Chapters
- Marco's Computer Waffling
- Big Sur duping Contacts
- TensorFlow uses the GPU
- Apple's ECC RAM controller
- Sponsor: Linode
- More on M1 scaling
- Windows virtualized on M1
- Sponsor: Bombas
- HomePod Mini review
- iPhone 12 Mini review
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- MacBook Air update
- #askatp: Disable M1 fan
- #askatp: Apple News
- #askatp: Discrete obsolete?
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Marco
Actually, yeah. The transportation to the beach did I guess dislodge it off dust. I'm getting near the end of my rope here like it's pretty bad. Like it's now audible most of the day. Even when it's extensively, you know, idle like when there's nothing in activity monitor or iStat menus showing it's actually using the CPUs, it's now idling at like 72 degrees celsius, and like 1300 to 1400 RPM fan speed, which is not normal. And this even just Catalina being Catalina because it processed the reboots, too. So I'm just, this is the worst time in possibly a decade to need a new high performance desktop Mac.
Marco
I know. I was like, that's actually I could just trade it in. And just buy like, you know, the highest spec Mac Mini with the new chip which is like $1700 but I would only then have two terabytes instead of four. And I would have only 16 gigs of RAM instead of 64 and I'm a little hesitant to go that route and I'd have to you know go get my stupid LG 5K and bring it to the beach. And no way in hell I'm ordering a second one. But you know, just move that one here. So it would be kind of an ordeal and then like, what I really want, ideally, is a new iMac. Like I love the iMac. Although, and well do I love the iMac? I mean I've had now two I guess, right? Did I only have one 5K before the pro?
Marco
Yeah, the iMac pro came out in the end of 2017 and I had it for three years so yeah, so I'm pretty sure I just went straight from that iMac 5K the first gen iMac 5K to the iMac Pro. And in both cases I loved them for a while but they didn't age incredibly gracefully because of the all in oneness like you know the first one I had, I had a screen problem and it's you know it took a while for me to be able to go geit fixed I don't want to send my whole iMac in for repair for you know just the screen.
Like the computer part was fine if it was a Mac Pro I could just unplug the monitor you know like the all in one is there kind of limited its lifespan and in this case the all in one is limiting it's lifespan as well so maybe I should learn from this I probably won't. But what I ultimately like if there was an M1 based iMac I would have probably already ordered it.
Casey
As we record and I've mentioned this before I try to work on the show notes and get a pretty solid rough draft ready and I had already written, you heard it here first Marco is really starting to justify a new Mac I think I will now change that to you heard it here first Marco is really starting to justify a new Mac Pro.
Marco
I was looking up I fix it today. It's like how do you open an iMac Pro if like I wanted to get in there and actually try to remove like you know, major dust buildup? How do I get in there and how risky is it? And the answer is like it's a pain in the butt and moderately and so I don't know if I want to attempt that especially in a dusty salty air environment that's highly corrosive in a house that I have very few tools and no abilities to open iMac's you know effectively and cleanly it's probably a bad idea. So I'm probably not gonna want to attempt that myself.
Marco
Well, it would probably be more practical to just you know, go take my iMac, put it in the carrying case, walk it to the ferry, get on the boat go across the bay, go to the nearest Apple Store, drop it off, or I guess I could do mail in but that's a whole other ordeal. And then yeah, and have Apple do it. I'd be without it for a while. They don't have to take another set of you know ferry and car trips and walking trips and you know to go pick it up in a few days whenever it was done so it would be an ordeal.
Marco
I mean, I really am I have been very tempted to just switch to my Air full time somehow. Even though it only has one terabyte and you know, I could use externals I guess I could make that work with some hacks, and then just somehow solve the monitor situation and which would probably be on my next trip. Picking up my 5K and bring it here. So maybe that's what I'll do. But I don't know. I don't love that option.
Marco
That's a good question. I really don't love the idea of buying the 6K monitor to have an unknown future computer like what am I going to plug into that in a year? What if the most compelling computer for me in the next year ends up being an iMac again, then I bought this giant monitor with all this money for you know only six months of use. And then like that's, that's a pretty big loss and a pretty big waste. I think like I would have trouble swallowing that. Whereas if I just either had a Mac Mini that I could plug in or something like that, or plugged in my Macbook Air to the LG 5K.
I don't like swallowing something about all these plans. But I think using all of the hardware I already have that is like the LG 5K just sitting in my house like in Studio B doing nothing. I could just use that. And that's probably what I should do. Even though like I'll be grumbling the whole time looking at that stupid monitor. And it's terrible backlight leakage. And it's giant ugly frame and the big ugly foot and all that stuff.
Casey
So John, would you mind going to apple.com slash shop slash trade hyphen in? I'm curious if you enter in John, the serial number of your XDR, I doubt it will like magically make it through and please do not, you know, share that obviously, verbally. But if you just quietly enter in your serial number, I wonder what it would say.
All right, shall we start with some follow up we have hold we have follow up today. It'll be a miracle if we get out a follow up today. So let's start. Ryan Fegley writes, I had some duplicate the same context issue as Marco this week caused by an upgrade to Big Sur, I believe de-duping the contacts or de-duping in context didn't work. So I restored from a pre upgrade iCloud backup on the iCloud website in a browser, I had no idea this was possible. Ryan writes, it worked like a charm, it's good to know it's an option. So you log into icloud.com you click on your name in the upper right, and then go to account settings.
John
I filled in the details of this because I'm like I remember it being on iCloud.com being able to restore stuff. And it was a little bit of a trick to find like you wouldn't think to go to account settings and these links appear totally on the opposite side of the page. But they do. So you can restore. I think you can restore individual files. So you know, like it's nice, this stuff is there. I don't understand why it's not on the Mac or whatever. Second bit of follow up related to this is that when I was doing this to confirm it, I opened up contacts and guess what? I had duplicates of all my contacts too.
And I'm like, wait a second, I didn't even upgrade. I didn't even upgrade to Big Sur Why the hell do I have duplicates? And I said, Oh yeah, I didn't upgrade to Big Sur but I just got an M1 Mac that runs Big Sur and I made my account on it and I logged in and connected it to my iCloud so something having to do with Big Sur is really, really excited about making duplicate contacts I just used the de-dupe feature in contacts and it fixed my problem. I have no idea why I had duplicates, but that's what I had.
Casey
So sorry. Alright, so Accelerated TensorFlow for macOS probably just uses the GPU. If I recall correctly, we were surmising that maybe uses neural engine. And apparently that's not the case. There's a link to machinelearning.apple.com, where they write until now, TensorFlow is only utilize the CPU for training on the Mac, the new TensorFlow underscore MacOS fork of TensorFlow. 2.4 leverages ML Compute to enable machine learning libraries to take full advantage of not only the CPU, but also the GPU in both M1 and Intel powered backs for dramatically faster training performance. Very cool.
John
Yeah. And some people were saying on Twitter, like, Oh, it's because the neural engine can't be used for training. But @hishnash on Twitter says neural engine can be used for training as well. But it's limited in the type of operation. So ML compute framework uses the CPU and GPU because it's more generic. So yeah, TensorFlow did get a lot faster. It is seven times faster on the M1 Mac, but it's not because of the neural engine.
Casey
Indeed. Max Lein writes that Marco said on this is actually this is a very good well, actually, this is the kind of well actually I can get behind. Marco said in the podcast that Apple's never made memory controllers with support for ECC Ram. Admittedly, it has been a while but the Power Mac G5 and Xserve G5 both supported ECC RAM, and the memory controller was made by Apple.
John
Yeah, I should have thought of the power when he said that I was trying to pull something out of my head of whether they did it. And I remembered the Power Mac G5 had ECC RAM, but I couldn't remember of Apple made the controller if it were some Motorola or IBM thing, but we'll trust Max, he seems like he knows.
Marco
Alright, moving on Jonathan Dietz writes after listening to the scaling the Mac the M1 architecture to hiring machine section for Episode 406. I figured I'd send along some cheat sheets of relevant info. Die size is generally constrained by the reticle limit, which is due to current lithography steppers having a maximum field size of 26 millimeters by 33 millimeters or 858 square millimeters. It's important to keep in mind just how many different chips Apple is integrating into each time series system on a chip, the CPU, the GPU, the PCH, T2, what's PCH?
Casey
All right, okay, thank you. T2 functions including storage controller and the Thunderbolt slash use before controllers. It's also worth noting that decent SSD controllers like the one in the T2 have their own memory interface with four DRAM cache. With the M1 the storage controllers connected directly to the system fabric and shares the unified memory pool meaning performance is no longer limited by PCIe times for connection to the host processor or cache size. Eliminating the need for both integrated and discrete GPUs as well as consolidating the two or three different memory subsystems has a lot of upside for Apple.
John
That's a, say a couple of people are talking about HBM. We'll talk more about that in the next video. But high bandwidth memory. It's not a great acronym cuz like What does that even mean? What does high mean? What happens when the next Memory Interface comes out? But it has higher bandwidth. And then suppose it HBME or whatever.
John
So I did actually make it the image that's in our show notes here is perfectly square for the purposes of show art. So Marco, please make this graph. Because I spent so long making a stupid graph because I do not know how to use spreadsheets to graph things. And they make me so angry. That's why, I always go to numbers because like Jason still makes his graphs and numbers and like, oh, Apple's nice, everything's gonna look nice. I'll use numbers to make it but I cannot figure out how to do anything in numbers. And so that I go to excel grudgingly. And I also don't know how to use Excel at all. But somehow I'm able to do it in Excel.
So I do what I need to do in Excel. And then I import I save the Excel spreadsheet, and then I import the Excel spreadsheet into numbers. And then the graph appears in numbers like a lot, and I still can't even reverse engineer it. I still don't know how to graph things. And I would say spreadsheets are also terrible at graphing things, especially time series data, where spreadsheets have no idea what time is, like, they just think like, oh, this is the first column. This is the second column, the third column like no, but their time values is separated by time.
Can you graph them over time? And it's like, nope. Yeah, I know, you probably can't Excel geniuses will tell you, but I don't like them. So this graph, what this graph shows is related to something we were discussed. And Jonathan sent us this giant spreadsheet filled with all sorts of information about various different silicon things, CPUs, GPUs, so on and so forth. We will put a link to, I put the spreadsheet I copied most of the spreadsheet and cleaned it up a little bit and put it into Google Sheets. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. It's publicly viewable. So you can look at it it's way more data than we're going to go into here.
But the one graph I wanted to pull out was related to our previous discussion is, how much bigger can Apple make the system on chips, and we were trying to look up die sizes, and we didn't know them off top of our head. And you know, and so this is why he was replying with all his info. So here, this graph shows, and someone should paste this into the chat room for chat people. It shows the die sizes of lots of different CPUs and GPUs and stuff. Weigh at the left end of the spectrum here is A14 and A13. And the A14 is actually smaller than the A13 through the magic of process shrink.
Even though it's got more stuff in it, right? And the A14 is 88 millimeter square, right? Way on the right side is like this weird Data Center machine learning GPU is just massive. And it's 826 millimeter square. But right next to that, the second biggest bar and the thing, it's 700. That's the 28 core Xeon than the Mac Pro. So the A14 is 88 millimeter square, and the 28 core Xeon is 700. So there's a lot of room for these chips to get bigger by the M1 is around 120, that's an estimate. So from 120 to 700. That's the currently the range from Apple's smallest Mac chip to its biggest one, there actually may be an Intel on this one, but I doubt it right?
So can how much bigger can the M1 get, you know, especially regards to like how much cooling capacity can absorb? Well, if you've got a 28 core, you know, Xeon in your Mac Pro, and it's able to cool it with that fan. Boy, you can, you can make the line a lot bigger and a lot hotter before you run into any cooling.
John
Yeah, I put the Google Docs thing and the Google Docs has, it has the Google Docs version of the chart, which I also probably wouldn't know how to do but because I imported it again it figured, I just don't like graphing. I do like graphing. I don't like these programs, the way they think about graphing is not the way I think about it. So we clash.
Casey
Okay, good talk. Here is Cerebras, and they claim to have made a single dye ML accelerator that is about eight and a half inches square. I have no idea what the yields are or if it is even good, but the chips is an example of how big these things can be. It's 56 times the size of the largest GPU, and so the largest GPU is 815 square millimeters with 2.1 billion transistors.
John
You have to look at it. It's it's basically like, you know, the silicon wafers, you see where it's like a big circular thing. And then on it, they print a bunch of different chips. This is like just use the whole wafer for one, quote, unquote, "one chip". And I mean, obviously, it's not one chip, obviously, it is many of the same things over and over and over again, but it's hilarious.
Can you imagine? If this was your target, like, every single one of them had to work, the yields must not be good. But if you want to know how big can you make a silicon thing you can make as big as the whole wafer if I guess money is no object. And obviously, if the cores are simple enough, or whatever, but yeah, 46,000 millimeters square. So again, M1 is 120. Xeon is 700. This one is 46,000.
John
I mean, I can go take a shot at it by paraphrasing, because I don't understand the major points. This is a long test this Wade for gases. And he's got a lot of info about Memory Bus. And we've talked about memory in the M1 and the memory architecture and bandwidth, and so on and so forth. So his first bit is, he says, I've seen it repeatedly stated the M1 has 60 gigabits per second of memory bandwidth, and that it's three times that of any MacBook Pro, the M1 does in fact, have 60 gigabits memory bandwidth, but the 16 inch MacBook Pro has 40 gigabytes of bandwidth.
So it's about 1.5 X not three X. And he gives all the math on this and it looks like it makes sense to me. So I think people doing a three X or maybe just not keeping in mind that a double data rate memory sends on the leading and trailing edge. So you have to double it, right? So that's why it's it's not six X. So you know, it's not to diminish the M1 again, they just in the cheapest MacBook Air you can buy it has 60 gigabytes per second memory bound, which is faster than the 40 in the most expensive Intel MacBook you can buy, right?
Says what's novel here is the frequency being on package and not having all the single interchange latency. Apple's been able to increase the DRAM bus frequency by 220% versus 60 inch MacBook Pro. While this increased bandwidth is mostly the most touted consequences, this also reduces memory latency. And that's more likely the main contributor to performance, right? So talking about more of the benefits of the RAM being on package, you can clock faster, it's closer, quote, unquote, "closer by" and you have less latency, and so on and so forth.
So some more speculation about what do you do in the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro when you need more memory. So first, on the topic of like, well, the unpackage memory has such amazing bandwidth or whatever. High end, CPUs today typically have at least eight channels of DDR4 authoring 400 gigabytes per second of bandwidth. So the Big Mac Pro and other big computers have way more memory bandwidth and the unpackaged memory, on package doesn't make it magical.
Like if you throw money and buses at it, and huge banks of RAM, you can get large amounts of aggregate bandwidth from doing that, right? And soon, DDR5 will be out which will basically double the bandwidth again, I'll put a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page for a memory interface bandwidth numbers. Where it says I doubt Apple can push the frequency much higher, they're likely limited by signaling integrity, if not thermals. So to get into the ballpark, they'll need to increase the number of channels and therefore chips about eight fold.
But by using regular DDR instead of LPDDR, which is what they use on the package RAM, that amounts to just eight channels and chips very possible from all angles. So these things basically, if you put right now we have this two little unpackage chips and the M1 say you make room for eight of them, say you put like, I don't know, put them all around the edges or whatever. That's not a ridiculous..
John
Yeah, we're talking about 3D stacking in a little bit. But yeah, it's not ridiculous. So they can do that. That still leaves the capacity angle, it's likely impractical to fit terabytes of RAM onto the CPU package for the foreseeable future. But I think there's a presumption being made that Apple cares about large memory systems. This is a point that Marco brought up in a couple of past shows. Apple trumpeted the 1.5 terabytes support of the current Mac Pro, because they could it came for free from Intel, well, not free, but you know, you know what it means?
How much do you think that capability actually means to their customers? So Wade says is, what I actually suspect is that they'll simply go with on package only placing the capacity limit on something on the order of 128 gigabytes. And I think the performance will be astounding, thanks to the same kind of three times higher clock frequencies, etc, not to mention all their performance advances from the rest of the system. So that's, like this is where we're talking about, like, is it feasible? How much could you get on package if money is almost no object?
128 gigabytes, probably feasible, but it'd be really fast under 28 gigabytes and here is the, Wade is obviously well steeped in the ways of Apple here is his justification. I believe that Apple believes that they can get away with this by focusing on the end results other domination over Intel in any and every performance bench benchmark, which they can trivially achieve from anywhere they are already achieving with the frickin MacBook Air. So no problem there. If pushed, they'll use their typical line of, we just couldn't find a way to achieve the performance we wanted by doing it the old fashioned way.
I find this plausible. And in keeping with Apple's attitudes, I don't think it's a slam dunk, just because as the Mac Pro's whole role is to have tremendous capacity and limiting that just cuts you out of the as Marco said in the last show just totally cuts you out of certain markets where people just need more RAM. But those rumors of a half size Mac Pro, or like an iMac Pro that maxes out at 128 gigs of RAM that has these characteristics. That would be fantastic. And that is you know it extremely Apple like in a very likely machine that they could make.
So that was the end of Wade's comment I have a few of my own to add for, because we got so much feedback about here's how I think we can make bigger and better and faster Mac's based on ARM chips. Lots and lots of people this is the most popular thing that people suggested is how about you just put two M1 chips in there? Remember one Max use that multiple CPUs?
I mean, hey, like Power Mac G5 and two of them, my Mac Pro had two of them. Why don't you just stick a second one in there? I think this is unlikely for a couple of reasons. I mean, it is related to my next line item which says low effort Mac Pro. Some people think this is a low effort, right? Don't worry about all this of making the one bigger just make like a little bit bigger M1 like an M1X and use that in like your iMac or whatever. And then on the Mac Pro, just the two of them are four in them or something. Symmetric multiprocessing, where you have multiple CPUs that each have their own caches, but share a central pool of RAM.
Like the setup that had been used on past Mac's. It's kind of a pain, because as you can imagine, we talked about the cache hierarchy last time, all these CPUs have to sort of keep on the same page, so to speak, pon pon, about what the deal is with memory. So if they pull something from memory, and it's in there, like L3 or L2 or L1 cache or whatever, and someone else wants that piece of memory, like CPUs need to communicate with each other and say, Oh, you know, I'm in the middle of changing that, or you don't know that I changed that because it hasn't been written back yet. But I have a changed version of that in my cache.
Or if someone changes a piece of memory, they have to tell the other CPUs, hey, if you have this in your cache and validate it, because I just changed it. And that it, you know, that process, there's overhead to that process, it's not particularly efficient. It's the same overhead when you have multiple cores, and you keep jamming into the same chip, not the same overhead. But it's a similar type of thing. But the more integrated the thing is, the easier it is for you to make a very efficient way to do that. That's why within a single CPU, it is easier to deal with cache invalidation, that it is with two entirely different chips on it on separate parts of the board that has to do that same task, but they're farther apart have more latency.
And they can't optimize the way they do this, especially if it's like, you know, two way or four way now you have to handle even more cases, it's kind of a pain. So I don't think Apple do that. But I think the performance is worse. And I think the complexity is pretty annoying. It's not actually that low effort. And speaking of low effort, I was thinking of this last show this is one of the first notes I put in for next week's show. What does a low effort Mac Pro look like? I don't mean this to be insulting.
But like, what if you needed to make a Mac Pro to serve the same needs as the current Mac Pro, but you just didn't want to spend some ridiculous amount of money to do the cool things the way was saying where you make this giant ship that has you know, 128 gigs of on package RAM and this amazing performance and just this amazing, bespoke beast that just has inside of it little bits from like the 14 but in general is this huge beast. What if you don't do that because it's just too much money. How do you make a Mac Pro with sort of the parts on hand?
Let's assume you have something that's like an M1X, that is beefy enough to be in an iMac or whatever? Or you know, you're willing to do that level of work. The low effort Mac Pro is rip out the on package RAM and use an AMD GPU and ship it because you've got the M1 quote unquote "system" on a chip. The RAM isn't a bunch of DDR dims. And the GPU is from AMD, your trusted partner for GPUs. And you write drivers to the AMD GPU. And you use the RAM and those giant banks that have tremendous bandwidth because it's very expensive and there's 12 slots in this huge dims in them.
And you're done. Like that's it, that's a low effort Mac Pro, it would have better CPU performance in the current Mac Pro, it would have equal capacity. And you know, the new AMD GPUs are actually giving Nvidia run for the money lately. So you're basically done like that's a great Mac Pro. The things that are bad about the current Mac Pro is the CPU is slow, right? The GPU is actually as good at whatever you can buy and stick in there. It's as good as you can make it, right? Apple does not have anything competes with the top end Nvidia or AMD GPUs.
And the integrated GPU as amazing as it is for an integrated GPU does not compete with the big, external ones. So the low effort Mac Pro I'm gonna throw out there is still an option, like we keep talking about all these fantastical things they can do. But they can also make a low effort Mac Pro, I don't think it's a bad machine. I think it's a machine that has a cooler faster CPU, but has all of the same capacity. And thanks to the wonder of interchangeable parts and slots, the boring old head just got a bunch of PCI slots, suddenly, you can put a 6800XT in there, which is an amazing new GPU from Nvidia, not on NVIDIA, AMD.
And Apple likes AMD. And they just have drivers for it and you're done. I know the whole thing we've been talking about is Apple's never going to use. They're only gonna have Apple GPUs from now on they're only going to write their own driver Big Sur doesn't even ship an ARM version with any drivers for any GPUs other than the Apple integrated one like the writing's on the wall, that you're never gonna see a third party GPU. And you know, Apple-Silicon based Mac, we don't know the answers to those questions yet. All I'm saying is the low effort Mac Pro, is right out there as an option, it is entirely technically feasible. And I think it's actually still a good product, even if it's a little more boring.
Marco
Right, exactly. So like, if they hadn't said that I would possibly think this might be even further out. But yeah, you know, they did say that. So but you know, truly like the lowest effort would be, just keep shipping Xeon workstations at the high end and but you know, again, that's not their style. And that's not what they're going to do, I do also think that they're gonna keep having slots, and they're gonna keep having interchangeable modular architecture. And so the way you do that, is not by making some giant monster CPU that also has a bunch of GPUs on it.
The way you do that is by retaining some amount of modular expansion slots, whether that's RAM or cards, or both. Most of the feedback here was actually very, very interesting to me, because most of the feedback was way above my head and like way above my knowledge and expertise from people who really know what they're doing in this area. And it was really, really nice to hear, like, quite how large these other processors in the industry are, that we use, or that people can use. And so we know now that Apple can make a really giant M series chip, if they want to.
That has tons of CPU cores, tons of GPU cores, as long as you can pay for it. I mean, like those, the 28 core Xeon-W that's in the Mac Pro, is like a $3000 or $4,000 CPU. And granted, those are like you know, Intel's prices there some profit margin there that Apple would be able to absorb into their total product price. But still, like, you know, you're talking thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs just for that CPU. But while most M-computers, like most of the M-base Mac's, I think are going to have no expansion possibilities whatsoever, internally.
You're going to see similar things to the M1, you know, soldered on RAM that's on or near the package, only GPUs that are built into the package thatare built actually on the chip. I'm not expecting to see any kind of, you know, other thing than that, like now that I've heard from all these listeners, and now that I see how big chips can get and still be part of like kind of mainstream products. I now no longer think they're gonna take the GPU off the CPU, I think GPU stays on. And the only question is how you physically interact with memory in a short fast way.
John
I think seeing the benchmarks of the M1 in various scenarios, because people just really benchmarkinging the heck out of it these days. The M1 wins everywhere until a real GPU will comes walking along. You're like, well, who cares about that I don't care about gaming. There's a bunch of video apps do a lot on the GPU. And you'll take a slower crappier Intel Mac and put a decent GPU in, and it suddenly becomes twice as fast at like, 8K video rendering or whatever, right?
So and, you know, it doesn't mean that Apple won't make that GPU, but they don't have anything that competes with that so far. And I do wonder if they have the will to do that. And especially given that AMD's new GPUs because it when it was just Nvidia, like, we know that it seems like Apple just totally on the outs with them. They're not gonna do anything but the new AMD GPUs and the new architecture, it's the same architecture that the new consoles use as well, but bigger and beefier, they're really good.
And so in a top end iMac. If someone buys that, they're not going to want it to be slower than their current iMac. And a lot of the tasks are GPU bound. So I'm pretty well convinced that there has to be a discrete GPU in the top and iMacs otherwise, the ARM based ones will be slower than the current iMacs' for these kinds of tasks. Now, again, Apple could make that GPU but we don't even have a hint of them doing that. So I'm, I'm leaning pretty heavily towards a discrete in the top end iMac.
Marco
Yeah, I mean maybe. I didn't realize there was that big of a performance gap. So yeah, that's, that's very possible then. But regardless, I think almost every other Mac has everything in or around the package, no separation of anything. And then only at the very high end, I think that's when you get separation. And it doesn't make sense. Again, it doesn't make sense for the Mac Pro to exist. If there aren't expansion slots. Like an Apple really, I think very strongly communicated.
That that was the direction they intended to stay now that they like rebooted the Mac Pro, they got it back on track that that Pro's like I think they're going to keep expansion slots. So I I still think that's going to stay in that product. But I would be very surprised if any other Mac had any kind of expansion or nearly any kind of separation between the components at this point.
John
Final bit of follow up on the making Max bigger, faster, stronger, something to keep in mind with regard to die size cooling and everything else is that TSMC who manufactures Apple chips. TSMC is not Intel, TSMC continues to make process advances. The latest story was about the TSMC, she use major breakthrough in 2 nanometer manufacturing process. So to recap, the A14 and the M1 are at 5 nanometer, 2 nanometer would make for even smaller and more transistors and even less area and be pretty amazing.
And this headline confused me because someone sent this link and was like, they achieved major breakthrough in 2 nanometer manufacturing process comma risk production in 2023. And you have to park like, they tried to like you know what headlines when you leave out articles or whatever you leave out certain words for compactness for the tradition of trying to fit things in the printed page? Are they saying they risk like but risking production in? Or are they saying risk production with parentheses around it as a compound noun in 2023.
And what is risk production? So I looked it up. And I found a couple definitions put a link in the show notes. I think one of the plain English ones from tunafish on hackers news was risk production means that the foundry says "ok, we think everything is fine now, but we make no guarantees that it will work." Customers then have the option of purchasing super expensive wafer starts, you have to look up what starts means because that's a whole other lingo thing, super expensive ways wafer starts that might or might not work.
You might luck out and have lots of great next gen chips months before your competitors. Or alternatively, you might get five working chips out of each $10,000 wafer. So that's what risk production means. So 2023 is the time horizon when conceivably, if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge just would not be Apple, although for the really low volumes, who knows, conceivably at very low volumes at high risk, you could get to nanometre parts at TSMC. Which means that the 2024 Mac Pro, you know all the numbers we gave you about die sizes and everything.
That's why in the graph, we pointed out that the the A14 is actually smaller than the A13, despite having more stuff in it. Again, that five nanometers shrinking down to two nanometers doesn't mean they're going to be half as big for the same motor transistors. But that means they're going to be smaller. So you know, we're back. We're not it's not that we're back on the Moore's Law curve, because you know, Moore's law will and we've discussed this before. But whatever curve we were on with Intel, we're not on that one anymore.
So expect every couple of years to have maybe for the next couple of rounds to have a process shrink, and to have that process shrink grip lock rockets, Apple's products, and really sort of give us continuing benefits that those were another one of the questions of a lot of the feedback we got was like, can we expect this level of advancement with the M2, M3, M4? First, the easy answer is no, because you went from Intel that was stagnant to ARM, which is not.
But you also shouldn't expect the M2 to be like 3% faster than the M1, right? We're on a better curve than we had been. But there's not going to be another leap where the M2 is seven times faster or whatever, right? So things are looking up but keep your expectations in check. But don't forget, shrinks will happen. And shrinks are good.
John
I didn't put the link in the show notes for a wafer starts or starts in silicon manufacturing, but you can look that up as well. But risk production was a new one for me. That's why I put in like so. And one final bit about our Mac's. This is not about making them faster. But just to note, the Alexander Graf. The story has already gone around a lot today, but from earlier in the week, has successfully virtualized ARM windows on Apple silicon using QEMU plus a bunch of patches. So as we know, Microsoft does not officially support any of Apple's ARM Mac's with Windows despite the fact that Microsoft itself has a version of Windows that runs on ARM and they have their own hardware that runs on ARM.
But their hardware sucks because it doesn't use Apple-Silicon. And so if you run ARM windows on an M1 Mac, in this QEMU virtualization environment it's about twice as fast as the fastest, actual native windows ARM hardware you can buy because Apple-Silicon is better. So it's still you know, as we said back when the ARM Mac introduction, the ball is in Microsoft's court. Technically speaking, there is nothing stopping Windows from running natively on our Macs except for Microsoft, which has thus far not decided to support them.
I feel like Apple wants Microsoft to support Windows on Mac's just because for the same reason Apple put that time and energy into bootcamp basis things some of their customers find valuable, and it makes Mac's more valuable and more versatile. So I hope those two crazy kids work this out because I really do want windows on our Macs.
Marco
Exactly. I'm from Ohio too I get it just not that part of Ohio. Anyway, the Home Pod Mini is where I'll start. Everybody seemed a lot more excited about this product than I think is ultimately deserved. And it's not to say that it's a bad product. It's a fine product. There are a couple of places that I have enjoyed Home Pod's. Let's say the smallest rooms in my house. In the you know, for the past, however long the Home Pod been out, but year and a half or two and a half years, whatever it's been. I've enjoyed the homepod for that purpose, but it's a bit big.
And it's a bit expensive to waste in the smallest rooms of your house. And so the Home Pod Mini is actually really good for that, like I have swapped it in for that role. And it is fantastic for that. And it's also good in contexts where what you're mostly going for is the voice assistant and not necessarily like music listening, or where the quality of the music being played. isn't that important. But I don't think anybody with that list of qualifications is buying Home Pods of any size. The whole reason you buy Home Pod is that they sound pretty good.
And if you really wanted like the voice assistant part as the primary role of it, you're probably gonna want an Alexa device instead because they're generally better at that. Anyway, I had two Home Pod Mini's as a stereo pair. Two Home Pod Max use I guess as a stereo pair and also a new Amazon Echo. And then I also tested out all of them as I only had one echo. I also tested them out as just mono's, single speakers. Just why you know, unplugging one of each thing and unconfiguring the stereo pair and testing it just as mono.
The Home Pod Mini is this tiny little ball, but the size of a grapefruit is $100 bucks. The current which is actually like a brand new generation of $100 Amazon Echo like the main middle of the road echo is also $100 bucks, also a ball but much larger, more like it goes from a grapefruit up to like a almost a little bit bigger than a softball, I think.
Marco
Anyway, what you might expect is that the sound quality goes up proportionally with price. And it doesn't. What you might expect instead, is the sound quality maybe goes up proportionally with size. Because really, when you have Home Pod Mini, Amazon Echo ball thing, and Home Pod Maxi all in a row. It is like kind of like a you know small, medium, large there, it's a nice size ramp. And that is pretty much true. That is effectively how the sound ramps up. Because you know speakers at same thing with microphones, by the way.
You really can't defeat physics, after a while you can play some tricks, you can be really clever. But if you're trying to have a point source emitting sound, that is not extremely close to your ears, you're gonna have a hard time making that sound good. If the point source is really small, or really far away from you, or a very small source in a very big room or you know, some other kind of like, large difference in the physics between like the ratios or the proportions of the distance or that you're trying to go
Marco
Right, yeah, you know, shear displacement here like because it's you're dealing with a physical thing. You know, sound waves are physical compression waves, you have to, you know, at some point physics is going to win. I don't have a current gen Echo Dot. But I bet if I had a dot, I bet it would fit in right below the Mini in size and sound quality. But the dot costs like less than half or about half of the Mini's price. And I bet it isn't half as much worse. Similarly, the Amazon Echo costs exactly the same as the Home Pod Mini.
Actually, when it's as it frequently is on sale, it costs significantly less. And the new you know, the new, you know, whatever. What do I say magic eight ball sized? Amazon Echo sounds significantly better than the Home Pod Mini. So it's the same price. It sounds way better, and the voice system is way faster and way more reliable and way better. So ultimately, if you're looking to spend $100 on a voice assistant speaker thing, the Amazon Echo is a way better choice overall than the Home Pod Mini.
Marco
So it's not an amazing home run product. And if you compare the sound from the mini, to the full size Home Pod, it's clear as day like, Oh yeah, the full Home Pod sounds way better, especially where the Mini especially falls down. It's a massive difference in bass, the Mini basically has no bass whatsoever. And the regular Home Pod has surprisingly good bass for its size, which because the regular homepod is still in the world of speakers is still small. In the world of you know, smart speakers, it's maybe medium to large, but like in the world of speakers as a whole, it's quite small, and it competes very well with stereo speakers that are much larger than it especially when you have two of them.
So I think ultimately, the regular Home Pod sounds like it's twice as good. And it's about twice the size. Unfortunately, it's nearly four times the price officially. And so I think if you can actually have the Home Pod, the full size Home Pod at its frequent sale price of 200 ish dollars, that's a fantastic buy. And that is totally rational and sensible as twice as much as the home pod mini because it's about twice as good. As for the Home Pod Mini itself, like where it's left, it's kind of you know that the size kind of suggests its quality pretty well compared to the other ones.
If you have a role in your house that you want to fill with a very small smart speaker, that is not that expensive, and is not that good sounding. But where that might not matter. Or you might not care, it's a good buy, I'll give it that. But that's a lot of ifs. And if you want something to like, you know, play music in your kitchen, or something, the echos gonna be better for that, or the full size Home Pod. As with the other Home Pod, if you can afford two of them it is great, and it's way better than just one.
However, even in a stereo pair, the Home Pod Mini is not a real winner with sound it doesn't make up for its its lack of bass or the rest of it being kind of okay, whereas like a stereo pair of the full size homepods really does sound quite good almost in almost any room, I would strongly suggest if you have you know, a role and maybe the smaller rooms in your house, where you're mostly playing podcast and you don't care about sound quality.
Yeah, go for it. It's nice, it's inexpensive. If Apple would have made the Home Pod Mini, the size of the current Amazon Echo instead, it wouldn't have been as small. But people don't really need these things to be super small. So did they make it super small Because Apple? Even though nobody was really asking for it to be quite this small if it's gonna sound quite this mediocre? Or do they make it this small because at $100 their profit margins wouldn't allow them to give it like two drivers.
Because like one of the reasons it sounds so bad is that it doesn't have a separate woofer and tweeter. It has only one driver. And then it has these quote passive radiators on the sides to kind of enhance basements I think I don't know, I don't know enough about speakers to know what those do. But every other speaker in this price category has multiple speakers inside, there's usually a sub woofer and a tweeter or a woofer and tweeter, at least.
And so if they prioritized size here, I think that was the wrong move. If they could have shipped something with better speaker drivers, and maybe more of them at this price point I think they should have. But ultimately, that could have been a price decision as well. It's a fine product, but it's not competitive with the echoes at similar price points.
Casey
Which is fine. I mean, well if we're gonna put on music on the Echo Dots, it's because we're trying to get like multi room going and we just want seamless music throughout and we only have these upstairs. So yeah, we just want seamless music throughout the upstairs. We are not listening. You know like what is it the Maxell or whatever it was called that I've mentioned before the advertisements guys with his hair blown back. We're not sitting there like listening and really paying attention. We just want some ambient stuff on and for that it's fine.
But they sound like garbage unequivocally. The other thing you said is that the Home Pod Mini has no bass and that alarms me greatly because I am not that much of (beatboxing) kind of guy but my understanding of your music preferences is that they are not particularly basic, generally speaking. And so if you're saying with your comparatively tinny music preferences that they're not very bassy someone who likes something that is less fish and more, I don't know, like, bassy, that could be quite the deal breaker.
Marco
Yeah, I mean, again, this, if you care at all about music sound quality, this is not a product for you, period. End of story. That's it. And you know, generally like in the world of smart speakers, they don't sound great, you know, because, again, part of the physics mentioned earlier, is every one of these speakers and the whole industry of like sound bars, which I also hate sound bars, amazing branding for such a stupid concept. But anyway, the soundbar problem, which is the same problem that almost every smart speaker has, is that they try to play tricks to defeat physics to try to make a wider soundscape basically, you know, to simulate having multiple speakers in the room, when you're actually broadcasting sounds, just from one point. And so you have to do things like try to bounce the sound off the walls or in the corners, whatever.
And while that's a real thing, you can indeed, you know, bounce sound that way, in practice, it doesn't work very well in most rooms. And it's not as it's not nearly as good as just having like two different speakers that are just one on the left one on the right, like it's not nearly that good. Similarly, all these speakers try to somehow sound okay, while broadcasting from one single point in a room. Oftentimes, that can't be like the ideal space that you want, maybe want to put a speaker if you cared about sound quality. So like, you know, you're dealing with these compromised physics situations here. And so all smart speakers kind of have to be graded on a curve.
And so from that point of view, you could use the Home Pod Mini and okay, commute, commute and fun, fine. But if you go in for convenient & fun, I honestly I would go for the Echo. Again, like unless you really love Siri over Alexa for a particular reason that's very important to you. So it could be privacy. It could be maybe some of Apple's integrations. Airplay too is a big one. And I love airplay, too. And even though the latest release of iOS has made it incredibly buggy, thanks, thanks for implementing.
But if you don't have a significant reason to prefer Home Pods, specifically, it's not a great product because even by the grading on a curve that you have to do for smart speakers, and even though the regular Home Pod, the full size Home Pod almost eliminated that curve, like you don't have to agree that on a curve, you can just create it as a nice speaker and it does pretty well for its price point. Especially this kind of price point. But the Home Pod Mini just doesn't, like it doesn't it's not a great product. It's a cute small product, that is fine.
But Apple, I think cut a few too many corners on this one, and they should have gone a little bit higher. And and even if they had to make it cost, you know, $129 instead of $99. If it could have had significantly better drivers in there, maybe two separate ones, that would have gone a long way towards sound quality. And if it made it a little bit bigger. Oh, well, nobody cares.
John
I just want to add that in while you were talking about this. My wife messaged me to say, quote, "Siri sucks." Now here's the thing. Is she listening to the show live and wanted to chime in about the fact that Siri is not as good a voice system as the Amazon Echo? Or is she just living in my house where Siri exists? And occasionally does things that annoy us? There's no way to tell? Because very often people in our house will have complaints about Siri that are unrelated to listening to a live podcast. So yeah, Siri still got some catching up to do.
Marco
Yeah. Oh, and we've fired our Sonos stuff and it's so good. I'm so happy without the bug. Sonos makes some good products. The Sonos amp is awesome. Like I love the Sonos amp it's a stereo speaker amp with airplay too with TV inputs and analog inputs. It's wonderful. I love my Sonos amp. That is what that was what drives my TV speakers. The reason I love the Sonos amp is that it doesn't have any smart integration, and where the Sonos products really fall down is the ones that integrate the Alexa support and try to make these combo voice controlled smart products.
I don't know what it is about that integration, but it's buggy. All the reviews, people were complaining about them about the election integration, being buggy. And I thought maybe that was just like, you know, beta 1.0 software issues. And maybe they've made it better now, like multiple years then. No, they haven't. It's still really buggy. And the Sonos move, I feel the same way about like, we have one of those, I just want to sell it now, like I want out of that entire ecosystem.
Anything in an ecosystem that has a voice support I want out of it. So I'm just going to be unloading those things probably. But the Sonos amp is wonderful. because it keeps it dumb. It lacks both the buggy Alexa support, and any reason to ever use Sonos as apps for anything. So it's great. Like, I just use it as my TV speaker. And it's an airplay too destination. It's wonderful. And that's it.
Marco
Alright, so I got my kind of red. The back of it is not even close to red. But that's okay. I never look at the back, the sides are red, and they are delightful. And every time I see the aluminum sides of my phone, it just makes me smile. I love the way this phone looks. In the hand, it feels fantastic. In the pocket, it feels even better. I have been using it without a case so far, I have the apple case, I figure kind of you know, maybe just like if I can ever travel again, I'm probably gonna want a case. Or maybe I figured I'd try it for like a week and see what I like better.
The screen size is great on the Mini, you know, I don't feel like I've lost any screen real estate because I didn't like they did just shrink the 10s and 11 Pro screen to fit this size now. So like screen real estate wise, it's the same, they just made the pixels smaller. Now on the small pixel side, between the 12 Mini, which is shrinking the pixels, and my new MacBook Air, which I'm running at its default resolution. Whereas compared to my 16 inch, I ran at its native resolution, which is larger pixels. I'm looking at everything a little bit smaller now.
And I'm starting to feel I'm 38 and a half now. I've never worn glasses, but I don't have many years left of not needing any vision correction and having good uniform vision, I can kind of feel it's likely slipping away. And as I am using these two new devices that have more dense screens than what I was using before, I'm noticing that, I'm noticing like, hey, this, this is a little bit harder to read than it might have been a few years ago, even though what I've just done is, is go back to the density of all the phones before the 10.
Marco
Yeah, maybe I'm kind of hoping that maybe in future revisions, they might reduce the weight of the of the middle pro line a little bit because they're so dense and heavy. And I feel like I got worse this year anyway. So otherwise, they're like, it feels wonderful grip wise, I'm still getting used to not having a leather case, because this is the first time I haven't had a leather case, since the 5S I I'm still getting used to like picking it up off, you know, with the edges and having I kind of still feel like I'm gonna drop it all the time.
John
That's one of the main reasons I use the case these days, I demand that it both lay flat and not make me nervous about crashing and laying flat. Yeah, that's why I really was upset by the the Apple leather pro max case, which adds a bump on the bump. So even when you get it doesn't lay flat. I was afraid that would be true of all the cases, but apparently not on the non-max size of Apple cases and certainly not on the senate case that I'm using. Laying flat as a major feature.
Marco
Yeah, exactly. And also just like having a little bit of that tackiness grip when you're on a surface like I think I'm ultimately probably going to go with a case but I want to try cases a little while longer because it just feels so good. And it looks really good. Again, like I love the red aluminum edge. I absolutely love it. I like it way better than any of the other colors. Performance wise, battery wise, the battery is noticeably lower, like as everybody said, Yeah, I do get less battery life. It has not been a problem yet.
And ultimately if I'm going to like ever travel with this phone, which honestly, it's probably not gonna be a whole lot of that but if you ever travel with this phone, I would probably want some kind of like magsafe battery if Apple would make that, that would be awesome. I don't think if they also made one yet. But that would be great like a little like that you could just stick on the back for charging in your pocket sometimes, but not all the time. That would be wonderful. But that doesn't exist yet. So we'll see.
I haven't actually tried magsafe yet, I've just been using my regular charger that I've that I've been using for years like on my nightstand. So I haven't tried that yet. Because ultimately, what I want for magsafe is something that is stationary on the nightstand that like I don't want their weird little travel wallet they unveiled for way too much money yesterday, like I don't want that. I don't want just like the loose cable I want like a dock.
John
That's another issue with the Mini with dock like things if you have a dock that's made for quote unquote, "normal phones", the Mini is so small that depending on your luck, it may be that the coils don't align as well, because the Mini is shorter, you know what I mean? And so either it doesn't charge as fast because it's misaligned or in some of them, it just won't charge at all because the things is misaligned and will charge it I don't think this is a big problem Panzer posted about it when it first came out.
Marco
Yeah, so otherwise, like other than, like, you know, the battery being a little bit low. And, you know, having a dilemma on whether I want to use a case or not. Otherwise, I'm loving this thing, it does feel a little bit like going back in time in the sense that it is so much smaller and lighter. And you do have less screen physical size. And so for things like watching video and stuff, it's like slightly worse than the big phones. But ultimately, you know, we're talking about what a half an inch or something or like a one inch screen size difference.
That's a lot proportionately but you're still watching video on a tiny screen. And so if you're trying to decide whether you want to watch video on a tiny screen or a tiny your screen like it's, they're both massive compromises compared to like a TV, or even a laptop. So that almost doesn't matter at all. Camera wise. So far, I have not missed the 2X camera that much. I have taken pictures where I have zoomed in digitally, but usually not to the full 2X.
And the digital zoom has been good enough for my like, you know, 1.4 1.6 kind of rings, it's been good enough for that. There have been some pictures where you know, we take pictures like around a dark dinner table, like we took our Thanksgiving dinner pictures around our dark table, and Tif had her Max. And I had my Mini and her pictures did look better, they did have a little bit more detail. But I had to like zoom in and like and really look for the difference.
And so from my point of view as as a much more casual iPhone photographer, like I'm not a pro photographer, I barely post on Instagram. I am you know, I don't shoot raw I don't use highlighter or any of the fancy apps that people who are really good at this stuff use. I just shoot with the built in camera and occasionally tweak the photos a little bit and occasionally post some of them to Instagram but even then, it's pretty rare. And so from my point of view, the 1X camera is great. And digital zoom when I need it so far has been okay.
If there were a 2X option on this size, no question I would pay extra for that, I would definitely take that. But there isn't. And so ultimately, I do like the size a lot. Even despite that. Finally, the speaker seems to be like some of the reviews try to say that the speakers were kind of comparable between them. They're not, the speaker on this one is a little bit lower volume and a little bit worse than the bigger ones. But it's not a big difference. It's it's not a difference that I would consider fatal.
And I use a speaker a lot, mostly for podcasts because it sounds like an Echo Dot for music. So anyway, ultimately, I'm very happy with it. I'm a little scared that no one's buying it. Because when I look at my stats in Overcast, there's not a lot of 12 Mini compared to the other ones. So I'm a little worried about that this might be like a one off thing. And like they might not make another one next year or ever. If that's the case, if this is not like a regularly updated product line. I'm not gonna like hang on to this forever.
I don't love it so much that I would do that. Like if next year, the lineup is similar, but without a Mini option. I'll just go back to the you know, the the smallest Pro, like I have for the last few years. But if this is still an option next year, I'll probably take it because it just feels so good. It's so light. It's so small But it's not too small, it doesn't feel too cramped. I haven't problems like with the keyboard accuracy or anything like that, like, it doesn't feel too small. It's just right on that edge. But it's not.
So ultimately, I'm very happy with it. And yeah, we'll see how the rest of the year goes. We'll see like, what I think about it. If I travel with it, I'm sure the battery life will be a hit there. We'll see. You know how the lack of the 2X camera plays out over the year, but for at least this year, I'm very happy with it. I'm very happy with the almost red color that I picked. And yeah, I guess I'll keep you posted on my exit interview, at least at the end of the year to see what I think the.
Marco
Alright, let's do some ask ATP like for real this time. Matthew Taylor writes, is it possible to disable the fan on the new M1 MacBook Pro? Does Big Sur contain a setting for such or do you know of a third party app that can do so thus forcibly restricting system wide performance to a fan of thermal envelope? What annoys me about my current 2015 MacBook Pro is fan noise I'd love to be able to make fan usage an option I control. I understand the question but I have a few problems with this like First of all, anyone I've heard read spoken to has one of these says that the fans almost never kick on first of all. Second of all, if you don't want fan noise, buy a MacBook Air, like that'll fix the problem for you.
Marco
Yeah, but it does do one thing though. It makes it look new and different. Because while I know the gold has existed for a couple of years and that product then for even more years before that on a 12 inch. Although that was a different gold anyway. I've never had it. So it's new to me. There's never been one in the house even so that is new. So to me like, if you don't get a weird color on this on this product, you can't even tell what it is. You can't tell that it's this radical new cool thing. And for many people, that's a feature.
But for me, I kind of felt like you know, I kind of want this radically different new awesome thing to look different to look new. I'm so tired of Space Gray. Space Gray is I'm way way over it. The Silver is what I probably should have bought. But I've had silver laptops now for how many years like it's, it's fine. It's a great color but like it just looks it made it look and feel older. I think so I'm very happy that I got this weird gold, orange, pink, whatever it is color.
Marco
But one other thing. It doesn't have a touch bar. Oh my god, I'm so happy. I love like, Hey, you want to turn on the volume? Just tap? one tap not two you don't have to wake it up first. And then find where the button is. And then drag it down. Nope. One tap on a button. Boop. Volumes down. You want to increase the brightness? Oh boop, one brightness.
Casey
You know, what can we explore that just briefly? Can we explore that briefly. Because when I got MacBook Pro six months ago, which was the first touch bar to be in my own home. First of all, I don't have particularly strong feelings about the touch bar. Like I don't think it adds anything. But it doesn't actively piss me off like it does a lot of people I know, including you Marco. But I thought to myself, well, you know, I should use better touch tool for doing cool stuff. And I think we spoke about on the show. Yeah, that one of the things I did was put like a little emoji representing whether or not the garage door was open on the on the touch bar, not because it needed to be there.
But just because I thought it was a neat thing to try. And it worked. But I personally found bettertouchtool to be extremely unreliable and very crashy and just did not work well with the touch bar at all. Now it very well could have been user error. And honestly, if it was I don't care, because I don't think I care enough to go digging and figuring out why this was the case. I know other people have had very good experiences with better touch tool with the touch bar. But for me, it just felt like a pile of hacks that just wasn't really for me. And so those of you who are bettertouchtool fans, I respect that. But I don't know, I don't know how you do it.
Marco
Yeah, I mean, in all fairness, the touch bar is very buggy and crashy and unreliable, even stock. But yeah, I am so happy with this laptop, not having a touch bar. To me. It's like having a fan. Like it's just, it's wonderful. It's like, here's this thing that occasionally annoyed me. And now it's just gone. Wonderful. And I'm thinking to like, it's probably going to have a longer lifespan, because there's no moving parts, like, you know, I'm having this problem of my iMac feet being filled with dust after three years, laptops have that problem too many people frequently have problems with their laptops.
Like where the fans spin up like crazy way more than they did when they were new. And some of that's, you know, because of weirdness and, you know, maybe thermal compound degrading but some of that's also because stuffs really full of dust in there and it's hard to get it out. And so when you eliminate the fan, you eliminate not only the noise and annoyance of that, but so many problems that could occur in the future as you use this machine for years and years that I think you know, ultimately the main limiting factor this is probably going to be the battery lifespan not anything else about it.
Unless you know it gets damaged because it's there's just nothing about it to really go wrong. And that's yet another feature of the air and again you look at the lineup and you know going back to this ask ATP question that I really interrupted sorry Casey. Like I'm with you like if you're looking into the MacBook Pro, the current one the 13 inch, you know kind of mini MacBook Pro and you're worried about the fan noise just get the Air I mean even though people have said that it's really hard to make the fan turn on like if that's gonna be a main priority for you just get the air because it's nearly the same computer.
John
Yeah, I don't think it's about the fan turning on like I don't recommend getting the Air if you want a MacBook Pro. you want or get one you like the reports basically say that even though the fan is spinning, its spinning so slow that you can't even hear it if you have a 2015 MacBook Pro and you're annoyed by fan noise. Don't use that as a way to measure how you're going to feel about the M1 and just get the MacBook Pro with the M1 in it. All reports said you will if someone just tells you it's fanless you won't even know because even when people running benchmarks for 10 minutes It was like like Gruber was saying he literally could not hear it.
But as he ran up the thing he you know running a benchmark he couldn't hear it right. The fan is in there and it is spinning but it's spinning so slow that it's not going to be anything like your dust filled 2015 MacBook Pro so that's if you want the M1 base MacBook Pro, just buy it, if you want to be sure you're not going to hear a fan get the Air but I don't want to steer people away because all reviews have been unanimous in saying like, yeah, it's got a fan. But don't worry, you won't hear it. It's not like the fan on your current Intel MacBook Pro.
John
Marco
Now I have a question. So the way those programs like cool book, like the way those used to work is, you know, they would interact somehow, with the power management unit of the computer. I don't know how that I don't know what mechanism they could do that. But I would expect, first of all, I would expect all that to be different on the M1 base Mac's, possibly not to be available at all for software to modify, or if it is available, it will probably be a while before the apps are updated to support it.
John
I mean, they pretty quickly like it took remember that iMac Pro, it took a while for any app to support fan control, but eventually went because it's the Mac, you're not limited in the same way you are in iOS devices. So yes, it is an M1 and it's new, and they'll have to come up with new stuff. But they will do it like there's nothing that's stopping them. So
Marco
Unless they don't have access to it like unless there is no API, they can call to modify that on the M1 architecture, which is possible. Anyway, so I'm curious though, John, because like, the way those used to work is they were able to adjust the minimum speed. So they could speed the fan up. But they couldn't slow it down beneath what the unit wanted to run it at. If temperatures reached a certain level like it would, the system would enforce its minimum speed no matter what you told these apps to do.
So all these apps could do would be to increase the speed. So that maybe you could if you want to like the reason why it's called CoolBook is like you could you could run your laptop cooler by having the fan blow faster. So you're saying that with your Mac Pro, it was able to actually lower the speed beneath what it would normally be?
John
So I didn't play the full game of chicken to see, hey, what happens if I just leave it like this. But you could put it into manual control, I think the app I was using was TG Pro, you can put it into manual control. And it basically gave you sliders, and you hear what the fan level is at now. And you'd move the slider down and it would get quieter, and then you'd watch your temps start going up, right? So clearly, it's whatever I'm doing, I'm making it be below what it would want to go because the temp would start climbing and climbing and then I just put it back into automatic because I didn't want to see what would happen.
You know, like I don't want I didn't want to find where the limits are on my very expensive computer. But I'm pretty sure that it really was bringing the fans down to blow where they want it to be. You know, it could be the default mode is above the minimum to your point, like maybe there's a minimum and they don't run it the minimum they run like in the middle. But it did give me a slider and you could slide it all the way to the end. It did make it quieter, and it did make the temperatures go up. But please don't do this to your computer, especially an M1 MacBook Pro, just get it and just tell yourself, there's no fan and see if you ever hear it.
Casey
As a another quick side from the Ask ATP that will never end. I recorded using prior sponsor channels, I recorded a couple of things, a couple of holiday specials off ABC and I was running them through Final Cut Pro in order to take the commercials out. And I rendered them these are like 45 minute, maybe an hour 10 minute total television programs and they were 720. The source was 60 frames per second, which I did not keep and I cranked it back to 30 I believe but I was rendering them out of Final Cut Pro there were no like fancy transitions, there was no weirdness to them.
I did render them as HEVC on my iMac Pro. One of them took literally like six or seven hours, I have no idea why I had nothing else was going on in my computer that was abnormal. And after that was done. I very nearly bought myself a new Mac Mini. Like this is preposterous now, though. I know I'm a media packrat. I know I have very esoteric and peculiar needs when it comes to media stuff. It is unusual for me to be going in Final Cut Pro and doing these sorts of things.
But I don't know why it took so long. You know people are already unloading in the chat. What about hardware encoding? What about hardware encoding? Yes, it has hardware encoding. I know it does. I have no idea why Final Cut Pro is not Final Cut Pro 10. It's just Final Cut Pro now. I don't know why it took so darn long. But I started it around lunchtime. And it didn't finish until around dinnertime. I have no idea why. But oh my goodness,
Casey
And that may have been in fact I think that might have been it now that you say that but either way, I have encoded like, you know, H264 stuff I've re encoded as a HEVC in order to save storage space on the other end. So if it's something that I'm you know, it's not critical to me that it's in the original form factor in which I downloaded or the original codec, I downloaded it.
Casey
Depends on what we're talking about. I think that's a good point, but especially what we're talking about. But nevertheless, I can do I can usually on the iMac Pro get anywhere between one X and like three X with the CPU doing HEVC encodes. And this was like one 10th X and maybe it was the 10bit thing. I don't know.
Casey
Yeah, I don't know whatever it was just it was hearing all these people saying oh, I can render in Final Cut Pro so fast. It was quite the sales pitch for me getting a new Mac which hand to God I do not want a new Mac. I don't want a new MacBook Pro right now. I probably will soon. I do not want a new iMac right now. Probably will soon.
Casey
Well, so that's an interesting, that's actually a very interesting question because I sitting here now I really don't have any need or desire, he says with little confidence to change my iMac. I really do think though, as soon as there's a four point 13 inch MacBook Pro, it's quite likely I'm gonna pull the trigger real soon. And you already did. I mean, you've already lost that fight in the laptop department. So I mean, I already won.
Casey
That's also true. I don't know. All right, we should probably get back to Ask ATP. How long should we start this? Bryan Hoffman writes, can you guys explain what you don't like about Apple news? Is it just the UI is there something more your comments over the last few years brushed it off as almost been obvious to all pile of garbage. But for me, it's become my go to new source. I've also looking to Apple one and news plus articles. Yes, the UI could be improved. But so good photos, just wondering, you know, I don't ever touch Apple news.
Unless I end up there by accident because somebody posted a link there. I don't know how to describe it. But I know that there are affordances in Apple news that are different from the standard way iOS works. Like I think swiping back actually gets you to a different article, if I recall correctly. So if you do like a left to right swipe, I would expect you to go back to the prior screen. But it's like, oh, no, no, here's another article for you. All right. Like I don't want that no, no, every other app on my phone, when I swipe from left to right, it goes backwards.
And you're just sending me to a different article, which I guess is kind of backwards. But that's not what I want at all. Additionally, like sharing, to me, if I'm going to share a link with somebody, I want to share the canonical version of that link, which 99% of the time is the web. I want to share frickin Apple news article like if you're going to share something, share the web version, please. And thank you. I just don't care for it. I don't like it. Half the time I end up there. It's for a paywalled article on it. I don't even know it until I land there, which I guess isn't any different than the web. But I just I don't care for it. John, why don't you tell us? What is wrong with Apple news?
John
Yeah, the second bit is what you got. The content in Apple news is content from webpages, and it should be viewed on the web. The reason everyone has animosity towards Apple news is when we see an Apple news link, we're like, oh, I don't want it. Tap that and launch into a dedicated app for this special kind of URL that is worse than a web browser that is more annoying to use than a web browser and makes the article look worse. And you know, that article in most cases came from the web to begin with. And it's like a worse version of the article. Now granted, the web is annoying, too.
That's why we run ad blockers and everything on our devices, right? But in general, the open web with URLs that are all interlinked to each other as viewed by a web browser is the proper forum for web data, not a special dedicated reading application. Even things like RSS readers that read a news feed from a site, show a web view for the full article or launch a web browser, depending on your preference. That's the right way to do this. If people were sharing links on Twitter, and it was like a net news wire, you know, and nnw colon slash slash, we'd be annoyed by that too, because that's not the right way to do it.
If it's a link, if it's a URL, and it's a webpage, take me to the web page. Don't take me to an Apple news app that embeds a web view that shows a weird version of that webpage Apple news is bad now I understand people who like okay, but I like having a dedicated app for this one type of web page. Fine, good, don't share this link with the public eye get your own little private place where you go to see things but don't send especially as like Twitter if you want to send it to someone through messages and you know, they're also a diehard Apple news user.
Marco
Yeah, I feel very similarly you know, the news is is almost always designed to be very web browsers and, you know, for all of its faults, as John was saying, like for all the faults of the web, the web browser is an incredible application. And we've all developed habits and expectations on how web browsers work. And you mentioned earlier, Casey, like, you don't like how you swipe back. And instead of like, going logically back in the hierarchy or the history, it goes to some other article. And that's just that feels wrong. Because you're looking at the content and you're, it feels like a web browser, but worse.
And if you're going to read web content, read in a web browser, like that's, that's what it's for. And if you if you do anything else, if you try to replicate a web browser, like experience in an app that is not a web browser, you're gonna get all the details wrong. And you're gonna have capabilities that are wrong. Like, one of the things I love about web browsers is like, you can just pop a boot and smooth new tabs and, or you can hit Command F and find stuff on the page real fast. Like there's all sorts of things that are built in, that you don't even think about, because it's just, they just had been in web browsers forever, and we use them every day.
But you don't necessarily think like, oh, I need this feature until you're in something like Apple news, and you want that feature, and it's not there, or you expect it to behave a certain way. And then it behaves some other some different way. And it just feels wrong. And it has, it has limitations and weird behaviors that just make it feel either limiting or wrong or both. If you're reading web content, the web browser is the best app to do that it most of the time. And anything that forces people out of that with some like weird automatic behavior, like universal links do on Apple stuff, it just feels wrong.
And it's frustrating, and it's annoying, and you know, it can, it can really disrupt your flow or angry or both. So, you know, I don't like things that should be in a certain format that are forcing you into their format for business reasons. You know, there's a reason why. If you look back at the sponsors of our show, and you look at the sponsors of other podcasts, one of the little rules that we try to enforce whenever reasonably possible, is we don't like taking sponsors from services that our subscriptions are some kind of products where you pay per month, and you get a box full of dog toys, or whatever, like, and it's like, well, I don't really need a subscription to dog toys.
And that feels like if you want to sell me dog toys, what am I just gonna order dog toys when I need dog toys. I don't actually need a subscription to that, right? I don't like when certain things are like forced into a subscription for business reasons where it's not, it doesn't really make sense. And that's kind of how I see apps like Apple news like, this is forced into this app for Apple's business reasons, not because it's better not because news wants to be in this weird, special app that takes over this certain type of link.
And you know, kind of makes it hard to behave normally as a web browser would like, that's not, they're not doing that, because it's better for you the customer. There in some ways it might be but no, in most ways, it's either just more limited or more annoying. They're doing that because it's better for them. It serves their strategic interests or their business interests like and that's why that is the way it is. I don't like that kind of thing. Like if something is is better, or native to a certain way of doing things or a certain platform or a certain type of app for viewing or consuming it.
I want it in that kind of app. I don't want to have it in some weirdo special thing. Like, that's why I don't listen to podcasts on YouTube. Like I use a podcast app because that's what podcasts want to be in. And it's way better. And it works the way you expect. And that's it. And so and you know, that's why every like, major podcaster, or every major audio platform is now adding podcasts for reasons and they're trying to cram it in like, oh, you use our app to listen to this particular show that we just bought.
And oh, if you have this particular type of fridge, you can listen to our podcast, this podcast production company we just bought that can only play on our fridges. It's like, no, nobody wants that. And if you if you have the option of not doing that, I genuinely don't want to take that option. So I kind of I like for things to be in the place in the app, whatever it is, where they make the most sense where they are native and where they can be full featured and follow expectations. And Apple news breaks a lot of that and that's why I don't like Apple news.
Casey
Kevin Doran writes and someone based computers have arrived all tech announcements related to traditional non system on a chip computers already sound old and unexciting. It seems that on an infinite timescale, almost all computers will switch to using ARM based systems on a chip. This has me wondering are discrete component motherboards, the internal combust engines of computing? How dare you, sir?
John
An infinite time scale? You know, we get the heat death of the universe you don't get succeeds. Unfortunately, this, this is an interesting question because I mean, Kevin, well, Kevin is pointing out as a just a general trend in this part of the technology sector, which is, as we are able to make smaller and smaller transistors, as you know, the process shrinks or whatever, you need to spend those transistors on something. And it turns out that if you can suddenly fit something that used to be an external chip into the, you know, the CPU or whatever, for example, putting the memory controller into the CPU, putting a GPU into the CPU, like this process of taking chips that used to be elsewhere on the motherboard.
And putting them into not an even bigger chip, but a chip that is more or less the same size. But now you can fit more stuff in it has been going on for decades and will continue to go on, it doesn't mean as this process has happened, it doesn't mean that suddenly you have zero, you know, just a motherboard with one chip on it, because you get other chips that are elsewhere, like the you know, the cell modem or whatever, oh, you can integrate that like so, this, this process will continue.
But, and they may eventually get to the point where essentially, you have one chip and certain devices and then just analog stuff outside of it. If we're not already there in some scenarios, but it's not a new trend. And to give an example of that we should put this link in the show notes. An acronym from my childhood, and that I also found in my schooling at various points is VLSI. Do you know and looking it up what VLSI is?
John
That's right. And this is another this is kind of like the high bandwidth memory. If you make up a name like this, like Very Large Scale Integration, that sounds impressive, atleast didn't say ultra or whatever. But they did say very, Very Large Scale Integration, a term coined in the 70s. With the idea was that you take a bunch of what used to be discrete components, transistors, I don't know if you've ever seen a little black little pencil racer thing with three metal leads coming out of it.
You take a bunch of what used to be a bunch of transistors on a board. And you can combine all those transistors into one thing that we call an integrated circuit. So all those little transistors used to be that now they're in one thing that's Very Large Scale Integration, that they burn that term. And now we can't use it. But just for the idea of an integrated circuit of not having separate transistors, so.
John
Yeah, so this consolidation trend will continue, as long as we are able to make smaller and smaller transistors, eventually, we won't be able to make smaller and smaller transistors and this trend will stop. And who knows, maybe we'll use DNA based computing or something I don't know there's other avenues we can go on. But transistors will not get smaller forever, because physics. But for the foreseeable future, we will continue to spend our transistor budget on putting more stuff into the one main chip, which we now call system on a chip.
But honestly, like when when Intel integrated the memory controller, oh, it's not a system on a chip. But we're certainly putting a lot more stuff in this chip. And like, we cross the threshold. And so now it's a system on a chip. Now, whatever the arbitrary definition, you want to say, well, when you put this in, then it becomes a system on a chip. But yeah, we're gonna see more stuff going in, or the other direction goes, well, you can just keep making the GPUs bigger because you can basically make GPUs bigger forever and spend all your transistor power budget on it.
But it is advantageous to have more and more things integrated. This is another question by the way of like, we've been talking for a couple years now. About Apple making its own cell modems for its phones, which is a difficult thing to do. And they started on it many years ago. And they bought Intel's business for doing that right? And we fully expect if not in the next iPhone, and certainly the one after that, that Apple won't be using chips from Qualcomm for its cell modem, it will be using its own, could that be integrated into the system on a chip, maybe but there are analog components to cell modems that may not be easy to fold in.
So maybe still be a good idea to have it outside. But those are the type of things that you can imagine being sucked into that. And as for discrete components being inherent combustion engines, no, because there will always be discrete components, because it doesn't make sense to put literally every single thing into the system on a chip. We just talked about DRAM last time, because DRAM is manufactured in a slightly different way.
It doesn't make sense to try to do sort of, you know, the the manufacturing system to use for the logic and then a separate manufacturing system to use for the DRAM to try to put that on the same die. It's not always going to make sense to do that. So there will almost always be components, even if it's just like the stuff that's like all the capacitors and the analog components for the power supplies that are outside the system on a chip that's still going to be out there even if it looks like it's dwindling. As we pull more things into the system on a chip, we come up with new ideas to put in that board space.
John
If you're listening to this now, and you're just now you weren't paying attention earlier, but now you're composing that email to tell me what a breadbox is. Just stop. I know when it was coming out of my mouth like I can hear the tweets going now. you don't know what a breadbox is. You've never seen a bread box. Here's a photo of the bread box on my countertop right now. Why don't you have a bread box? Your missing the point of the joke. It's silly.
It's silly that the thing we use for 20 questions and charades or whatever, to assess the size of things is a breadbox which despite you knowing what it is and despite my grandmother having one is not the first object that springs to mind about for size comparison. So for whatever reason, breadbox got it. 20 questions, right. Is that the context in which you know, bigger than breadbox?
Casey
I mean, honestly, I haven't kept up with this. A couple people have mentioned this. And, frankly, the only people have heard about it from our test loners. So this hasn't even made my sphere outside of Tesla people being like, oh, I've got full self driving now or whatever. So I'm not even sure what's different. To be honest.
John
I have this, this is the first I've heard of this story. But I haven't been paying attention. I The last thing I saw about full self driving is a bunch of angry Tesla owners saying that it's the worst $5,000 or whatever they ever spent, and they're super angry about it. And that made me happy because they're learning that the thing they have in their car now will not drive the car for you.
Marco
There's been so many asterisks on it. And there still are like that. Every time they make progress. They do something that's very technically laudable, like it's very impressive. But it still isn't full self driving, which is what the feature is called. And like, and every time they get, you know, every time they get like one step closer to that, they call it full self driving. It's like well, okay, can it actually drive with no interaction from here to there, no matter what I mean, by here and there no matter what it accounts, you know what it encounters in the meantime. No, it can't. Okay, well, then that's awful. So driving, it might be something else might be great. But that's what full self driving means.
John
So here's the thing, if it says that no attention is required, that's not true. But if you fall asleep and it ends up running, it gets off at highway exit and then comes to a dead stop in the highway exit and you're asleep in the car because it's like well, I've exited the area where I know how to drive. So it's time for you to drive driver and you're snoring. That's not good. And it's dangerous for the car. Even if all the Tesla's pull over after the exit and say, well, all drivers are asleep. But we can't drive any farther. I don't like level four, level five or bust. And so far, it's all been bust.
John
This is like the worst version of like, don't worry, you'll be needed soon. But not now. But you don't have to pay attention. But you do have to be wakable, but like, it's like trying to get kids up for school. It's like, look, either you're gonna either hit or you're gonna drive me there by yourself, or I have to be involved in the process.
John
Reminder to everyone listening that if you think that the car can drive for you. But at any moment, you will be called upon to take over. You can't do that no one can do it. No human can do that. It is against human nature. It is against the functioning of your brain. It is an incredibly dangerous situation, drive your car until it can drive for you. There is no way you can maintain that level of vigilance over a long car trip, your attention will wander you will not be ready to take over in time and you will die. Don't do it. Hands on the wheel.
Casey
Agreed 1000%. In please for the love of God, please don't email us please, please, I don't care. I'm telling you. I don't care. And I know this sounds rude. I realized that this sounds rude. I am genuinely so thankful when we get feedback because it means that you're listening, it means that you care enough to correct us or to give us new information. Except the Tesla people who are all the worst. So I don't care. Don't email me. Thank you. I love you.
Marco
And I know lots of people who own Tesla's who are not part of the like fan base. They're like me, they own it. And they like their car. But they don't participate in the community or fan base aspects of it. I mean, frankly, that's pretty much how I am with Fish too. Like, like I I'm not I don't go to the shows. I'm not super into like any of the communities around it. I don't know anything about them.
Marco
Yeah, I don't do any of the drugs. Like I just listen to the music. And that's it. And I love the music. And that's where my interaction ends. With Tesla, like, I love driving the car. It's a great car. That's where my interaction ends. Like I do not want to talk about Tesla on Twitter with people I don't want to follow what Elon Musk is doing in his side projects. Like I don't, I don't want to do any of the experimental features. I've never used summon even because like, oh, here's another thing that here's another way I can destroy my car. And it achieves a benefit I don't need so no thanks.
I won't try that. Thanks. Like I just I don't care. I just don't care. It's a great car. I love driving it. That's the extent of the involvement that I want with this brand. And that's like the relationship I have like with the brand of scissors that I buy what you know what I when I bought when I need scissors, like you know what I do I buy some scissors. And I don't know a damn thing about the brand. I just know I like the scissors and I buy them and that's it.
