AirPods Max 2 review, Apple’s anniversary, Mac Pro discontinued

Mayo, you thought you found a pretty good April Fool's joke yesterday morning, didn't you? But it turns out it wasn't. Oh, yeah. April 1st, wake up, get on social media. Someone told me the Studio Display XDR is now cheaper. It's like, no. Oh, never. Well, I mean, what a great April Fool's because they got a lot of margin to play with it. But actually, it was kind of true. Uncharacteristically, Ample's actually dropped the price on a product by about 12% within releasing it, specifically the Studio Display XDR without the stand. So the one that comes with the visa amount that configuration is now $400 cheaper. When they launched it in early March, they were both $3,299. Like that was just the price, whether you got it with the stand or without the stand and got the visa amount. But they've come to their senses and realized that it doesn't cost them as much money to make a little amount than it does to make the entire stand. And now they reflect that in the purchase price. So you can actually save $400, which I think a lot of high-end buyers do, right? Like a lot of people that are buying Studio Display XDRs have their own custom desk setups, already have visa mounts, because a lot of the time they want to do two side by side, so they have the dual visa mount thing. And I mean, if you bought two of them, you'd basically save $800, which is a significant amount of money. And Apples confirmed that they're going to give refunds to everybody that already bought it at that price. If you read the press release, it's definitely written as like, it's just $3,299. So it's not like the store had a pricing error and that they only caught later. I just think they had a strategy change, or maybe someone asked them, like, why is it the same price? And then they changed it. Yeah, it made zero sense that the version without a key component of the product was the same price as the version with that key component. Except that the Studio Display Non-XDR has the exact same thing. The Studio Display Non-XDR, the visa mount version is the same price as the... Yeah, the base Studio Display. Really? Yeah. It's been the same like that with like the 2022 and the 2026. It's the Studio Display Non-XDR is $1599, whether you get it with the tilt adjustable stand or the visa mount adapter, you can then buy the tilt and height adjustable stand for X400. Right, okay. But if you get the basic stand or the visa mount is the same price, they only charge you the $400 for the height adjustable version. But this is definitely intended, because like if you go, when you buy Studio Display Non-XDR, it gives you those configuration options, what stand you want, what glass you want. Well, before April 1st, they would put the glass as the first choice in that page, because it would let you pick between stand, glass and nano texture. Now, they put the stand as the first choice, because it actually shows the lowest price you can buy the display for. So like it's very much intended. It wasn't like a weird glitch. But yeah, I don't know what triggered them to change their mind within a month of releasing it, but certainly makes it a bit more compelling. Yeah, so does it change your calculus at all on whether you're going to buy a Studio Display XDR? No, if they came to their senses and put more than one port on the back of it for display input, that might actually change my mind. Well, that's never happening. But otherwise, listen to plus this week where we talk more about display ideas. But yeah, if they had another port on it, I could actually consider it. But at that price point, I just can't do it. Because part of the appeal of the XDR, the Apple Studio Displays, is the nice stand. Like the stand is cool, right? And it's so smooth. I use it in the store and you can like go up and down and you can move it with a finger and it feels perfectly balanced and stuff. But if it's only got one port, I'm going to need two monitors at my desk, one for the PC, one for the Mac, and that means I'll need these amount of configurations so I won't be able to even use the stand. It does stink slightly less than if I did that when I spent $400 for a Visa Man adapter. But yeah, it's not enough to tip the scales, unfortunately. And of course, the other April 1st occasion was Apple's 50th anniversary. So I don't think we actually ever really talked about it on the show in terms of Apple's plans to celebrate. And Tim Cook posted a letter on Apple's website a couple of weeks ago. Then what they did basically, what Apple did to celebrate was they held a series of celebrations around the world. So it started in New York City. They did a concert at Grand Central Station with Alicia Keys. That one was really weird or weird but also cool because it was like a pop-up concert. Nobody knew it was happening. Then gradually they did more in other places around the world. Like at the Apple Battersea campus in London, they did one with Mumford and Sons, did one in Australia, Singapore, China, a whole bunch of these just kind of pop-up concerts around the world. But then what was kind of weird, I thought, was that April 1st rolled around. And from a public-facing perspective, they didn't really do anything except change the homepage on apple.com and Tim Cook tweeted. I feel like they were hyping it up so much that the actual anniversary came and it was kind of just like crickets. Yeah. What they did was kind of what they expect them to do, i.e. not much. But then if you go back to the start of the year, when it was like, oh, this is Apple's 50th year of being in business, well, they don't normally take too much care about celebrating anniversaries like that. Because it's the classic jobs-thing, like always look forward, don't reflect on the plus, blah, blah, blah. But then they spent the blast follow up a few weeks being like, oh, we're going to make a special moment of it because this is too good to miss or whatever. And then the day comes and they basically did nothing at all. So it was a bit of a letdown. Like even the homepage change, it wasn't even that good. They just had this very basic like sketch art animation. I thought they were going to do like a big homepage takeover, like a big timeline of all their big events, big announcements and products from the last 50 years. And you'd be able to scroll through and it would be, you know, like have some, something of value there, like a meaty thing instead of there's like one page, here's a little animation. Thank you for being an Apple fan. Like they did a few interviews and stuff. Like they had some press interviews arranged, some execs. But I really think the day itself was a bit of a disappointment because I thought they were based on what they were doing in the run up to it. And the fact that like, if they were, the way they framed it with Tim Cook doing his public letter, what, like two weeks in advance, I was like, Oh, they're going to, they're getting this out now because they're going to have a big, a big thing for the actual day. And then the day comes and they didn't, instead they should have just had the letter be released on the day. Like if they'd have done the Tim Cook letter on April 1st, it would have been a bit more momentous. Instead they did it in advance. And then the day came when it was a lot of buildup for not much. The one thing that they did do on the 31st, so the night before the actual anniversary was they did a concert at Apple Park with Paul McCartney as the headliner and all of the clips and the pictures and everything I saw from that. I don't know if you saw them too, Mayo, I'm sure you did, but it looked incredible. Like seeing the rainbow stage at Apple Park properly transformed into like a concert venue, all the Apple employees. And Paul McCartney did like a full set. Like a lot of times when you see an artist do one of these corporate gigs, they do like a half set or like a modified version of their usual tour. But Paul McCartney did the full thing. He had all of his, his fireworks, his pyrotechnics, everything. It was a full fledged Paul McCartney concert in the center ring on the rainbow stage at Apple Park. Like that is like a, I would have tried to sneak in the building if I was in Cupertino. Like that would have been so much fun. Yeah, but that's the point. It's not public facing. Yeah. It was employee private concert. Exactly. And they should have, they should have, or they should have released the video from it. Like I'm hoping they were filming it because like they filmed the Steve Jobs tribute concert after he died that they did an infinite loop. I really hope they were filming this and they have plans to release it or they filmed it and it's going to leak at some point. So on the newsroom article, they've updated it to include some clips. Like a couple of seconds of video from the Paul McCartney concert. But it's unclear if they're just doing that as like, newsroom promo if they actually filmed the whole thing for full release. It might be a case where because it was, they had to be employees like letting loose it. They might want to do it as a private affair rather than potentially showing people's faces and stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's true. So I was kind of hoping that they, you know, they did a pretty big song and dance privately that they'd have something equivalent for the general public. Obviously they're not going to do a public concert, although they did in the old days with the iTunes, you know, they did the iTunes concert in London, the iTunes festival for years and years and years in London. They gave up on that. But like some kind of big video thing, that's what I thought was going to happen. Like they'd have some big video release on the 1st of April and they just, they just didn't. You mentioned the Tim Cook interviews that he did for the 50th anniversary. And there were two that I thought were really good. There was one in Esquire, which was like a full on kind of profile of modern Apple of Tim Cook. And I really enjoyed that one because I think the interview, it both touched on the history. And then it also, it did a good job of pushing Tim Cook on some of the things people complain about with modern Apple, particularly like the political side. And Tim Cook's been asked about that before. And in this interview too, he gave his normal like, I don't want to be on the sidelines yelling, I want to be in the room where it happened. The Trump administration's very accessible. That's great. They can, they'll listen to you whether or not they agree, which that's all fine. Like he said that before, but he also specifically did call out how, despite what Apple is doing now and what they realistically, what they have to do to protect the company, despite all of that, he was adamant that Apple's values have not changed. So the values of Apple and his personal values are the same today as they were when he first joined Apple in the 90s, which that was just a perspective that I don't think we've really heard him express before. Or he's expressed that blatantly in recent years. Because the common thread in response to some of the political things Apple does is like they're destroying the reputation, they are changing Apple, they are not the same company that they were. And even though from an outsider's perspective, it certainly does look like that. If you take Tim Cook out of his word in this interview, which he did seem genuine, like the interview has the full transcript of that interaction about Trump, about the politics, about the values, if you take him out of his word, like, which I do, that's a nice reassurance, I think. So I really enjoyed that Esquire piece. Yeah. I mean, cynically, what's the point of having values if you're not going to fight for them? Yeah. At least you've got the values of the first place, you know? Like, I don't, like we speculated this on the show before, obviously I don't necessarily support like ambivalence, but you can totally understand why Apple does it, right? Because it protects the company and I wouldn't expect to see one of the biggest companies as well to act any differently. I also liked the Wall Street Journal video they did, where it was like Tim Cook going through some of the things that like the Apple Archive is to dig up. So they have some like old iPhone prototypes, some iPod prototypes, and they had like some news articles and stuff. Like the Wall Street Journal found the first mention of Apple Computer in the Wall Street Journal, and it had the newspaper article of Tim Cook joining Apple in like the 1997 or whatever. Apple hires Tom. It was like compact, you know? Cook of compact joins Apple inside Jobs May Stay. Like such a nice framing of his tenure, right? I mean, Apple is 50 years old, but some of this stuff is definitely tinted by the idea that like it's the home stretch for Cook, right? Like, you know, of the Apple at 50, Cook's basically been there, what, 27 years, 28 years, if not a bit more? 28, yeah. Basically almost 30 years at this point. So there is the, and obviously, succession continues to bubble around in the background. And he again rebuffed it. He's like, oh, you know, that day may come, buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. But he set the stage for this in 2021, 2020. He said he didn't see himself being at Apple by the end of the decade. And so ever since then, it's just been the hot button topic who's taking over. Obviously, Ternis is going to take over at some point, but we don't know when. And some of these Apple at 50 coverage is like a kind of a reflection on the Tim Cook era of the company, right? Yeah. And I felt that the Wall Street Journal framing of it was quite nice. Like it wasn't super combative, but it was, it gave you a different angle on things. And you get some genuine cook reactions in that video that you don't always get right when he's super PR trained. It was funny too, in the interview, the Wall Street Journal columnist who was Ben Cohen, I think he asked Tim Cook, he's like, have you seen this stuff before? And he's like, no, I've seen a lot of these prototypes, these, all this archival material right now in the lead up to the 50th anniversary. And throughout Apple Park 2, I saw pictures from some employees they had like, I think it was in Cafe Max, they had like all of the IMAX, all of the design errors of the IMAX laid out. They had all of the design errors of the iPhone. A really fun version of Apple, I think, that's typically not very introspective. And you can hear Tim Cook kind of, I don't know if he's forcing himself, or it's very hard for him to do these interviews and do these conversations where he's looking back, because that's something again, just not in Apple's value to look back. They look to the future, blah, blah. But he did get retrospective in a lot of these interviews. And it was really cool. Yeah. And there's like a undercurrent of emotion there. You know, like it doesn't always come out. Yeah. It was well framed. But yeah, I just kind of wish Apple itself had done something slightly more public. Like the display they did in Apple Park of all the old products, they could have like staged that at Fifth Avenue or something, you know, just to put a bit more on public display, but they didn't do that. Better they could have at least posted pictures of it. I had to find out pictures from employees. Like, okay. Yeah. It's all a bit like, oh blurry iPhone photos that we're not 100% sure if they're allowed to take, released rather than like Apple doing something on its own. In the Wall Street Journal interview, Tim Cook said the first song he listened to on his iPod was Hey Jude by the Beatles. And I was like, I don't know if he's just saying that because he knows Paul McCartney is about to perform at Apple Park. Or if that's true. If it's true, then it's a fun, it's a fun like full circle connection for sure. I mean, my memory is no way negative enough. Remember the first song I played on the iPod? That's for sure. Mine was probably Coldplay. So whenever we have 50 years of 9 to 5 Mac and Coldplay is the headliner, I'll be able to say that in an interview. One thing I did see, which was like an interview with Joe Zuiak and they were talking about like, it was like, oh, what's Apple going to be like in the next 50 years? And it was framed as like, the Apple will still be selling iPhone in 50 years time, right? And the quote is something like, well, we can't envision a future without the iPhone, etc., etc., etc. Insert some jaded comment about AI devices here. I kind of don't really like those things because like 50 years is such a long time frame, you know? The interviewer and all the executives are going to be around in 50 years time. So you can literally just say anything. And it's like, who knows? Especially in a current world where the iPhone, the product is at most, you know, it's not imminent threat, but it's under the most threat it's ever been, right? On the apex of the technological sphere, right? Like we finally get to the point where maybe someone could argue that maybe the smartphone will be replaced by something soonish, but not, you know, tomorrow. And they just kind of like flippantly dismissed it as well. 50 years time, the iPhone has to be around blah, blah, blah, blah, but like, nobody knows. It's such a long time frame. You go back 50 years, Apple's making circuit boards out of a garage, right? Like no one knows what 50 years can hold is such a long time frame. And so stuff where they're like, oh, let's look 50 years forward. It always kind of rubs me the wrong way a bit because you can literally just say anything and no one can be held accountable because literally everybody will be dead by the time those pledges come true. But overall, a decent Apple at 50 moment, but I was hoping they'd have something a little bit more for the actual day itself. And it just kind of peed out a bit. Did it prompt you personally to do any reflection on your time using Apple products and developing for Apple platforms? A bit. A bit. I think it happened more when we had like the 10th anniversary of the iPhone or like when they sell their billionth iPhone stuff. That felt a bit more because the Apple at 50 thing is a bit before my time. Yeah. Like there that was kind of my perspective. It was like a good reminder of how much of Apple's history that I and we have not really been a part of. My interest in Apple started in the mid era of the iPods, like the iPod Nano kind of. And then you hear some of the other people in the community like John Syracuse and Jason Snell. They've been a part of Apple for so much longer. I don't know. It was weird. It almost gave me a bit of like imposter syndrome. You know, like I was not involved in the vast majority of the history of this company. Yeah. And if you say Apple at 50, most of the coverage is really about like the first 25 years because that historical record of that is so filled out at this point because everybody's either retired or died. So everyone's done their memos and their biographies. The more recent period, i.e. the stuff which kind of we grew up in with jobs back at the company in the 2000s. Like some of that stuff has eaked out a bit. Like you have like the Ken Kishenda book about, you know, the iPhone keyboard and there's some iPhone coverage and stuff. But a lot of it people aren't ready to talk about yet and break their NDAs on. Right. Most of, you know, a lot of the employees are still working at the company. So it's not, it's just not going to happen. So the kind of half of the Apple at 50 history just hasn't been told and it won't be told for another 20 years. Like you kind of have to wait for the next era to take over. Like you kind of need the Tim Cook transition to finish and then what the current executive team did to part before we get the kind of detailed coverage that we get of like the first 25 years of Apple for the 25 years that are, you know, more relevant to me and you. I mean, I was born in 95. So like when I was born, technically, Joel's been back at the company. But by the time I can actually think for myself, you know, it was a jobs run organization and practically speaking, didn't really become a personal interest until around 2010. Yeah. Which is well into the iPhone era at that point. And, you know, the iPod and stuff a bit before it and iTunes and stuff. But really it was like 2010 when I started paying attention significantly. So yeah, for us, the Apple at 50 thing is kind of still a bit too time shifted to be super relevant. It was interesting thinking about like how much of all of my career is based on this company. I have never had a job that is not nine to five Mac. So that was an interesting like moment of introspection. Like this company gave me what I do today and what I hope to do for honestly the rest of my life. But yeah, beyond that, it's like, I feel like Apple at 75 will be more when people like me and you like this generation, we're ready to like look back and we can tell the kids like, yeah, back in 2020 Apple did Apple Silicon. It was like, yeah. And now it's like back in whenever Apple did PowerPC. It's like, no, that's not really us. When the time comes to reflect on this era back in our day, Apple sold the iPhone, you know, like they'll be on to the next. Yeah. Happy hour this week is sponsored by HelloFresh. Check them out at hellofresh.com slash happy hour 10 FM. Do you find yourself always ending up making the same meal and repeat comfortable, easy, but it's so uninspired. And let's be honest, a bit boring. 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I struggled a bit with my AirPods Max to review, because there are so many things that haven't changed. And for so many people, those things that haven't changed are just flat out, understandably, deal breakers for them. So that's the design and the weight mainly. They do not fold. There's no way to make them smaller, to stick them in your backpack. And they're heavy. They still weigh the same. They weigh 13 and a half ounces, I think. But what I struggled with was acknowledging that for people who don't like the design, who don't find them comfortable, AirPods Max 2, they don't change that. If you didn't like AirPods Max 1, you're not going to like AirPods Max 2. And then also looking at it from my perspective, which is that I like the design of AirPods Max. So I'm glad, like borderline glad that they didn't change with AirPods Max 2. Like I've worn them almost every day since December 2020, when they first came out. They're comfortable. They fit me well. And I think visually they look just, I think they're the best looking over ear headphones out there. Like I look at Beats products and Beats makes some really great over ear headphones. They make foldable versions. They make versions that have the built in three and a half millimeter plug. They fold up. They fit small in your backpack. And that that's a great segment and Beats makes great products. But AirPods Max 2 look infinitely better, which they should for the price, but the aluminum, the stainless steel arms, like all of that is super premium. But it was weird writing the review and saying that these things that a lot of people hate, I like. Like do you get what I'm saying? Like it was a weird angle to take, I think. And I guess the improvements to the sound quality and the noise cancellation are notable, but they're not enough to change the calculus for people that were never going to buy them before. Right. You're not going to be willing to overlook the discomfort of AirPods Max or the weird non folding design or the weird case because the sound quality or active noise cancellation on version two is so much better than version one. Yeah. Though like white and cost still exist. Yes. It's a bit like the vision pro. Is the vision pro headphone. This is like an era of Apple where I benefit by having a big head because my head can hold up the way to vision pro better than most people and it can hold up the weight of AirPods Max to them than most better than most people. But on the, the, so the big, there's three main hardware changes, which is the H two chip replaces the H one. There's a new high dynamic range amplifier for better sound quality. And there's a new five gigahertz wireless chip for improved wireless audio latency. The H two chip I think is, I mean, obviously it's overdue. It should have come years ago. But if you look beyond that, the features that it enables are great. Like I'm thrilled to have adaptive audio, which kind of balances and adjust the levels of A and C and transparency based on the environment around you. That is the mode in which I almost always use AirPods pro. So to have that on AirPods Max, I think is great. Then there's conversation awareness. I, I hate conversation awareness. I always turn that feature off live translation, not as applicable on AirPods Max, I think as on AirPods pro. Then there's things like voice isolation, better audio recording, personalized volume, which is kind of useful. Siri interaction. So you can like shake your head up or down or left to right to interact with the Siri, like response. I do that a lot, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, do you not get the, um, do you know when you're walking around, you get the, uh, Oh, I want to start a workout now. Do you want to do that? You know that? That alert. I always start my workouts manually. I like, I'm very particularly. Mostly it comes from when I'm just walking around, right? I don't really consider it a workout. That's true. But you work out for 10 minutes. Like, we think you're doing an outdoor work. Do you want to record it? And before you have to like, you know, I don't like speaking to nothing. So the whole like replying with voice is like, I'm not just not going to do that. So, you know, I'm get my shirt cuff, like roll it up, roll up the sleeve, look at the watch, tap the button on the screen. Now with the little Siri interactions, you just do a little head nod, boop, boop. And you can carry on walking. It's actually quite good. And if you get a phone call when you don't want to talk to someone, you do a little shake left and right. It's really subtle. Like you don't have to do massive movements. So I'm a big fan of that feature. Do you use the announced notifications feature? For some. For some. Okay. I have that turned off for everything. So that I would probably use the head nodding more if I had announced notifications on, but as of or on a day to day basis, I don't, I've almost never used that feature. But also all of those features on AirPods Max 2, they're great. They're just as good as they've been on AirPods Pro. One thing I think that we've forgotten about as the H2 chip came out in the AirPods Pro so many years ago is just how much better it is from a reliability and speed perspective than the H1 chip. Like with the exception of adaptive audio, which I noticed right away, the other H2 change that it was on AirPods Max 2 is just how much faster it is to connect to your phone. The automatic device switching feature like actually works. It stays connected better. Like all of just the day to day quality of life things with H2 are just incredibly noticeable on AirPods Max. Yeah. I mean, you're running firmware that is like continually updated, right? Whereas the AirPods Max 1 with H1 was kind of stuck in a frozen in a past of several years ago, where obviously all of Apple's other attention was delivering software updates to the H2 platform because that's on AirPods Pro and obviously it will be base AirPods 2. The sound quality, which Apple says is better because of that high dynamic range amplifier, it's better. Like I can notice it a little bit and I notice it in certain songs and certain like types of music. Like it seems to be the improvement seems to be more on the low end. So things with a lot of bass, it's almost kind of like it gives the AirPods Max. It brings it a little bit closer to the beats sound signature, which is very base heavy. Like beats is always emphasized the lower end. And that's kind of what I noticed on AirPods Max 2, but it's not a dramatic difference, which is kind of what people say they did from AirPods Pro 2 to AirPods Pro 3. Yes. Yeah. You know, push the base curve a little bit more, which can kind of be viewed as masking that there's not any other real changes to audio quality because people notice when the bass changes. They don't really notice when other things change, I think. So it's a good way to make it seem like it's better when really maybe all they did was adjust the sound curve a little bit. Yeah, like cook the books. Yeah, cook the books. Yeah. The active noise cancellation. Apple's metric is like 1.5 times more effective. I don't have any idea what the hell that really means. Like how do you quantify that? What does more effective mean? It's not necessarily better, but maybe it is better. But in just day to day testing and day to day use, it's definitely better. Like it's not the jump that I think AirPods Pro 1 to AirPods Pro 2 was, but it is better. And I think the difference there is just the difference in form factor. Like AirPods Max inherently have a higher level of noise cancellation because they fit over your ears. So there's less computationally that they can do or less sorry, less hardware changes that they can make to improve noise cancellation. Yeah, like the lowest levels of noise are already dampened by the physics, right? The software. Everything has to be done computationally, which the H2 chip helps a lot in that. But like on the day that my AirPods Max 2 came, we were having some landscaping work done. So there was there were people outside like with leaf blowers and other machines. I don't really know what they were, but I was switching between AirPods Max 1 and AirPods Max 2 to try and see how well each of them blocked out that noise. And AirPods Max 2 did a much better job. Like AirPods Max already had good noise cancellation, but this went like the extra a few further steps, you know, like just better enough that you will notice it. I am looking forward though to trying AirPods Max 2 on a plane because I feel like one way the original AirPods Max really fell down was with that like constant hum of the plane engine. Something about the frequency of that or the sustained just constant hum like really seems to throw AirPods Max off a little bit, at least AirPods Max 1. So maybe I'm hoping that that's better with AirPods Max 2 and maybe that's something they specifically addressed in changing the computational audio side of things. But I haven't gone on any planes in the past week, so I wasn't able to test that. Ultimately, though, I think AirPods Max 2, like what I said at the start is basically the gist of it. If you liked AirPods Max 1, these are great update just because of the quality of life improvements for enabled by H2, the better ANC, adaptive audio is just fantastic. I love that feature. But none of it is a big enough improvement to for someone who didn't like the design or the weight to overlook those drawbacks and buy AirPods Max 2 when they didn't like AirPods Max 1. Yeah, the biggest crime here is that the H2 chip delivers so many improvements, but why did we have to wait six years for them to give it to us? That's another thing I struggled in the review with because I don't want to be like, I don't want the whole review to be, you should have done this four years ago. That's not a great angle for somebody thinking about buying a product. It's like they want to know how the product compares, not that maybe the product should have been updated three or four years ago. Yeah, that's more like a comment on the vitality of the product line rather than the individual product, right? But it still applies. I mean, that's what hurts the most is that Apple's most expensive headphones, they went through a version where they changed nothing but the port to then also then do the chip upgrade that they could have done at the same time as the port. But another three years on, right? Like, AirPods Pro 2 with H2 came out in what, 2022? Yes. And in the intervening years, the AirPods Max got nothing. Meanwhile, Apple kept delivering more and more software features to the Apple Pro and even the basic AirPods because they ran on the H2 platform. And it just took them so long to get AirPods Max on to H2. And it's almost like if you wait another year, AirPods Pro might be on H3 and then we're going to be in the same boat again. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Which is going to be very annoying. But, you know, for the company that talks about hardware, software and services integrated together, it's like, yeah, integrate your hardware and your software can be the same across your platforms. But I don't understand what the hierarchy is inside the company that meant AirPods Max was so, well, had to lag so far behind. You mentioned the vitality of the product. And I think one thing that this update to AirPods Max does do is it signals Apple does not have further plans for a dramatic change to the product. So if you've been waiting in hopes that Apple would revise the design or make them lighter, you've been holding out and not buying anything because you are waiting for that. This gives you the indication that that's not going to happen. And now you should just look elsewhere and buy something from Sony or Beats or the Sonos headphones or something because AirPods Max 2 are not for you. And Apple's commitment to the product line is nothing more than delayed chip upgrades. Yeah, this might be the only Apple's next update in the entire decade. Nothing that they've done kind of signals they're going to accelerate their designs. I mean, they could do. They could have a more significant revision in a couple of years, but you wouldn't bet on it. Mark Gurman this week continued his slow drip of features coming as part of new Apple intelligence and Siri enhancements with iOS 27. I feel like he's just publishing report after report, each of which contains one or two new tidbits. Like, I don't know if he has all the information and he's holding it back to gradually release it with time or if he's just continually getting new information. But this feels like the fifth or sixth report like this we've gotten recently. This one specifically focuses on Siri's ability to multitask. So Gurman says that Apple is developing the ability for the voice assistant to parse and handle multiple requests from a single prompt. So the example he gives is asking Siri to check the weather, create a calendar event and send a message all within one prompt. This is not something you can do today. You have to do individual prompts for those three things. To me, I didn't interpret this as really being new information because my interpretation of the original announcement about the in-app actions and the app intent stuff as part of Apple intelligence in iOS 18 was that it would work exactly like this, right? Like, yeah, you're just stringing together multiple intents into a request. Like, I was under the assumption that this is how it was meant to work from day one. I mean, they demoed like, look at this photo and make it pop, right? And it did like multiple edits in one request. Or the check the flights example, like they didn't have to go find the flight from my mum, search for the message that says that like they were already implicitly they were chaining all things together into one action. So I guess this is more explicit of a confirmation and also that it will work like across different domains in one go. So like you could ask for the weather while also doing something completely unrelated in the reminders thing. But yeah, I mean, this was kind of if not said explicitly, it was very much implied in the original thing. Because I think one of the original demos or maybe it was something like JG or Federici said in the interview was that you'd be able to say, okay, look at this photo, crop it, make it pop, and then send it to John in messages or something like that multiple app multiple command was the whole initial pitch behind the Siri can take actions in apps for you as part of Apple intelligence. Yeah. And if you're making as previously reported by Mark, a more general chatbot experience, right, in a conversation design, you can ask chat GPT like you don't have to do, you don't have to separate out what you want to do into three separate presses of the entity, right? You can just do like a stream of consciousness and it will like pass it out and give the answers. So I kind of feel like the if it was a chatbot that can do literally one thing at a time, it would be terrible, you know? So I feel like it was kind of implied by his previous things. But as we keep seeing new baiters when nothing happens, it's always nice to get some reassurance that this is actually going to like when it finally comes, you're going to be happy, you know? Like I feel that's every Mark Goemnach call now about Siri is like, we're not there yet, but some point very, very soon. Yes. We're going to deliver on everything you actually want this thing to do and we'll be happy about it. The other tidbit in the report is that Apple has explored an updated system keyboard that expands autocorrect by offering alternative words. It uses an approach that's similar to tools like Grammarly. Then he says, the final decision on releasing the keyboard hasn't been made. So who knows if it'll ship as part of iOS 27. But this stood out to me because one of the few Apple intelligence features that has shipped is writing tools, right? Like you can highlight text, tap on it, tap writing tools and have it. Check for typos and kind of clean up your writing. I use that feature occasionally, particularly for like social media posts just because it's right there and it's quick and easy. But the overall interface of writing tools does not give you a great experience for editing or proofreading longer forms of text. Like I cannot use it to proofread a 9 to 5 Mac article on the Mac. Like the interface just does not do that. And I can't tell what if what German here is reporting that it will be something that is like works alongside you like on your Mac as you're writing or if it's just going to be literally an upgraded version of autocorrect. Like I can't tell how far this will go based on what he's reporting. Yeah, because if it if it means upgraded or correct, then it's kind of different to what the writing tool stuff is because the writing tool stuff is is like it's not immediate, right? Like yes, even if you ignore the UI problems, you do write tools proofread. It takes a good amount of time before it figures it out and gives you an answer back. And if you could pass through the stupid UI, the the results and the transformations it gives you in my experience a journey pretty good. Like I think it's a decent proofread, but the UI definitely needs definitely needs work. It's a bit better on the iPhone, but obviously you don't do much. You're writing on the iPhone, right? Yes, on the Mac is pretty rough for a feature of the keyboard. You have to imagine it's more real time as in improved autocorrect. And maybe it's like if autocorrect previously would only do convert one misspelled word to something, if it can realize there's, you know, multiple good options, it can like present them both to you at the same time. And it, you know, again, all this stuff is kind of like improvements on what is there because in certain situations that already happens, right? If you do, if you type something that's a bit weird and it doesn't 100% confidence in doing a replacement, it can do like the little blue underline that you then tap on it gives you multiple options. So like all these things that exist in, you know, primitive or fundamental forms, but hopefully this will like upgrade it, be better, give you better options, better suggestions based on more advanced models, right? That's the that's the hope and dream. But yeah, go and do quite nail it down in enough detail for us to know exactly where this will land. But keyboard improvements are always welcome, right? Because like you ask a random iPhone user and they'll definitely have a complaint about the keyboard in one way or the other. So if they can at least try and make it better, that's always going to be, you know, more well received than some random feature that no one's ever heard of. The comparison to Grammarly by Mark is kind of what threw me off because Grammarly inherently is just a proofreader. Yeah, Grammarly is more like writing tools. Yeah, like it started as just like a proofreader kind of like it would analyze your text as you were typing and tell you about typos. But now it's like does everything, it does way too much, like to the point where I've mostly uninstalled Grammarly because it's so obnoxious and so aggressive. And I think I told you or told somebody at one point that if I were to ever get into like to try to like vibe code an app, what I would vibe code would be a Safari extension that is Grammarly, but without all the crap around it. I want the world's most basic proofreading Safari extension. It can be powered by writing tools. I don't know if there's like a framework that you can use for writing tools for other developers to access it. It can be powered by any of the large language models, whatever. But Grammarly has like just fully jumped the shark that I think it's not particularly useful for how I write and what I want from a tool like that. Well, it's like everything they have to justify, subscription or justify an enterprise package by adding in 500 million features. Yeah, it's also so expensive. Yeah, it's so hard these days to be an independent developer or be a small company and just do like one thing really well because people don't want to pay for it. So they have to basically do like, you know, jack of all trades kind of things where they just throw anything related to writing or words into one big thing. And you know, I'm sure you can ask your Grammarly AI chatbot like a random question or make your text sound like a pirate, you know, like everything end up just evolving into that same area because otherwise people don't want to pay for it. Did you also see that Grammarly is doing that thing where they like make suggestions on your writing and it'll say like to make this writing sound more confident, here's what Neelay Patel at the Verge would do. Oh, really? And it's like, and then Neelay takes to Threads or Blue Sky or something. He's like, we have no involvement in this. Like they are literally taking, just cribbing my name, names from journalists like Ray Wong from Gizmodo. Like he was one of them, like taking faces and names from journalists in the text space, in the writing space and saying, if you want to write in the style of Neelay Patel, here's what you should do. And it's just, it's another example of them jumping the shark. So if I were to ever to vibe code something, that's what it would be. But I'm kind of hoping that what Mark is describing here can take the place of that. Yeah, app was in a perfect spot to offer the features that you want, right? As just a system thing. And writing tools is quite close. 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Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this show. So as you hinted at earlier, Mayo, Apple keeps releasing betas without any of the Siri and Apple intelligence stuff. And that has happened once again this week. iOS 26.5 beta one. Kind of the biggest story is that there's nothing in it. Like there's no, nothing of significance for me to say for this. Suggested places in Apple Maps, there's evidence or they're kind of laying the groundwork for ads in Apple Maps. RCS into encryption is back and it seems like it will actually ship as part of 26.5. It didn't ship as 26.4. There's some new app store purchase options, like something that will let you commit to 12 months, but be billed monthly, which sounds kind of like a headache to me, but I don't know. We'll see how it's implemented. That's quite popular in other website thing like Adobe. Yeah, Adobe. That's why I said it sounds like a headache because Adobe is bad at that. Yeah, but Apple's pretty good at presenting pricing things in a decent way in the sheet where it lays out exactly what the purchase plan is going to be. So they have to offer the same functionality that other payment providers offer, but at least if you do it through the Apple sheet, it will at least present it to you in a clear way rather than trying to be mischievous about it. Yeah, then also some European Union stuff, some small couple changes to iPhone to Android transfer. Nothing exciting, no serious stuff. I think the development cycle of iOS 26 has officially winding down. Like I don't think we'll see any big changes to iOS 26. I think the focus is now on iOS 27, which we're just a little over two months away from at this point. And that better deliver is we've all been waiting. And finally this week, the Mac Pro has officially been discontinued. When Apple told me about this, I was both I was surprised that they finally made the decision. Like they finally they had to make a decision one way or the other to update it or keep selling it. So I was surprised that they finally made that decision, but I was not surprised that the decision they came to was to discontinue it all together. So it's no longer on Apple's website. If you go to the apple.com slash Mac Pro URL, it takes you back to the Mac's homepage on that little slider across the top of the Mac homepage. It is no longer there. It's kind of funny because if you have your window at a certain width, the product that now shows up instead of the Mac Pro is the accessories category, which is a picture of AirPods Max. So that's kind of funny. But yeah, so there's three laptops and Apple's lineup right now, the MacBook Neo, the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, the three desktops, the iMac, the Mac. Mini and the Mac Studio. And the Mac Studio is clearly what Apple views as the future of the quote unquote pro experience on the desktop. They even flat out confirmed to me that Apple has no plans to offer future Mac hardware. That is of course, feature Mac hardware. Sorry, what did I say future Mac hardware? Future Mac hardware. They're done. Oh yeah, they're only doing iPads for now. They confirmed to me that they have no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware. And there is an inherent hedge in that like no plans. Okay, well they could have plans tomorrow if they really wanted to. It's very similar to what they said. Oh, you're gonna, yeah, you're gonna hurt my feelings because you're gonna be at the 27 inch iMac, right? Which they did. I think they confirmed that to the Verge like with the M, not the first Apple Silicon iMac, but maybe the second one. And it was basically, I think it was when they did the first one. Was it the first one? Yeah, because I, because the iMac was 24 inches, right? And everyone was like, oh, I want a bigger screen size than they're like, we're not doing it. Stop waiting and buy one now. Yeah, it was basically what they were saying. Yeah, but yeah, the Mac Studio is the future and there's, it's been the future for a while at this point. Like the best piece of evidence that the Mac Pro is going to die is that when they brought the M3 Ultra and the M4 Macs to the Mac Studio last year, but didn't bring it to the Mac Pro, which was still languishing with the M2 Ultra. I wish I could even act like I was surprised by this or sad by this. It just doesn't make sense as a form factor in the Apple Silicon era, I think. Well, they could have made Apple Silicon chips that were more designed for a big case, right? Like, I mean, they could have. Because you could, yeah, you could have made a bigger, beefier, hotter Apple Silicon chip that would exceed the thermal limit of what the Mac Studio is, right? And at least justify a bigger case like what a Mac Pro is or, you know, some sort of tower form factor. In fact, this was rumored for a while, right? Like even Mark Goverment reported they were working on like that quad, you know, M2 Extreme chip. And I think that probably was the plan at one point. Like, do you remember when John Ternus at the end of the Mac Studio event, he was like, and that finishes our Apple Silicon transition, except for one, the Mac Pro. But that is for another day. That's just, yes, I forgot about that. When does Apple tease anything about future plans? Like, they clearly did that because, and at the time that was directly after they announced the Mac Studio, right? So I feel like that was set up for the, for the narrative to be, look, we're doing the Mac Studio. It's a great product for professionals. But the highest end workstation consumers, we're going to have something even better for you coming at some point, right? With the Mac Pro. Because otherwise, if they hadn't said that, the immediate narrative on that day would have been, well, the Mac Studio to place in the Mac Pro. But they put it out there explicitly to be like, look, we're going to do something even better, even more high end to separate from the Mac Studio for the Mac Pro. Do you know how long it took for them to deliver the M2 Ultra Mac Pro after he said that? Two years. It was almost two years. It was like a year and a half. Yeah. It was a long time. So everyone's waiting, everyone's got their hopes up because John Ternis is our saviour. He's like, here we go, we're going to do something crazy. The M2 Extreme Room was still kind of gurgling around at that time. And then what do they deliver? They deliver an identical Mac Pro to what they shipped in 2019, but with an M2 Ultra chip, which was the same chip they would then ship in the exact same Mac Studio update. And all of the other advantages of the Mac Pro from the 2019 version were dropped. So no GPU expansion, no CPU expansion, no RAM expansion. You can maybe have some PCI cards if you want for some extra storage, but that was about it. So they basically killed it when they did that. Right. But I think they probably, in their heart of hearts, were wanting to do something a bit more ambitious and it just didn't come to pass. Or when he teased it, they thought they were going to do something more ambitious and they tried it and the yields on the chips are too bad or something. And then it kind of all forward and they're like, we can't be bothered to do this. So if they were being nice, they probably should have cut off the Mac Pro when they did the M2 Ultra Mac Studio, which was 2023. I don't know. I can't explain why they let it sit around for another three years and then discontinue it and around in week and March. Like I thought they were holding it maybe for the next rev of the Mac Studio. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah. And like they'd be like, here's the M5 Ultra Mac Studio and the Mac Pro continued. But no, it's like they didn't even rev the Mac Studio at the moment. And in fact, all the terms of the Mac Studio recently is remove the highest end configuration because you used to be able to get a Mac Studio with 512 gigs of RAM and they just quietly dropped that from the websites. Now you can get 256 probably related to, you know, all the RAM shortages and stuff at the moment. But it's just kind of funny that the time they chose to actually discontinue the Mac Pro was when they made the highest end Mac Studio worse. But it's sad. Like the Mac Pro has not had a good revision for the 2013 Mac Pro was 13 years ago. Still one of the best looking Macs the whole time. Yeah. Cool as hell. But did it deliver what professors wanted? No. So then what happened to that? It sat their dormant for six years, seven years before they finally did the 2018 Mac Pro, which was a great product, but way more expensive. Like they took the price of the Mac Pro way up market because the trash can was like $3,000 and the 2019 Mac Pro was like $6,000. So that annoyed people. But otherwise it was a decent offering with expandability and modularity. The problem with that was it was a victim of timing because the very next year Apple started doing the Apple Silicon transition where even like the Mac Mini with an M1 chip was beating the 29 Mac Pro in some workflows and some tasks. And then you wait a couple more years and, you know, the M1 Mac chip just wiped the floor with it. So the Mac Pro's checkered history has not been too strong. And what we see in the rest of the lines where they do chip and chip updates, right, where they just rev it and carry on, the Mac Pro basically hasn't had that. The 2013 trash can got stuck in a thermal corner, so it never got an update of any significance. The 2019 never got an update because it was pending Apple Silicon. And then they did the Apple Silicon version, which was kind of like an awful thought because they gave it the same chip that the Mac Studio had. And then they never rev that either. So basically we've had 13 years at least of the Mac Pro never getting a revision. Like beyond the restart attempt and they've all failed. So it's not the greatest thing to go down in the history books. It's kind of sad. But if you look at current state of affairs, I think the market for the Mac Pro was so niche that whatever the reason was, they couldn't make the quad chip. It just wasn't worth the investment. It just wasn't worth the yields. Wasn't worth taking the factory and the fab space. So if you're not going to do that, there's no point in being a product. So they should have killed it in 2023 when that became clear. I guess they had some excess stock there waiting three years to get rid of. I said earlier that I wish I could pretend to be sad about this and that sounds harsh. But I think what I'm my point is that the state of the Mac Pro has been so sad and so bad for so long at this point that this just feels like the march of time. It's like, okay, they needed to make this decision. They made it. Let's move on. Yeah. Because I think the 2019 Mac Pro, I could make an argument that that's the saddest Mac Pro of all time because of how quickly it became outdated. 2019, the next year they did Apple Silicon. 2021, they released the first like M1 Pro and M1 Mac chips, like the next step in performance of Apple Silicon. They went beyond the base chip into higher end options for the first time. It was out of date so quickly. And I think personally, I think it was clear from day one that that would be the only Mac Pro to ship with that design, with an Intel chip, with the modularity that the Mac Pro is known for. Like it's just been, the writing has been on the wall for so long that the story, I think, is that it survived this long, not that it's dead. It kind of limped along. I said this in my AirPods Max review where it's like Apple has these products at the high end and they sit and they languish and they don't get updates. The pricing doesn't change. And then Apple has to make a decision whether to update them or discontinue them. Because for those products to continue sitting at their price points at $550 in the case of AirPods Max, or $6000 in the case of the Mac Pro, like that is a black eye on the AirPods lineup for AirPods Max and the Mac lineup for Mac Pro. Because there is a product in the lineup that you cannot recommend somebody buy. Because it's unclear whether Apple is committed to the product going forward. And in the Mac Pro's case, I just don't think at this point in time, it's a wise place for Apple to dedicate resources. Yeah. I mean, in the Intel era, the differentiation for the Mac Pro was that it had the Xeon chips and the main lines had like the Core i7s and the Core i9s. The 2019 Mac Pro came out of the goodwill of the 2017 Mac Roundtable thing, right? But it's such a victim of poor timing. Like this is what you want the next Apple at $50 reflections to be. When exactly did they know that Apple Silicon was going to happen and be good, right? I'm pretty sure it was 2018. So they did the Mac Roundtable in 2017. And they're committed to making a modular high-end Intel Mac Pro. As they're making it and as they're, you know, to ship something in 2019, they feel like finally designed the year before, right? So literally as they're finalizing the design for the new Mac Pro, the rest of the Mac team is realizing that it's going to be outmoded by a laptop the very year after. It's such an awkward timing thing. I'm pretty sure when they did the Mac Roundtable in 2017, the Apple Silicon plan wasn't finalized. There's been some reporting on this where it really came up in the 2018 timeframe. With, I think at the time it was the A12X or the A12Z, wherever that was on the iPad. That's what they started using as prototypes internally for Apple Silicon. And what would go on to be in the developer transition kit, right? That they released for developers as well in 2020. And that was right around 2018. So I'm pretty sure all of the pledges they did for the Intel Mac Pro for 2019 were just before that. And they probably regret it pretty soon. And they're like, oh dear, well, we have to do this now because we promised the world. And we've spent all the industrial design team energy and resources making it. Only for us to know deep down that within a year, people are going to be like, well, this thing's pointless. It's such a sad unfortunate rollout. I don't think I remembered that there was a four-year gap between the disaster 2013 Mac Pro launch and the Mac Roundtable. Yep. I thought those two were closer together for some reason. No. I'm reading through, as you're talking, Gruber's post about the Mac Roundtable, just for old times sake. And what I also had forgotten about is Phil Schiller, his insistence that in 2017, there were people who continued to buy the Trash Can Mac Pro, and they were going to continue to sell it, despite also saying that a dramatically rethought version of the Mac Pro was coming within the next couple of years. Their insistence on doing that is just so funny. They continue to do that same thing over and over again. Selling a product that is impossible to recommend to people for whatever reason. I mean, I guess Apple's scale, someone must be buying it, right? I mean, yeah. But it's got to be super niche cases. Yeah. I did not realize. So what prompted, maybe you remember better than me, what prompted them to finally do the Roundtable in 2017? Was there an inciting event? So it was the gradual buildup of discontent with the Trash Can. The butterfly keyboard was in there. The butterfly keyboard stuff was starting, but I would say the most proximate event was the 2016 MacBook Pro. Oh, with the yes, yes. Where they made it super thin and light, and they made it USB-C only. And so it got rid of all the ports. People got mad about it. Like, it was like that plus the Trash Can, basically. Yeah. The butterfly keyboard mess was a thing, but I think we were still on the first generation butterfly keyboard. At that point, they hadn't done the thing where they tried to fix it two times in a row and failed both times. So people weren't as mad about that yet. But yeah, it was the inciting event from what I can remember was like the the undergoing narrative of Apple doesn't care about pros anymore because of the Trash Can being terrible. The high-end iMacs were, they didn't do the iMac Pro. Like the thing that came out of the Mac Roundtable was the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro, both of which basically flopped in terms of their lifetime, because the iMac Pro never got revised and the Mac Pro, the only revision it got was the stupid upper silicon one. So yeah, I guess the thing that led up to the Mac Roundtable was Trash Can, the general narrative that Apple didn't care about pros anymore. I think there was like a narrative that Apple was going to replace the Mac with the iPad, like that was still prevailing at that time. And then it was the 2016 MacBook Pro, which was seen as like the apex of like, Johnny Ive cares more about making these things than a lie than caring for professionals actually need. At least that was the the mission statement, right? And that's kind of what led to the 2017 Roundtable. And the the Mac Roundtable generated a lot of good will and people came away from it happy, like the general community. But the actual products that came out of it were not so successful because it was the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro 2019, both of which have unfortunately, checkered devices. All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review, find an ad free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5Mac.com slash join, send us feedback happy hour at 9to5Mac.com. I'm on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller and Mayo. What about you at BZM? All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye bye.