Chapter 1: What is celebrated in the anniversary corner?
john do you want to step into the corner with me the anniversary corner because on episode 476 on the 30th of march 2022 do you know what you did john No idea. You announced your independence four years ago.
Happy Independence Day. I always forget this is in March. I also forget the total number of years, so thank you for reminding me again. You get fireworks?
Yeah, we should get fireworks. We'll have our editor edit it.
Sent with fireworks. There you go. I just gave you the text version.
Right, right. Anyway, happy anniversary, John. I'm glad that you are still independent and things are still going okay.
That basically sums it up.
Thank you. Are there any learnings, as they say, that you would like to share with us?
Ew. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have any wisdom to impart at this time, but I'm glad I'm still here and making it work.
Me as well, and I'm sure I speak for Marco in saying that.
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Chapter 2: What insights does John share about his independence?
And if you walk or run or hike and you want something on your Apple Watch to show you where you've gone and how far you've gone, it's a great app for that. especially that map view. Really, really good. So Pedometer++ for that. I would also say that as a little preview, I don't usually announce future products.
However, I will say that a future episode of this podcast, I will be talking about another non-Apple smart athletic sports watch. It did not arrive in time. It arrived... three hours after i left my house uh for this walk but it will um hopefully in a future episode i will have more to report about that
You got to do what everyone suggested and what Underscore has done is, hey, you got two wrists.
That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a walk where I'm going to have the Apple Watch Ultra on one and then the new sports watch on the other and I'll compare them. And by the way, the Apple Watch Ultra doing a nine hour long walk with GPS and full workout sensing mode, but with low power mode so that always on screen is turned off.
Lasted the entire time with like 40 or no, 60 percent battery left. So it'll have no problem lasting the full 32 miles.
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Chapter 3: How does Marco's training for the Manhattan walk affect the show?
Secondly, thirdly, whatever, I've lost track. I'm tired. Last night I saw this new movie called The AI Doc or How I Became an Apocalypse Optimist. It is a bit of a rough name. It also has an amazing list of interviewees. So it's basically a documentary that's just like a series of interviews with very important people in the world of AI, including Sam Altman and Dario and Daniela Amadei.
So Sam Altman, of course, from OpenAI. The Amadei is from Anthropic, which is actually a sponsor of this episode. Yeah. and a whole bunch of other people from the AI business and also good AI thinkers and everything. And I really enjoyed it. This is not a sponsorship. It's only in theaters for a reasonably short time because it's not that... It's in theaters?
I thought I was going to think it was on YouTube.
I assume it will be in theaters for a little bit, but I think this is the kind of thing that eventually you will see on YouTube. But I would suggest if you're into this business, like the list of people that the filmmaker got to interview is pretty impressive. So I think we're going to be seeing like, you know, clips from this over time and stuff like that. So it's pretty fun. Yeah, that's it.
So I watched a movie about AI and then I took a very, very, very long walk and it was pretty fun.
All right. We should do the thing that we always forget to do.
And thank you to John for not only putting in our internal show notes, new member special with a yellow background and obnoxious pink foreground color, but also at the top of the follow-up section, because I often jump over the pre-show section, go straight to the follow-up section, is a second instance of new member special in pink and yellow.
Everywhere you go, there I am, Casey.
It's a dream come true. But yes, we do have a new member special. John had the genuinely brilliant idea of taking all of the icons from our home screens from whatever episode it was like a month or two back that we talked about our home screens. And John put together all the icons at great pain in order to do a tier list. So we have ATP tier list home screen icons.
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Chapter 4: What features make Pedometer++ stand out?
If you go to the Zoom website under settings and meetings, turn off the annotation feature, which is what that little pencil is for. So hopefully next time it will not be there.
Also, people suggested a feature to be added to my tier list app that will show an enlarged version of the item we're talking about, which definitely helps when we're talking about something we want to look at, like a logo or an icon. So I'll make sure I have that the next time we do a tier list, which may not be for a while because we've done a bunch of them recently.
People also suggested in my tale of woe about how I got these icons. I didn't mention all of my tale of woe. Part of it did involve writing various scripts and web scrapers to try to get icons from the new app store website, from the old iTunes URLs, from the app store API that's available. And I could get lots of icons from there and I could get artwork from there, but they were never available.
Right. They didn't have a transparent background or they were the wrong size or they were weirdly truncated. I also got another suggestion to try device control again. And I was like, I tried that and I got messed up icons, but maybe I have to try it on Tahoe. So if I ever have to do this again, I do have a bunch of new suggestions about where to get stuff from.
And speaking of icons, one of the icons that we discussed, I guess I won't spoil which one it was. You can watch the episode. One of the icons we discussed had a strange feature. that we couldn't figure out if it was supposed to be like, is the corner of the icon peeling up, which totally used to be a thing in the iOS 6 days. By the way, tons of icons did that.
You know, they're trying to show a page curl, and it's not working, and we couldn't figure it out. Well, silly us. It was the Ukrainian flag, because the developer of that app is from Ukraine originally. And we just didn't pick it up. I'm not sure it helps the icon, but we didn't figure out what it was because you didn't have that key piece of additional information. So mystery is solved.
It wasn't a page curl. It was a flag.
Well, it was the colors from a flag, to be clear.
I mean, it could be. It's like a flag waving.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did the 2019 Mac Pro face after its release?
It was no longer reasonably priced. It was no longer as capable because almost immediately after it was released, it lost single-threaded performance, or maybe even it already was. Multi-threaded performance was good for a little while, until it died from thermal problems with the GPUs. GPU performance was, again, okay for a little while, but it didn't remain competitive for very long.
It was way less expandable and way more expensive. So they shrunk them by their own choices. The market for professional workstations was still a healthy market back then, but by Apple's own choices with the trash can redesign, they shrunk its market, and then they also pushed the price way up.
Chapter 6: How did Apple's design choices impact the Mac Pro market?
Then what happened? Then nothing happened for a while. The iMac Pro was good. That was kind of a one-off. We're not talking about that right now. The next Mac Pro was the 2019 one. Yes, six years later. So they neglected this market for six years. So during that time, there were no Macs with expansion slots. Like, go ahead, try to kill the market as best you can.
Then in 2019, they released John's current Mac Pro, the Intel 2019 Mac Pro, the last Intel one. It started at, what was it, $6,000, John?
Something like that.
Yeah. So they designed a computer that starts at $6,000. Wow. So you've already this was something that, you know, the previous tower version started at like twenty seven hundred or three thousand dollars. And you've now doubled the entry price skyrocketing this market way up like you are losing so many people from that. All of the GPUs you could buy were also pretty expensive.
So you're really pushing price here. So now you're limiting it really to extreme high-end buyers only. No hobbyists are going to buy it. No power users are going to buy it. No one like John, who mostly wants to use it regular ways, but wants to play games with good GPUs, none of those people are going to buy it except John. So they shrunk the market so far down.
less than a year before the Apple Silicon transition. And of course, they would have known that when they released it. So what they did was through their own choices and their own, in some ways, negligence, in some ways, just mistakes, they kept shrinking the market for this product massively by their own choice.
Now, what was also happening in that time was the market for professional desktops was itself shrinking, not just from Apple, but from everybody as more people were moving their work to laptops. And as Apple was losing a lot of that high-end computing market, anything that was using NVIDIA's CUDA, that all moved off of Apple platforms.
A lot of high-end video editing was moving off of Apple platforms. Apple was losing a lot of the high-end pro markets already for other reasons. Then Apple Silicon happens. And what Apple did was design this amazing architecture that serves pretty much everything below that need amazingly well. We have amazing phones all the way up to amazing workstation class laptops.
And the Mac Studio, which is like a pretty great overall, you know, asterisk here and there, like pretty great overall computer. Except... Look at the performance of the Ultra chips versus the Max chips. It doesn't scale up that well. It scales up basically only in some of the GPU compute benchmarks, like the Metal and OpenCL. Those scale up. Nothing else really does.
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Chapter 7: What limitations exist in Apple Silicon architecture?
Then the Mac Pro M2 Ultra generation, which, as John was saying, was just not useful. It was like, what is the market for this? If you cut off GPU expansion and it's still insanely expensive compared to everything else. No longer GPU expansion. No longer RAM expansion.
They just kept cutting off markets, reducing the selling proposition, increasing the pricing on everything, on everybody trying to buy it for whatever they did need it for. Just cutting off markets one by one. And now AI is happening. And Apple is just nowhere in that business. And maybe they'll get there, but they are currently nowhere.
So by Apple's own failings and decisions and directions, they are doing great in every single other part of the Mac hardware lineup. The Mac hardware lineup is awesome, but the Mac Pro, they just kept cutting off limbs. And some of those were inevitable in the long run. A lot of them weren't. A lot of them were just bad execution or, you know, greedy pricing decisions from them.
And like and they just kept cutting off and cutting off and cutting off. So, yeah, it's dead now. But the last good Mac Pro was the 2010 Mac Pro 16 years ago.
I don't think everything you said supports that. The 2019 was the last good Mac Pro, clearly. I know it was a shame that it got Apple siliconed, but like when it was released, there was no Apple silicon. So we can only, you know, even though Apple knew that it was coming, whatever, at 2019 Mac Pro was released, it was an amazing Mac Pro. Now, granted, the price was higher.
As you noted, it was not as economical as it was, but I think that's as the 2008 one. But I think that's just a sign of the times and that Apple realized we have to move up market because that's where... That's where the people who are going to be able to afford this computer that we want to make exist, and the other users are better served by our lower-end stuff.
At that point, you could do Final Cut on an Intel laptop still, even though it wasn't as good as it is an Apple Silicon. So they went upmarket with it, which is fine. You can go upmarket with a high-end computer. But the 2019 Mac Pro is what they promised to that 2017 Mac Roundtable.
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Chapter 8: How should Apple balance new features with existing functionality?
So we're going to make a modular Mac Pro that's our biggest, baddest computer. How long will it be before... Apple ever makes another computer with the capabilities of the 2019 Mac Pro, just in terms of RAM. It could hold 1.5 terabytes of RAM. Granted, it was slow RAM, not like today's super fast RAM, but it was 2019. Massive RAM capacity. How long... Has it been or was it? I'm not even sure.
I'll have to look up the stats in this. Before there was ever a Mac that could contain as much GPU processing power as the 2019 Mac Pro, which I believe could hold four AMD GPUs, two dual cards in it.
it was it was so long before that was bested by any apple silicon things i have to look up the stats to see how close it is to being competitive with the m3 ultra which is the current mac gpu wasn't it like this year i think it was recent i have to look up with it but like the thing is like well what am i going to do with all those gpus what the hell is the point of that i can't play games on it there's no game that's going to run on four nvd four amd uh gpus again
What could I do with a box filled with GPUs in today's age? I can think of some things you can do with it that aren't gaming, you know, and their whole relationship with NVIDIA and how they messed that up, as you noted, is the thing.
But like the 2019 Mac Pro, when it was released, had capabilities that were so far above any other Mac in terms of what it could do and what you could stuff inside it. Because remember back then, you could put in...
you know graphics cards you could buy them from apple you can put in third-party ones you could expand the storage you could expand the ram all inside the big giant tower case like it fulfilled the promise of that and again listen to the episode of the last detail here we uh talk about how i love the design of this thing and yeah it did go up market from the 2018 but 2018 was was in an era when power users would buy desktops and by 2019 we were no longer an era where power users were even interested in desktops it was more of like a home thing so who
Who is going to be interested in an ultra powerful thing like this? People for whom a $6,000 starting price is not a big deal, right? That's the market they were going after in the 2019 Mac Pro hit it. And then we were just off into the wilderness. And how long will it be before at this rate? How long will it be before any Mac can hold 1.5 terabytes of RAM?
And again, I know it's faster RAM these days, yada, yada, but like. How long will it be before you can add as much GPU capability relative to its time? Like in 2019, the amount of GPU you could fit in here, scale that linearly with today's standards.
what apple is doing with the gpus is amazing but it is non-expandable and you cannot like you know how many watts of heat of gpus could you put inside this if you have that many watts of heat in a mac today just think of the gpus the apple designed first party gpu you could put in there if you had a case that could dissipate it and a gpu that was designed to be in that case they could dissipate it so i will defend 2019 mac pro forever i love the 28 2008 mac pro it's
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