay $50 more or $100 more? Maybe. Depends. It would have to be good. It would have to not be like a very vaguely colorful.

It would need to be really colorful. That said, I don't think that they will make people pay extra. I think like the iMac, the MacBook Air is going to come out in colors and you just pick. I think JJ Aparo just wanted to be like, we put our money where our mouths are.

Riddle me this. Riddle me this, Batman. Chris wants to know, do you think in an Apple lab somewhere, there is an iPad Pro that runs mac os monterey i mean it's gotta be right i mean maybe i i'll tell you this i am i i know in fact that when in the run-up to apple silicon there were ipads running mac os because they were they were test systems before they did the dtk and like you got an ipad with a an a12x you can run mac os on it so like yeah yeah probably um i don't know if it

means anything but i mean probably or or truthfully there's probably like something that's kind of like an ipad that's got a mac os version attached to it somewhere. It may not be Monterey. It may not be current. Who knows? But like, clearly they can, and I'm sure inside Apple they do. There was probably some MacBook Airs running iOS when they were building the Magic Keyboard, right?

Could be. Yeah, that's a great example. Like, why don't we load this on a Mac that's already got the keyboard and trackpad attached so that we can... Just test the software. Maybe, although don't we load this on a Mac that's already got the keyboard and trackpad attached so that we can... Just test the software. Maybe. Although maybe they just use the Bluetooth.

But who knows? Yeah. But I think... I'm sure historically that has happened. I know it for a fact that that happened. But is it happening now? I mean, who can say? It certainly could be.

It would depend on what the project was and what they were why they were doing it that way but um i don't think it says anything about whether they're gonna make ipads run mac os or anything and finally today steve wants to know does the white led on the front of the mac studio have the pulsing sleep effect does it do anything no okay it doesn't it's quite disappointing it just is there and is on. If you have problems in booting, there was a YouTube video I watched today where it actually will blink out SOS if it has a problem, which is pretty funny. And in certain circumstances, it will blink out SOS with an amber color instead of the white, which is also pretty funny. So there's probably all sorts of other wild things that it can do. But I put this to sleep anyway, and it didn't do anything except keep the light on. funny um so there's probably all sorts of other wild things that it can do but um but i i put this to sleep anyway and it didn't do anything except keep the light on so i keep the light on

for you that's what it says it would be nice if it did that i love that pulsating uh little sleep breathing thing yeah yeah i think it was disturbing i honestly though like in a dark room it was disturbing because you'd be laying there in the dark and everything is there's like this pulsating light on the wall i didn't like that here's the thing i have the nostalgia for this ultimately i don't like my computer anthropomorphizing itself yeah also drawing attention to itself when it's in a mode where it doesn't want your attention. Yeah. But just in general, I don't need to ever think that my computer is breathing. Like, I'm good. I'm good, you know?

Hello, Mike. Help me! Like, you know what I mean? Help! I'm pulling back studio, blinking out the amber. I'm going to be giggling to myself about that

all day now. There's just something very funny about that. I guess the idea being that because it has no screen right that it needs to be able to communicate some error messages exactly but this doesn't buy a morse code apparently but i love that it has two different types of morse code that it can do yeah oh yeah there's the the words where it's confused and then where it's actively angry. Oh, dear. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the Real AFM members Discord that you get access to if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you will get yourself a special feed. In that feed, you will get longer, ad-free versions of every single episode of Upgrade. What an incredible thing. And I'll just say, you get the back catalog of those too, going all the way back to when we started this,

like two years ago nearly now. So you can go back and listen to a ton of great stuff. Like there's lots of very fun content in there. So it's available to you. And you also get to support the show as well. I mean, it's a win-win-win. That's what we call it around here. But thank you also to our sponsors for this week's episode,

Memberful, DoorDash, and Squarespace. If you would like to find Jason online, you go to sixcolors.com. I recommend that people check out the video that Jason did with Dan Morin, kind of doing some hands--on it was a great little live stream a bunch of listener participation it was really fun it was your idea for us to do the post embargo drop video and i i think it worked great i think it was a lot of fun and we went for 90 minutes which is way longer than i thought but yeah it's like a podcast with that's like a full on podcast that thing i'll tell you that uh speaking of which i would actually like to

mention something new that i'm doing um if you are a formula of which i would actually like to mention something new that i'm doing um if you are a formula one fan i now have i can't but i genuinely cannot believe i might hurley host a sports podcast now but i do i know right uh it's called the back markers and i'm hosting it of austin evans because me and austin have been working on a show called the test drives for the last couple of years it's focused on tech but ultimately uh we just want to talk about formula one so now we do and something that we're doing differently with this is there is a video version of the show we stream live as soon as we can after each formula one race has finished and we do video there is an audio version at relay fm but we also have a youtube channel

and we're putting the video up there and it also is going to stay there afterwards so you can consume it however you would choose, video and audio. And I'm enjoying a new challenge, like the idea of making a video podcast and how to make that good whilst also making the audio podcast good. It's like an interesting tightrope to walk, which I'm enjoying.

Maybe learning some new skills after being in this game for so long. So if you are a formula one fan new or old check it out we are building this show primarily for new fans me and austin are new fans and we're making a formula one podcast for new fans part of this was because the shows i was listening to there was just too much built-in knowledge with the hosts and it was hard for me to follow some of the stuff. And so, you know, people that have been watching it for decades, like they have a lot of inbuilt knowledge that I didn't.

And get ready for Saturday morning, Friday night baseball, my new podcast in which I talk about the Apple TV broadcast from the night before of Friday night baseball, not existing ever. You know, for a big sports fan, I don't do a sports podcast and i'm okay with that yeah i mean there are lots of things i don't and will never do uh podcasts about but this one felt just right like we we were talking about it more and more on the test drivers so it was kind of like let's just actually make the thing that we really want to make

which is this show so we're doing it now and we're only we're doing it every time there's a race if there's no race there's no show so it's it's kind of an interesting format for me so yeah fun looking forward to it so you can go check it out uh it's uh the youtube channel go to backmarkers.live and you'll find it and then you'll find back markers on the real fm website and i'll put links to those in the show notes before we say goodbye can i ask you a couple questions about formula one yeah Yeah. F1. I assume that it begins by a ceremonial, like,

rolling of a tire or something down the road, right? Sort of like how baseball rolls the baseballs out from center field? Yeah, they let all the wheels out and then the teams have to catch them

and then depending on who catches the best wheels, they have got the best chance of winning. Okay, that's good. And then my next question is, I assume the way it works is that they're driving around a city looking for the F and there's only one. There, that's good. And then my next question is, I assume the way it works is that they're driving around a city

looking for the F. And there's only one. There's only one F. And when they get it, it's like the snitch, when they get it, then they can return to base. It's the immediate win. There is a finish line, but if you're able to catch the F, you win. Okay, good. This sounds great. I'll check it out. You're gonna love it.

This is your sport, Jason. It's got all of your favorite components. Got to find that F. Someone's going to find it. There's only one. One F. There's only one F, and then you find it, you are F1. And then actually win the entire season. You don't just win a race.

Wow. The season can end after two weeks if someone finds the F. That's right. That's part of the O-ish-al rules. Because there's no F. No Fs in it. Formula One until they find the F. So if you want to find out the actual real rules,

which are obviously what we just talked about, you can go and check out the back markers. And if you have a passing interest in Formula One, maybe you haven't tried it yet, watch Drive to Survive, the Netflix documentary. That's what turned me into a big Formula One fan like many others. So it's a great onboarding and then the back markers will be there for you when you're ready for it if you want to find the show notes for this week find them in your podcast app of choice or at relay.fm uh slash upgrade slash 399 we're at 400 next week which means

we are going to be reviewing our predictions from 100 episodes ago so that's going to be a fun uh a fun time for everyone. And you want to find Jason in the meantime, he's at jsnall. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.