Episode 978: Requiem for the Mac Pro

Unscrewed and unfiltered, unafraid. Welcome 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 of weeks ago, Apple decided out of a 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. We'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. We'll make a whole new segment to guarantee that I had 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 macro.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. All right, Roman, before we get to the Mac Pro, let's put a let's close the book on Apple's 50th anniversary. Last show we had former Macworld editor-in-chief, chief, podcaster, long time 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. Nothing 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 throughout the week. I don't have anything to add that wasn't already said. I kind of wish Apple had done something more special. 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 was the, be the pitch. So it was kind of weird that like we're going to launch this a month before. It would have been a good opportunity. Somebody must have brought that up in their meetings and decided 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. So I don't know. Happy birthday, Apple. Kind of wish it, you did more, but it's, you know, I was hoping for something more like fan forward also, like an announcement or an app or something. We got like a animated thingy. Which was, it 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. Let'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. How is it big deal? Yeah, but I never think of it as like an Apple product. I don't think it's one of the top 50. Right. I would put a card 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, I barely know what hypercard is. And I work for Apple. Like people don't know what they have. It was very on like the second half of Apple's, you know, existence. Yeah. 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. And then what were the, oh God, the modems called air capsule, time capsule airport, time time, time capsule airport. Yes. There was the original airport. Then there were airports with time capsule built in 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, 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. And 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, yeah, it just wrote our list and we didn't include airport either. I actually still have, I'm writing, I'm working on a feature. I still have a time capsule that I use. That's 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, it was a fantastic, like their whole networking setup thing was great. And 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 thing. The original one was kind of UFO looking. Then they were sort of like tall towers. They were sort of similar to like a, like a long extruded Apple TV. White, of course. I had one of those. Tall. And it was, 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. But, 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 works. It's easy to set up. It works fast. It doesn't require anything. I mean, it was fast for the time. It's dog slow for Tay. It's a sure, but it's fine for backups because you don't need to worry about it. It's not important for like, 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 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. Yeah. Industry. But that's a whole other. Show. There's a whole other show. Yeah. So Apple 50th came and went. Paul McCartney played a concert on Tuesday, which I thought was odd, not Wednesday, which was the anniversary. That's, you know, the Paul McCartney thing, the Beatles, Steve Jobs was a big fan, the Apple records, like that's all interconnected and makes a ton of sense. And that's it. You know, like we move on, but Roman, let's do Apple history here because it's kind of related to Apple 50. It's like not quite, but kind of. But all right, so you can, you can go and then we'll get into Mac Pro stuff. What I've dedicated my life to is revenge. A brand new drama based on the best selling novel. They think they're better than us. Who do you think you are? I'm going to prove to them that they're wrong. She's punishing me. You destroyed my family. I will not rest until I've destroyed yours. A woman of substance on channel four stream now. I guess in a way it's related to Mac Pro and that it's a computer. I think about it. It's not really related, but anyways, cause you know, I'm into the Segway, so I was trying to find a segue. But anyways, on April 11th, 1976, Apple released the Apple one. Yeah. So it's first computer. So it became a company on Apple 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. It didn't even come in a case. You had, it was basically parts. Computers did it back then. Basically, yeah. Yeah. What was the guy's name? Something, John Tully or something like that. He ran the bike computer shop. Basically the first computer shop in the country, but he saw what they were building back then you 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. And so he saw what they were doing. He said, I will pay you for 50, $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 are roping in every friend. They start, Jobs sold his VW bus and did what, you know, was selling his calculator. He sold everything they could to get the parts and then roped in all their friends to like 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 like 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, you know, the original batch of Apple ones to to Tully a bite shop was supposed to be fully assembled. They weren't when they delivered them. They were just motherboards. There were some arguments over what fully assembled was right. Sure. There was like, I was marketing. Well, back then that it was common for like a computer wouldn't come with a keyboard and display connectors or anything like that. And so they did 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 like because you didn't have that from other computers back then. Like there weren't like computer kits. I should call them computer kits. There weren't computers. So but that was the big leap for Apple to Apple to is 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 had the guy who ran by shop refused to pay, which he could have done because he didn't. He argued that he didn't they didn't deliver what he wanted. Right. Like if he didn't pay, Apple might not have existed. Oh, they were been could have been it. Yeah, they were they were host because they 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 that 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 like so like they would never have paid back the line of credit. It would have been over. Right. So it's like that guy is, you know, like power to you for keeping your word because he could have just been like I am I am paying. I can't sell these. This is the one. To be fair, he could sell them. No, no, it's not like all the other course. Yeah. Yeah. I understand that. But it could have like, like he didn't know Steve Jobs is going to be a visionary, brilliant computer guy who's just too, too scruffy hippies with a bunch of parts. Roman, did you test an apple one? I was six years old. So I did not. My school district, they had Commodore pets. Yeah. So. Okay. Yeah. So even, you know, so I wasn't, I've never actually like laid my hands on an apple one or an apple two because my school district didn't. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have an apple one. Nobody. Right. So all 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 we're like the son of some engineer or something, like you would, you would have seen an apple one. So the apple one sold for $666 and 66 cents. Right. Well, I think it's gone on recorders saying that there's no symbolic meaning behind that price is just that he like repeating numbers or something. But was is known as a jokester. Mm hmm. And I don't buy that he didn't know that the symbolic. I don't either. Reason behind 66. 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 I think he set the price. So I don't. Yeah, I don't think they actually had anything to do with the stories that around say that was the accept the price. Yeah. So, okay. Like, like, like the suggested retail price type thing. Right. Yeah, it was probably say an MSRP. So whatever he totally sold him at was probably lower than that. So, but yeah, 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 we're going to found this company, you know. Yeah, that would be interesting because they because it wasn't it wasn't jobs and was that did that they kind of got talked into making a company. So yeah, I wonder by their by their third. What was his name? He had a second ago. Yeah. Ron. Ron. He basically took 10% of the company and talk to him into making a company and and all that. So I think it could have just been coincidence in that thing because I don't think they 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. Yeah, I can see how like jobs and was that we're kind of like do whatever whatever Ron just here they don't they didn't care about the whole creating a business thing at that time. Yeah, you know, they just wanted to this seems like a big mess and Ron Wayne was 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. I don't know. Well, it is now. Oh, there's more to this. Oh, no, I was just gonna start wrapping it up. So go ahead. Yeah. So now we're in year one of Apple's next 50 years or starting year one. The MacBook Neo got in just under the wire, I guess, right? Like that's part of the first 50 years. So yeah, we and the next 50 years starts without see Roman, I can transition without the Mac Pro, which has been around. So it's been around for 20 years under this name. It's really been around much longer than I because 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 two then and six was when the Mac Pro made its debut. It was the first tower with the with an Intel processor that the the the the G5. Jason, did you test it? No, I was I was too great. What year was it? Oh, six. Original in six. Two thousand and six 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. They so 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. It 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, 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 G for the 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 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 it. I bought a graphics card. I bought it and, you know, that type of Mac is, you know, it's fun to have when you're getting 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 is outside of like a like a like like a high end workstation business would have would have bought one. That's that's what they're made for. They're not made for for people. Right. I thought I thought it was interesting, the old Power Macs that you're talking about were a core selling point for Apple of those was how easy it was to get into them and modify and tinker and stuff like that. They had you 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 because 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 can't even get into your product anymore. 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 actual 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. No, yeah, none of us are. And no one, no one who follows this stuff would be. But like 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, 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 upgradeable at that point. Like I was, I didn't, but I got a graphics card. I got it. I got I added a second hard drive. And, you know, over the years that kind of went away. The first one that really took a lot of that away was that, well, now they call it the 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 had a cooling thing and the thing was in the inside and the air came out and stuff. One of the coolest Macs I've ever seen. But yeah, before that, the thing that people called the tissue box max, the clear lucite like a paramax cube. Yeah, that's it. It was awesome too. 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 for some time and. And. Paramount G for a $4 trillion piece. Like that was meant to be, I guess, I guess so 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 have a bunch of wires taken out of it. Yes, it was meant to be. Yeah, it's meant to be up on your desk. It'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. Yeah. And I think it's. You said like, you know, 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 that same facility in Texas. They have a bunch of extra space, but I'm also, I also think they're going to use the existing Mac Pro line, 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 because I saw a tweet. The 128 gigabyte model with, you know, 120 gigabytes of RAM, the Mac studio is sold out till like literally September right now. Like you can't get it for months. Yeah. Because there are models that people are buying. All the Mac Minis are kind of right now. I think they're not replenishing very much because 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 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. Yeah. Which people who want to run local models or make like a local server farm and stuff can like, yeah, it's good for that. And so, yeah, 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 it because people are buying them like basically in bulk. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, there's companies who that's what they, that's what their server farm is, is it's racks of Mac Minis. Yeah. Roman, did you test the, what is it? The, the cylindrical, it didn't have a name. It was just called the Mac Pro, but the, the, the, the, the 2013 Mac Pro. 2013. I, I was here at Macworld, but I, I didn't test it. We had a lab back then. So 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. But I do have one at home. The, the, actually, well, it turns out. I was cleaning up my garage yesterday. I 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 Solentist Mac Pro. And I was like, I'm going to take this home. And we're not, we're 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 I 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, you know, that, that trash can Mac Pro, 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, I wonder with Apple Silicon. I mean, it essentially has, right? That's the Mac. It essentially has because it's the Mac studio. 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. It 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 graphics 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 yeah, it was a, it was a custom super expensive thing to replace. And yeah, and it wasn't the last one. 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 decided 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. Yeah. But it was cool, man. I wish I had one. Roman, you should, you should hook it up and play around. Well, you have to bring it back to the office because I, you know, it shouldn't be at my house. I gotta find a place to store it here. We'll delete that part of the show so nobody knows. Um, but so kind of related. So on Thursday, when Apple announced, well, they didn't actually announce when Apple pretty much put the Mac Pro out the past year. Couple of days ago, yeah. I was sitting in the office and finishing up a story and 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. They 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 don't think much of Apple. I'll just put it that way. So it wasn't going to matter what I was going to say, but Jason kind of alluded to it is that, because one of the points that this PC world editor was making was Apple used to be a high end machine maker. I used to be a, I used to work in a studio where we had Mac Mac pros to do our work. Now those machines are gone. And what are those people going to do? My response was almost, well, you can fit five Mac studios in that space of the Mac pro. All right. It's just as fast. It's fast. It'll be faster. One of them is faster, right? Right. And you can even interconnect them. Do you also also a high end Mac, 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 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 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. Now their GPUs are Thunderbolt five, it's 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. Yeah. It's Apple is 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 fifties was about making computing affordable. Right. Like the Apple to like all the ads for things like the Apple to and the early Mac and stuff like that were about how much cheaper it is than these IBM PCs. Like even the I was it was more powerful and more. Yeah. And then that was on the when they came back. One of Job's things was, you know, we have too many products. We have all these power Macs. We saw this expensive stuff and everything. No, we need 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, fifteen hundred dollars you can get on the Internet. There's no step three, blah, blah, blah, right? Just plug in your phone line. So 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. And not you have to be rich to buy an app. An Apple thing. Yeah. I mean, the Mac Pro is literally 10 times the cost of was 10 times the cost of the Neo. I mean, that is yeah, it was a ridiculously high end machine. And by the time Apple discontinued it a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't worth it at all. Like it had an old chip. It didn't have 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 it as it's heart in it anymore. The last like, I don't know, 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 grader design that was like, but I returned to like modular tower Macs. And, you know, people were crying for it. And like we like this and 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 both 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 four thousand dollars, 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 six thousand bucks like pick one. Yeah. Yeah. They don't Apple has no interest in doing what PC vendors do where like you can buy a tower PC that's like eight hundred dollars, right? And it's upgradeable and all this other stuff. And Apple has not engineered. I don't I'm not just saying like it's a business choice. Like 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. Yeah. If 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. We'll now forget it because Ram's too expensive. But now, yeah, just not with Apple. Like just Apple's not going to be a built 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 Mac Pro is always like not really there. Not always, but in the last 20 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 you 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 just like, you know, make the hot rod or a terabyte of RAM or a terabyte of RAM. 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 lights and stuff. 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, or that nobody could buy one. Right. No one could buy one. So it's like starting price, $30,000. Right. Right. It's branded. You know, has some kind of gotty branding with it as well. So like what they do with that. 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 Apple and 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 and it's going to be that it's not going to be a, uh, 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 thought for consumers. This is a consumer high end all in one. It's costs more than the iMac, but it's, you know, better. That was going to be my next question. So you, you already answered it. Like, is the iMac next to go? Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Studio and studio display, like that's our desktop lineup. I feel like it's going in either, the problem is studios 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 a little something a little bigger, a little more performance, maybe an HDR display, maybe a better webcam, like, like a higher end iMac, I think. Consell. 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, like that's, we've talked about this before. That's basically an iMac inside there with the display with the storage and all the 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 like 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. And yeah, or they could do, you know, the kind of like the mini's and stuff like it's the, 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 sort of and the same with the MacBook Pro, the same leap in display. You get HDR and promotion and all these other things in the Pro version. So 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 that's studio now. Anyone miss it? Like is it like it's only been a couple of weeks, but like, is it said that the Mac Pro is gone or sure is it just a sign that we should move on and put the past in the past? I haven't seen anybody complaining online. I don't. It's hard to be sad for a product to be discontinued. But the thing is, it wasn't that it's hard to say that. I mean, the Mac Pro is a bad product in that it wasn't a new one. Yeah. The newest. Yeah. And that the chip wasn't updated. Right. But it's design and its features said it wasn't a bad product. And that's that sense. So it's it's it's it's sad in a sense that there just seemed to be more potential with that type of product. Although potential doesn't mean they sell device. 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 like a like a mini Mac Pro looking tower for the for the Mac mini, like like an extra like a case inside the case. It's the coolest thing ever. That's what I wish to do. Give me like a little tiny thing that I can buy. I'd buy that in a second. Yeah, they make the high end Mac mini like a like a little replica of the little cheese crater. She 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 that people have put them on like Twitter and stuff. And they they're really nice. Like the mini goes like sideways, but yeah, it's a tiny thing with little feet and stuff. It's cute. Anyway, Mac Pro is gone. We'll miss you. Maybe, maybe not. And yeah, if you have what hold on to it, because it's a collector's item as as Roman was just talking about, like that's it. Okay, Jason, we're going to talk about now. So tangent, dentally related to the Mac Pro or the Mac displays, which were once like Apple would come out with the new Mac Pro and they would come out with new displays like we're going back like 20 years. The way back to cinema displays. Yeah, cinema displays. Right. Well, cinema display. Yeah. The whole day. 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. We never got around to it. Sorry, I'm shooing my cat away. It's there to me. The I'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 they improve this. They improve the speakers, but like you hardly and they improve 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 and 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 like butter. Yeah, like that. But it's a 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 that they possibly sell? Yeah, I know there's a shake for the studio display that that yeah, it's a 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. It's not the best, but it's actually it's gone from a bad camera to a actually decent functional camera. It's it's 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, four 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. 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 four hundred dollars for the 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. So it has all the problems the old studio display had except that the webcams better, but it's four years later and the display hasn't improved. And it's the same price. And what do they do it? This is a this is a four or five hundred dollar monitor and they're charging like fifteen hundred dollars for crazy. The studio display XDR 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. But it at least is a really awesome display. Right. It has really good HDR. Really good color accuracy. Same speakers and webcam and stuff. The same design. You can only tell them apart because there's a 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 it's not the cool ventilation that you got on the pro display XDR. They 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 tilt, tilt and height. Yeah, the tilt and height. They're they all tilt, but the one that can go up and down. It comes with that, which I guess is a four hundred dollar value. Yeah, like a snow. No, it's so crazy. A weird thing about last week. So the when they announced the studio display XDR, it was thirty two ninety nine. And it was like, well, that's expensive. But the I thought it was VESA. It's a visa mount. You said visa a second ago. It's visa. Well, whatever it is, whatever it is, the thing that 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 visa. It's mount on the wall or or desk or a clamp or any stand. It's 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 thirty two ninety nine. Last week, I guess they made a mistake because they said, oh, by the way, it's it's it's actually twenty seven ninety nine for if you don't want to display and thirty two ninety nine. If you don't want to stand, if you don't want this, of course, you stupid. Yeah. If you don't want to. So the the starting price changed. I 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 three grand, but the tilt and height adjustable stand is included to no, no, no. It's twenty seven hundred dollars. And the tilt and height adjustable stand is still four hundred dollars extra. Like that's which is just a bonkers price. I mean, it's a nice stand, but it is not. This is not a four hundred. It would be overpriced at a hundred dollars. It's nuts. But it's a very Apple thing to charge twenty seven to say it starts at twenty seven ninety nine. So the the Pro Display XDR famously started at four ninety nine. And the stand was a thousand bucks. Like that was a big. Oh, yeah. 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 is like the Mac Pro. It was this was meant for companies to buy in limited quantities who they needed six K they needed it to push a thousand nits all day long in a darkened environment. They were going to mount it in studios on things that they had. This was not a product for for consumers and people. The Pro Display XDR is 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 twenty seven inches, but it's it's OK. The other one was thirty two. Yeah, that's the original pro display. It was thirty two. Right. But this is not that this is the studios right, which is always twenty seven. 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 consumerified 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. I feel like this. Jason Snow, 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 work into medical imaging, like color accuracy stuff and all that. But it just needs it's not like three thousand dollars great or twenty seven hundred dollars great like at two thousand dollars that you would say, wow, this is way more expensive than comparable monitors from BenQ and whatever. But, you know, Apple tax built in speakers. OK, whatever, you know, you know, fine. It's just overpriced. So the studio display is way overpriced. The studio display XDR is also overpriced. But they're both fine monitors. They just, you know, the whole thing where if Apple doesn't want to let your monitor go up and down unless you pay four hundred dollars, I just can't understand. If if money is no object, would you buy one? It really depends on what I need to do. If I was just like, all my stuff has to be Apple stuff. One. OK. 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. They're 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. Right. Something. But they're they're way more reasonably priced than they're not like worse displays like, 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. OK. 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 display port 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. You 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 three thousand dollars on most monitors. You plug it into your computer. But you can also plug something else into it if you need to. Right. Well, you could do it on iPhone. I'm a iPad with the studio display. Can Apple plug into it? Kind of. Yeah. But you still don't have you would not have control over its brightness and contrast. No, this is like 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 four hundred dollar monitors. It's it's really not. So when you know, 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. You are 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. You can't see on the video, but over over on this side of my desk, I have Apple Thunderbolt display from, geez, I don't know, 15 years ago. I don't know how long, 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 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 and looks looks great. The picture is fantastic. Like it's a fresh journey. I mean, the thing that like people aren't going to buy a studio display because it's $1,600. It's it's it's their their price. They've priced a lot of people out of that market. Yes. Yeah. I wish they made a 999 version because Apple displays are really, really good. I mean, the version that they sell now should cost 999. Right. Like the way they built it, but they could build one. No, I mean, I mean, the way they built it. I mean, with the aluminum and the A19 and the storage and the RAM and the everything they have about it could be 999 and you would look at it as a consumer and say, well, gosh, that's that's an expensive Apple tax monitor. But it looks nice and it's got the webcam and stuff in it. Like $1,600, $1,500 is just bonkers money for what it is. Just absolutely crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I don't think that they're making like like they're probably still making their 28 to 32 percent. I just think it they chose a path that is is unnecessarily high end. No, no, no, of course, my problem as a consumer. Yeah, you know, I'm not defending it. What I'm saying is I wish they would have prioritized a price point that was lower because it's a nice display. And Apple makes really nice displays and they've always been just a little bit too expensive for mass consumption. Anyway, you can read Jason's studio display and studio display, actually our reviews on our site and Roman will put them in the. I always say show notes. I don't even know what that is. Like I don't know where they'll I don't know where those things live. I guess under the video or Spotify gives you like a like a thing to write on. OK, so yeah, you can you'll find that stuff. OK. All right, we do do that. Every Thursday or whatever. But anyway, thanks, Jason. All right, Roman. We're about an hour. Let's let's let's let's let's wrap this up with a comment. Order. Yeah. OK. We got a couple emails. We talked about Siri like a few couple shows ago, I think. Michael K via email wrote, will the most popular feature of Apple intelligence be to block ads? Will it even be possible to block Apple ads? So that's also in response to an article Jason wrote about maps showing ads in an upcoming update. Yeah. So. And then Ozzie Dave wrote via email. I am thinking that AI is now the new scary thing in the computing world for many people. I think Apple has a great opportunity to develop and market safe AI computing if they can develop their own AI and ensure it is quarantine, transparent and robust. I think many people would be enticed to change platforms. I think there is a truth that like there's a lot of Apple does have an opportunity to position their AI as differently than the chat GPT and Claude and all these other things that just like sort of slurp up all the personal information in the world and all, you know, that's a safe, like you said, the safe AI. They do have an opportunity to present that. There's people who just hate AI for what it is and for how it's made and for the gigantic and and flagrant copyright violations necessary to train it and everything else. Like, and then you're never going to convince those people and they may have a point. But there are, I think, a significant number of other people who just kind of worry that like AI knows too much about them or the company knows too much about them. And Apple has an opportunity there. Yeah. It was something of a stroke of genius to call it Apple intelligence because they don't actually have to use the word AI, but they can talk about it all the time. Artificial. Artificial to Apple. And there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And then our final email comes from it's a follow up to when we were talking about the MacBook Neo, Doug via email said they aren't MacBooks, but Chromebooks are easily the most resilient laptops out there. Barnan, they are used by careless students who don't DGAF and road warriors who beat them like rented mules on a daily basis and they just keep on running. Doug also asked me to make sure that I don't make it sound like he's mad about us putting down Chromebooks. So I hope I did that justice, Doug. But yeah, we get your point. I understand your point that, you know, there is a purpose for MacBooks and they're used by people who don't necessarily take care of their devices. Chromebooks. As you get Chromebooks. As you get down to that lower price point and the industries that buy bulk $500 laptops and stuff. Yeah, you get people who aren't really trying to take care of it. And so the Neo is going to be entering into that market. It's going to be very interesting because you can sit there and use one compared to a $500 Chromebook or something. You go like, yeah, it's got less keyboard flex and all this other thing. Like this could be a more durable thing. But our complaint about Chromebooks has always been the utility of them, not their longevity. And I will say this from personal experience, my son was assigned a Chromebook in school and he had to pay 30 bucks last year because he broke some part of it. So there's that. And also this year, the school has a policy that you're not allowed to bring them home anymore because too many of them were breaking. So they do, they do can't they can withstand maybe abuse, but not completely. So I think the MacBook Neo in that regard, being aluminum and also being nice enough where I think the kids who use it would not want to toss it in their bag. I think that I personalize it with stickers and then they'll like it. I'm really curious to see what's going to happen, say, a year from now or whatever where or even two years when school districts start, you know, by making purchase orders for upgrading their, you know, students technology and stuff like that. And there's going to be a movement from Apple to be in that market, to be in that thing where it's like, oh, you need five hundred laptops, you know, we can sell you five hundred Nios. Here's the management software. Here's all the things you can do and everything. I'm very curious if we're going to start seeing a real movement in those, you know, sort of district wide, large scale purchase technology purchases. Yeah, for sure. I think it'll probably start with, you know, school districts that are in a little bit more affluent areas. But as the price comes down, maybe next year, that four ninety nine laptop is three ninety nine for schools, you know, like Apple has a lot of flexibility here. And that does it for comment quarter. And that does it for this episode of the Macro podcast, episode number 978. Thank you to Jason Cross. Thank you. Thank you, Roman. Thank you, sir. And thank you. You know, I still have my name in this stupid thing. And thanks for tuning in. You guys could subscribe to the Macro podcast and the podcast app on Spotify, on YouTube, at our Macworld podcast channel or through any other podcast app. If you have any comments or questions, contact us through Blue Sky Facebook threads, search for Macworld. Look for the blue mouse logo. Comment under a video. Comment under a post. Send us an email to podcast at Macworld.com. Send us a personal email. Just get us a message somehow. And you can join us in the next episode of the Macro podcast where Roman, that's next week, right? Yeah. So we're going to have David Price on to talk about the iPhone 17. That'll be next week and all right. See you next time. I was only having fun. Wasn't hurting anyone. And we all enjoy the weekend for a change. I just ran to the combat zone. I walked through the bed, but I alone. You know, my motorcycle in the rain. And you told me not to drive. But I made it home alive. So you said that only proves that I'm insane. You may be right. I may be crazy. Oh, but it just may be a lunatic. You're looking for. Turn out the lights. Don't try to say. Maybe. Maybe. Wrong. For all I know, you may be right.