Upgrade - 443: Core Variations

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

Jason's spent most of the last week with an M2 Max MacBook Pro, so it's time for his full review. We also discuss the M2 Mac mini and the second-generation HomePod. This naturally leads into a discussion of Apple's future home products and what form the M3 processor might take.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 443 today's show is brought to you by electric capital one and upgrade plus my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason hi mike we got a big show today. Since our last episode, Apple revealed new Macintoshes to the world. You've gotten to spend some time with one of them, the MacBook Pro, and we're going to do a review of it today on this episode, as well as talk about the Mac Mini and Dan Moran's coverage of Six Colors and much, much more. But before we do all of that, I have a hashtag Snell Talk question for you which comes from kevin who wants to know are you still paying for itunes match right i i took the snell talk question as a public

service announcement just to explain to people if you are an apple music subscriber you don't need to pay for itunes match because itunes match functionality is included with your apple music subscription itunes match for those who don't know is a thing where it looks at all of the music that you've got on your personal music library and it scans it and it either matches it to stuff that's in the iTunes library, the Apple Music library, or it uploads it and it allows you to have cloud access to your entire sort of like MP3 library that you have on your Mac at home. It means that it'll play on an iPhone and stuff like that. It's a fun little feature, but it was very quickly sort of subsumed by Apple Music, which also does all of those same things. So if you're an Apple Music subscriber,

you don't need to be paying for iTunes Match. And to answer Kevin's question, well, no, as soon as I became an Apple Music subscriber, I stopped paying for iTunes Match because I don't need them both. If you're not an Apple Music subscriber and you want to sort of like be your own music streaming service with the music that you have and nothing else, then iTunes Match is the way to do that. I have a secondary question from Zach, who's listening live in the RelayFM members Discord. We do record this show live every Monday if you want to hang out, especially if you're a member, it's fun to hang out in the Discord while we do it. Zach asks, doesn't iTunes match it to DRM free and content in Apple Music

will match it to DRM content? I don't know what that means. So let's imagine you had a live version of a song or whatever. That's your live version of a song. Yes. Is it going to do it to a different, like to a version that's in the apple music library rather

than the one that's yours it's not supposed to and in in most cases it doesn't there it there's an a chance that it might do that by mistake it's not supposed to do that um so i i yeah i've got live albums and stuff that are in my itunes okay music library and will play from any device so it doesn't matter in fact the clever thing about it is if you downloaded content from someplace that wasn't yours and it matches um you get you get it and then it's in the library it may be again we're we're this is a question about uh responding live to a question that is unclear in a discord but um there is a a question about responding live to a question that is unclear in a discord but there is a question about like if you're matching in apple music is it all wrapped in apple music drm and expires when you leave that may be true um i don't know the point i would make is do not upload your

entire music collection to apple in any feature in in iTunes Match or in Apple Music, and then delete your music collection. Yeah, okay. You should keep it. That's the way to do it, yes. And then you can check it, right? But then you've also still got it. It's yours. And then you can see if it's the stuff that you want.

But, yeah, don't delete the music. No. So you keep it around. And if you decide to switch to Spotify or something like that, what you could do in that scenario is cancel Apple Music. Pay from iTunes Match to get your stuff that you have on your hard drive, again, that you saved and you didn't throw away, available on your phone when you're out and about. And then also have Spotify. Because I don't think Spotify will let you upload tracks and stuff like that. They used to a long time ago.

There are ways to do it. There are ways to do it. But iTunes Match is not relevant if you are an Apple Music subscriber. It's duplicative. And the but what ifs all come down to don't throw away your music collection. Don't do that. Don't trust Apple. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on a future episode of upgrade just send in your snell talk over upgradefeedback.com use question mark snell

talk in the relay fm members discord thank you to everybody that has done so uh it is time for some follow-up jason snell which has all been submitted again while our wonderful new uh feedback tool. I'm going to start off with something sent in from underscore David Smith, which I enjoyed that underscore sent this via the upgrade feedback tool when he could have just texted it to me or put it in Slack,

but you know, very official. He sent it in that way. Thanks. And this is about, do you remember zombie arms? We were talking about zombie arms. Underscore wrote in to say, I explored a bit about the origin of the phrase zombie arms

as it relates to touchscreen Macs the earliest reference I could find was actually Jason talking to John Gruber on the talk show episode 164 back in August of 2016 as part of a discussion about the touch bar yeah so that

proof that I did not invent that term so proof that it predates that yeah i don't know where it comes from or maybe you did invent it i didn't maybe you did though i really didn't know you ever considered that no brian writes in and says regarding touchscreens coming to the macbook pro first it's the laptop ios developers use if all it did was let developers use the touchscreen for their ios simulator some of us would buy it i found that as an interesting idea for why developers might want a touch screen um sure i i do think it's interesting i think it's novel i don't think that's like the reason they do it but i do think it's a novel use that would be uh useful if they

let developers have access to that i mean you're going to get the zombie arms but you know you can it's okay uh and i had one counterpoint that i hadn't considered from anthony who said i would hate to see a touchscreen added to the max at the expense of a noticeably thicker or heavier screen fair enough but there are lots of pc laptops out there. They all have touchscreens. There are iPhones and iPads. Fair enough. Yes, it would be a shame if the screens of a MacBook Pro got worse because of the touchscreen.

I'll also point out that it might not be the touchscreen. It might be other stuff because if the Apple were to do something that was more convertible, they may have to do things like put the brains of the computer or a battery in that top half which would make the balance of it really different than it is now um there's lots of things that could happen there so we will see but i i i am dubious that Apple would add a touchscreen. And when you look at other PC laptops, it's fine. So I just – but fair enough.

Yes, that would be a negative if they made your whole laptop thicker. I actually kind of don't care about the screen being thicker. It would be more about the weight and the balance and and the laptop being thicker yeah sure sure i'm yeah i'm i'm doubtful that this is going to be an issue but i don't deny that if it were it would be a problem all right let's talk about the macbook pro so you've had one right for the best part of a week also five five-ish days six days days, something like that, yeah. So we're going to talk about the MacBook Pro and the M2 chips kind of all in this one discussion, and we'll touch on the Mac Mini.

Oh, and there's a home pod. We'll talk about that too a little bit later in today's episode. What I wanted to start with, though, is the configuration that you got. Could you let me know the specs? But also, I want to talk about the fact that you have a 16 inch laptop and i just want to know what how that felt to you it is a um 16 inch macbook pro m2 max with 12 cores and 38 gpus uh i think it's a terabyte and 64 ram i don't. I would have to go get it.

It's actually not right in front of me right now. Okay. It's a big one. Yeah. It's the big one in all dimensions. So when was the last time you used a laptop of this size, if you have ever? I mean, I probably,

the last time I used a laptop of this size was when they introduced the 16 inch macbook pro on intel or i mean right because i got the 14 inch for m1 so it was that it was that first it was that that right before the pandemic uh event in new york city where they did the the first 16 inch where they they still had the touch bar, but they fixed the keyboard. That was sort of the, I think, the last time that I spent any appreciable time with a laptop this large. And this is just what Apple sent you, right? You didn't ask for a 16-inch computer?

No, I did not. No. Okay. But that's what they sent me. And I'm just intrigued. I think they're having a laugh. I want to know, like, how it felt like i know this is not the interesting part of the review but i i've been desperate to know how you got on with that that like massive laptop because they're huge

yes they're it's gigantic it's enormous it's it's hilariously enormous i mean what do you want me to say i hate it i just wanted to get your like know, did you have a revelation or what? I would never in a billion years want a laptop this large, right? Fortunately, the 14-inch is exactly the same on the inside other than, like, battery capacity and the literal physical size of the screen. But, like, computer-wise, they're the same. So you can choose. I would never in a million years choose the 16-inch ergonomically. It's, I don't see the benefit in having that screen and i mean like i didn't even know where to put my hands on the keyboard mic

because my hands are like drifting around because there's like the big speakers to the side and there's just this vast amount of space on the on the keyboard plane of the laptop and i didn't even like i try to orient my hands sometimes by the edge of the laptop, but you can't reach the edge of the laptop. It just goes on forever. I don't know. It's big. It's not a size for me.

And those who love it, bless you. Great. It is a beautiful, huge screen. As a thing you put on your desk, I can get behind why you might want it. I tried to use it as a laptop, like in my lap and stuff. And it's, yeah, it's gigantic. I would love to know, Upgradians, if you use a 16-inch laptop every day,

I want to know why you chose it. Send us some feedback and we can talk about it i'm not judging you right there is for me no judgment i'm just intrigued and where do you use it primarily yeah how about that one too because i i suspect a lot of 16-inch laptops are left on a desk right they're not maybe toted around all the time and and oh i'm on the couch with my giant 16-inch laptop but then why are you using it as a laptop right get a monitor and a keyboard right like why why would you get a 16 inch laptop and then not take it anywhere you know what i mean like i'm just i'm just really

intrigued so if you have a 16 inch macbook pro and you use it i want to know why you chose it and how you use it let me know what great feedback what is wrong with you? No, I'm not saying that part. That's Jason. Mike just was curious. And we can talk about it. I'll collect these up if we get people right in. Great. And we can talk about it later on.

All right. That's upgradefeedback.com, right? Upgradefeedback.com. Hit the link at the top of the show notes. Send us some feedback. So by and large, this MacBook Pro, everything that's new is inside, right? It's like the power of the thing.

That's where the newness is. Outside of that, there isn't really much to talk about. This is, I mean, that's how my lead of my story is, is here's what it's not new. It's not. It's not new. We did that already, right? Yeah. M1 MacBook Pro had more ports and they had Apple Silicon and it had that beautiful backlit the the the mini led

hdr display it's the it is the best display apple has ever made basically it for the mac certainly it is that again right like there's not anything really new except that they took the processor from m1 to m2 so it's a generational boost which is something but it's it's not a lot i mean i think what i said was if you have an m1 macbook pro i think you're fine unless you're in this unless you're one of these people who it just doesn't matter i always need the fastest because i could use all of that power so get me the fastest again because it is a little bit faster because it's an m2 or you've got a very specific need like with the hdmi being able to output at high resolution and frame rates like okay or the only other scenario could really come

up with from the m1 would be regret. Like, I bought the M1, but I kind of like cheaped out on the specs and I've regretted the size of the internal drive or the RAM or whatever. And like, and you're going to give yourself a mulligan and buy an M2 and then sell off your M1. Like, okay. But a regular user of an M1 MacBook Pro should feel fine because these things are not are not meant to last a year or 15 months they are meant to last a lot longer the difference in speed is not worth the price of buying a brand new laptop your laptop is fine so I think that the truth of this product is it's primarily for the holdouts right lots of Lots of people who bought the, maybe that 2018 or 2019 MacBook Pro 15 that they rolled out or one prior to that, but like an Intel MacBook Pro late model, still pretty good, still pretty new. Couldn't really justify getting rid of it.

Also, a lot of people talked about sitting out the M1 era because they were concerned about a processor transition and a lot of bumps. I would argue that the processor transition was actually incredibly smooth, but you do get those people who are like, no, first generation hardware, I'm just going to wait. I suspect a lot of those people said that, and then they saw the reviews of the M1s, and they're like, okay, never mind. But I think that there are also people out there who are like that. But the most likely scenario is you just bought a laptop in 2019. It's fine, and you just bought it.

You're not in the market for a new laptop. Those are the kind of people for whom the M2 MacBook Pros make most sense, right? Because there, you're still getting what we talked about 15, 14 months ago in late 21, which is the enormous leap that you get going from Intel to Apple Silicon. That you still get. And then the leap is just that much further because it's M2 instead of M1. But otherwise, yeah, these are really familiar, recognizable laptops because they're just, this is,

unlike the MacBook Air, because it changed its physical appearance when it went to M2, this is a speed bump. This is what an Apple Silicon speed bump looks like which is everything gets a little bit better but it's not revolutionary in any way it doesn't need to be the revolution happened uh 15 months ago it was pretty great and this is still pretty great i would say apple pulled a bit of a magic trick on me with the pro max chip right because the m1 to the m2 is about 12 faster right like i remember

when the m2 like the straight up m2 macbooks came out yeah my book macbook airs it was like oh this is a little bit faster but it's not like you know i remember at the time we were saying like okay like maybe that's what this is going to be like. It's a little bit faster. But the way that they tricked us is they just put more cores in than they did last time. And so now you get 20 to 40% faster on some tasks depending on the task. I thought it was very smart

and it surprised me, the difference. I was expecting a similar from the M1 Pro to M2 Pro that we got M1 to M2, but it's more than that. An M1 core is about 1700 Geekbench and an M2 Core is about 1900. So that's 12%. Yep.

And that's true through everything because an M1 Core and an M2 Core, they are what they are, right? Like it's just core count because they did. That's one of the interesting things they did with this is they did four uh four of these efficiency cores and then you get six or eight of the performance cores p cores and e cores as upgradients no you know what i mean so the the the four means that you're going to get and battery life we can talk about because battery life is so complicated but um i didn't manage to drain the battery in two and a half hours um but but here's the thing the having those four efficiency cores means that that most of the work you do on this mac is not gonna run the performance cores ever right because it won't need to which means that that's why it gets really good battery life in regular use is because if you're not stressing it out it's just sitting there going with its four

cores a quad core processor that's pretty fast the the you know it's not a performance fast but it's pretty fast and very low energy and so anytime you need more it's not a performance fast, but it's pretty fast and very low energy. And so anytime you need more, it's not going to feel slow. It will send something to the performance cores. But having four efficiency cores means that it could do a lot before it even breaks a sweat. And that is where the battery life is coming from. And then, yes, there's this cumulative effect that happens. It's not one-to-one. You don't add a second core and double

and then add a third core and fourth core and then it's quadruple. It doesn't work quite like that. It's not quite that efficient. But yeah, every core that gets added, especially every performance core that gets added or every GPU core that gets added, makes it that much faster.

So if you've got 32 GPU cores, it's that fast. And if you've got 32 gpu cores it's that fast and if you've got 38 gpu cores it's that fast and that's just this is how i was talking to dan uh more and about this on the six colors podcast uh for members and um and we were talking about how we've swapped kind of like one complexity for another because it used to be like i3 i5 i7 megahertz uh you know all the the clock speed of the of the intel processors all that stuff and now we don't have that apple doesn't talk about speed with m1 and m2 at all but there are these core variations right like the low-end model that's got two fewer cpu cores or the gpu configuration differences that happen and it's just it's funny because they have these names m2 m2 pro m2 max but and they could make it like well

they mean something m2 means this many cores and this many gpus m2 pro means this many cores and this many gpus and m2 max means this many cores and this many GPUs. And M2 Max means this many cores and this many GPUs. But then they do that binning thing where they're like, well, no, not really. I mean, the M2 Pro starts with this one with two fewer cores, and then you can pay for more cores. And the GPU cores can be a little bit or it can be a lot. And that's where the new complexity is. And the Apple Silicon world is Apple letting you vary some of that stuff. But that's the stuff that directly relates to performance, right? Because it's all based on just uh core count how many more of these are there

yeah i think it was just this is the thing that i hadn't really conceived of yet that they do have some level of flexibility in how they want these chips to be by the amount of cores they decide to put in them right and they can scale it up or down depending on the power of the core itself like the m let's imagine a world of the m3 core on its own is like 20 faster than the m2 well then you don't need to add so many right if you don't need to necessarily increase the core count for the m3 max to get a significant boost over the m2 max and so like they have that flexibility there which i guess apple loves right because now they were able to make a year-over-year improvement on or like revision it's like 18 months right like

or so since the from it's a little less i think they were planning on this being a 12 month i think so right thing right back in november it would have been 12 or 13 months but but it's a little bit longer yeah that they've basically for some people have made this a year-over-year desire for upgrading because they can get their work done with a 20 speed improvement or whatever you know so i just think that that's yeah kind of fascinating that they have those tools available to them now, which they wouldn't have been able to have before with Intel. Yeah, I think that's a very small audience, but it is important. But it's there, though. Money is no object. Performance is what matters, right? pay more for more performance no matter what because it matters either in terms of their time or in terms of the amount of uh you know the high-end level of their work sure that's that's

true i i think most people who buy this laptop aren't those people but those people do exist and like i liked in your review that you you know made a big kind of like hot basically half of it talking about like all right if you're coming from an intel mac now because you didn't want the first ones of these here's what you'll get like i like that perspective if you're coming from an Intel Mac now because you didn't want the first ones of these, here's what you'll get. Like I like that perspective a lot. But like I have an M1 Max MacBook Pro. I'm not going to upgrade to this.

There's no need. But there are people that will. And I just think it's interesting that I wasn't expecting them to do anything with this machine that would make that a real desire for people. But there are interesting gains that you can get from the speed increase that they've got but anyway yeah and the memory bandwidth and the fact that the um the 92 or 92 96 96 max ram yeah like those things are all there and and those

people are there i i just i mean this this is the question this is why i wrote the three different reviews essentially within my review because the question is who's this for and i think apple wants to show off apple silicon and quite rightly show rightly so it wants to show off how high-end work can be done on these things and i and so good for them right like it's it's absolutely true and if you're chasing performance and you want the most RAM and the RAM, the memory bandwidth and they have this thing where they always demo

where it's like, here's a 3D model that can't be opened on a PC laptop, but they can open it and work with it pretty fast on a Mac laptop. And that's entirely down to the fact that they have all that RAM

and they have all that GPU performance. It's like, it's a very impressive demo. So I want to give them credit for that. And I know there's an audience out there for that. That said, I mean, most people who buy this thing aren't going to be that audience. They're not there. They're going to be people. I mean, we can talk about the psychology of who buys the MacBook pro. Cause that was the other, one of the other sections of my article was why would you buy essentially, given everything else that's out there? And there are lots of good reasons, right? But not everybody who buys it, most people who buy it are not going to be, well, I really need the 96 gigs of RAM, and I really need all those GPU cores.

They're going to be people who are like, I want the nicer screen. I want more ports. I want more external display configurations. I hear from those people a lot about how frustrated they are about the MacBook Air not doing multiple external displays. Those are the reasons that I think a lot of people will buy the MacBook Pro or have bought the M1 MacBook Pro. And those are good reasons too. I think we could ask ourselves the question why Apple made the decisions it did about some of this stuff to say, you know, we're going to wrap all of our GPUs and all of our CPUs and all of our Pro stuff

and our screen and all the best stuff is going to go up here and it's two grand or up. And we're going to withhold most of that stuff from the MacBook Air. And that's how we're differentiating our line. But that's the decision they made. And the result is, you know, you might choose it for performance. But there are plenty of other people who buy a MacBook Pro are probably buying it for the features that aren't raw speed, which is just, I think that's interesting.

So you wrote that piece before, right? Where you referenced the first review and you said like Mac Pro in your backpack kind of thing. Yes. And I think we're back in that situation again, because I was actually excited. And then also kind of surprised that the MacBook Pro with an M2 Max beats out the M1 Max Max Studio, right? In basically every test you put it through based on your charts. Yep. I just found that kind of interesting because

i mean i don't know why but like there's just something about like well if you built this machine and it sits on a desk and it's not a laptop and you can do whatever you want with it that maybe it would still just have an edge in some way and like i think about the fans and stuff and like, you know. Well, the, let's be clear here. The Mac Studio Ultra is the fastest Mac around. Yep. But there's also the one that I've got, which is the, the, the Max. And you can get a Max chip in the MacBook Pro too. And at that point it's an M2 Max versus an M1 Max.

And if you keep everything else equal, it's going to be a little bit faster on the laptop because it's it's the newer generation of uh the chip so yeah i mean this is this is mac pro in your backpack is still a real thing here that the the power that you can get especially if you choose the high-end configuration of a MacBook Pro, the power, the huge amounts of RAM, so many GPU cores. If you're somebody in that market, that's kind of what we always thought of as the Mac Pro, essentially, market. the case that at 14 or enormous 16 inch sizes you can have what we always used to think of as mac pro power and stick it in a bag and walk away with it and do work on it on battery and apple always makes this point but i think it's a good one that pcs tend to the high performance pcs tend to only be able to put out that amount of power when plugged in, whereas the Mac laptop will do it whether it's plugged in or not. So full power, even if you're like in your backyard in a chair

doing your whatever it is that requires that amount of RAM and that amount of GPU, your 3D modeling or whatever. It's a nice day outside and you're working from home and you've decided to go in the backyard and take your MacBook Pro with you and you've got that Mac Pro power sitting there. It's absolutely the case and it's quite remarkable. And that's why I think that Apple is right to make hay with the super high-end applications of this thing, even though it's mostly, I guess we could say mostly aspirational for the vast number of people who will buy it. It still feels good to know that the thing I'm getting has no limits, essentially. Even though I'm not going to push the limits, this is what the pros can use, too, and it's the same tool.

And that's always been an aspect of buying high-end Apple products if you're not a high-end user. So Apple quoted, this is the best battery life in any laptop ever. I think it got like an extra hour for both Pro and Max, I think I heard. You can correct me if I'm wrong, but you said you drained it in two hours? It's about two and a half. Two and a half hours. I went from full to

empty. I ran all the CPU cores at 100%. Okay, how do you do that? I used Xcode Benchmark. I could have used anything, but Xcode Benchmark is a nice benchmark test that

tests Xcode compile. And there's a Unix command you can use that is, what is it? Repeat? Something like that where you basically, when it's you can use that is, what is it? Repeat? Something like that, where you basically, when it's done, do it again. And then, so I just ran it. And I had an activity monitor open and all the cores were full CPU cores. And that was enough

to kill it in two and a half hours. But again, this is the point. The point is, this is not scandalous. The point here is that if you take another computer and do that to it, and I didn't, so I don't have a comparison here, it will kill it a lot faster than that. That's literally, nobody works like that. Nobody has a hundred percent CPU on all cores at all times on a laptop. And if they do, their laptop doesn't last two and a half hours. But I wanted to make that point too, that like, these are the extremes. I didn't hit the GPUs. The GPUs probably would have killed it even faster. And if I'd been able to flood both of them, it would have killed it even faster than that. But the point here is when Apple quotes 22 hours, they're quoting for sitting in the TV app, watching a movie that's using one of their hardware decoders to

decode it and play it. And as a result, almost nothing else is happening on that system. When they quote 14 hours or 16 hours of wireless web, they're quoting a scripted test where they're using Safari to load a bunch of websites and click around and scroll and then click around again and all of that. And that's automated, which is great. But again, it is a, I would say very non-intensive test. It's more intense than, uh, watching a video and not doing anything else. But again, you can see it just dropped from 22 to 16 or 20 to 14 or whatever their numbers are, but like you lose a lot just there. So the truth is everybody's profile is different. Everybody's using different apps to do different things with and and and keeping in mind that when you're sitting there staring at your screen and nothing

is happening and you're not rendering something or whatever. It's crashing everything to zero, right? It's like all the performance cores go off. You know, the efficiency cores start to go off because there's nothing happening and your battery use goes way down when that happens too. So it becomes very difficult to say, here's what your battery is in this thing. Here's what you're going to get. It will be somewhere between 22 and two and a half hours, depending on, or probably two hours or an hour and a half, depending if I'd killed it in a different way. And that's just, you know, again, the point here is that based on, by holding those tests that Apple does level, Apple's able to say, to express that this one has more, more battery power. And that is a function of both its battery

life and the efficiency of its chip and the efficiency of the software to drive that chip efficiency even further by being really smart. I suspect that the four efficiency cores are a part of this. Like I said at the beginning of this whole conversation, I think that's going to be a big part of it just because so much of what we do is not pushing performance. And so having four cores that can just do stuff with very little effort, very little energy expended is a big win. But again, I didn't do one of those things. I didn't have time to do anything other than run the battery killing test.

But it does have an enormous battery. And if you get the 16-inch, it's even more enormous. And that's why it's it does it does have an enormous battery and if you get the 16 inches it's it's even more enormous and that's why it's so big and so heavy but uh but it's also a huge battery and and if you are on a lot of airplanes or out in the desert at a video shoot or something then it's going to be valuable for you to have it the exact numbers i don't know how useful they are right for those reasons but just knowing that it's more than the last one is you know that's kind of what you really need to know right like oh that's great like there's more you know like i already like my battery life in my laptop now

there's more of it awesome always want more of it there are no colors still still just silver and and darker silver no midnight no nothing like that. I just feel like we need to mention it. It's professionalism. Something we care about. No colors in professionalism. Mm-hmm. Don't, mm-mm.

Nope. But overall, very impressive machine, right? As you rightly pointed out, these were already great going into it, and now it's even faster than it was before. There's no complaints here. Yeah, it's even faster than it was before like there's no complaints here yeah i i uh it's spectacular um as somebody who has chosen i mean i have a mac studio and a macbook air right so

i've made both of these choices and i see the value in both of them i would say i love the m2 macbook air i think it's a great value i think that it's you know it's not quite half the price because that's the m1 but you know i i think think the MacBook Air is the best Mac for most people to buy. I really do. Yep. But I detail in the article, I mean, and we've talked about it here, there are lots of reasons to get a MacBook Pro. its enormous, truly enormous power is maybe not the most important one for most people. It's all the rest, right?

It's the battery and the ports and the external display. And that beautiful screen, right? Like those are all the other reasons that you get it. And I think those are all perfectly reasonable reasons. Plus it mac pro power if you want to if you want to go down that path but um but you know at the same time when then i opened my macbook air up i was like oh oh what a relief and i know it's slower um but i do the kind of work where i can stress a computer out that's why i use a. Um, I've got a lot of audio and video stuff that I do that, that having the extra power is great. But that said, I'm not

working in an environment like some people are where a Mac book air is just not going to be able to do it. Right. It's just going to be slower, right? All the video stuff I do, all the audio stuff I do will just be slower on a MacBook Air, but I could still do it. So I can have my primary computer be a MacBook Air if I wanted to and plug it into my studio display. What I would lose is the speed of every time I do a, you know, isotope RX de-reverb or de-noise that takes, you know, it would take whatever, four times as long or who knows, a lot longer to do it on the MacBook Air than it would take whatever, four times as long or who knows a lot longer to do it on the MacBook Air than it would to do it on the Mac studio. But, um, but my point is that

like most people don't even do what I do. And, and so I think that the air is in terms of like, I have, I have friends who call me and they're like, my kid is buying a laptop and what should they buy? And, and one of the fears that comes up a lot is, is this not going to be capable of doing what they need to do? There still is a fear out there that like the, the, the cheapest Mac laptop is not going to be powerful enough, um, for their kid to do whatever they want to do. It's going to be kind of a loser system. And there were eras when that was more true. And that's why I think about it in these terms, because what I tell them now is no, it's not a problem, right? Like the 999 Mac M one MacBook air will be more power than your kid is ever going to need. And yes, I would

know if their kid was a 3d artist and their employer would probably buy them that computer for them. But like, you see what I mean? Like there was a time when you might have to worry that the cheap Mac was just not, you know, you're so compromised. It was just not going to do what you wanted it to do. And we, we have left that, especially with Apple Silicon, we have left that era behind. So that's not a reason to get a MacBook Pro. Reason to get a MacBook Pro is, yeah, you need that power or you need, like, I think I'm not going to blame you. I'm not going to judge anybody, right? But I'm especially not going to judge you if you said, well, I don't really need the power, but I want that screen and I'm willing to pay

$2,000 to get that screen. It's like, I totally get it. The screen is amazing. It is absolutely better than the one in the MacBook Air. It looks great. You got those extra ports. That's super convenient. You want to attach your laptop to two external displays on your desk. All of these are also great reasons. This episode is brought to you in part by Electric.

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business. For listeners of this show, Electric are offering a free pair of Beats Solo 3 headphones for taking a qualified meeting. Just go to electric.ai slash upgrade. That's electric.ai slash upgrade. Go there now and get your free pair of Beats Solo 3 headphones today for scheduling a meeting. Our thanks to Electric for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's talk about the Mac Mini now then, because the MacBook Pro wasn't the only new machine. There is a new Mac Mini as well, which features both M2 and M2 Pro as configurations. Your partner in crime at Six Colors, Dan Morin,

had got a review of the M2 Mac Mini and has written a review and published it as well. I like that Dan kind of makes the argument that this Mac Mini is really kind of two products, where it is both the base level, I think, very affordable and capable M2 machine, which is really compatible for all kinds of work, similar to how you were talking about the MacBook Air, right? Like it is a machine for whoever, you know, has a monitor already, right? Like this would do a great job for you. But then you add the M2 Pro, which is a mid-range prosumer machine that can go that extra mile. And I think kind of starts bumping up against the current studio as well,

right? It's like a really fascinating take on this computer being quite different from each other depending on the spec that you get yeah i don't i wouldn't say bump up i feel like it slides in um okay actually i think i think it's the apple's vision here has been revealed a little bit right which is there are um it's not two computers mike Mike, it's four. Whoa, so many computers. It's four computers. It's the M2 Mac Mini, the M2 Pro Mac Mini, the M1 Max Mac Studio, and the M1 Ultra Mac Studio. I feel like if you look at it as four,

they all have their prices and their kind of performance profiles, and they really are four different computers. So the Mac we're talking about is one different computer but it's really two because it's got that you know 599 m2 model and then you go up to whatever it is 1299 1399 i didn't write the review i don't know 1299 a million it's a uh it it's then you get the um you get the m1 pro which or m2 pro which is our first pro desktop pro m m whatever pro on a desktop system we've only really had the m1 iMac and then the Mac Studio with pro with Max and Ultra and so it fits this little kind of like Apple has obviously obviously m2 m2 pro m2 or m1 max these names are so hard obviously no m whatever no name

m whatever pro m whatever max and m whatever ultra means something to apple and you win these with these two slash four products now you've got all of them in a desk in a compact desktop and i think that's meaningful and if you look at the prices you know mac studio is a premium over the mac mini at the high end still um because you're going up to to max from pro and so you spend an extra several hundred dollars to get up there and you can go wild right this stands that you can you can spec one of these mac minis out to 4500 if you want but you can spec right which is true and i i see those arguments sometimes i'm like well yeah but have you seen what you can spec a mac studio

too right like if we're specking them up they both go up it's not like the mac mini shoots past the studio i think that's like right if you're like i have to have two terabyte internal then the prices you're comparing between the two are very different prices but they still are separate because one of them has got a pro processor and one of them's got the max processor i i mean how many people really need a max processor over a pro processor i think is a good argument to make like would i if they had offered the mac studio and the mac mini side by side last year would i have bought a mac studio maybe but i certainly would have done what dan is doing which is seriously considering whether the the uh the pro chip is plenty for me. And it probably would be.

But I mean, I'm happy to have a Max because it's just, you know, it's going to serve me well for a long time. But in terms of what I do day to day, Pro probably would have been just fine. So I'm looking at the charts again here. So the Mac Mini with the M2 Pro, it does beat out the Mac Mini with the M2 Pro,

it does beat out the Mac Studio. I'm assuming this is your Mac Studio, right? Yeah, it's my Mac Studio. In like a couple of things. I think, what is it, GPU, where it kind of starts to fall down? But in CPU tasks, it performs really well.

Well, I mean, 19 GPU cores versus 32 GPU cores, it's, you know... It's not going to have much of a competition but i'm saying like it's interesting though right like you could i mean considering the type of work that you're doing exactly i'm not using those gpu cores am i no you're not you're not doing that so it's the difference is so my m1 max has eight performance cores and the mac mini pro you can configure it to have eight performance cores and then the four efficiency cores instead of the two on my studio so so yeah i mean that that's a a good example where an m2 pro like the one dan tested it's fast

it it's geekbench cpu multi-core score is faster than my mac studio absolutely i want to make a claim here and i'm going to test it against your knowledge i think the mac mini the standard m2 mac mini might be the best value apple has ever offered in a mac they dropped the price by a hundred dollars from the m1 mini and it's faster made it more powerful yep and i kind of can't believe the price of it it's like it's very surprising to me you get an eight core cpu 10 core gpu eight gigabytes of ram 256 gigabytes of RAM, 256 gigabytes of storage. Like, yeah, the RAM and storage aren't great, but it's $600. Yeah. Keeping in mind, somebody did the calculation,

like the original Mac mini that was $499 is like $750 in today's dollars. So it may be pound for pound, dollar for processor, for geekbench score somebody could do that math by the way uh but it's not me today uh that it might be the best deal that they've ever done it's entirely possible like i i am kind of blown away by it like i wanted to make sure we mentioned it because you know i spend a lot of time talking about how things get more expensive all the time right but this is not only is it so good they made it cheaper and i and if you're in education

it's 4.99 right like this is a great computer for that money like a truly excellent machine that can be dropped into a bunch of scenarios right like it's you know the mac mini was created to try and get people to switch from windows right like that was its thing initially yeah yeah bring your own keyboard monitor or mouse was that what it was was that screen and mouse display display keyboard and mouse yeah and i feel like this might be trying to do that again the apple silicon Silicon transition, I think, is turning a lot of heads. The power, and it's interesting, and Apple Silicon is cool. I see it a lot in YouTubers.

People talk about it a lot. They even started their fake keynote video with a bunch of content creators, including friend of the show, Austin Evans. They put a bunch of clips in of people are talking about the Apple Silicon chips. These are a big deal in tech right now so it's like why not make a really competitive entry-level mac again that can be just be dropped into an existing pc setting and now you've got this great value mac mini to do that i think it's really interesting and i do wonder if that played any hand in the decisions

that they made in this machine. I don't know. Because they didn't change anything on it. Design's the same. They didn't, as Dan points out, they didn't put any ports on the front or anything like that, which is a shame. You know, because the Mac Studio got those ports on the front, which would have been lovely. The colors, they actually reduced

this. There's less colors now. It's just silver. There's no space gray. I'm surprised that like the overall size of the thing you know like the overall kind of like form factor is basically the same i think there's like some small changes in the physical size but like it still looks like you know put those two things next to each other it just looks like a mac mini you know i guess that's part of why they can make it cheap. I don't know. I think it is. Yeah. It's a MacBook air stuck inside a Mac mini enclosure.

I haven't given a lot of thought to the M2 base Mac mini because it is just, yeah, I'm glad it exists. It's kind of amazing that they refreshed it. Um, and we, and everything I said about the MacBook air goes for the Mac mini, right? It's the, it's literally the same, except not a laptop, but like performance wise, it's exactly the same and it has a fan. So it'll, it'll be, it'll get,

keep cooler longer. And so run a little bit faster in the long run, if you're really extending it out, it's a lot of computer in a pretty low price and a little small container and a little low price. Yeah. Dan did a lot of work and couldn't get the fan to go. And I appreciated the the lengths that he went to to putting his apple watch up to the thing to see

if the decibels changed he installed an app like a fan monitoring app to make sure there was in fact a fan inside it seems like you couldn't get this fan to go which i don't know why but i feel like i have a personal vendetta against the fan inside of the mac studio i don't know i don't know why, but I feel like I have a personal vendetta against the fan inside of the Mac Studio. I don't know. I don't know why it bothers me, but it bothers me that it's in there. And apparently, from people I know, including you and Stephen, it's running all the time, the fan inside of the Mac Studio. And there are a bunch of other machines that this doesn't happen. So I'm really intrigued as to why it does what it does and why it seems to have so much headroom for cooling compared to upper max yeah i mean i use it every day and i don't care so i'm not saying you should care well i'm just

saying it's funny that that you don't use it and and have a problem with it and i do and i don't but well my problem it's not like a problem it's like it is a curiosity to me that i feel like i don't have an answer for it is mysterious that it seems to always run and that and that it is it has the ability to cool an m1 ultra configuration but even if you get the cheapest um m1 max configuration the fan still runs i think that the cooling is different in the two units too so it's it's like that that that m1 max one with the fan noise it's strange right like why is it always making exactly noise i find that i just find that strange like it's not like i feel like they shouldn't do it but like i just i feel like at the moment there doesn't really seem to be an answer like we wanted this at a time maybe this will make sense in like three years right that the ultra

maybe never so bananas or maybe never maybe never but i did uh uh ask dan about noise and he was like there isn't any so you know that is uh and that's the case with that laptop too. The only time I could get the fans to turn on on the MacBook Pro is when I ran graphics tests. Right. CPU at 100% for two and a half hours. It got a little warm. Fans never came on. Or at least, well, I can't say that.

Fans were never audible. I can say that. The GPU test, the fans were audible. Very, very much audible because the GPUs are the ones that get really hot. The CPUs don't get so hot. The GPUs really burn it up and they're the ones who need the cooling. And I love the Apple Silicon era. It's great. It's pretty wild, right? I mean, we will talk later in the show about what might be next for the apple silicon era because we're always looking ahead but this has given us with the pro and the max i mean the lesson we learned here with both of these computers is that with m2 apple's really just sort of like

pushing it forward a bit it's not and nor should we expect that there'll be a revolution in the second generation, right? That doesn't happen. But everything got pushed forward and there were little tweaks here and there, but Apple also made a bunch of design decisions in the M1 that essentially carried forward to the M2. So when we shift gears in a little bit and talk about the future, uh, that's one of the things, uh, to think about is like, uh, will there be a more, at some point there will be more dramatic change,

I think in things that Apple throws into the M three or M four and five, whatever. But M two is really just about, about keeping it going, keeping the trains running, um, getting these out there refreshed, which is, again, very admirable. I love that they were originally planning on this basically being a

year. It's a little bit more than that, it turns out, but not a lot more. Here's a faster MacBook Pro. And everybody who was sitting on the fence saying, you know, I can't justify buying the M1 MacBook Pro. I still have this Intel MacBookbook pro now is another you know you have another opportunity now with a new macbook pro if you want so why don't we switch gears from talking about some exciting product revisions to maybe a less exciting product revision with the brand new HomePod. Yeah. There's a new HomePod. There is. Is that what you were looking for?

Yes. Believe it or not, there is one. You know, you can look at it and you might not know. It is now powered by the S7 chip from the Apple Watch. It is apparently a little bit smaller. It has a slightly bigger kind of like screen on the top it has the same temperature and humidity sensor that the homepod mini does and now all of these are exposed to home kit as of ios 16.3 which i think comes out this week and there is a thread

radio inside so it's all set to be a full-on matter controller and it's $299 yeah so so for all of us who anticipated that the home pod needed a rethink the answer is it didn't get one it got a refresh and it looks it looks like it got turned into sort of the brains of a home pod mini and that they they decontented right they removed some stuff from it presumably the new home pod is uh cheaper for apple to make so it's back i think it's um i think it's okay i think i still have home pods that work and are fine and i like them them, the big HomePods. I think that having the minis and no big HomePods was weird. It's not like Apple to have a modified product without other products in the family. It was the HomePod mini and that's all there was. But I think that the biggest thing that's not like Apple is, it's not like Apple to have a product for $99 and not a more expensive product to upsell you to. And now they do with the,

with the big home pod. And, um, I haven't heard it. I don't have them. Apparently some journalists were allowed into a secret room to listen to them, but only in that one room.

Uh, and, uh, and I don't know, I'm sure they sound fine. I'm sure they sound good. Uh, the old home ponds sounded great.

And, uh And it's still stereo pair for 600 bucks. It's pricey. But, you know, Apple stuff is often pricey. At least the HomePod minis also exist. Beyond that, I don't know. I don't know what to think about it. Personally, my HomePods still work great. Would I buy new HomePods if my HomePods died? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. I like having them there, even though I could turn on my Apple TV and I've got speakers in my living room that I could use instead that are better. I find myself playing music on the HomePods a lot because they're just there and addressable and sound good. So I might. I might. I might look around at other options,

other speaker options, but I might get a new set of HomePods if my HomePods died. Yeah, Chris Walsh at The Verge got some time of it. Wasn't allowed to take any photos of it. Wasn't allowed to have a side-by-side comparison. What did we call it when the original one came out

that I was allowed in the Hidden Grove or something? You had a similar deal, right? It was like you can listen to this thing but nothing else you can't tell details of where you were or what the environment was or what you saw you can only talk about what you heard in this room and that seems to have happened again remind me though did they play it in comparison to other devices uh they did right okay in my demo they compared it to other devices but they didn't do that this time it seems and welch says it's about sounds about as good as the original to his ear but of course he couldn't do it he said he had to run back to the office so you can guess where they were and listen to the original and try and be like does it sound the same uh i'm disappointed

right in case you couldn't i'm very disappointed uh in this home pod i really want more from apple than what they've done here um especially for 300 like the home pods are great but i don't think they're 300 great like right now um and i don't think that're $300 great right now. And I don't think that they've really put enough into this thing to make it compelling. It is really now, it's just a big HomePod mini, and I kind of feel like, well, I'll just get HomePod minis and it will be way cheaper. I think there's nothing wrong with making a bigger version

that sounds better for people who want to spend more money and get something that sounds better. And I like that they're both functionally the same beyond that. I think that's all good. I wish it was cheaper because I do think that they're best in stereo pairs.

And I'll say what I did when the original HomePods came out, which is I kind of wish they would sell it as a bundle, right? Like buy two and save, but that doesn't seem to be part of their initial announcement either. And 300, right? Like triple the price of the HomePod mini is, that's a big leap, but obviously they have some confidence that they can sell them that way. I think it's really interesting because the HomePod

original is perceived as being kind of a failure of a product, and yet they're really kind of going back there again. It's $50 less, but $299 was a price that was readily available at the end for the HomePod. So at least it's cheaper, but I don't know. It's interesting. A lot of rumors out there. This is not the rumor roundup, but a lot of rumors out there, a lot of reports that there are other Apple home products in the works. And so maybe this is Apple finally kind of like showing that they need to get

all their ducks in a row. They need to get that new HomePod out. They need to get ready for Matter and then they can start rolling out some other products too. Who knows? This episode is brought to you by Capital One.

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maybe to lift my spirits about Apple's home strategy. Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple continues to work on a set of devices to expand their smart home lineup. Quote, The push into smart displays

will start with a tablet product, essentially a low-end iPad, that can control things like thermostats and lights, show video, and handle FaceTime. The product could be mounted on walls or elsewhere using magnetic fasteners,

positioning it as more of a home gadget than a regular iPad. Apparently as well, a version of the Apple TV that would combine a speaker and camera is still being worked on, but is unfortunately facing setbacks. Oh, my soundbar. Come on. iPad. He's describing it as an iPad, essentially an iPad, right?

I think that's just a way to describe it, right? I think so too, right? And we've speculated about this a lot. I love hearing about this. As somebody who's had an Amazon Echo show in his kitchen for a while now, there's a lot of opportunity to do better.

And that Apple could really, I really want Apple to make this product. My guess is that it's based on iPad hardware, that it is going to be able to run apps like an iPad, but that they're going to make it have a kind of like a, a better kind of far away visual mode like these other products have, um, so that you can control it via voice,

via Siri and have it be, um, you know products have, so that you can control it via voice, via Siri, and have it be able to show you stuff in a way that an iPad lock screen that expects you to be holding it in your hands doesn't. So whether that's a more Apple TV-like mode or it's a different kind of lock screen mode. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what the form is and again everything needs to be scaled up because you're standing four feet away from it instead of holding it in your hands but all the pieces i know we've said this in the past all the pieces are there

apple has all the pieces to make a product like this they just have to have the will to make it and it sounds like this is what this product is going to be it's going to be something that is you know put it on here's a stand you can put it in here's an attachment to the wall you can put it on and that they're they're trying to use it based on kind of ipad technology sounds good i'd love to see it the thing that i want them to do is what google is doing with the pixel tablet where you can get this base and if you put it on the base it turns it into a Pixel tablet, where you can get this base, and if you put it on the base,

it turns it into a home hub. So you can just take your existing tablet and just turn it into one of the home products. I think that's super cool. I would like them to do that. However, I don't imagine they'll do that because why sell a base when you can sell a whole device? But then it would give people something

to do with their older ipads which i think would be awesome right but nevertheless i really want both of these products this is exactly the types of things that i want you know me and you have spoken about this idea of this like soundbar apple tv facetime thing a bunch i really hope that they can get this product together because i think it would be amazing um but i really do want that an apple focused screen it's got all my photos in it already to show me memories yep or got all my calendars in there or like everything's in there for me and like i think for most of our listeners, they're using some version of services that Apple provide. I would love the stuff that I have in iCloud to be available to me on a screen.

Do smart stuff, like give a voice or face recognition to show the correct things for the correct person in the house when they're looking at it. I would love all of that kind of stuff in a product made by Apple rather than a product made by somebody else. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And you could implement this. If you're Apple, you could implement this as a device that was running tvOS. You could implement it as an iPadOS kiosk mode of some kind. It's unclear what it's doing here. But those are implementation details, right? Somebody has presumably been working for years trying to figure out the best way to make a product like this

that is at a price point that Apple wants to hit. But with widgets and Siri and all the cloud services and honestly apps, whether it's tvOS apps or iPadOS apps, the pieces are here for something great. And every time that I wonder why can't I do that thing on my Echo Show or why is it showing me another stupid ad? And the answer is because

I paid very little for it because it's an Amazon product designed to deliver me ads. Don't get me started. That I wish for something better and think of how nice it would be if I could put some iOS widgets on my screen and maybe get my notifications there and use Siri to play music and, and, you know, and which I can do with, with the Amazon, uh, assistant too, but like, I don't know, there's a better experience to be had there and Apple's got all the pieces. So I would be very excited if Apple decided, yes, actually, uh, uh, uh, an assistant with a screen is a good idea, right? Because the HomePod, my frustration that I'll go into at a later time, my frustration with the Amazon assistants,

I could unplug it and move my HomePod there, right? But I don't because there is value in having a screen. There really is value in having a screen. Even if it's just being able to glance and see what the timer status is, there's value in having a screen. So I hope Apple will play there one day. Mark Gurman has also reported that Apple is currently planning to follow up on their Mixed Reality headset now with a cheaper version in either 2024 or 2025 before they were to release a full AR-focused product. before they were to release a full AR-focused product. The AR product is apparently on hold due to technical issues in development. I mean, translation, this thing sounds like it's going to be really hard to make,

and turns out it is. I mean, I'm not surprised by this at all. I feel like what we're seeing with Apple and these products is a pretty traditional product, new product category curve, right? Which is like, or plot, however you want to want to say it, where it's like, well, here's our first one. And it, it kind of works and it's overpriced and, uh, not a lot of people who aren't enthusiasts are going to want it, but, but here it is. And then the next one is, well, we made one that's cheaper and, uh, more enthusiasts are going to want it but but here it is and then the next one is well we made one that's cheaper and uh more people are going to want it but we're still working on it and like and you got to go several steps out from there before you get to these are glasses you can wear out in the world and they overlay things into your field of vision right

like that's a way harder product to make that that's like that's like somebody with an Apple II in 1977 saying, we've got the iPhone on our roadmap. It's like, hmm. I even see it as something like, imagine if Apple started with the iPad. And the next year, we're like, oh, we're going to have an iPhone next year. The iPad, much bigger. You could, in theory, make it a chunkier device. But then, having something that can just be available all the time, battery life can be put in somebody's pocket,

the miniaturization required if they had done it the other way around would have been really hard. And that's kind of what this feels like, where you start off with a mixed reality headset for whatever that's going to be. It's going to be expensive and big and chunky so it can have a bigger battery life in it. The idea that then somebody could just put a pair of glasses on their face and just live their regular life, that is going to be incredibly hard. Yeah, it's not 1, 2, 3, right?

That's not how those steps work. It's like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, cloud question mark. Exactly. 83. It's a long way off so of course i mean technical issues in development i just read that as this is this is technology we have not yet invented or that we have not yet invented at a size or weight or power consumption or all of the above that it makes it a product that can exist today.

And that, I mean, that's the case. Apple was prototyping touchscreen things, including like iPhone-like touchscreen things way before the iPhone. But it was always like, how do we, you know, how do we get this to work in anything small? And it took time to reach that point where it was like, now we can make a product that people want. And that is the case. And it's not just Apple. It's literally everybody. Like this glasses that you wear

that show you the world, but also paint things on your vision with details and all that. Like that is science fiction tech that we're not there yet. Or if we are there yet, it's with like a thing that is connected to

80 other things. It's like that fusion that happened at the Lawrence Livermore lab where they're like, well, you know, it took an enormous thing and we actually, to run it all, it took this huge amount of energy, but the actual fusion experiment generated power. It's like, you know, it's a very large asterisk. It's like's like this is very exciting but it's not something you can actually apply right now this is a little like that where it's like they may have a lot of this tech but not in a in a way that it'll fit on your face it's like if you've got eight people behind you and a like a cable going to a van that is following you down the street like okay but that's not what the product has to be yeah it's like that fusion as you say like that fusion reaction wasn't net positive right like if you encountered everything that

it took to get it to the point where it can generate the energy to get it to the point right and that and it's in it's experimental and i get that's what happens in early tech and the encouraging thing about the fusion reaction is that when they got it there they this technique generated more than they put in. And that is a milestone, right? But you can't forget the rest of it, which is that it's not like you can put one in your basement, right? That product does not exist and may not exist, if ever, for decades. And there's just a long way to get there.

and may not exist if ever for decades. And there's just a long way to get there. Quote, Apple is aiming the lower price of the follow-up mixed reality device by using chips on par with those in the iPhone rather than components found in higher end Mac computers. So I don't think this is a version one, version two situation. No, this is Apple Reality Pro and then Apple Reality One,

I think is what mark german said that it's calling it so what they're doing is they're going to make the aspirational thing that costs a fortune that nobody's going to buy um and then they're going to follow it up and whether they say it at the time this is clearly the strategy which is like oh there will be another version that people will actually buy just not yet right there'll be a cheaper version it's like oculus what is it the the oculus strategy is similar, right? Where they still are selling the Quest 2, which is their cheap one, and then they've got their expensive nice one. brought out the Quest and made it easy. Now, the Rift doesn't exist anymore,

but now they have the Quest Pro, right, as you say. So, like, they kind of flipped it around again, but they're still the expensive and cheap. I really wonder if Apple would be so bold as to say this when they introduce the product. It would go against everything that they've done in the past, but I would certainly, again, if I were one of those people in a meeting, again, they would recognize me as an outsider

and throw me out immediately. But if I were there and they somehow thought that I had something to say, that's what I would say is, you know, you need to reassure people that this isn't the whole story because you're going to get lambasted for it. This might be the one time to do it. Yeah. You only get, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Developers want to hear what you have to say.

And so you should commit that this is just the beginning for us. We have other products that are coming that are, that are also VR, AR, XR, whatever you want to say, products. Lean into that. Lean into that this is step one of a whole, just like how you leaned into it's an area of interest years before in order to prime the pump. Just say it. You don't have to say next year we're going to announce the Apple Reality One, but say we have other products in the pipeline,

this is going to be big. And we anticipate that in the next couple of years, lots of people are going to have, uh, have devices running on this platform. That's, that's what I would say that they should probably say is just go out with confidence. Don't pre-announce those other products, but give a nod and say, yeah, that we're in on this. This isn't it. This isn't a sink or swim kind of thing with this one product. We're in it. And there will be other products coming that are great that people are going to want. And in a few years, there's going to be so many people using this platform that you get on board today, right? That's the argument. Yeah, I agree with you. I would say this is maybe one of the only times where they could straight up say, we have another product next year that's

going to be different in value. And this is a sneak peek of it because... They could, they could. But I mean, like I said, they can couch it a little bit and it would be okay. I don't think that the user base of this expensive headset would change dependent on whether they did that or not.

Like the type of person that's going to buy this... Sure. If it's $3,000, right? The type of person that's buying this is not now gonna go okay then i'll wait i'll wait for the one in two years that's cheaper yeah it's either people sickos like me right who won it and like i would be that person no matter what right like whether i do in this show or not if i wasn't doing this show i'd still be the person that wanted it and if i could afford it, I would do it.

And then also, developers, right? Developers aren't going to be like, oh, they're bringing out another thing next year that's cheaper. If you have an idea, you're not going to be like, oh, wait for that one then. No, you want to be ready for when the cheaper one comes. And so I don't think they're going to do it this way. I'm saying I could imagine this being one of the only times where they could get away with it. And I don't think it would hurt this product's chance in the market either way, to be honest. Probably not. And like I said,

I actually, I think Apple needs to give developers especially confidence that this platform matters yeah yeah digitimes is expecting a macbook air powered by an m3 chip to be released in the second half of 2023 it is expected that this could be apple's first three nanometer apple silicon chip uh this is interesting because it kind of does and doesn't line up with the rumors time wise at the 15 inch model there have been lots of rumors to suggest it would occur in q2 but i think personally this all kind of wraps up this is the next revision i mean they could do an m3 macbook air a year after doing or a little more after the M2 MacBook Air. Remember the M2 MacBook Air was delayed. So maybe they turn around and put an M3 in it pretty fast. The scenario that does make

more sense is that this is the 15 inch model that they've been talking about, but it's possible we'll get a 15 inch M2. And then in the fall, we'll get a revision of the 13 inch model that's an M3. It's possible. I don't, you know, I mean, who knows, right? Like who knows how their schedules are shaping up? I think what's more interesting here is the idea that this could be the Apple's first three nanometer chip. This is a theory that I've had for a little while now that I'm still wondering about, which is given that the A series chips release every year and the M series chips release every year and a half, that we're going to see a skip

at some point. If this is the first three nanometer Apple Silicon chip, that suggests that the M3 is based on, I would guess on the A17, which will be in this falls iPhone and is supposed to be on a 3 nanometer process. And given the rumors or reports, there are reports, that the A16 had the GPU cores that they tried to do, next-gen GPU cores, and they failed them and went back to the old ones

because they used too much power. This plays into that, right, which is the Mac wants to leap over that. It's almost like the a16 is a lost generation at that point um it's also possible that it's a it's the based on the a16 but made at the three nanometer process with the new gpu cores because they'll they'll work fine on the mac but i don't know at that point it's almost an a17 anyway so maybe that's the truth is that the m3 is the a17 they're going to come out together this fall essentially and the mac will and when i was talking before about like

just progressing from the m1 to the m2 the m3 feels like that's where you might see apple's first sort of like haha but but wait see what we did with this next generation of chip in a way that the M2 doesn't do because it is more just a little bit of an improvement over M1. If you enjoy this show and want more of it, you should subscribe to Upgrade Plus because you'll get no ads, and you'll get bonus content each and every single week, including our challenges.

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I'm going to quiz Jason on his seeming new distaste for his Echo Show because I have an Echo Show and have my own distaste for my Echo Show so I want to dig into that today rich guys go to getupgradeplus.com uh jeff bezos if you're out there you can pay five hundred dollars a month

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Jem said, you mentioned previously in the loss of future revenue for Twitter app developers. So like we're talking about that as like Twitter app's gone away. Twitter app's gone, gone now. That's gone. It's done.

Twitter changed the API rules. It's over. So we were talking about the idea that these businesses, that's it for them now with these products. That is a thing. But as the Twitter, and Jim goes on to say, but as the Twitterific team state in their blog post, if people who paid demand refunds because of the app that they paid for is now useless it could devastate them for icon factory and tap bots both they are and anybody else who's got a paid twitter client if people ask for their money back which is their right but it's going to happen all at once and it's going to yeah it will be an

enormous loss of money for these very small businesses yeah and this is a very complicated situation i feel like because as you say right like people paid for an app. Like, it is not the user's fault that this happened. This isn't the developer's fault either, but it's not the user's fault, right? And so, like, this is one of those really weird decisions, like, really weird situations where, like, I, being who I am, lean on the idea of that the developers keep the money, like, daddy's small businesses, etc but there are a lot of people like well i pay for this too right it's very complicated i would ask our listeners

if they're thinking about this to kind of just write this one off as like oh well because you know if you'd used and loved this app do you really want to put the developer in a tough situation? Right. Because that's they didn't you know, listening to the show, what's gone down here. Right. I would kind of give it as them as a tip or whatever. Right. Like, here you go. Like, thanks for your work. Goodbye. But I would not if somebody wants a refund and requests a refund. I'm not going to say you're wrong for doing that because it's a business, right?

You are a customer. It's a transaction to provide a service. It's not your fault that it went away. It's really weird, right? It's just a very strange situation. I mean, and it gets worse by the fact of like, if you ask for a refund in the App Store, that 30% that Apple takes,

I think there is precedent that they can make you as the developer refund the full amount and Apple won't give back their 30%, which is even stranger and more complicated and weird. David says, I'm ready to update my desktop Mac and the new Mac mini looks great to me. My current iMac, which is a Retina 5K 27 inch late 2014, has a lovely big monitor that

I would love to keep using. From everything that I've seen, I'm out of luck and will have to discard this monitor and buy something new. Have you heard of any way possible to reuse my iMac monitor with a modern Mac Mini or Mac Studio? The answer is essentially no. The way that the Retina 5K displays on iMacs were built, they don't have target display mode, which used to be a thing long ago. They're moving a lot of pixels and they were never designed, as iMacs largely have not been designed to be monitors.

They're computers, they're not monitors. If you really want to you can use um something like the what like the duet display there are some apps that'll do it lunar display lunar display well duet display was another app right is that not a different app they're both fat but i don't i think lunar display does the hardware thing. Luna Display is software. Right. I think that may be right. There's definitely hardware with a Luna Display. That's part of the secret sauce there. So there are apps that will let you take your Mac and put it on a second Mac as a screen. But keep in mind, one, you got to boot up your iMac and run that. It's still your iMac. It's still running there. And two, you know, you're not going to be

satisfied with the quality because it's not going to be, it's going to be laggy or it's going to be lower quality because it is streaming video into a faux monitor, like from your Mac. So you could try it and you might like it. My guess is you won't like it. And so that's why I taken this question to be, you know, reuse my Mac, my iMac monitor with a Mac mini or Mac studio as like the primary display. That's why I say no. Cause the answer is yes, with an asterisk. And the asterisk is, you're not going to like it. You can try it. You're not going to like it. It's not going to be satisfying to you. Just like using it with an iPad would not be satisfying. You could do it. You're not going to like it. Joe asks, do you think that an m2 max and m2 ultra max studio update could be

imminent now that we have the macbook pro updates or could the max studio be another one and done proposition like the imac pro joe you're asking the question that we're all asking whose way is this just max studio owners or like, I mean, I think everybody is asking, right? Like, is the Mac studio a one-off that was just sort of like to get us to the Mac pro or is the Mac studio going to continue to be a part of Apple's product line? I feel like there's a perfectly good place for the Mac studio. I don't know how the sales have done, right? Like I, I feel like I said earlier in this very show that there's this space where you've got the Mac mini and the Mac studio and, and they fit the four of them fit across the line. What a Mac pro does to that? I don't know. The Mac, the Mac pro

is going to be so much more expensive than the Mac studio. So my feeling is that there is probably room in the product line for a Mac studio and that the Mac studio is actually going to appeal to more people than a Mac pro, but I could also see Apple saying, nah, it's not worth it. Mac Mini is good enough. And then Mac Pro. So we'll see. But I hope that they'll just keep revising the Mac Studio. They went to the trouble of making it.

So just keep doing it. And Eli asks, what movies are you most excited for in 2023? Oh, right. Is this a draft or how do we do this you could just list it just list the the ones i have a list you have a list i think we can just go through the lists all right um uh the sequel to um the animated uh spider-man uh spider-verse movie is coming out across the spider-verse part one i guess or maybe it's they're gonna have to they're making two of them but um they have different names i don't remember what the second one is but like across the spider-verse and then there's another one spider-verse so into the spider-verse was the one this is the one starring uh you know miles morales and it's animated and it's great it's one of the great one of the best

animated movies of all time. There I said it. So another one of those. So yes, please. I'm encouraged by the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie. And I love Indiana Jones. So I'm looking forward to that very much.

The Marvel movie I'm looking forward to the most is The Marvels, which is the Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel team-up movie. I'm going to mention a DC movie here. I haven't seen anything about it, but I love the comics of it, which is Blue Beetle, which is about a kid in Texas named Jaime Reyes, who gets this bizarre alien tech suit that allows him to be a superhero um the comics were really fun i think and cat capture the vibe of this kid trying to figure out how to be a superhero and deal with his family and his friends and this weird alien suit uh could be great i don't know i'm gonna put on my list for now very intrigued and i realized the other week that dune part two is coming out this year which when the

first part came out i thought you know they didn't produce them simultaneously it was going to be forever before they got part two into theaters but it's apparently going to happen uh toward the end of the year so i'm excited about that because i really like dune part one so bring on part two so i'm also all in on across the spider verse cannot wait for that movie trailer looks so sick like can't wait um i'm you know for me i'm all in on marvel movies so i'm excited for ant-man i've already booked my tickets i've got an update i've got an update here across the spider verse is the third movie beyondVerse, is the second movie, I think. I don't know.

Or is it the other way around? No, I think Beyond the Spider-Verse is the one next. Beyond the Spider-Verse is 2024. Across the Spider-Verse is 2023. It's so confusing. Part one and two were less confusing than this. Yeah. All right.

Anyway, sorry. So, yeah. Ant-Man, I'm in. The Marvel-man i'm in the marvels i'm in guardians of the galaxy 3 can't wait for all of them i'll be there opening night i love it oh okay that's just how i am for me with marvel movies i love them right and i don't want spoilers so i just go open a night to each one of them and have a great time i'm super excited for the super mario movie it looks great. Like, I love it. The clip that they had at the Game Awards

completely sold me. The trailer was good, but like they played like a one minute clip or something and it just looked like so much fun. I am going to have a great time watching the Super Mario movie. Can't wait. Similarly, I'm very intrigued about the Barbie movie.

Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling. It's a good trailer. The trailer sold me where I was like, oh, okay. very intrigued about the barbie movie margot robbie ryan gosling it looks the trailer the trailer sold me where i was like oh okay now i don't know what's happening uh and oppenheimer christopher nolan movie uh about the atomic bomb kelly murphy like i love kelly and murphy i'm happy that kelly and murphy's finally getting a full-on starring role in the Nolan movie like he's always in him somewhere uh and I love killing Murphy so that's what I'm excited for this year I read um the making of the atomic bomb which is a very large book last year um so I'm very interested in that because I've I've read a lot about that uh about the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer is a

particularly interesting figure so um you know I, I'm intrigued by that one. I didn't have that on my list, but I will admit to being intrigued. This is the one where they actually did like an actual bomb, right? And they shot footage of an actual explosion rather than using CGI? I don't think so. You can't blow up atomic bombs. Not an atomic bomb. They just blew up a bomb and said look it's atomic

pretend it's atomic so christopher nolan recreated nuclear explosion without cgi for new film according to the guardian yeah without cgi i'm gonna get give you a guarantee here there's cgi but it's nice that he blew something up could be something up you know yeah i don't know what it means but apparently he blew something up i just hear people talking about the blowing up and then and then you had cj we watched top gun maverick over the weekend and we had that conversation which is you know is this practical or are those you know effect shots and my answer was i think the answer is yes i think they did a lot of innovative photography and they did a lot of aerial photography and that crazy tom cruise was probably out there in a plane somewhere and then they took that footage and then they

composited it a lot right like i think both of those things can be true if you can hold that in your mind that they can shoot some amazing footage and then still need to clean it up in order to make it look like it fits inside the film. I kind of don't understand why people are so against visual effects. Like, you see this, right? I get it. And I understand the mixture, right?

Like, I think the mixture is important, right? Because I can imagine sometimes for actors, they like to be in places, right? Which is, I think the volume is really cool because it can at least give you the impression of, like, being in a place, rather than just standing in front of a green screen. But, like, there is, like, I don't know why

people get so mad about practical versus special effects, and I don't get it. Practical versus, like, digital effects. And, yeah, I don't entirely agree. I mean, there is an argument to be made that there are movies that are being made that are relying on special effects to dazzle people and that the other parts of filmmaking are left behind. The problem is that, I mean, that is such a reductive kind of idea. Special effects have been with us. Visual effects have been with us since the beginning of film believe it or not todd desirio always likes to bring out gifs from like things from the 20s to show you vfx has been with us since the very beginning um and there are always good ones and there are bad

ones and there are filmmakers who know how to use them to tell a story and there are filmmakers who don't know how to use them and fail to tell a story and the tools that are being used have changed but everything else remains the same so i don't i yeah i am with you i don't really understand the i'm tired of cgi argument um i do i i will say i think that there's something at the root of that argument that maybe i do understand, which is that there are, there's a couple things there, right? One is that filmmakers don't always, or production companies or studios, don't always have a good movie. But they figure that if they have a bunch of special effects that maybe people will come see it. That's not new.

That's been happening for a long time i don't know i feel like what people are seeing is that they don't like the bad filmmaking right like it's just bad filmmaking is what you don't like yeah right yeah and then they try to find they try to find reasons to to do that and then bad filmmaking is another thing i wanted to mention which is another problem here is that sometimes it's just that the filmmakers don't know how to use um you know they get hired and they've never worked on a movie with a lot of special effects and they don't know how to use them. Also, some of this stuff is like laziness. Like the, um, the volume is interesting because it requires you to do all of your computer production work, not all, but a lot of your computer production work before you shoot.

And that means that it forces the filmmakers to actually make the decisions and do the work before they get on set to shoot. I think that a lot of broken films from the modern era are because filmmakers have decided that they don't need to do the work up front. They can wave their hands at the VFX department and say, fix my things. They don't plan ahead. department say fix my you know fix my things they don't plan ahead and those filmmakers make bad films shockingly uh people who don't do their job um don't do good at their job but but that's why i actually like things like the volume is is um for those who don't know like if you're shooting on a an led wall where you've got an entire three 3D world that moves as the camera moves to make it seem like you're outside in that world, all those assets have to be done and decided on in advance. Whereas with a lot of stuff that's shot before a green screen or a blue screen or really anywhere, it allows the director to get away with being like, yeah, we'll figure it out later.

And that's not conducive to good filmmaking. So I think there's, I think there's stuff that's at the roots of it. And then it just becomes a holy war, right? Which is just like, this is stupid CGI where, where,

where you see people posting like, uh, over the weekend, Todd Vizzieri posted a thing that was, uh, uh, somebody posting a video of Iron Man from the first Iron Man movie in a scene. And he said the Iron Man costume was so much better when they didn't do it in CGI.

And Todd said, you know, the Iron Man costume in that shot is CGI, right? Like, come on. Anyway, it's silly. But anyway, all the movies that I listed and that you listed will have CGI in them. I guarantee it. Back in my day, Iron Man really put the suit on. You know how many people got poisoned from the makeup in The Wizard of Oz because it was clogging their pores and they were allergic to it? Well, at least one, but probably more than that.

They're probably very sick, covered in silver paint or like lion fur or whatever, right? And that was 1939. It happens. If you would like to send in a question of your own for us to answer on the show in Ask Upgrade, send it in to upgradefeedback.com

or click the link in the podcast app of your choice and you can send in some feedback to us and it'd be great. I'm really enjoying getting our Ask Upgrade questions there. They've been really great.

Thank you to everybody that's done that. We will be back in the next week's episode. Until then, you can check out Jason's writing at sixcolors.com and here he's podcast at theincomparable.com and right here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows, of course, here on RelayFM too and check out my work at cortexbrand.com. You can send us your feedback and your questions at upgradefeedback.com.

And thank you to our members who support the show with Upgrade Plus and to our sponsors this week, Capital One and Electric. We'll be back on next week's episode. Thank you so much for listening. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, everybody.