Episode 978: Requiem for the Mac Pro

Hank's Pizza Shop

0:00No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the $1 slice work. Now Hank's has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com slash work.

0:30Unscripted, unfilled, and unafraid.

Welcome to Macro Podcast

0:36Welcome to the Macro Podcast. My name is Michael Simon, and I am joined once again by Jason Cross. Good morning. And our producer, Roman Loyola. Oh, hi there. This is episode number 978. And today we're going to talk about the Mac Pro for the most part. A couple weeks ago, Apple decided out of the blue, well, not really. We'll talk about that too. But to just stop selling it, like they just removed it from their website. Yeah. We're done. Yeah.

1:07We'll look at that. We'll look at the history. We'll look at what it means for Apple's lineup, what it means for Pro Max, all that stuff. And when we're going to try to have a new buy it or not segment. So Jason can finally talk about his studio display XDR impressions.

1:26We'll make a whole new segment to guarantee you that I get an opportunity. All right. Then we'll have this week in Apple history, and we will close with our comment corner. Speaking of comments, you can contact us through Blue Sky Facebook threads. Search for Macworld. Look for the Blue Mouse logo. Send an email to podcast at macworld.com. Send us an email. Comment under a post. Comment under a video. Get us a comment. We'll collect them all, and we'll talk about some or all of them on a future show.

Apple's 50th Anniversary

1:57All right, Roman, before we get to the Mac Pro, let's close the book on Apple's 50th anniversary.

2:08Last show, we had former Macworld editor-in-chief, podcaster, longtime Apple guy, Jason Snell, to talk about Apple's history. So Jason Cross, our regularly scheduled Jason, didn't get a chance to talk about the anniversary. So do you have anything to say, Jason? It's okay if you don't.

2:31Nothing that wasn't covered. It was, you know, I was more busy. We made a bunch of shorts about little trivia bits from Apple's history that we ran throughout the week. I don't have anything to add that wasn't already said.

2:54I kind of wish Apple had done something more special. Yeah. I really think it would have been smart for them to hold the NEO's launch to make it a thing for the 50th anniversary. Like, we're bringing, Apple was all about democratizing technology. That was its big thing, bringing the computer to everyone. So, like, we are bringing Mac to millions more people than ever now. And that would be the pitch. So it was kind of weird that, like, we're going to launch this a month before.

3:26It would have been a good opportunity. Somebody must have brought that up in their meetings and decided, like, specifically to launch it when they did. Because they could have held it for a month, sure. Instead, we got AirPods Pro Max 2, which no one cares about. Yeah.

3:44So, I don't know. Happy birthday, Apple. Kind of wish you did more. Yeah, I was hoping for something more like fan forward also, like an announcement or an app or something. We got, like, an animated thingy. I know. Which was nice. It was fine. And there was Apple's Instagram account and everyone else posted, like, a video, like, clicking through the top 50 devices and products and things that they released.

4:17Let's talk about that for a second, because I thought it was funny that Apple Card was included. I guess it is, like, a big deal. That was a big deal. Yeah. But I never think of it as, like, an Apple product.

4:29I don't think it's one of the top 50. Right. I would put HyperCard above Apple Card. Yeah, so, I mean, I don't know how they would visualize that or if anyone, like, most people don't know what HyperCard is. I barely know what HyperCard is, and I work for Apple. Like, people don't know what HyperCard is. Like, they have – it was very heavy on, like, the second half of Apple's, you know, existence.

4:53Yeah. They were very heavy on the sort of after the Bondi Blue iMac time of Apple. And, yeah. I mean, granted, there are a lot more products at that time. Did they include any of the modem stuff? Did they include any of the – I don't – I – everybody, every site had all these, like, best Apple products of all time and all this other stuff. And I didn't see a lot of – time machine is software, but there were also sort of the time machine hardware things.

5:26And then what were the – oh, God. The modems called Air. Capsule. Time Capsule Airport. Time Capsule Airport. Yes. There was the original airport. Then there were airports with Time Capsule built in. Right. And everything. And every time we run a thing that says, like, what products should Apple bring back or whatever, everybody goes airport. Like, we get – like, the fans, there's not a lot of them. But the ones that there are are very vocal. They're all airport, airport, bring back airport. We want airport again.

5:57And now everybody did their, like, top Apple products of all time. And all the airports – I didn't see anybody say anything. I didn't either. That's true. I didn't even think about it when we were doing our stuff. Like, we wrote our list, and we didn't include airport either. I actually still have – I'm working on a feature. I still have a time capsule that I use that I can't use anymore because of various reasons. We won't get into that. But in Mac OS 27, you won't be able to use it anymore. But, yeah, it was a fantastic – like, their whole networking setup thing was great.

6:32And, yeah, I don't think it was part of that video. I don't remember seeing an airport, if you don't remember what – it was, like, that UFO-looking router thingy. The original one was kind of UFO-looking. Then they were sort of, like, tall towers. They were similar to, like, a long, extruded Apple TV.

6:53White, of course. I had one of those. Tall. And it was my router for a while, and it had a built-in hard drive that you used for Time Machine. That was the time capsule. And then I even kept using it. I turned off all the router stuff. Once it couldn't – it wasn't a good router for me anymore. And that pretty much pretty quickly came and went. But it was a good network hard drive backup system. It really is. It's easy to set up. It works fast.

7:25It doesn't require anything whatsoever. I mean, it was fast for the time. It's dog slow for today. It's an old spinning hard drive. Sure, but it's fine for backups because you don't need to worry about it. It's not important. Yeah, for, like, middle-of-the-night backup stuff, it was fine. I mean, the storage – today, the storage capacity is slow. It would be an SSD. It would be all these things. It's none of that. But it would be a good – I still think Apple should enter the network-attached storage industry.

7:56But that's a whole other – Yeah, I doubt it. But, yeah, that's a whole other show. That's a whole other show.

8:01Yeah, so Apple's 50th came and went. Paul McCartney played a concert on Tuesday, which I thought was odd. Not Wednesday, which was the anniversary.

8:10That's, you know, the Paul McCartney thing. The Beatles, Steve Jobs was a big fan. And the Apple records, like, that's all interconnected. It makes a ton of sense. And that's it.

Apple History

8:19You know, like, we move on. But, Roman, let's do Apple history here because it's kind of related to Apple's 50. It's, like, not quite, but kind of. But, all right. So you can go, and then we'll get into Mac Pro stuff. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

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9:20I guess, in a way, it's related to Mac Pro. Yeah. In that it's a computer. Well, they're probably not. Now that I think about it, it's not really related. But anyways, because, you know, I'm into the segues, so I was trying to find a segues. But anyways, on April 11th, 1976, Apple released the Apple One, its first computer. So it became a company on April 1st. And then 10 days later, it came out with the Apple One. So the Apple One was made in a limited quantity.

9:55It didn't even come in a case. It was basically parts. Computers did it back then. That was the... Basically, yeah. Yeah. What was the guy's name? Something... John Tully or something like that. He ran the Byte computer shop. Basically, the first computer shop in the country. But he saw what they were building. Back then, when you bought a computer, if you weren't a big company buying something the size of a fridge, you bought a kit and instructions, and you had to get out your soldering gun and put chips on a board and all this other stuff.

10:28And so he saw what they were doing. He said, I will pay you for $500 each for 50 of these fully assembled. And I'm going to sell them fully assembled out of my computer store. And so then they're roping in every friend.

10:43Jobs sold his VW bus.

10:48Waz was selling his calculator. They sold everything they could to get the parts. And then roped in all their friends to sit there soldering boards and making them and everything. But when you see one in a museum now, the only ones that survived are ones that people then put into a wooden case or something. But they didn't have keyboards. They didn't have display connectors or anything. You had to supply all that. The original batch of Apple Ones to Tully at ByteShop was supposed to be fully assembled.

11:19They weren't. When they delivered them, they were just motherboards. There was some argument over what fully assembled was. Sure. That's Steve Jobs' marketing. Well, back then, it was common for a computer wouldn't come with a keyboard and display connectors or anything like that. Or in a case. And so they didn't. Fully assembled very well could have meant to most people, yeah, we soldered all the chips on the board and everything. Because you didn't have that from other computers back then.

11:53There weren't computer kits. I should call them computer kits. There weren't computers. But that was the big leap for Apple II. Apple II was like, it comes in a case with a keyboard with display circuitry inside so you can just plug it into your TV. Like it was, that was a massive leap. And had the guy who ran ByteShop refused to pay, which he could have done because he argued that they didn't deliver what he wanted.

12:26Right. Like if he didn't pay, Apple might not have existed. Oh, they would have been. That could have been it. Yeah. They were hosed because they got a whole line of credit and they only got the line of credit because the bank called Tully and said, did you place this order for like 50 of these? And he said, yeah, no, that's legit. I'm going to pay them. So the bank thought they were getting paid back. They had 30 days to pay the bank back. It was one of those net plus 30 things. It was like, so like they would never have paid back the line of credit. It would have been over.

12:58Right. So it's, you know, like that guy is, you know, like power to you for keeping your word because you could have just been like, I am paying that. I can't sell these. This is what I want.

13:10To be fair, he could sell them. No, no. It's not like all the other computers. Yeah. No, I understand all that. But there's something. He could have like, like he didn't know Steve Jobs is going to be a visionary, brilliant, computer guy. He was just two, two scruffy hippies with a bunch of parts. Roman, did you test an Apple one? I was six years old. So no, I did not. In my, my school district, they had Commodore pets. Yeah. So. Okay. Yeah.

13:40So even, you know, so I wasn't, I, I, I've never actually like laid my hands on an Apple one or an Apple two. Cause my school district didn't use. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have an Apple one. Nobody. Right. A few hobbyists are all who, who bought them. So unless you lived in what is became, what wasn't then, but now has become Silicon Valley, unless you lived there and were like the son of some engineer or something like you would, you wouldn't have seen an Apple one. So the Apple one sold for $666.66 and Wozniak has gone on record as saying that there's no symbolic meaning behind that price.

14:25It's just that he liked repeating numbers or something, but Woz is known as a jokester and I don't buy that. He didn't know that the, the symbolic, uh, I don't either reasoning behind success. I think they do because I don't think they set the price. I think Tully did like, I think they got paid 500 bucks each from Tully and he, I think he set the price. So I don't, yeah, I don't think they actually had anything to do with the original. Well, the stories that are out say that Wozniak set the price.

14:57Yeah. So, okay. Like, like, like the suggested retail price type thing. Right. Yeah. I was probably saying an MSRP. So whatever Tully sold him at was probably lower than that. So, but yeah, I, I don't, I don't buy that. I don't buy that. I also don't buy that. They, that April 1st wasn't purposeful. Like they also say that, like it was just happened to be the day that they walked into the office to say, like, we're going to found this company, you know? Uh, yeah, that would be interesting. Cause they, cause it wasn't, it wasn't Jobs and Woz that did that.

15:27They kind of got talked into making a company.

15:32So yeah, I wonder by their, by their third, what was his name? Um, Ron. I had it in my head a second ago. Yeah. Ron Wayne. Ron, Ron Wayne. Yeah. Ron Wayne. Who basically took 10% of the company and talked them into making a company and, and all that. So, uh, I, I think it could have just been coincidence in that thing. Cause I don't think they even really wanted to incorporate. I think they were, they were, Jobs was working at Atari and stuff. You know, I don't, I don't think there was.

16:03Yeah. I can see how like Jobs and Wozniak were kind of like, do whatever, whatever, Ron, just take care of it kind of thing. Like they don't, they didn't care about the whole creating a business thing at that time. They were, you know, they just wanted to. This seems like a big mess. And Ron Wayne was like, no, I've been through this several times before. You need to get this legal stuff settled before you start producing computers and everybody gets into an argument over money, like, so start dealing with this. So yeah, we'll see.

16:34I don't know.

16:37Um, well it is now, oh, Roman, there's more to this. Oh no, I was just going to start wrapping it up. So go ahead.

16:45Yeah. So now we're in year one of Apple's next 50 years or starting year one. Um, the MacBook Neo got in just under the wire, I guess. Right. Like that's part of the first 50 years. So now we, and the next 50 years starts without, see Roman, I can transition without the Mac

Mac Pro Discontinued

17:07Pro, which has been around. So it's been around for 20 years under this name. It's really been around much longer than that. Cause there was the power Mac and the power Macintosh. Like it's like that type of, of machine has been around for a long time. And, uh, 2006 was when the Mac Pro made its debut. It was, um, the first tower with the, um, with, with an Intel processor, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the G5. Jason, did you test it? No, I was, I was great.

17:38What, what year was that? Oh, six. It was the first Mac Pro. The power Mac G5 existed obviously, but not. Yeah. I'm trying to think. I don't think I was at PC world yet. I think I was still with extreme tech and stuff, but no, I was doing enthusiast PC stuff back then. Uh, they, so they, they changed the name because the power, power Mac, actually, I don't even know why they changed the name. Does anyone know why they changed the name? I was going to say power PC, maybe. They were, they were dropping power PC chip and moving to Intel chips.

18:11It was, it was essentially because power, power was associated with the Motorola chips, the power PC chips. So they wanted to, you know, they want to do sort of a complete start, fresh start with the branding with Intel, even though they use the same case. They did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the power Mac G5 case was the same as this one. I had a power Mac G, my first Mac was a power Mac.

18:41G4. The, um, I bought the graphite one on clearance after I think the Quicksilver or something, whatever, whatever the one after the graphite one, I bought that like half price or something. And I, I, I had no use for that type of machine at all, but it really got me into like computing. Like I would open it up. I would do like mild modifications to, and I bought a graphics card. I bought a, and you know, that type of Mac is, you know, it's fun to have when you're

19:13getting into the computing world, but the Mac pro is so expensive now. Like, right. Like that was like, no one, no one younger or even like no one outside of like a, like a, like a, like, like a high end workstation business would, would have, would have bought one. That's, that's what they're made for. They're not made for, for people. I thought I, I thought it was interesting. The old power Macs that you're talking about were a core selling point for Apple of those

19:50was how easy it was to get into them and modify and tinker and stuff like that. They had, you'd pulled that one ring up and the whole thing came open and stuff. There were PC enthusiasts who would buy the cases like on eBay and stuff like that, like on clearance and they didn't quite fit a PC motherboard correctly. You had to do some modifications to make them fit, but they wanted that case cause it was so cool. You could just pop it and get in. I just think it's so funny that like how Apple, how far Apple has gone from that to you

20:23can't even get into your product anymore. Um, but yeah, the Mac, the Mac pro, it makes sense that it's gone because Apple is, Apple's branding has been shifting to pro meaning not something for professionals. It's just the high end consumer version like AirPods pro and like MacBook pro and like all the pro stuff has just been the higher end consumer version and studio is the new thing for like

21:00actual professionals, like actual business professionals who need like something really special for work. So, and they made Mac studio and there's very little reason to get a Mac pro instead of a Mac studio. So I'm not surprised they killed it.

Mac Pro History

21:20No. Yeah. None of us are. And no one, no one who follows this stuff would be, but like the, the modular Mac, I mean, we were just talking about the Apple one that came with the box of parts. Like that's been Apple's calling for, you know, for a while. Like, you know, do you, you can, you know, modify, like when I got my power Mac G4, like I was able to change everything except when maybe no, the chip even was upgradable at that point. Like I was, I didn't, but I got a graphics card.

21:52I got it. I got, I got, I got, I added a second hard drive and you know, over the years that kind of went away. The, the, the first one that really took a lot of that away was that, um, well now they call it the, uh, trash can power Mac, but the, the, the cylindrical one, which was cool as hell. Like one of the coolest things you've ever seen, but you couldn't do anything or you couldn't do much to it on the inside because of the design. Right. They, it had a cooling thing and the, the, the thing was on the inside and the, the, the

22:26air came out and stuff. Um, one of the coolest Macs I've ever seen, but yeah, then before that, the thing that people called the tissue box, max, the, the, the clear loose site, like the power max cube, that was another cool looking thing that was like, that was a little more problematic with the cooling. They had some cracking issues and stuff, but it was also very difficult to work on service, upgrade, anything like that. You weren't going to do anything with it, but yeah, they've been moving in that direction

22:56for some time and.

23:01Power Mac G4 Q was like, that was meant to be, I guess, I guess it was as expensive as Power Mac, like a Tower Mac tower, but it was like a, like a smaller version of that big desktop tower meant kind of the precursor to the studio and the mini meant to sit on your desk, meant to be quiet and powerful and, you know, not be hidden and, and have a bunch of wires sticking out of it. Yes. It was a meant to be, uh, yeah, it's meant to be up on your desk.

23:33It's meant to look good. It went together with a matching display and they had like matching speakers and the speakers, everything. This was at the time and everything was clear plastic. That was like the hot thing and stuff. So, uh, yeah. And, and I think it's, you, you said like, you know, uh, uh, precursor to the mini and everything. I think that's part of the reason that they're getting rid of the Mac pro is because they're going to start making Mac minis in, in that same facility in Texas.

24:03They have a bunch of extra space, but I also think they're going to use the existing Mac pro

Mac Mini and Mac Studio

24:10line, that space and all those people. They just needed to make Mac minis, which is a computer people buy. Whereas I don't think a Mac pro is the computer that people buy anymore. Yeah. Well, it's funny. All this AI stuff, Mac minis are basically, you can't find them right now because people have snatched them up. Like I was looking the other day cause I saw a tweet, the 128 gigabyte model with, you know, 128 gigabytes of Ram, the Mac studio is sold out till like literally the

24:43literally September right now. Like you can't get it for months. Yeah. Because those are the models that people are buying. All the Mac minis are kind of right now. I think they're not replenishing very much cause the M5 is about to come out. But yeah, the part of the thing about the Mac mini is it's a small headless. You're not buying a keyboard or you're not buying a display. You're not, you don't have to buy any of this stuff with it. It's a little small headless thing that can have a whole lot of unified Ram in it, which people who want to run local models or make like a local server farm and stuff can like,

25:16yeah, it's good for that. And so, yeah, they, they run out because there's consumers buying the one Mac mini, but then there's people out there who are like, no, I buy 20 of them and I make an array in my closet. Right. Like, right. That's why you can't find them because people are buying them like basically in bulk. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. There's companies who that's what they, they, that's what their server farm is, is it's racks of Mac minis. Yeah. Roman, did you test the, um, what is it? The, uh, the cylindrical, what, it didn't have a name.

25:48It was just called the Mac pro, but the, the, the circle, the 2013 Mac pro I did. I, I was here at Mac world, but I, I didn't test it. Uh, we had a lab back then. So I, I think the lab tested it and someone else, I think, uh, Dan Franks did the review. I looked it up. Yeah. Dan Franks did the review. Okay. Um, but I do have one at home. The, the, the, actually, well, it turns out I was, uh, cleaning up my garage yesterday.

Mac Pro Alternatives

26:17I have two of them. Oh, no way. Oh. And what happened was, so I have one, and then I've, I totally had forgotten that while we were cleaning out the office here, they were going to toss the, the, the, this Mac pro. And I was like, Oh, I'm going to take this home. And we're not, I'm not tossing this thing. I'll take it home. So not necessarily take it home for my own sake, but you know, just in case it's a museum piece, essentially. Yeah, for sure. So I, so I took it home and then I totally forgot about it cause I put it aside and then

26:49I was cleaning my garage this past weekend or the weekend before and found it and went, Oh, I forgot this was here. So that's funny. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so I, you know, that, that trash can Mac pro it, I understand what Apple was trying to do with it, but it's kind of like the wrong machine, the right machine at the wrong time. So I wonder if not necessarily that form factor, but that compactness would work now.

27:23I wonder with Apple Silicon. I mean, it essentially has, right? That's the Mac. It essentially has because it's the Mac studio. Uh, I think part of the problem was, um, the parts they were using back then were very power hungry. They had a very power hungry Intel Xeon chip. They had a very power hungry GPU. They were trying to cram it all into a custom way. They could flow a bunch of air in and up this thing. Uh, and it was problematic. Like it, it ran in thermal throttling issues.

27:55It could get loud if you were like, it's this piece that's meant to sit on your desk and look cool. And it's like, yeah, but every time I sit there and render a video out or something, it goes, it did not. Yeah. It did not take much to get that fan going. Yeah. Um, so, so yeah, I think it was, it wasn't the compactness that was the issue. It's that, like you said, at the wrong time, they, they didn't have the hardware that was power efficient enough to sustain that sort of thing. And they were in a world where everyone expected you to expect it to be able to slap in a different

28:29graphics card or add Ram or upgrade a hard drive or whatever. And it was really not made for that. Yeah. You could take out the graphic card. It's just, you needed some custom thing because it was a, super expensive thing to replace. And yeah, the RAM and the storage, you could, I think that was relatively easy maybe, but nothing else because it was all like, you had to get it from some boutique company that

28:59decided to make a graphics card. Like you, like Nvidia didn't make a card like they did for the previous Power Max that just popped in. But yeah, but it was cool, man. I wish I had one, Roman. You should, you should hook it up and play around. Well, I'm going to have to bring it back to the office because I, you know, it shouldn't be at my house.

29:22I've got to find a place to store it here. We'll delete that part of the show so nobody knows. Um, but so kind of related, uh, so on Thursday when Apple announced, well, they didn't actually

Reaction to Mac Pro Discontinuation

29:34announce when Apple pretty much put the, uh, Mac pro out the pasture. A couple of days ago. Yeah. I was sitting in the office and, um, finishing up a story and, um, someone from PC world came up to me and was like, started going off about what the heck is Apple doing? You know, you know, they come out with the Neo and they used to be taught themselves as a high end computer manufacturer. Now they're going after the low end.

30:04They have no high end. And I just kind of sat there and nodded and I didn't, I didn't come back with it because I didn't, because I, I don't think they were interested in me explaining to them what Apple was doing. I think they were more interested in going off about Apple because, you know, those guys over there, they, they, they don't think much of Apple. I'll just put it that way. So it didn't, wasn't going to matter what I was going to say, but Jason kind of alluded to it is that, cause one of the points that this PC world editor was making was Apple used

30:37to be a high end machine maker. I used to be a, I used to work in a studio where we had max Mac pros to do our work. And now those machines are gone. What are those people going to do? And my response was almost, well, you can fit five Mac studios in that space of the Mac pro. Right. And it's just as fast. And it's, it'll be faster. One of them is faster, right? Right. And you can even interconnect them through Thunderbolt.

31:07Also, also a high end, a Mac studio, like a well furnished Mac studio is like a $5,000 machine. These are not, these are high end machines. These are not in any way, not a high end machine. But the thing, I guess my point is, so his rant was kind of in line with what I was seeing a lot on the internet. And what it is, is there's this perception that high end equals tower. Sure. Right. And that's not necessarily true anymore, especially with Apple Silicon. So, and you know, maybe you can argue that how you can use a tower with expansion because

31:42of the expansion ports and stuff. But then, like I said, Apple Silicon, they have, you know, they have these special codecs on their chips that kind of eliminate the need or Apple at least would say eliminates the need for those cards. It's, you know, their GPUs are Thunderbolt 5, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. And it's all built into one chip. It's really hard to do that and then say, oh, but you could buy a separate card. And that doesn't, like, it's very difficult to engineer a product that works that way.

32:14Yeah. It's, it's, Apple is, I, I find it interesting when somebody says Apple's like a high end brand, like, because yeah, modern times affordable luxury has been their thing, but their whole history as we just got through their 50s was about making computing affordable. Right. Like the Apple two, like all the ads for things like the Apple two and the early Mac and stuff like that were about how much cheaper it is than these IBM PCs.

32:47Like even the iMac. It was, it was more powerful and more, yeah. And then that was on the, when they came back, one of Jobs things was, you know, we have too many products, we have all these Power Macs, it's all this expensive stuff and everything. No, we need a, we need to get back to a cheap all-in-one for people, you know, that gets people on the internet and that we could sell that, that we could sell people, hey, $1,500 you can get on the internet, there's no step three, blah, blah, blah, right? Just plug in your phone line.

33:16So yeah, it's Apple's history really has been, if you're going to say anything about Apple and the Neo and getting rid of the Mac Pro and stuff, it would be, oh, it's, I'm so glad they're getting back to computers for everyone. Right. And not, you have to be rich to buy an app, an Apple thing.

33:41Yeah. I mean, the, the Mac Pro is literally 10 times the cost of, was 10 times the cost of the Neo. I mean, that is, it was a ridiculously high-end machine. And by, by the time Apple discontinued it a couple of weeks ago, it, it, it wasn't worth it at all. Like it had an old chip. It didn't have the, the, the, the RAM ceiling that the Mac studio even had. Like, it just, it just wasn't worth the money. And we knew that it wasn't, Apple wasn't, it didn't have its heart in it anymore.

34:14Right. The last, like, and I don't know what, for lack of a better word, good Mac Pro was, I think Roman, it was 2019 when they released that, what they call now is the cheese grater. Design. That was like a return to like modular tower max. And, you know, people were crying for it. And like, we'd like this, the cylinder thing doesn't work for us and we want to go. So they released this thing and it was outrageously expensive again, because like, you can't have

34:48both anymore. Either you're going to have a Mac that sits on your desk and can't really be upgraded for, you know, three or $4,000, or you're going to have this big giant tower made of gorgeous aluminum with all these slots on and it's going to be 6,000 bucks. Like pick one. Yeah. Yeah. Apple has no interest in doing what PC vendors do where like you can buy a tower PC that's like $800, right? And it's upgradable and all this other stuff. And Apple has not engineered, I don't, I'm not just saying like it's a business choice.

35:20Like they have engineered their entire Silicon pipeline and their OS and everything else to not make that. Right. They have no interest in that. So yeah.

Apple's Branding Shift

35:34If you want a powerful Mac, just get a Mac studio. You'll be happy. Yeah. And if you want to build something, you know, like I just a couple of years ago or a year and a half ago built a PC with my son and it was a lot of fun. Like you can still do all that stuff. Well now forget it because RAM's too expensive. But now, yeah, just not with Apple. Like just Apple's not going to be a build your own PC company. And there never will be like that. This is Apple's thing is they want to give you the experience from, from, from head to toe. Like the, like the Mac pro is always like not really there, not always, but in, in the last

36:1020 years, 20, 15 years, like, like that's not what they're delivering anymore. They want to supply the chip and the RAM and the storage and build in the machine you want. And then you can deal with it, use it for five to 10 years and then get another one. That being all said, I do wish Apple would build like the goddess, you know, like a machine with like a 200 core CPU and like an eight terabyte SSD and like a gigabyte of RAM and

36:42just like, you know, make the hot rod of Macs. A terabyte of RAM. Or a terabyte of RAM. A gigabyte of RAM. A gigabyte of RAM is nothing, yeah. That's fine, I know. A terabyte of RAM, you know, just, you know, make a, make a giant hot rod Mac kind of, so to speak. I wish they would do that. RGB lights and stuff. Yes, they would never do that, but just to show off what they can do in terms of like, if, if, if no one, if they didn't really care about efficiency or anything like that. Yeah, or that nobody could buy one. Right, and no one could buy one, so.

37:14It's like starting price, $30,000, right? Right. It's, it's branded, you know, it has some kind of gaudy branding with it as well. So, like what they do with the Apple Watch. Yeah, I mean, so let's talk about that. Do you think they'll, they'll ever bring back the Mac Pro line? Forget about like the tower concept, but is the Mac Studio the thing now forever? Or will at some point, 10 years, 15 years down the line, they, they say, here's a new Mac Pro. So, I think Studio is the brand for professional gear for, for Apple.

37:50And Pro is just the brand for the high-end consumer stuff, like AirPods Pro and all that stuff. So, I think it might be some time, but if they bring back a Pro Mac, it's going to be in that context. They already have it in the MacBook Pro, right? The MacBook Pro is not just for like professionals, it's just the high-end, the laptop. But it would be something like that. It would just be a consumer high-end desktop thing. The next Mac Pro we're likely to see, I think, is an iMac Pro.

38:25And it's going to be that. It's not going to be a, I'm a studio professional who needs a $6,000 ultra-high-end PC. It's going to be, well, no, this is the high-end all-in-one. It's just for consumers. This is the consumer high-end all-in-one. It costs more than the iMac, but it's, you know, better. That was going to be my next question. So, you already answered it. Like, is the iMac next to go?

38:53Yeah, good question. And Mac Studio and Studio Display, like that's our desktop lineup. I feel like it's going in either, the problem is studio displays are so expensive, but I think it's going in opposite, it's going to go in either direction. They're either going to kill the iMac, which means no more all-in-ones, or they're going to expand it a little because it's kind of only serves kind of a low end of the market right now, and they really need an iMac Pro to make an all-in-one that's for people who need something a little bigger, a little more performance, maybe an HDR display, maybe a

39:25better webcam, like a higher-end iMac, I think, could sell. I think people would go into an Apple Store and go, oh, that's nice, I want that, and it's a lot better than the little one. Yeah, particularly if it looked just like the Studio Display. We've talked about this before, that's basically an iMac inside there with the display, with storage and RAM and a chip and everything else. So, I mean, it's not a stretch to say maybe the iMac becomes an A19, like the Neo or something

40:00like that, an iPhone chip, and then the higher-end one gets an M5 or an M6 and a 32-inch display and, you know, changes things in that way. Yeah, or they could do, you know, kind of like the minis and stuff. Like, it's an M5 in the iMac, and then you get an M5 Pro or Max in the iMac Pro, just like the MacBook Pro kind of jump, you know? They can do that same, and the same with the MacBook Pro, the same leap into the display. You get HDR and ProMotion and all these other things in the Pro version.

40:32So, yeah, I think they could do an iMac Pro. But I think the idea of Pro as, like, the big tower, the super expensive thing that's actually for companies to buy for professionals and not for consumers, and I think that's gone. I think that's Studio now.

40:53Did anyone miss it? Like, is it, like, it's only been a couple weeks, but, like, is it sad that the Mac Pro's gone, or is it just a sign that we should move on and put the past in the past?

41:07I haven't seen anybody complaining online. It's hard to be sad for a product being discontinued, but the thing is, it wasn't that, it's hard to say that, I mean, the Mac Pro was a bad product in that it wasn't. The new one, yeah. Yeah, and that the chip wasn't updated, but its design and its feature set, it wasn't a bad product in that sense. So, it's sad in the sense that there just seemed to be more potential with that type

41:39of product, although potential doesn't mean they sell units, so. Right. Yeah. There's a company, Roman, you can link it. We wrote a story about it a while ago. That makes it, like, a mini Mac Pro-looking tower for the Mac Mini, like a case inside the case. It's the coolest thing ever. That's what Apple should do. Give me, like, a little tiny thing that I can pop on my desk. I'd buy that in a second. Yeah, they should make the high-end Mac Mini, like a little replica of the Mac Pro.

42:16Yeah. A little cheese grater. A little cheese grater. You can put it in. Seriously, there's a company on, they sell them on Amazon. It's probably 3D printed, but it looks pretty cool in the pictures, and people have put them on, like, Twitter and stuff, and they're really nice. Like, the mini goes, like, sideways, but it fits in this little tiny thing with little feet and stuff. It's cute. Anyway, Mac Pro is gone. We'll miss you, maybe. Maybe not.

42:44And, yeah, if you have one, hold on to it, because it's a collector's item, as Roma was just talking about. Like, that's it. Yeah, it might be. Jason, we're going to talk about now, so tangent-dentally related to the Mac Pro, or

Studio Display and XDR

42:57the Mac displays, which were once, like, Apple would come out with a new Mac Pro, and they would come out with new displays, like, we're going back, like, 20 years. Yeah, way back to cinema displays. Yeah, cinema displays, right. Well, cinema display, yeah, the old day. Yeah. Yeah. So, recently, Apple came out with studio display and studio display XDR, and Jason got a chance to check them both out, and we've been teasing this for, like, four weeks now, and we're finally going to get these thoughts.

43:28Come on. We've never got around to it. Sorry, I'm shooing my cat away. It's staring at me.

43:35I'll make the regular studio display. It's the second-generation studio display. Right. I'll make that simple. They kept the price. It is the same damn thing. They improved the speakers, but, like, hardly. And they improved the webcam a lot, but it is still not the world's greatest webcam. Like, I'm really frustrated that they updated the front camera on the iPhones to this really awesome, like, 18-megapixel, like, square sensor thing that lets you shoot vertical videos

44:09and all that without turning the phone. And that would be so perfect to put in a big monitor where you could shoot vertical videos without turning your display, like, monitor, like, things like that. But it's a weird choice that they didn't. Like, you could say maybe they don't have enough of them, but how many studio displays did they possibly sell? Yeah, no, there's... Yeah, it's a rounding error on the number of iPhone 17s they sell, and it's on all the iPhone 17s. Like, so it should have been that camera.

44:40It's not the... But it's actually... It's gone from a bad camera to a actually decent functional camera. It still doesn't shoot 4K, 60 frames a second. Like, there are better webcams if you want to buy a discreet webcam. They could have done better, but it's an actual good webcam. Other than that, it's the same display, and it's super annoying because when it came out... When was the original studio display? 2022. 22? Yeah, four years ago.

45:11Four years ago when it came out, everybody was going, this is the same display that's been in the iMac since 2017, I think. Like, literally the same panel. Uh, and it's the same now. So you're paying a lot for a display that's honestly not that good. It still doesn't go up and down unless you spend $400 for this stupid thing. You can't... And you can't buy that after the fact. Right. Like, you have to take it in for service to replace the stand. So you get the stand you want, or you can buy the Visa mount.

45:44So it has all the problems the old studio display had, except that the webcam's better, but it's four years later, and the display hasn't improved, and it's the same price. And what are they doing? This is a $400 or $500 monitor, and they're charging like $1,500 for it. It's crazy. The studio display XDR... Yep. ...is much better. But it's also twice as expensive. So you're still in this land where, like, it really shouldn't cost this much.

46:15But it at least is an really awesome display. Right. It has really good HDR, really good color accuracy. Same speakers and webcam and stuff. Same design. You can only tell them apart because there's little ventilation holes, like, all above the top and bottom. And the ventilation holes go halfway on the regular studio display, and they go all the way on the XDR, because there's more venting. It's not the cool ventilation that you got on the Pro Display XDR.

46:45They're just little holes. Yeah, they're just little holes. But there's just more of them on the XDR than there are on the regular studio display. That's it. And it comes with the height-adjustable stand included in the race. Tilt and height, yeah. The tilt and height. They all tilt, but the one that can go up and down, it comes with that, which I guess is a $400 value. Yeah. I don't know. It's so crazy. A weird thing about last week...

47:15So when they announced the studio display XDR, it was $32.99. And everyone was like, well, that's expensive. But the... I thought it was VESA. It's VESA mount? You said VESA a second ago. It's VESA? Well, whatever it is. It's an acronym. Pronounce it how you like. The thing you put on the wall. It's an acronym. You can pronounce it how you want. But yeah, you can... Instead of a stand, you can get a mount on it to have your own stand. And there's a standard for those called VESA. It's mount on the wall or desk. Or a clamp.

47:46Any stand. It's just a standard for attaching. Yeah. When Apple announced that, it cost... Those two things cost the same. The stand or the mount were both $32.99. Last week, I guess they made a mistake because they said, oh, by the way, it's actually $27.99 for if you don't want to display and $32.99 if you do want to display. If you don't want to stand. If you don't want to stand. Of course, you're stupid. Yeah. If you don't want to... So the starting price changed.

48:19I can't quite wrap my head around what happened there. Like, did they just forget? It kind of went from... It kind of went from, well, it's $3,000, but the tilt and height adjustable stand is included to... No, no, no. It's $2,700. And the tilt and height adjustable stand is still $400 extra. Like, that's... Right. Which is just a bonkers price. I mean, it's a nice stand, but it's not... This is not a $400. It would be overpriced at $100. It's nuts. But it's a very Apple thing to charge $27.

48:51To say it starts at $27.99. So the Pro Display XDR famously started at $4.99 and the stand was $1,000. Like, that was a big meme back in the day. So the Pro Display... You almost have to put this aside from the Pro Display XDR, which was not a product meant for consumers. Right. It was meant for... It was in the old Category Pro, it was like the Mac Pro. This was meant for companies to buy in limited quantities. They needed 6K, they needed it to push 1,000 nits all day long in a darkened environment.

49:25They were going to mount it in studios on things that they had. This was not a product for consumers and people. The Pro Display XDR is, it's a company, it's a company, it's a, it's, it's made for your startup to spend its VC money on. It's, you know, but it, but it's, it's a nice, I wish it was bigger than 27 inches, but it's, it's 5K. The older one was 32. Yeah, the original Pro Display XDR was 32. Right. But this is not that.

49:57This is the studio display, right? Which was always 27. There's a lot of comparing this to the Pro Display XDR. I feel like they are completely different products. I feel like this is the, this is an upgraded studio display. This is not a downgraded or consumer-ified Pro Display XDR. The Pro Display XDR is axed just the same way the Mac Pro is axed. Yeah. They're just not in that market anymore. This is an actual product for consumers. It's just overpriced, I think.

50:28I feel like this, Jason Snell, I think, wrote this on his blog when he wrote about this. He says, it needs to either be better or cheaper or both. Right. And it's, and it's in that thing. It's great uniformity, great HDR, color accuracy is really good. It has a neat trick where it can do medical imaging, like color accuracy. Stuff and all that. But it just needs, it's not like $3,000 great or $2,700 great.

50:58Like at $2,000, you would say, wow, this is way more expensive than comparable monitors from BenQ and whatever. But, you know, Apple Tacks, built-in speakers, okay, whatever, you know. Yeah. Fine. It's, it's just overpriced. So the, the studio display is over, is way overpriced. The studio display XDR is also overpriced, but they're both fine monitors. They just, you know, the whole thing where Apple doesn't want to let your monitor go up

51:33and down unless you pay $400. I just can't understand. If, if money is no object, would you buy one?

51:45It really depends on what I need to do. Okay. If I was just like, I, all my stuff has to be Apple stuff. Well, okay. Then, then maybe, but like there's, there's other better monitors out there that don't cost as much. They're just made by BenQ and Samsung and all this other stuff. And they're 32 inches and they're, some are 4K, there's some are 5K, but they, and they have accurate color and calibration and all this other, but they're just not Apple. Right. And maybe they don't have a built-in webcam. So you have to have your own webcam or something, but they're, they're way more reasonably priced and they're not like worse displays.

52:22Like, Oh, it doesn't have, you know, this one thing. So if someone said, listen, I don't care what I spent. Yeah. I like Apple's design. I want a really good display with. It's going to be really good. Yeah. Okay. And I don't care that I have to use it with a Mac period. Right. Right. There is, there's no other input. It does not accept HDMI or DisplayPort or anything like that. It can't be updated through any of those. It has no controls. All the controls are done through Mac OS.

52:54You cannot control its brightness or, or contrast or anything except through Mac OS, right? This is a Mac only display, which is a frustrating thing. You spend $3,000 on most monitors. You plug it in your computer, but you can also plug something else into it if you need to. Right. Well, you could do an iPhone, iPad with the studio display, like an Apple product. I mean, plug into it. Kind of. Yeah. But you still don't have, you would not have control over its brightness and contrast and all this.

53:26Like, there's a lot of stuff he doesn't, it doesn't, those things, those products don't then update the display when it has firmware updates and all that other stuff. So, yeah. Yeah. It's a Mac display. It's a Mac display. It's a Mac Thunderbolt only display. And it costs a whole lot. But at least in the case of the XDR, the quality is really good. In the case of the regular studio display, I would say the quality is only good compared to $400 monitors.

53:57It's really not, no HDR, no promotion, no anything. When you switch from one to the other, it was a noticeable difference to you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your desktop doesn't look much different because it's not HDR, right? But like any content you look at, yeah, it's, and of course it's kind of, you know, high refresh rate and adaptive refresh and all that stuff.

54:27You can't see on the video, but over, over on this side of my desk, I have a Apple Thunderbolt display from, geez, I don't know, 15 years ago. I don't know how long, how, however long ago they made those. And I tell you, man, it's still pretty damn good. These were, these were super expensive at the time either. I, I, it's, it's not mine. I got it from my brother who got it from someone else, but it's still great. It still works really. It looks, looks great. The picture is fantastic. Like, like it's a frustrating thing that like people aren't going to buy a studio display because it's $1,600.

55:03It's, it's, it's, they're, they're priced. They've priced a lot of people out of that market. Yes. Yeah. I wish they made a $9.99 version because Apple's displays are really, really good. I mean, you can see that on their products. The version that they sell now should cost $9.99 or less. Like the way they built it, but they could build one.