Casey
Which didn't work by the way. So I did my Call Recorder update, and then I updated Skype and then nothing. So then I had to manually go and re-update Call Recorder. That means just to show you the pains that we go through to bring this this program to you ladies and gentlemen. I am recording this not once, not twice, but thrice I now have a hardware recorder. The what is this Mix Pre3-ii.
Casey
I've got the audio hijack running and Skype Call Recorder, a Call Recorder for Skype, whatever it's called. Because darn it I will not leave this recording. I will not, I swear it. But yeah, it's really getting frustrating that Skype updates even more often than chrome it seems. And that's saying something.
Marco
Yeah, like 20 bucks, like six years ago, like, don't think about it. It just keeps updating. But I think the time of relying on it for anything is over because Skype is just outpacing, it just constantly disabling it. And issuing or rather, Skype is constantly issuing updates to itself that disable it. I don't know if it's intentional, but that's what happens. And it's just I think at this point, like, you can't really depend on that anymore actually working.
John
I still feel like you can rely on I mean, we all reinstall Call Recorder. So I don't think one of us has had that use case where it's like or that failure mode where the problem is that we forgot the Call Recorder wasn't installed. We always notice it's not installed, and then we reinstall which is annoying, but I feel like once it's installed, it still does the job.
Marco
Yeah, but for me, it's it's my backup recorder, right? It has been for some time and I use Audio Hijack for primary for all sorts of stuff like the entire processing that generates the live stream file, the live stream itself, the processing to make me sound crappier on the live stream to match how bad you guys sound from Skype. All that's done an Audio Hijack, and then I have a couple of recording locks.
Casey
They were right about chapter markers. And so I'll never forget it was a few months ago, and it was a genuinely well meaning email, like it was clear that this person just wanted to help. And they said, here's what you got to do. You got to get this like completely esoteric, like super professional, like, tons of switches, knobs and buttons software that is either untranslated or lightly translated to English. And I swear that's gonna be that's gonna fix you up. That's what you need. It's like, okay, like, I'm sure if you're a German person and can understand German, this works great for you. But I am neither of those things.
That's true. Oh, golly, I know, you're probably you should edit all this out. But I don't know. It's just, it is kind of preposterous. It's like, you know, why do we use IRC as the chat room? And I'm not, God, please. I don't need the Discord apologist to come at me. I know, there are other options, but for the purposes and that the three of us have. I really think that IRC is probably the best answer for what is basically a group of people chatting via text for two to three hours once a week.
Like I don't think I need a full Discord just for that. And yes, I understand we could do that for membership or something. And who knows, maybe we will one day I don't know. But today, it seems like the best answer for a group of people that want to chat via text is IRC and IRC is what like 30 years old, 20 years old, something like that.
Casey
Yep. And I mean, we could do something like cast, which I've met the guy who writes it, and he's a super nice guy. I can't remember his name off top my head. I apologize, but super nice guy. It from everything I understand. It's like a great service. But when we have something that works, even though we hate it, and it's free, it's a lot of it's actually a surprising amount of momentum to get us to do something else. I mean, the chat room is saying we could use Slack. I thought about pitching like FaceTime audio group calls, but God knows I don't want to rely on Apple for that sort of thing. So, I don't know.
Marco
So at the time, I was a Windows user back then, Casey, as were you, John, we're sorry. Please stop listening for a few minutes. QuickTime Player to Windows people was just the worst. Because you'd come across some video that was in QuickTime format, you'd be like, "Oh, God," now I have to either install that thing or run that thing. And QuickTime player in typical like, you know, Apple on Windows fashion, was a terrible Windows citizen. And it just was bloated and installed like weird little hooks everywhere and tried to auto launcher and like all sorts of crap. And it would just, it was just totally out of place. And it just sucked, like it was just a terrible experience.
Having to open stupid QuickTime Player on Windows, to play a QuickTime video that you had nothing else at play. That to the windows, people was just, you know, annoying and hellish, and a big turnoff. But to the entire world of Mac people. That's just what they had. It was fine on the Mac, QuickTime Player with just the video player and it was fine. But in their world, what was fine, was totally foreign and unpleasant to this other world that existed that they just never thought about. That's what discord is to non-gamers.
Like Discord, gamers love Discord. And I think to some degree Slack has the same attribute where like, if you're in a community that uses Discord, or that uses of Slack, adding another one is no big deal. Because you already run the app, you're already running it all day on all your devices, you already have it set up you already have like, you know accounts and stuff, you know how to use it, you know what it does, you know what it doesn't do. So when you're already in one of these, like communities or environments that use one of these chat apps.
Like adding another Slack, to me is no big deal. But if I added a discord to my regularly checked things. I would have to run Discord, I would have to install it on my phone, which I've never had before, I would have to make a spot for it like on my home screen, which I don't have, like I don't have any more space for that, that I want to spend on that,
Marco
Right. Like on my on my Mac, I'd have to install discord on all of my many Mac's, I have to keep it running a lot of the time. So I wouldn't miss stuff or whatever. It's just, it's one more thing, one more like bloater electron app that I'd have to run. And like I just the last thing I want is to have to add something like that to my life that isn't already there. And so if I was already in Discord, this wouldn't be an issue, just like I'm already in Slack. So slack isn't an issue for me. But because I'm not already in Discord. I just I don't want to have to add that entire, the entire bloat of yet another one of these services to my life.
Casey
Alright, so I have a couple thoughts here. First of all, I agree with you with regard to Discord and I have lots of complaints about it. Second of all, we are removing all doubt that we are the oldest most out of touch of all of the people in our little sphere because everyone else seems to love Discord and I hate it. Third of all, I see your QuickTime Player for Windows and rays you Real Player.
Casey
Such a pile of garbage. I mean, QuickTime was bad. But oh, real play was such a pile of garbage. Which is funny, because, you know, back in the olden days, when when you had to carry your bits uphill both ways in order to get on the internet. When you know, Marco and John and I were on the internet, streaming audio or video was just not a thing. It was not possible. And then all of a sudden, real player came out. And you could stream audio and then maybe it was the same time it was a little while later.
Then you could stream quote unquote, "video", which really was like a postage stamp sized video that had approximately 12 pixels of data within it. That would update once every seven seconds. And that was quote unquote, "video" back then and oh my God the RealPlayer app was such a pile of garbage and I hated it so much. With regards to Discord, I think a lot of the problem I have with Discord is that it's it to my eyes, it fulfills the exact same needs as Slack does even though I understand that they're not the same and there are very, very large differences between the two.
But for the kinds of needs that I have, which is basically chatting with a select group of people in one or more different contexts, you know, chat rooms or what have you. I don't feel like discord handles that simple use case as well. Now it does many other things quite a bit better. Like my understanding is that moderation is way better on Discord because it was built for gamers and I already insulted every Tesla fan ever last week. So let me try to be a little more gentle, gamers can be challenging and that could require and maybe require a little more finesse than your average Slack user.
And so like and the other thing that I Dislike about discord is that in this very well could be user error and maybe it maybe I don't understand what I'm doing. But I I feel like it is information overload always, anytime I start Discord which is basically only when I'm recording Analog because that's where the chat room is relay now. I started first of all it makes me login again because I haven't logged in in a month and that's annoying in and of itself. So then they do this you know like really slick and I mean genuinely a really slick like you know scan this QR code with your phone because I'm on my desktop you know scan this QR code with your phone will log you write in, which is great.
Except to go to my phone my phone's logged out because I haven't like so then I log into my phone thinking All right, I'll just do it here I'll use my face ID to get my password and then that'll be great. And then every time I forget where the hell it is that I go to scan the QR code because I can't just use the camera on the iOS camera or the iOS camera because then it just pumps me to Discord and discord is like okay, you're in discord sweet. Oh, no, I want to log in on the other.
Casey
No, cuz I'm on my phone. It just pumps me to Discord from the iOS camera app. So then I got to figure out where the hell it is in Discord on the iPhone, that I can scan the code to get me logged in on the desktop, and then I log in. And there's 304 friggin channels, all of which are bolded because all of which have had activity since I've last been logged in. And unlike Slack, where you seem to be able to leave a channel and again, it is very possible this is user error because I barely ever touched Discord but it seems like in Slack you can you can choose to join or leave a channel.
And the the equivalent in discord is muting a channel. (beep), man, I don't want all this and I don't want all this (beep) my life. No, I don't want it. I don't want to mute it. I don't want to friggin see it. So, yeah, it's very frustrating. And I know that I am just, I'm just announcing how old I am by going on this rant. And I can feel how old that I am. I think my hair is actively getting more gray as I'm in the midst of this monologue, but I don't know, it's just, it's for the kids, man and I ain't a kid anymore.
Marco
You're a gamer. Discord to me, was clearly you know, clearly came from gamer roots. Overall, Discord looks like it was designed by Windows users. And Slack looks like it was designed by Mac users. And I'm not like I'm not saying Discord is badly designed. It's just a different set of goals and way different priorities and way different styles of doing things. It's very brutal, like from those gaming roots. And you can see it in so many ways. Gamers are usually Windows users and like it just it feels like a big old Windows app, and Slack for all of its faults. You know, like I've had many quibbles with Slacks design changes over time.
It's still you know, it's is a blue electron app for sure. And you know, there's a lot of there's a lot about Slack that that is, you know, not ideal or not great. But Slack still feels generally like it was designed by MAC people with Mac sensibilities and discord feels like a Windows app. And that will probably always be the case. Speaking of communities, and Casey speaking of Tesla people, I just got an email with a terrifying subject line.
Marco
It looks like they're just moving lease stuff into the Tesla Account Control Panel instead of I guess whatever, like financial company. It was like subsidiary servicing it before. Tesla changing the leasing experience is kind of like Apple changing the laptop keyboards. It's like, "Oh, please, please don't mess it up. Like, oh god, you don't have a good track record here. Please just maybe not touch it. Like once it works, just please don't touch it."
Is Apple-Silicon ready? It's a very odd phrasing or title for a site, but it's actually really good sight and does what it says on the tin. If you want to know if an app is ready for Apple-Silicon just go to isapplesilliconready.com. And it'll tell you for a fair number of different apps. It's quite stunning. In fact.
John
I added the hyphens to the name. So you would know how I think it's supposed to be done. So the URL is all stuck together isapplesiliconready.com. But if you want to think of how it's supposed to be interpreted, my interpretation is it's a question about a thing. So is and is leaving out some words to be sure. But it says is this thing? Apple-Silicon Ready hyphenated, because it's a three word phrase that works as an adjective to describe the thing? Is Apple-Silicon ready? Or in Emacs parlance. Apple-Silicon-Ready P. There, I've done a Emacs joke for the month. So my quote is, anyway, yeah. Good site, check it out.
Casey
Yeah,it is very well done. And you can even you know, I played with this very briefly, even though the I'm the only one of the three of us that does not have an Apple-Silicon Mac. But among things you can do is you can like search for something. So I searched just arbitrarily for FFmpeg. Because hi, have we met. And, and I think there's a way that you can actually fill out a list of things that you have that may or may not be on the site. In make your own like little profile, it looked very, very well done. And it seems like it's translated a bunch of different ways. So this is very impressive. If I had an episode come back, I would be looking at it more often.
Marco
Oh, for whatever it's worth, like, I know HomeBrew is not quite ready for all this stuff. Yet, it's probably going to be a while, before all the different packages in the popular packages like FFmpeg, it's probably going to be a while before all of those pretty much build on M1. But through some kind of fluke of migration assistant, I on my MacBook Air, I have my HomeBrew installation from another computer. They just got imported over. And it works like because all those there's compiled binaries. And if you can get a compiled binary from an Intel Mac, and run it on the M1, it'll run under Rosetta.
And so like my M1 MacBook Air does run FFmpeg just fine. It's not as fast as it could be if it was native. But it like Rosetta works on command line binaries also. So that is an option if you need to run some stuff like that, for some part of your workflow or something you can bring that over from an Intel Mac. And there are I think there there are certain ways where you can force like there's some command, I forget what it is. But you can run HomeBrew itself in Rosetta, with some kind of command line trickery. And I'm sorry, I don't know what it is off the top of my head. But look that up if you're curious.
John
speaking of running things on Rosetta and then being fast enough. I tried to find this URL while you were talking about I couldn't someone did benchmark like Lightroom just updated to be ARM native. And someone did a benchmark of Lightroom running under Rosetta versus the native version. The native version was only a little bit faster. Because the Rosetta is so good. That it's I mean it was faster but not by a lot by like single digit percentages. And it's like wow, Rosetta is pretty good.
Casey
Oh, here we go. Who is this in the chat? I'm not in the right window. Rip Mac in the chat wrote. There's a post on notion.so. It talks about how to do it. So what you do is you make a duplicate of the terminal app. And then you go into the info for that terminal app and tick the open using Rosetta checkbox. And then everything that happens in terminal apparently is run through Rosetta so you could use HomeBrew.
Marco
Oh, that's something. Also there's thanks to Brian Booker in the chat. There's a blog post by Sam. How do you pronounce his last name? Sophos? Sophies? I don't know. Yeah, been around forever. Anyway, Sam Sophos wrote this good blog post, also about running HomeBrew on Apple-Silicon and uses the arch command to basically use the entire homebrew installer under Rosetta using the arch command so that look decent.
Casey
All right Agents Samson writes, this is a lot, so blame John. On the topic of sheer die size. An important avenue for scaling lately is chiplets, or multi chip modules, or MCMs, where more than one logic chip goes in the same package. Think roughly the same ideas the M1's in package DRAM, except it's multiple logic dies instead of one logic die and some memory. Triplets were just a research topic until fairly recently, AMD CPUs are all MCMs as of a couple of years ago, a triplet based approach could be a way to scale the M1 CPU core count or GPU size without requiring separate packages or ruining yield.
On the topic of using in package memory as a cache for more traditional larger onboard DRAM a second rapidly approaching technologies relevant here quote, "3d stacked" quote DRAM. Where ram chips are glued right on top of a logic die. The leading standard for this is high bandwidth memory or HBM, which is a terrible name. And it has so far appeared only in a few high end Nvidia GPUs. Xilinx has that right FPGAs etc. The capacity of this memory is pretty limited. So research on HBM often involves managing it as an OS managed for page based Kaspar for a larger pool of DDR memory.
Which seems like a win because as John mapped out in the show the bandwidth and latency advantages over traditional off package memory cross the threshold to make it worth it, then there's some math, which I don't think we care about. Both of these technologies were coming soon for a long time. But now they're here, I wouldn't be shocked. But I would be thrilled to see them in a quote unquote, "M2" any acronym that has BM in it, they're bind.
John
So they have a link to TSMC's 3D thing on it. So I'm pretty sure all the phone chips have used the RAM on top of the Logic for a long time now. So I don't think maybe it's not, maybe they're talking about something slightly different. But putting the RAM on top of the Logic instead of next to it is definitely a thing you can do. But for Macs in particular, especially Big Macs, you probably don't want to do that because it is much harder to deal with heat in that scenario, it's handled on the phone, because the whole deal with the phone is not going to be a fan in there anyway.
So you know, everything's clock down and made low power because the battery is tiny and yada, yada. But one of the reasons that the potentially one of the reasons that the M1 in the Mac's has Logic with the RAM next to it instead of on top is that it's much easier to cool because you get direct access to the Logic, which is super hot, right? And you can put a heat sink right on that to draw heat away from it. And then you have heat sinks on the RAM modules as well.
So that's way easier that if you stack them now you have this hot Logic thing that you're prevented from extracting heat from by the also kind of warm RAM on top of it. So I don't expect to see it stacked like that in any Mac. But multi chip modules is definitely a possibility that's related to something we'll get to a little bit later.
Casey
So moving on getting images from a Google doc and this is from Daniel Santos. So if you recall last episode, I think that I expected Marco would have cut this out. But he didn't. I was trying to extract I think a graph or something from our shared show notes document on Google Docs. And in typical Casey fashion, I think several colorful expletives were uttered as I was trying to figure out how the crap to get a image file out of a Google Doc stuck. And so Daniel Santos writes, a few months ago, I spent hours banging my head against the wall and screaming profanities for hours trying to figure out how to do this.
One would think it's a basic feature. But alas, Google being Google, they kind of included it that made it as unintuitive as possible. So basically, on a Google Doc, you can go to File, download web page, HTML zipped, and it'll download a zipped package in which there's a nice little folder called images with all of the image files from the document in their original quality. Or I could have just asked John for the original.
Marco
You can also right click on the image. When I right click on an image I get this weird option save to keep this capitalized. I assume it's some kind of service that Google offers, I don't know. But if you right click and say save, save to keep it shows up in a sidebar. In that sidebar, you can right click on the image. And that's when you get the browser native like open image in new tab or save image as.
Casey
Speaking of Apple news, we got a little bit of feedback in defense of Apple news. The feedback we got was very, very upset that we had besmirched their beloved app. But there was one fairly short email from Jay Peterson, who wrote news gives you better font size control readability options and accessibility features, then the quote unquote, open web, no, jerk bars, we had a different name for this back when Twitter was doing it. Cookie accepts flashing ads or page obstructions and no ad blocking required for the average user. With regards to swiping behavior, which is what I was complaining about. If you swipe from the middle of the screen, it does move you to the next or previous story depending on swipe direction.
But if you do the edge swipe from the left to go back news does take you back to the prior view like most Apple apps. So this is I think a lot of people were very upset about me describing the swipe behavior, I guess that I just didn't get my finger precisely to the left edge of the screen in order to go back, which is my fault. But I don't know, it's just as we were discussing just a moment ago with Google Docs, you expect to be able to right click and say save image and whether or not that's the best answer. It's the answer that it seems most people expect. And I could make a passionate argument that a good UI is a UI that doesn't make you go huh.
And so this was an instance where Apple news made me go, huh. So anyway, continuing on from Jay Peterson. Also most stories in the news app linked to the web source by tapping the share button and tapping Safari, which opens a web version of the story, or swiping all the way to the bottom of the story in the news, and then swiping further down automatically pulls up a web view of the story. Some sites abuse this news by only showing a stub of the story in news and then requiring a full scrolling swipe to see the full ad and much more unpleasant to read version of the story. So in the defense of Apple news, there are some things to like about it, I still don't think it's for me, but you know, there you go.
Casey
Marco
This is a very hard thing for us to talk that much about, you know, as everybody looks at the chapter marker and sees 45 minute long chapters. It's a hard thing for us to talk about. Because no one seems to have them yet. Or at least like when the announcement was made. Like there were no there was no like advanced reviews that were seated before that announcement.
So if there's no like an HD review or anything like this, so we don't have you know, there were was no like, you know, preview By John Gruber. Like there was nothing like that. And so we can't comment at all on how they sound, how they work, anything like that. But it is pretty unusual for Apple to release a brand new product in December. So we're gonna talk about them anyway. I think everybody wants us to
John
So AirTags is the I think the loan but I saw it from the Apple TV, AirTags is the lone remaining sort of rumored product that still hasn't landed in any kind of form. If you set aside AirPower and think that weird folding travel thing is whatever those rumors are about. But yeah, so I think these headphones are in the beginning, I thought, well, you know, it's nice that they made these is good, it feels like it feels out Apple's line, kind of like they're making a small phone and a big phone, they make AirPods, they want to extend the AirPods brand even though it makes not that much sense.
But the arison thing makes sense, the pods part not so much. But anyway, it's good, the Apple should have an apple branded over ear headphone. And I think these, this product comes at more or less the right time because the AirPods pro introduce a whole new set of features that actually are ideally suited to an over ear headphone, the noise cancelling, I mean, it was kind of it's cool that a little AirPods Pro can do noise cancelling. But it's obviously you can do a better job if you cover the entire year with a thing.
The spatial audio stuff that they rolled out. And of course, all the wireless pairing and all the other convenience factors like this, that whole feature set, you look at that features. And that would work pretty well in over ear headphone. So Apple should probably make one of those. And they have and it looks super Aplley. And, you know, I think it's a reasonable product, but I didn't think it was for me because I'm like, well, you know, I don't even like the AirPods Pro, I just use my plain old, you know, regular original AirPods are still my favorite because I don't like things in my ear canal. And the only place I use over ear headphones is right now, I'm podcasting.
I don't really use them at any other time in my entire life. So I didn't really have a place for these. But as you know, it's not the only reading reviews, right? So you know, I don't, nothing has changed about my attitude towards this that related to reading what people think of them. But as the day has, the two days have gone on, I've been thinking, you know, I do put my AirPods in and watch stuff on my iPad, I watch a lot of content that way, sort of late at night, you know, in bed, watch a TV show before bed or whatever, right? And I do that with my plain old air pods. Which don't sound that great, but it doesn't matter for a TV show.
But sometimes I've watched you know, a movie like that or whatever. And like you know, these things, I could put these on my head and watch something on my iPad, right? And I've done the spatial audio thing with the Pro's. And it's kind of cool. And what if these are really comfortable? And what if they're even more noise isolating for my wife next to me in bed, who doesn't want to hear if there's some loud part of a movie or something? So I started thinking about these things. I didn't put it in an order. I'm not I don't you know, I don't think I really need these in my life.
But I am actually primed to be interested in the reviews. If people say, yes, they are expensive. We'll talk about that a little bit. But people say yeah, they're super expensive, but they sound more or less like $500 headphones, and all that we already more or less know that all of the Air poddy features are good, because we have the AirPods Pro and we've done all the pairing things and we've tried the whole feature set like we you know, we understand how they interact with the Apple ecosystem. And if you like that, these do that too. Only another big so I am AirPods Max curious at this point.
I don't need to buy a $500 pair of headphones. What am I Marco? But I am waiting to see what the reviews if the reviews say oh, they're only okay. And you know, because I have Sony noise cancelling headphones which are, which I really like but I only use them for travel. I don't use them for the sound quality. I can tell you that just the podcasts on them. But if they say oh, these are not you know, they're on par with much cheaper models don't bother, I probably won't bother if they say wow, these things actually sound like $500 headphones. And they're super convenient.
And by the way, you can use them for monitoring during podcasts which we'll talk about a little bit i'm sure too. I may consider these at some point in the future. Marco on the other hand is not allowed to consider headphones he's mandated to buy all of them sight unseen. So Marco, tell us about what do you think of these things.
Marco
I did order a pair I don't have it yet. I did get one of those day one delivery windows though. So I think I'll have it in roughly a week or so maybe. I have some concerns. I think it might end up being a really great product. But man $550 that is not a ton of money for a flagship headphone from a headphone brand. Like if you look at like high end headphones that audio files buy. That is is actually quite mid range, like high end headphones, for audio files go well into like the $3,000 plus range. And that's actually a fairly recent phenomenon actually. But anyway, and I don't own any of those.
But for this market, this is very expensive, because the direct competitors to this are the Sony, you know, WH, whatever, whatever, whatever, Mark, whatever I think they're up before so far, and those are about $350, usually, the BOSE QuietComfort, full size model of whatever, you know, two year period we're currently in, I believe it's currently called the BOSE 700. Those are usually also in the $350 range. So for Apple to come out with something that, you know, those are the most obvious direct competitors at $550 is really above the market for what this product most likely is. And what it most likely is competing with.
Another very strong competitor in this area is Apple's own AirPods Pro, which are less than half the price. They're $250 officially and have been on sale a lot recently at various places for like, you know, $190, $200 like, you know, something like that. So, this is on track to be kind of another home pod, not Home Pod Mini but the regular home Pod. It seems like first of all, like there's maybe more overlap than we think. The rumor mill seems to think that these were edited a lot and kind of rushed out the door. And that like the final product has been changed so often in development and things didn't work out the way they wanted, and they change it around and change it around and change it around and then ship something out the door.
We heard a very similar thing about the home pod when that when that shipped the home pod came out to a market where it seemed like it was kind of missing the market like it the the Home Pod came out way too expensive, missing some some key features that the market expects and just kind of seeming like the people who designed and marketed and priced it either weren't familiar with the market they were entering. Or were so confident that they would be superior in some ways that they totally didn't bother competing and some other really important ways.
And it looks like they've done the same thing here. There are some things about this look really good. There are some things about this that are question marks for me and will remain to be seen until we get it and it's super expensive for what it seems like its category is. And so I think this is probably going to have a similar outcome as the full size Home Pod which is some of us will buy it but it's really expensive for the market that it's going into. And most people aren't going to buy it and it probably won't do the kind of volumes Apple wants it to do.
Marco
For the last couple of flights I took. I took only the AirPods Pro with me. And it was remarkable in almost every way. The amount of space in a bag that you save by not having a full sized pair of noise cancelling headphones is substantial. And it was wonderful traveling with just one pair of headphones, having one pair of headphones do everything is so great, so convenient. It's price efficient, you know, so there's a lot of benefits to having one pair of headphones that you can do everything with and that's why everyone loves their AirPods so much.
Because for many people AirPods can do that. And the AirPods Pro did that for me for so many things. I no longer interested for the most part in full size portable headphones for anything anymore. I use my AirPods Pro for pretty much everything away from my desk. At my desk I use full size headphones for reasons but you know like but when I'm away from my desk, I use AirPods Pro pretty much all the time I've stopped using almost any other headphones away from my desk. So this is very promising if this can not only be that for people for whom AirPods Pro weren't comfortable or didn't fit, or if this can be that you know for people who need things the AirPods Pro can't do or don't do well.
Noise cancellation is one of those things you wouldn't think the AirPods Pro do well but they actually do extremely well. Almost as well as full size headphones like the Sony's and the BOSE's and everything. So I expect noise cancellation on the AirPods Max. I don't like this name, by the way, because I don't think anything about them as AirPods but I think noise cancellation on these is likely to be excellent. But it's so good on the AirPods Pro, it actually might not be that much better. So if you want like, additional noise cancellation beyond with the AirPods Pro offer.
This will probably do that, but I don't know if it's gonna be a massive difference We'll see, we'll see when we get them, I have some concerns about long wearing comfort. Now the AirPods Pro on a long plane flight have a problem of battery life, they only last about four hours. And so if you try to take AirPods Pro on a cross country, US flight that's about five hours usually long, you're gonna probably at some point have to pop one out, put it in the case, charge it up, then a little while later, pop the other one out, put it in the case, charge it back in. Or you can do my solution and just buy two pairs, which you can do for a little bit less than the cost of the AirPods Pro Max whatever it's called.
Marco
So the first pair the one like I only had one for a while. The first pair got that got the death rattle. And so that one got replaced recently. And I've been exclusively wearing the backup pair like for a little while, hopefully to try to make it get the rattle within its whatever two year period that was gonna have. Anyway, the thing with the Max is again, we haven't heard it yet. It might sound amazing. But the AirPods Pro are so good that this has an uphill battle.
Marco
I sure hope they do. I mean, because the AirPods Pro, while they sound excellent for their size, they sound merely okay, compared to headphones of the Max's size. Now for them to sound even close is remarkable. They're not in your monitors. They're kind of partially sealed earbuds. And so just to sound and they're only, you know, 250 bucks, and that's Apple prices. So like to sound as good as a $400 pair over ear headphones would be a tall order for that product. But the AirPods pro do sound remarkably good for their size and convenience and portability and everything.
But you know, they don't sound amazing in absolute terms. And so if these headphones sound better, that's wonderful. And these do solve the battery life problem. They claim 20 hours of battery life for the AirPods Pro claim four and a half. So that's pretty good. You know, these are clearly made for flights and everything and that's great. However, they're also significantly heavier that MacRumors noted this as well. They're significantly heavier than most of the headphones in this class. And weight has a lot to do with long wearing comfort for headphones. And there's all sorts of factors.
There's like the clamping force, like how hard it pushes against your ears. You know how the headband is designed, how the ear cups are designed, what kind of materials are involved in everything, how they fit on a given person. Like for instance, like the clamping force how like how hard it squishes into your head, like from the ear pressure. That varies a lot based on your head size. And the headband can stretch in different ways and some models with a headband doesn't flex very well. It's significantly uncomfortable for larger headed people like me.
Where smaller headed people it might be totally fine for them because they aren't getting as much pressure because the headband isn't flexing as much for them. So everything's different for everybody here. But I do worry about comfort because of the weight alone. These are pretty heavy headphones for their category. That's a warning sign for me. It doesn't mean that it can't be comfortable.
John
To give some numbers on this by the way. These are 13.6 ounces. The Sony Sony MDR-7506 that everybody has are about half that at eight ounces. And the theBeyerdynamic DT 770 Pro that I just got a markers recommendation are 9.5 ounces. So I mean it's not surprising when you look at it why would these be so heavy? What do you see those ear cups those are metal I mean it's aluminum it's lightweight metal but it's metal and the little adjustable, whatever you call them things that you know that things that let you adjust how how big it is.
Marco
Right and even and you know and they have to have a certain amount of electronics in there and batteries and like even when you compare them to the BOSE's and Sony noise cancelling headphones, they're like 30% to 50% heavier than then even those direct competitors. So that's a warning sign there. Again, it doesn't mean they will be uncomfortable, but it makes it harder for them to be comfortable and harder for them to be comfortable for more people.
Marco
Going back to the market and how this product fits in the market that it looks like it's made for which is those like high end, you know, airplane trip noise cancelling headphones. Apple has always, I think, in the same way that like Twitter's always jealous of Instagram, and Instagrams jealous of Snapchat and Facebook is jealous of everything, like in the way that like all the social networks are just constantly trying to be like all the other social networks, they can't be happy with what they have and what they are. Apple has always seemed to even way back from the Steve Jobs days has always seemed to be very envious of the makers of like the $400 speakers and headphones, they would often sell in the Apple stores.
The Bang & Olufsen stuff. And Apple has always seemed to want a piece of that market themselves. That's why they made the old what was the iPod thing called? iPod Hi-Fi that yeah, that's why they made it because BOSE and B&O were making these hundreds of dollars speaker docks for iPods. And Apple wanted a piece of that market and they're like we could do that totally. And they just walked in and flopped. For reasons. Anyway, Apple has always wanted a piece of that particular market of like the like $400 headphones and speakers that they sell on Apple stores and high end lifestyle places. This is their version of that. And so like it's clear what they're going for here.
You know Beats never did it. Beats had its own success in different markets. But Beats was never a high end, luxury play. This is a high end luxury play and that's what they're competing against. But if you look at this market too like the market for this, which again is often playing travelers, that's the people who buy multi $100 noise canceling wireless headphones, for the most part, the market for that has a few requirements or priorities that I'm not sure these do well at besides price which you know, it matters. It doesn't matter as much to say to a lot of people but it certainly matters in absolute terms.
One of the things that those headphones all have is a hard case, a carrying case that you can somehow fold the headphones into with varying degrees of how you fold them. These just fold where like the ear cups rotate 90 degrees, so they kind of so the whole thing kind of folds flat. That's one way to fold, it's the worst way to fold. Besides just not folding at all, the better way to fold is what most BOSE and Sony headphones have done over time In this segment, although actually not the current BOSE ones. But most of them have done a thing where the ear cups fold flat like that.
And then also, they can swivel around the points where they attach to the headband. So you can kind of take advantage of the space that like between the ear cups and the top of the headband and rotate one of the cups in there and make a nice little compact and flat package. That is not what Apple's chosen to do here,
John
Marco, you should exercise your image extraction skills to take out one of the pictures I put in the show notes of this probably the Sony one shows just how much smaller headphones get when they are foldable in this way. And I'm looking, I mean, again, we'll talk about the case in a second. But like just ignoring the case for now. I'm just saying how do these headphones get smaller? When I saw that they didn't do this the thing I thought of right away and hopefully you're looking at this right now in your podcast player that supports chapter images.
The reason I thought it was like well, a folding like that is asymmetrical. And it is, I mean looks almost like they're broken. And it looks ugly. And Apple really does not like asymmetry. There are things about asymmetry, yes, the aesthetic thing of like, oh, it doesn't look as nice. But also, folding in this way, potentially makes the God I sound like Johnny, I want to talk about these things, but like potentially makes the item less sort of cohesive, less of a solid thing, you know, because it has to have two degrees of articulation instead of just one, right?
And so now you have all these extra joints and moving parts and things that can fail. And the hardcase thing I can imagine this argument going like this inside, you know, the hardcase thing is like these plastic ones, the BOSE's and the Sony's and I'm going to have both of these I've traveled with both of them, they fold up really small, but there's no way I would put this thing in its folded upstate into my bag, because I'd be afraid that it would crack or something because it's all these little plastic hinges, and the whole thing is made of plastic. And I'd be afraid if I squished up against something that a lot of plastic would just break apart.
Whereas these metal things that Apple has made, there's only one degree of freedom for the folding, they don't get very small. But you get the feeling that again, we don't have these things Marco will tell us when he gets is that they're sturdier because it's stainless steel attached to aluminum attached to what looks like a fairly solid headband. It doesn't look like they would crack when you know, put in a bag even with no case whatsoever. So I can imagine them saying well, we don't need a hard case. We're going to solve that by being sturdier. I don't know if that's true. But an argument could be made for it based on the design.
But the real problem is okay, but you're still not small. Right? I'm going to it's going to be my carry on bag that I have to somehow shove underneath the seat in front of me or whatever. Because I don't have to go up to the overhead thing or the overheads are always all full. I need these headphones to get as small as possible. If I'm going to use them on a plane and saying, well, we couldn't make them that small because it would be asymmetrical and it would be more delicate. And then we'd have to have hard cases like yeah, this market exists. And these products that have been competing in it have converged on this design. Not for the hell of it because the original BOSE QuietComfort that I had didn't do this kind of folding.
John
Anyway, I think this design is really good that like the Sony's that I currently use gets so small, it's ridiculous. And I like the fact that when they're all sealed up in their case, even though the hard case is not that hard, it is uniformly shaped and I'm not afraid they're gonna break inside there. And it's small and it's lightweight and the AirPods Max just totally missed that target. And I'm not entirely sure they were aiming at that target specifically because in all the advertising materials, you know, the pitch that isn't making to me is that like I said before that these are going to sound good, right?
That you're gonna want to listen to music that you like on these because it will sound good and yes, you'll be able to listen to music out in the world and transparency mode and yada yada all the features but the idea is that these will do your music justice, whereas the Sony and the BOSE, I've only used essentially as like what you know what someone who uses a jackhammer and use headphones for. Like I'm blocking out the noise, the noise of the plane, but music through them sounds terrible. I mean, I'm not even a headphone snob. But the BOSE and the Sony's that, like, I don't know if it's terrible. It's not good, right?
Marco
No, it's terrible. I mean, the BISE is more terrible than the Sony, the Sony, like the Sony has an EQ app that you can use to fix some of its shortcomings, which actually I'll get to that you can, you can make it a little bit passable, the BOSE has an EQ app as well. But no matter what you do, it sounds like garbage. It just sounds like different garbage.
John
And that's not what I'm using. Because these are clearly travel headphones, they get really small, they have a hard case you put them on so you can't hear the plane then you can hear your podcasts or your music but like obviously, you're not gonna have an amazing music listening experience on a plane no matter what, because you're on a plane, right? So I feel like these things are for when you're, you know, at either out in the world or bopping around your house, and you want to have a really high quality, good music experience, kind of like what Marco does.
He's got his fancy headphones, and he's on his computer and he's coding, he wants to hear good music with high sound quality. Like that has to be what these things achieve, for them to be a viable product because I feel like that's what they promised. That's what Apple's advertising materials promise, what they're not promising with their folding and their case and everything else is these are the ideal companion for a business traveler.
Now you can bring them with you if you're a business travel, but you you will realize that they're heavier, they're heavier in your bag, like not just on your head, they're heavier in your in your bag, they take up more room. And it's you know, you're probably going to be missing out on the improved audio quality because as good as the noise canceling may be, planes are super noisy.
John
And I know there's an obvious bra but thing going on, but like, this is like a bra for your headphones in that. Like a bra for your car. It doesn't cover the entire thing I brought in your car does not cover the entire car, it just covers the front of it. So they have what looks like leather. That kind of covers some of the headphone portion it leaves parts of it exposed for reasons I do not understand. Does anyone here understand why the bottoms have low cut outs?
Marco
And I'm like I assume like that the big flap that goes over the top I assume that's like a magnetic closure that you like flip it up like a bag opening and you pull it up. Like that's "uh everything about this. Again, we don't have this yet. Everything about this looks like it's not going to be, it looks clunky. Like the way the physicality of this looks, it just looks clunky. It looks like getting in and out of a bag is gonna be clunky, it looks like you probably like you can't like the way that when you're in an airplane or even just walking around the city or whatever.
When you have the Sony's or the BOSE's in there hardcase you can then just toss that into a bag and have it bounced around and it's fine, you know, everything will be fine. But this isn't really a case. And so I would never toss that loose in a bag with other stuff because I know the other stuff would scratch up the metal on the headphones, it could get in there it will fill with lint, it'll it could you know damage the headband or whatever that measurement of on top of the headband is so I would never toss that loose in a bag. And it just it's like what what's the point then.
John
And just think of everything else that this thing doesn't do. So, in all of my little hard cases for travel headphones, I have a lightning to headphone adapter. The cable with the little remote that it comes with some spare batteries because a lot of these take you know interchangeable like double A, triple A batteries like because it's a case you can fit other little things in there. There's no place or anything like that in here, you can't even put a lightning to headphone adapter on this thing because it's not a case like where would you put it it would fall out the little holes, right? So it's not fulfilling the job of a case.
Now here's what's baffling about this product, right? It's $550 I think it's for like you know for better sound quality plus the AirPods Pro feature set which you know, it's fine. It comes with a lightning to USB-C cable but just kind of weird that this thing has lightning on it like it could just be USB-C to USB-C and this is for charging and it does not come with a charging brick because you know that's not Apple's thing anymore. So you have to have something that you can plug this into to charge, fine, whatever, right? But it comes with the case. This is what's baffling about it, right? Like, we just talked about how strange and potentially useless the case is. But it comes with it.
And so now it seemed like well, wait a second, are you trying to tell me that the case is so integral to this? That you get it no matter what, like, you're not going to charge me $80 for the separate leather case that no one buys because it's $80? It comes with it, which makes me think so you think people are going to travel with these? Because that's not what the product is saying to me?
John
But no one's gonna put them back in the case when they're on their desk. I'm sure there's an idol that because it has, let's let's talk about some of the features. It has sensors in it. Okay, so this thing has optical sensors in each ear cup, and I'm assuming it will use that to tell when you're not wearing it to go into a low power mode. And not just the magnets in the case, it's got position sensors into your cup. It's got a case detect center near ear cup, which is I guess, separate from the optical sensor, the senses, your ears, the case, the tech sensors, the magnet thing that senses the magnets, got accelerometers and gyroscopes.
That's all for the spatial audio stuff, right? It's got nine microphones. Eight for noise cancellation and three for voice pickup. But two of the three for voice pickup are shared with the noise cancellation, right? The hardware design wisely, thankfully, happily, does not include any of the rumored touch surfaces. I have some which touch surfaces, and I don't like them. I think it was a smart move, even though it seems like they were having problems and it ditched them or if the rumors are to be believed, but who knows. But touch sensors on over your headphones, I'm not a fan of instead, what you get, which is, I mean, in some respects, it's like, you got to reuse everything Apple, but they put the quote unquote, "digital crown" on there. Yeah, the little dial from your watch, although I'm assuming is it's not quite the same size. But on the other hand, that is an ideal control for volume. It's a twisty thing that you can feel. And you know we've used the Digital Crown and it's actually surprisingly easy to manipulate the Digital Crown on your Apple watch with your finger. So this I think is like the perhaps the best case scenario for manual mechanical volume control on a headphone, maybe I'm not sure about the position because I don't have these Marco will tell us when he gets them but maybe it could be in a different position that might be better.
They might have put up there for aesthetic reasons, but I love the fact that it's got a actual physical dial for volume control. And you can also press it to play pause, press to dial phone, press twice to skip forward press three times to skip back, skip back you can use Siri through like all the things that you would expect. Unlike the AirPods and the AirPods Pro where they have to do taps and pinches or whatever you can put physical controls on here because the ear cup things are huge, right? And then it's got a button, an actual physical button that you press in and out to switch between noise cancellation and transparency mode.
Another thing that you can't really do on a tiny little ear pod like the AirPod the tiny AirPod's, how are we going to refer to this in the non Max AirPods. You've got a room to have a physical button so they put a physical button on it and I think all of that is great. I wish that the Sony and BOSE headphones would take notes from this and say you don't have to try to put a touchpad in. These don't have to all be like a remote on the wire or whatever, right? Setting the case aside. If I pretend that I'm not going to be using these on the plane I'm back to thinking oh well these sound really good.
And they look really sturdy and they somehow managed to be comfortable and aren't heavy. I think the ergonomics and general design of these headphones when they're just headphones looks pretty good to me like not in their travel mode and not you know, maybe again you can't say anything about the way that might be not be a problem if they managed to pull it off. But I think it would be cool to use these and I've never owned a headphone with these kinds of controls on it. So I don't know if I'm wrong about how easy it is turn a little dial but it seems like a good idea to me.
Marco
So that's one thing. I think these headphones are not going to be that big. There's a huge tension when designing like fashion headphones which is what these are between size and comfort. Because what you want comfort wise is a pretty large ear cup, because you want everyone's ear to not press against any edges. Like ideally the padding goes around the ear not touching any part of the ear because that's better for long term comfort.
But to do that, to have an ear cup that is large and deep to accommodate lots of people's ears, you have to make the headphones pretty large. And that doesn't look very good. And you have to have the attachment points where the headband attaches to them, they have to be further away from people's heads, because the ear cups have to be deeper. And that doesn't look as good either. And when you're designing for fashion, you have to prioritize how you will look when you're walking around a city with these on.
Because even though I never walk around with full size, noise cancelling headphones are, many people do. And so that's a thing that people have to design here. And Apple for all of its good qualities is not so good at prioritizing comfort over aesthetics and size. And so I think these are gonna be pretty small. And I think for anybody for whom very small headphones are not comfortable, I bet this is going to be a problem for you. Unfortunately, I'm one of these people. So that again, this is another reservation I have. But I think these are going to be substantially smaller than what you think, which again, is is a potential comfort risk
John
They look huge in the photos. But like you just don't know, maybe they're using small models. But like, one thing I can say is I applaud the fact that they are vertically rectangular and not circular, like the Beyerdynamic, because yours are roughly vertically oval things, right? Most people's ears are not circular, right? And so I'm glad that these are proportioned like an ear, which gives your ear a fighting chance, they do look shallow, though they don't look particularly deep. And the pads look pretty. Like the border defined by the pads, the pads look pretty fat.
So there's not a huge amount of room maybe for larger ears in there, but at least they're the right shape. So there's a fighting chance, this is the problem with any product like this that you know has to fit on people's bodies, people's bodies vary, these things are only adjustable in one way, which is those little stainless steel tubes that come out, slide out different likes. Now that's the adjustability, but there is still the place where they connect to that phone, it looks like a ball joint. So you can swivel in all directions, which is a very good idea because I hate the headphones that demand that the ear cups remain exactly sort of, you know, parallel to each other or whatever.
John
These ear cups looks so big to me. Right? They just look gargantuan they don't look deep, they look shallow, but they look really big and they look comfortable. Like they have that comfort look to them. The only thing I'm a little bit worried about and Marco you can tell me you have ones like this the mesh top lots of headphones have this mesh top, I've never used the headphone with a mesh top, how do they feel in general?
Marco
I don't think I've had one that was exactly like that. But I've had a lot of different like, headband designs, and they're all different and they're all over the map and how comfortable a headband design is very complicated and varies a lot person to person. So there's nothing about this to me that screams this will definitely be comfortable or uncomfortable. It's probably going to vary for everybody I will say on on your size estimations keep in mind that what you're viewing is the headphones on their absolute smallest setting.
Because the steel like you know pushing push out tubes that raise and lower the ear cups appear to be pushed almost all the way in and these pictures because it looks best. So when you extend that downward, you know an inch on either side or whatever it is, however you wear your headphones, they will look smaller proportionately.
John
Yeah, the thing concerns me about the headband. And I think this is a universal thing. People don't like stuff tugging on their hair, right. And so in general, I feel like headbands that are made of what this looks like like a soft touch, rubberized kind of plasticky thing, are not ideal because they sit on your head. And there's a lot of friction between the band and your hair and any kind of movement there, it's gonna feel like a thing is tugging on your hair. Now the mesh part doesn't do that the mesh part is not going to tug in your hair.
But the whole thing is in mesh, and I get the idea that the mesh is like like a tennis racket springing kind of thing where that's supposed to be contacting your head. But the borders on it are these thick tubes of the rubbery stuff. And I do wonder if they will come in contact with your hair and mess with it a little bit. I mean, presumably This is all the things that they tested him off and just see how it goes. But like my experience with over your headphones over the years of spending hours a day on them, you know, at work and coding and stuff like that as I tend to like the ones that are actually a little bit slippery up there. Just because having stuff tugging your hair is terrible.
Marco
Back a little bit to the market for these and the airplane. They didn't include an audio cable. And there is no regular you know 3.5 millimeter audio jack on them. And they can't operate passively. Every one of their competitors comes with a headphone cable, because sometimes you need that. And one of the most common places you need that is on airplanes, where if you want to use the inflight entertainment system, and you want to like listen to the movie that you're playing on that crappy Linux screen.
You have to plug into it somehow sometimes they have Bluetooth support but that's usually more trouble than it's worth to try to get that to work. So usually you're plugging into a you know a jack on the screen or on the armrest. And so you need a 3.5 millimeter cable. The BOSE comes with one that's only comes with one. Also sometimes you are on a plane on a long flight with your noise cancelling headphones and your battery dies. And you want to keep using the headphones.
Well it turns out headphones can be usually passive devices that require no power of their own and just get their power from the audio signal of the headphone cable. And almost all of these noise cancelling headphones can operate as just passive headphones where even if they have no power their batteries totally dead. If you plug an audio cable into that jack on them and plug it into an audio source. Usually you can play music through them even with no battery power left.
The air pods pro as far as we can tell from like people asking questions and press briefings and everything it seems like they have no passive operation so their battery's dead. They cannot operate at all. They do have that lightning port for charging and there is a cable that Apple sells that only works on like one Beats model and this that has 3.5 millimeter plug on one end not the jack but the plug on one end and the lightning port on the or lightning plug on the other end. So you can use that cable. Sorry apparently I said AirPods Pro, I mean Max.
So you can use that cable to connect the lightning port on this to a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on something. And this will apparently take audio in that way. That cable is $35 nobody has one yet because like it's not the cable to connect your iPhone to headphones like that the little dongle thing that connects your iPhone to headphones that doesn't have an iPhone jack, It's not that.
John
Amazon has cheaper ones and I have to think like we talked about this when lightning first came out I remember how like they had a you know a way to send analog audio over like we talked about when the iPhone7 came out, like how does the adapter work or whatever, we don't know that this does the same thing. But it's entirely plausible that that's exactly what this is, that it's just a weird way to essentially connect a, you know, a regular analog audio cable up to these things.
And we do know from.. Where does this point come from let me see, we do know from Matt Panzarino that these headphones do not support USB audio. So if you thinking you're going to use them like a USB audio device and send digital audio data over a USB cable to them, that does not work, right? So what could possibly be traveling over that lightning to 3.5 millimeter jack cable? It's got to be analog audio, right?
Marco
Most likely, yes. So I mean, that's what I'm hoping because, first of all, market fit wise, this is hilarious. Because as John said, like, if you want to bring this cable with you say on an airplane, to plug into the inflight audio system, or your laptop easily, whateveryou know, there's lots of ways or reasons a Nintendo Switch. Like there's lots of reasons you might want to plug analog audio into your headphones on a plane, or in real life. And so if you bring this cable with you, there's nowhere in the case to put it, A. B, you had to pay $35 extra on your already very expensive headphones. So you're hitting about $600 for this combination.
Marco
The scale by the way, which is not available in all these colors. It's only black or white. So you'll have this non color match cable, even though Apple makes color match cables for every Beats headphone, and every beat headphone comes with them. But anyway, we'll put all that aside for now. So assuming you do all this, here's my one question on this, which I don't think we will know until we can get some press reviews. Or until I can actually have one of these in my hands.
Is there a way to get zero or effectively zero latency audio into these headphones? I know over Bluetooth this is not possible. What I want to know is can somebody plug these headphones in to a computer or an audio device with that cable and have zero or you know perceptibly zero latency on that audio? Because that will affect whether these can be used for video games, for podcast recording, for podcast or video editing, for live monitoring. If you're like on a video shoot somewhere and you want to plug something to your phone real fast, or whatever it is like your camera. There are so many use cases, so many applications that many of Apple's customers do.
Where you need zero latency headphone monitoring or listening. This is the one big thing that when I'm bringing If I'm on a trip and I want to bring only my AirPods Pro, I'm I can get away with that as long as I don't have to do anything that really relates to podcasting, recording a podcast or editing one I did at one on AirPods once it sucks, it's terrible. Because the latency it's really a hard thing to do. It's very unpleasant, you don't want to do it if you don't have to. And recording one is nearly impossible. Like it's the way for anyone who's in podcasts. The way it works is you need to hear yourself.
The what you're speaking to the microphone, you hear it back through your headphones live. This is the same way. If you are old enough like us to have used phones back when they were hard wired, you know, landline phones, if you've ever used a landline phone, when you speak into a landline phone, you hear yourself out of the earpiece as well as the other person and you hear yourself with zero latency. If there's any delay in hearing yourself, it sounds very strange. And so it's not. You can't, like drives you nuts. You can't have any latency.
That's why every like podcasting targeted USB microphone has a headphone jack on it also. So you can plug in headphones to your USB microphone and hear yourself back with no latency without your voice having to travel first to the computer and back and be processed by any kind of thing like no latency, you hear yourself exactly. And if you don't have that, it's very disconcerting. And it's harder to podcast well. Similarly, you know, if you're editing a podcast or video, you need that because as you're watching the playhead move forward, it's crossing over audio, that you're not hearing for another, you know, whatever, 50-100 milliseconds afterwards. And it's it's it makes it significantly harder to edit.
If you're editing video, same problem even worse actually. And, you know for video playback the system frameworks are made to take to take audio latency into account. And so if you play a video through an app that uses the system video playback frameworks, the system knows if you're listening to bluetooth headphones, it knows what audio latency is for most headphones or for Bluetooth in general. And it accounts that so it'll do things like delay the video by a couple of frames. So it lines up with the headphones so that your audio and video play in sync.
But any app that does not take advantage of that or does not take that into account or can't take it into account, which is almost everything besides video playback, you have like latency and audio playback causes problems and makes it either difficult or worse to do a lot of things. One of the great things about the Sony's and the BOSE's is and almost any other noise cancelling headphone is that you can bring it on a trip. And you can have that be the only headphone you have on that trip. Because if you happen to need to record something, or monitor something, or edit something, or plugged into a Nintendo Switch or anything like that.
You can use the exact same pair of headphones with that cable they come with you just plug it right in. And you have zero latency passive like totally normal audio unprocessed normal audio. With these, with the AirPods Max, I know you're not going to have unprocessed audio, I know you're not going to have passive operation possible with no power. But I don't know whether it's possible to have zero latency input. And if it is, which I hope it is, that's great, because then people can more often bring only or own only these headphones that this could be someone's only pair of headphones, who does all sorts of things. If it has a zero latency input.
If it doesn't, then that's one less thing about it, that differentiated that can differentiate it from the AirPods Pro or the regular AirPods. Both of which are very convenient, small, portable, the Pro has great noise cancellation and pretty decent sound. But you know, you can't use those things for zero latency applications. There is no zero latency input on those, because there's no input on those. This has an audio input, I hope it's zero latency. I will tell you as soon as I know, hopefully some of the press will cover this. That's the one thing I really want to know here. That's my one big question.
The sound I'm pretty sure, it's I'm pretty sure these are gonna sound pretty good. Like that's, like Apple has a pretty good track record with that in recent years, I think they're gonna sound pretty good. They're talking about all sorts of, you know, technical tweaks and tricks and advanced methods they're using to do things like try to measure, you know, the ceiling around your ear, and every person is different and have adaptive EQ. And that all sounds great.
Marco
I have, but the reason I don't is not because of like, you know, breakage or loss, like AirPods without the case fit very well in that little jeans change pocket. But the thing is, like, if you walk around with that, they will like sometimes they'll mistakenly think they're in your ear, and they'll turn on.
John
It does have optical sensors, right? It's got a no like, there's no way that you're going to get two things pressed up against both of the cups in a way that convinces that is next to your head. I don't know, we'll see when we get these things I just feels like I understand why AirPods get confused about whether they're if you put them in a pocket, especially a tie pocket, you know, they're so small, those little pinprick sensors on there, that texting proximity, it's easy to fool them, it should be much harder to fool these. If that's stupid magnetic cases is the only way to get them to go to sleep. That's pretty crappy. But hey, but 20 hours of battery life, then just assume it's a one day charge. And so a few more tidbits from Jason Snell he asked about this, they say they get five minutes of charge gives you 90 minutes of use. So they charge pretty quickly. No claims about water resistance. And he says so maybe don't use these while exercising. But the idea that someone want to sweat into their $500 headphones.
John
Especially it's so heavy. They'd be like bouncing they'd be bouncing up and down in your head and it was like it's like rucking you know, just know what that is? It's super heavyweights in a backpack and walk around anyway, to give yourself some exercise for your neck muscles, replacement cushions if you know, the cushions are magnetically attached, as we said before, which is nice. And very Apple, replacement cushions are 70 bucks, which is typical Apple markup on what regular cushions might cost.
John
Yeah, the battery goes bad eventually 80 bucks battery replacement, which is reasonable. I mean, that's the other thing people are talking about with these headphones. They are made of aluminum ear cups and stainless steel tubes. And they look kind of like they don't have a lot of moving parts. They look like they could be sturdy. And if you buy these, unlike the Apple Watch edition, it's not like these, you can age out technology wise very quickly. Because if they do a good job as headphones, and they sound good. And they support a fairly rich feature set, like how people buy headphones that don't support spatial audio at all, how do they get around with those no dynamic EQ.
And sometimes people buy headphones that don't even have noise cancellation. And yet, you can still use those primitive feature headphones as they call it, for decades, right? So if these, I'm saying is if you buy a pair of these and you like them, and they fit you well and they sound good. There's no reason you can't use these for long enough that the battery eventually dies, and you have to get a replace. So I think if you buy $550 pair of headphones, and three years later, the battery's getting a little wonky.
You'll shell out 80 bucks to keep using them because they don't, like technology wise unless Apple does something very silly. These should last you a very long time if you happen to like them. And if they end up being as sturdy as they look. And they do work with fine by the way, that's from Matt panzarino. No. And he also confirmed that they don't work passively, which is a shame.
Casey
Yeah, that is something that I probably shouldn't be bummed out about. But it just seems crappy. Now with 20 hours of battery life, I can't imagine it would be that often that one would need to run them passively, which is to say, you know the battery is dead, but you plug it into a plane or computer or phone or what have you and you plug it in with a cable. And the power coming through that cable is enough to power the phones, the headphones, but perhaps you wouldn't be able to use like noise cancellation or anything like that. And that is not possible with the AirPods Max.
I also tried to say Pro, it's not possible with AirPods Max, that's kind of crummy. I don't want this less with all things Apple, especially when it comes to their accessories. It seems like this is designed to fit Apple's, Appley world. And if you want to do anything else, it's not for you. If you want to have a case that doesn't look ridiculous, it's not for you. Or by third party case. If you want to plug it into a plane after the battery's dead, it's not for you. Sorry, no look elsewhere. And it's just, it's tough.
Because in the same way that I don't think it's unreasonable for a Home Pod to have a line in. I don't think it's unreasonable for these to have a case that doesn't stink to fold a little bit better to to be able to work passively. And I mean, I'm talking about my keister, because I mean, I haven't handled these I don't know anything about these, etc. But I don't know it just, this is Apple's this is the part of Apple that bothers me that they put the guardrails so close to the edge of the road, that it makes your products worse, I think and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a little bit more of Apple, but I mean, I'm the same jerk that's poopoo on a product that nobody's ever seen. So who am I to talk? I don't know, we'll see what Marco says in a week.
Marco
I think that's a valid, you know, criticism of this of this product approach, though, you know, many of the products that Apple makes that we all love so much, are really incredible generalists, you know, the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, like the iMac, these are like, these are incredibly generalist products, like they hit a huge broad spectrum of their markets. And you know, there's kind of something for everybody in these product lines, and they do a lot and there's not a huge amount of like, sharp downsides to to them.
And then Apple make stuff like the Home Pod, or like the AirPods Max, where, like, there's some pretty steep drop offs to some of the appeal or the or the capabilities and what a lot of people will say is this wonderful phrase, well, it's not for you. And that's, there's a place and a time for that phrase. But it seems like apple in so many ways so often makes products like this where like it's not for so many people that it seems obviously targeted to that you kind of have to wonder who is it for exactly, and why and wouldn't have been possible to make a few compromises here and there.
That could make it for a hell of a lot more people. The Home Pod again. I keep going back to the Home Pod because there's so many similarities between the the apparent market fit between that, and this, if the Home Pod had any kind of input, you could use it as your TV speakers. And that would be amazing.
John
I feel like they learned from the Home Pod, though, I feel like this doesn't make the exact same mistake as the Home Pod. Because it does have audio input, right? Like you can imagine when I first saw this, I just assumed there would be no way to attach a wire to this other than to charge it. But it seems like that's not the case that, you know, granted, they didn't go all the way, which is, hey, just give us an actual headphone cable. Because imagine that, right? But you know, it does have input and I'm for now I'm assuming that really is analog input.
And, you know, that's the exact mistake that they made on the Home Pod, and they fixed it on this one. And I think that's a big deal. Same thing with the physical controls, despite the rumors, or whatever they were about touch things, physical controls, versus whatever the hell is happening on top of the Home Pod. Physical controls was the right call here, these you know, they're learning from their mistakes, right? This, I think most of the design of this product is good. Now the one thing that sticks out, and we've talked about, over and over is no passive uses.
But if you think about this as a product, like the whole idea of this product, I know we think of it as like a it's a pair of headphones, but the whole idea of the product is the full sort of computational audio feature set, not just noise cancelling was like well, I never used on Samsung, but all the other stuff, the spatial audio, the dynamic equalization is sensing your ear and like what like, that's the whole point of this product, they didn't just make a set of passive headphones. So to have a sort of limp mode, where okay, well, all the electronics are off because the battery's dead.
But we'll just allow the analog audio to feebly, you know, send audio signal to these drivers, and it'll be really low volume, right? That I think, is the type of thing I might have made the same call and said, That's gonna be such a bad experience using these passively, like, do we want to have to design the speakers and the drivers and everything, to be able to be driven passively, even though we don't expect them to be using that mode and what do we have to compromise about audio quality to make them work well there while also working okay, in the mode where they're powered.
So I can see an argument for these not working as passive things. And, you know, assuming this is your latency analog audio input, I think they made a reasonable set of compromises for, you know, for people who never want to take this on an airplane, I just want to use them in your house, and how the musical set headphones that you can, you know, dance around your living room in or just use while you use your computer like all the places where AirPods are good, but you're not an AirPod person, you were an over your headphone person. Plausible, it's plausible. What I see, I see growth.
I see a growth from the Home Pod to this you're very right that the development history of these sounds very similar in that the the Home Pod was supposedly going to be for the apple television thing, and it didn't quite work out and like oh, now we got this big product and it just wasn't priced right. And this could be doing the exact same thing in the pricing situation a little. Honestly, you know, as someone who owns multiple 300 plus dollar pair of noise cancelling headphones. Yes, this is more.
But that's like, you know, the usual Apple markup and it's I think it's in the realm of like, I think Bang & Olufsen speaking of them don't, I think Bang & Olfusen makes a set of headphones that look eerily similar to this like and are probably priced very similar and probably don't have half the computational audio features of these two, right? So I'm not entirely sure this is as far outside the market because the reason the Home Pod was the original Home Pod was such a dud is it was competing with $100 cylinders from Amazon, right?
This is not competing with $100 headphones, this is not competing. I think Apple thinks this is not even competing with $300 headphones, I think they think they're competing with other $500 headphones remains to be seen if there really are if they have the audio quality to stand up to that or whatever. But it's not like they're coming into a market where everybody is like 100 bucks, right? Or even less for the little dots. They're coming into a market headphones, which goes from super cheap, all the way up to ridiculous.
And they're ridiculous and so I don't think they're going to sell a lot of them in 500 bucks is going to go in $500 headphones but it's not inconceivable that this could land in the market and fit right into the slot where $500 headphones sit and sell a $500 headphone quantity of headphones. And if Apple's happy with that then congratulations you made a $500 headphone and then three years from now you can make the AirPod what, AirPods mini, I don't know how they would call it but like the the $199 version that's not made of aluminum and doesn't weigh as much and is cheaper.
Marco
Air Beats I don't know what no, like you know and John, to be fair, and to clarify my position on these two like the pass of operation. I agree. That's very unlikely happened here and not that important relative to all of its other potential pitfalls and shortcomings. That's like the least important one.
Marco
Yes and yeah. So that it makes sense not to have that because, like, if you ever use the passive mode on most recent bluetooth headphones, you learn how incredibly bad their drivers actually are. Because like, something has happened in the camera market. And our phones certainly are significantly benefiting from this. But this even applies to a lot of like, you know, standalone cameras now, is that, you know, back in the olden days, when camera shot onto film, everything about their optical path had to be perfect.
Because there was no software processing to fix the flaws. Digital cameras, especially modern, like you know, low end, ones that are maybe very small ones can rely on software processing, not only to make up for like, you know, the noise that their crappy little sensors produce, but even to correct for optical distortions. So they don't have to put really great glass in front of the, you know, almost any modern camera, because the software that's built into them can automatically correct for, you know, the known optical flaws of that lens or of the optical path that's going through.
And so making something modern and digital with modern software advances, modern computational power, has actually enabled it to use crappier components or fit in smaller spaces, and correct for those flaws in software, rather than have to have the perfect physical, you know, capture path, the same thing has happened to headphones, as headphones moved to Bluetooth, they got significantly up market, in part helped by Apple, in part help buy Beats, in part helped by, you know, just the world moving in this direction.
They got a lot of budget applied, portable headphones didn't used to cost $300 as the baseline, that used to be the top of the line. And they can now afford to have lots of electronics in there. As the price of you know, small computational embedded computers and stuff has plummeted. And the price of that of headphones has gone way, way way up. Newsflash, it doesn't cost $350 to make a pair of headphones, like the Sony's in the BOSE's, not even close, these are very, very high profit items.
So they can afford to have you know, certain computational benefits in there. At the same time. Bluetooth by definition, unlike a wired headphone, Bluetooth is always able to process the audio with a DSP, you know, with digital processing before it's sent out to the headphones. And so any flaws in the headphone drivers any flaws in their frequency response or distortion characteristic or things like that, they can build in like a stock EQ profile to the headphones that's always on.
And they can correct for some of those flaws, the same way cameras correct for optical distortion now. They can correct for some of those flaws in software constantly. So they're able to ship crappier drivers or drivers in more compromised physical enclosures that wouldn't be able to reproduce sound unassisted that well balanced with that good, whatever. And so they do. And this is why if you play any, like especially BOSE is a severe difference between BOSE's on and off modes.
If you play a BOSE headphone in passive mode, and then you turn on their processing, it sounds radically different. They both sound like garbage, but the one that's off sounds like even more garbage. And you're shocked that they're able to pull anything out of the the non garbagey one or the powered one rather, they're garbagey. So Apple's doing that with these headphones too. Like, they talk all about all their active EQ features and everything and like they're doing that so these headphones with no processing at all, would probably sound about as good as if you ever took an iPhone raw.
They shot and didn't apply any noise filtering to it or anything and just like took it raw as it was and like those pictures raw look like garbage. These headphones raw might sound like garbage, it wouldn't surprise me at all. For Apple to require their processing pipeline at all times. Makes a lot of sense. Also, one thing I am super excited about because here's the thing. We've a lot about our potential criticisms and pitfalls of this product. But like the Home Pod, like I like the Home Pod, and like these AirPods, Max like I think I'm probably going to like these.
There are some I have some reservations, as I've said, but I think I'm probably gonna like them. And if I liked them, they could be really incredible because one thing I'm really super excited about is transparency mode, transparency. mode on AirPods Pro has changed the game for headphones, in my opinion. Like it used to be that to get anything like that, you would have to use things like our past sponsor aftershocks, the bone conduction headphones like, I'd have to use those. And the reason I love those so much is because I was able to hear the world around me and hear my podcast, as I'm like walking around with my dog or whatever.
And so I could like stop and say hi to people, I could hear cars coming you know, it's very, it's a wonderful thing to be able to hear the world around you selectively. And then as I'm walking past a leaf blower, I can turn on noise cancellation and it turns down the leaf blower. I can take the same headphones that I can wear outside as I'm walking my dog and hear everything. I take the same headphones on a plane and turn on noise cancellation and be able to hear things at a low volume and so it's wonderful to have both of those things in one headphone to have super good isolation and noise canceling when you want it.
But then to also have amazing transparency that like the Sony's I don't know if the BOSE's offer these. Recent Sony models do offer a pass through mode that is like Apple's transparency mode, but it's nowhere near as good it sounds kind of weird like you definitely know that you're listening to like the microphone through your headphones that's being slightly altered the way your ears whereas like the transparency mode on AirPods Pro, you can almost forget that it's there. It's like it's so good, it really is transparent is a great word to use for it because transparent and audio means you don't notice it.
And that's a great, that's exactly how transparency mode is on AirPods Pro so on airpots max assuming it's as good or better that's going to be a game changer to have that good of a transparency mode in full size headphones. And to also presumably have really good full size noise cancellation when you want it with that one hardware but on top that is going to be great on planes if everything else about these is good. And that's why I hope these are good and if they are good, they could be worth $550 to some people like again.
I don't think this is gonna be a mass market product I don't think you're gonna see like you know, Consumer Reports and Wire Cutter saying these are going to be the best noise cancelling headphones for most people because they're just too expensive and you know, most people are going to be totally happy paying like slightly more than half the price for one of their competitors it's probably going to be almost as good in most ways. But if these really are as good as Apple says they are and if all these potential pitfalls are workable and they don't they aren't as bad as we think they could be.
This could be an amazing product and I really hope it is I really really do because the AirPods pro are so good. They've made almost every other headphone irrelevant to me. If this could do that even further for full size headphones and for more people who you know who may be AirPods pro don't fit or whatever. More power to them. I really hope they do it.
Marco
But Tif said that she wanted the blue like if she were to get a pair she said she wants the blue and so because I think these are a risk I think these are high risk I think there's a high risk that either I will return them because they won't be at all what I want or maybe I won't like them but Tif will so I yield it to her preferences on this one.
John
I think there's got to be only one color choice which is the white which you would think that that can't be the right color choice for any headphone but in the AirPod family as we know you can get in any color you want as long as they're white and that is the choice that I think most people should make that said if I got a pair of these, I would say all right, white but the AirPods are very small and are shiny glossy plastic that tends not to accumulate you know smudges but this sort of matte looking headband might get dirty so then I start looking at the black one but then black is super boring.
John
Oh yeah, iPad Air color. So there you go. I will have to hold them up and see is this literally the same green as the iPad Air or is it just looks similar to our eyes in these product shots, but anyway, I'm pretty sure you can anodized aluminum to not be so muted but apples in this muted phase and I feel like all the muted ones like the blue Yeah, I guess it's blue but it's like I'm Midnight Blue headband, and it just kind of faded iPad Air blue for the ear cups. And they're just, they're just not doing it for me. So I like the black and I like the white. But I really hope most people do buy the white because then it's like the white AirPods, like you see someone with a bright white set of giant over your headphones.
Like, oh, this must be the apple ones. And speaking of Apple, it's kind of sad. It's amazing. It's notable to me that these gigantic ear cups that do not have a touchpad on them also do not have an apple logo anywhere on. And if Apple doesn't do that they don't put logos on their products. Look at the back of your phone, look at the back of your laptop. They're not above putting a big apple logo dead center on a big flat surface. They have two flat surfaces on here, they didn't put a single thing on even the the engraving, which by the way is super cool. And you can use Emoji. Even the engraving is on the edge and not on the you know, on the sides of the thing. It's like it's on where like the little stock goes into the thing.
John
Yeah, I don't know if there's no Apple logos on this. I mean, you can get it examine. There's probably some apple logo on it somewhere. But the other thing that I was bringing up on Twitter of like, how do you how do you tell which is the right and left? Now the obvious answer is, once you own these things, you figure out that whatever the right or the left one is the one that has Digital Crown on it, it's a thing that you can physically feel again, yay for physical buttons, you can see it with your eyes, it's very clear.
Once you know which side that little thing is on. It's always on that side. But they do put a big R and L inside the ear cups, which is something that I hadn't seen before. But apparently every headphone manufacturer under the sun does. They do it by stitching slightly differently, like making the stitching thicker on the little mesh that is inside the ear cup. So you have to look inside the ear cups for a gigantic R or L. But I'm amazed at how many headphones get this wrong.
Like I posted pictures with my Sony gaming headphones. And even the Beyerdynamic DT 770 they'd like to do embossed R and L on plastic. And it's hard to see that especially in dim lighting the Beyerdynamic DT have Braille so if you know Braille, or you just learn what series of bumps mean R and L at least you can feel it without having to look with your eyes. But in general, if there's a wire and you learn that the wire comes out of the left side/
John
Yeah, but with wired headphones. So you just learn which side the wire comes out of and hope you don't have one of those terrible headphones where the wire comes out of both sides, you just learn which side the wire comes out. Like there's usually a physical way for you to tell which is which. But the Apple also did the thing where if you look inside the ear cups, they stitch the mesh to just make you think like, you know, boy, do you really care about audio quality Apple, if you're making different thicknesses of stitching and an R and L pattern that makes the left and the right ear cup sound different, you'll have to account for that in software.
John
But anyway, these are very sort of minimalist and featureless. Like these the ear cups are big expanses of a very smooth matte aluminum and there's nothing on them. No Apple logo no markings of any kind no R no L, like I said if you can get them engraved, which you totally should because it looks cool. That's on the top edge. You can't see it on looking from the side. So I can't wait to see somebody in real life with these the first time that happens might be the next time I see Marco. If they really sell in the volumes. We're thinking they're just selling but we'll see. I can't believe it to the entire show. Of
Marco
I don't know what they're gonna do. I mean, it's always hard. Like when you bring in, like when you have to tell them as a nerd, like, Look, I'm pretty sure that I have thermal issues that are physical in nature, and they're like, "did you try reinstalling the entire OS?" Like, come on, like, because that's what they're gonna do. They're gonna like, did you did you restore your phone, like they're gonna be doing.
Marco
I don't know because the thing is, like, imagine, from their point of view, you know, if somebody comes in and says, My fans running all the time, you know, it's probably some kind of weird software thing, because there's all sorts of things on Mac OS that consume 100% CPU as background processes all the time.
John
But they don't have to have that discussion with you. Because if you frame it, here's how I think you should frame it, you should frame it as I think this is a hardware problem. And here's why. And they can be like, Okay, well, now that you frame it that way, I'm not gonna run any your software, I'm going to boot it from one of my things, I'm just gonna ignore anything that you have, I'm not gonna run any of your software, I'm not gonna run it your OS, I'm just, you know, whatever, like, whatever diagnostic tool, they have to boot this thing up in a place where it's like, total safe boot, ignore everything that's on the drive, ignore this person's crap.
And just let's see, hardware wise, like run our hardware tests. And let's see what the cooling capacity is like. If you frame it that way, then if they ignore the software issues, you know, that's what you asked for. And I don't think you'll have to do the whole dance of like, "re-install, let's reset your PRAM, let's do all this or whatever." And then the second thing is, the reason they roll their eyes is because of course, customers come in and they think they know what the problem is. But do they really know?
Maybe it is a software thing, because you've only booted in you OS so maybe your fans are running constantly because you have some, you know, something's messed up in your SMC. And you actually do need to do a PRAM reset. So don't just assume you know what the problem is. But I would assume you know what the problem is. And I would say please just replace my thermal compound.
Marco
I was so close with the I had like a whole iFixit shopping cart ready to check out like so. It will all be you know, different like the little pizza cutter thing you have to like cut the screen adhesive and the new adhesive kid and a tuba arctic silver and like I was all ready to go but I'm like I just I can't I this iMac service wedge you could prop the screen up the writing. I mean, I was just like I was reading the guide and I'm like okay, you know you have to separate the screen out yet first of all you have to cut the adhesive around the whole screen of this pizza cutter thing then you have to like slowly gradually pull the screen up but don't rip the cable.
Marco
Would you do anything different I mean, it's being without your desktop sucks. It's a big pain in the butt to get it there to get it so you know to mail it in or bring it to me it's a big pain in the butt because they're huge and heavy and fragile. And so it's like yeah, I'm just, I have such a love hate relationship with the iMac as a family because like I love iMac's for about two and a half years and then like when something goes a little wrong. It's such a massive pain to have an address in our new in any way.
Marco
And even just the process, like I'm gonna have to, like you know, you know, clone it, be ready for them to restore it, I know, they're gonna restore it. So be ready for them to restore it and then have to get it back have to, you know, restore it from my clone reset up all my crap. Like, I just, it's such a pain. This is why I don't do this more often than necessary. And I don't know if there was any. And this is again, like because of where I'm living this year. This is much more logistically expensive and complicated than it normally would be. Well, you brought
John
Well, I mean, you're not gonna get it back that day. But I'm gonna say like, bring it to the back. They'll sit it there it'll when it comes up in the queue, someone will sit with it for a couple of hours and with all these things are like oh, we let it sit for a while we let it run we booked the temperatures or whatever. But hopefully it mean what you're hoping for. And hopefully this is what made you go and it's like look, I can reproduce this for now. I can just bring this in and just plop it down and say here look.
Marco
Yeah like you know my problem solved then I only need this computer last until the next iMac comes out when it whenever the like you know ARM iMac comes out I'm buying it possibly now this is what's driving me nuts with this is like I don't know what the future roadmap holds and what my future needs are but like every time I have a problem with my desktop so roughly every three years or so I always think at that point maybe I should just go laptop and monitor only again.
John
but it's a good plan because he gets the cool new ARM iMac which is probably going to be amazing, right and he'll love it. And when the honeymoon just starts to end they'll release the Mac Pro and whatever thing is annoying him about the iMac he can ditch it and get a modular quiet half size super fast, extreme capacity desktop and then he'll just use that forever and because Mac Pro's last forever.
Marco
But like, I would love to be in a position where like, I would just have a separate monitor, and a monitor list desktop. And if one of them needed service, I would love to be in that situation. Right now you know, the current Mac Pro XDR situation is not something that I'm super interested in. And that's why I'm gonna bring back my 5K and just plug in my laptop as at least a temporary solution while my iMac is being serviced. But I think it's actually a non trivial chance that I might end up liking that a lot.
And I might just stick with that for a while until the next time it comes out. And I might do like what well underscore has done like underscores iMac Pro is like, turned off like in the corner of his office sitting on the floor. And he's using his MacBook Pro full time because it's so fast. I might that like that might be my, my actual situation here. Like, when I get this back from service, I might not want it anymore.
Casey
You know, it's funny you say that because until you brought up the soon expiration or the pending expiration of your AppleCare Plus, I really thought that what you were implicitly saying here was that the MacBook Air was so good that you can stand to be without the iMac pro for a week or two. And it wouldn't be a big deal. Now I see it's also about time, but I think you're onto something. I think you're right that even though I know how much you hate the LG 5K, which admittedly, I've never lived with one but my dad has one. And I've seen it from time to time. And it seems fine to me. But you know, whatever.
Casey
It is ultra ultra fine. But anyway, so I would not be surprised if you end up liking that setup so much like and you'll still have problems with it. But I you know, ultimately, once you're compelled and forced to live with the MacBook Air and 5K setup. I wonder if you'll find the things that offend you about that to be less offensive than Apple saying to you. "Well, you know, we looked at it and we chiseled some crap around and hope for the best. Okay." You know, like, I wonder if you'll end up preferring that for any number of different reasons. So I think you're right, I think your iMac Pro days are numbered. In fact, I think if you're still using it by January 1st, if you're still using full time by January 1st, I'll be slightly surprised.
Now in your defense, I am still flabbergasted that you have not bought a Mac Pro. Now today in the last couple of weeks since these new Mac's came out. It makes a lot less sense. But I am really stunned that Marco Arment of all people has said no to spending a pile of money on something frivolous. So I'd have to commend you that you have impressed me and prove me wrong. So who knows what will happen.
But I still if I'm a betting man, I say you're going to be using that MacBook Air a lot more than you thought. In fact, I would almost be forced to go so far as to say you might buy yourself a MacBook Pro, because reasons I don't even know something about the MacBook Air isn't fast enough. So you need the Pro.
Marco
I haven't ruled that out. Like I might like this is one of the reasons why I don't want to buy the pro display XDR right now to solve my problem right now. Because I don't necessarily want to spend a huge amount of money with any kind of assumptions about what my setup will be in the next few years because I think there's gonna be a lot of possibilities and a lot of potential changes, like because everything's in flux with this transition.
It radically can change the landscape of like what's worth it, what do I need, what do I not need? Like the things that Mac Pro offers are mostly things I don't need. Like I don't need expansion slots for anything. I don't need that many CPU cores like I have 10 in my iMac Pro and that's great. I don't like even when I bought the iMac Pro I didn't get the 18 core model. I got the 10 core model. Because like I didn't need the Max, I don't need pretty much any GPU power, like and that's again, one of the Mac Pro main focuses is massive potential for GPU power.
I don't need that at all. I don't use GPUs for anything. Like I need GPUs to display images. That's, about it, animate my windows moving around, like very little. So, you know, I don't really need anything super there. I don't need like huge amounts of RAM. I have 64 in this and that's a lot. Can you get that now in the 16 inch?
Marco
What I do buy is a big SSD. Like in this, I have the 4 terabytes, that was the biggest that was offered at the time. And now they offer 8 in some of the things and I would love to have that. Ultimately, like, I think I would be totally fine to do all of my work on a 16 inch. Like that would be fine. If I had a big monitor and everything. But there are parts of that setup, I don't like as much I do like having a laptop that doesn't have my entire software and document and file bloat from my desktop. I like that's kind of like a clean thing. It's like, it's almost like having two cars in a good way.
It's like, if you have like a giant conversion van full of all your crap. And then you have a Miata. You don't want all your crap in the Miata. Like you want that to be like, clean and lightweight, and it's different. That's it like I like having a laptop that is a different software setup. And there's lots of advantages to it. And there's disadvantages certainly, like it is a pain in the butt to, to have stuff synched up, in a lot of ways it is a pain in the butt to have like setup all the software twice.
It's also nice though, like, if one of them's in use, or if one of them breaks, you have another one, like so there is some some benefit to having multiple to having a desktop and a laptop. I don't know. But the point is like, because the entire Mac lineup is getting like tournaments on its head right now, in all good ways. But it's being totally shuffled up. Right now. The best computer I own is a MacBook Air. That's that blows my mind.
I would have never guessed a year ago, that would be the situation I'd be in right now. And like things that are super important to me are things like fan noise. Well, you know what, maybe I mean, honestly, probably none of the M1 or whatever based Macs are going to have bad fan noise at this point. But if they do, like, I have a great model here. That's fabulous. That's wonderful. Maybe my solution can be instead of buying a super high spec desktop every three years.
Maybe I buy a medium spec laptop every two years and have that be it you know, I don't know yet. It's way too early to sell until we see the rest of the Mac transition to the ARM chips and see what those products look like and what they're good at what needs they serve and what you know what they're bad at. I don't want to commit to anything. My mind is open to all possibilities here. And that's why I don't want to like buy another LG 5K, and I don't want to buy an XDR or, like I don't want to invest really heavily. Or make any assumptions in any particular plan for what I'm going to buy next or what I'm going to use over the next few years.
Because I think might change and and I want to leave my options open. And that's why like, again, like I can assume I will probably want the next iMac but until it shows up we don't know, we don't know what's going to be whatever it is. I might not want it or I might not need it. And maybe the whatever the next Mac Pro is maybe the next Mac Pro is something that I end up not wanting or needing maybe my next computer is a Mac Mini. I don't know like until we see how this lineup plays out. I want as few assumptions and massive upfront investments as possible.
Casey
It makes sense. It is an odd time to want to buy a new Mac you know unless you want one of the two that has been released then it's one of the worst times to buy a new Mac I would argue it's almost worse than then butterfly time because in this case you really don't know what you're getting in whereas with the butterfly keyboards like yeah, we all thought eventually one day maybe they would you know, backpedal and they eventually did but up until that time like you were getting a really great computer with the exception of the keyboard so why not just go ahead and do it whereas now you don't know what you're saying no to, you don't know what you don't know, John. I know you don't know what you know, I got him failing.
