Apple turns 50! — and Mac Pro turns dead

Coming up, Apple turns 50 and the Mac Pro turns dead. Griffin's first impressions of the AirPods Max 2. We bid farewell to the Mac Pro by honoring a top setup and our celebration of Apple's 50th birthday. Welcome to the Cold Mac Podcast, I'm your host, Neal DeCaney. Joining me today, D. Griffin Jones. Good morning Griffin. Good morning, I mean sorry, good evening. Y'all tripping me up there. No, don't say good evening. It always throws me off and it throws me crazy. Good evening, Leather. It's not even evening in Ohio. I round up. It's afternoon, I guess. Well, people might listen to this at any time of the day and at the time we release the show in your time, it'll be evening. Right, well anyway, I just wanted to keep it consistent. It's morning for Louis, though, isn't it? It's actually a beautiful morning. A glorious morning, thank God I'm not outside in the beautiful sunshine. Looking for bricks that fell off people's houses because of the earthquake last night. Did you feel it? I didn't feel a thing. I didn't feel it either, no. Friend of mine from the sunset apparently felt it, which I mean this is down Santa Cruz, right? So it's like 50 miles away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they said they felt it up in Santa Rosa, I saw in the paper. Crazy. Yeah, I didn't feel a thing. But we're sitting on bedrock anyway in our neighborhood, we're on a big rock. So when there was the last one that we felt, my mom who lives in Hayes Valley, her house shook like a maraca and we didn't feel anything. Yeah, usually the ones that I feel here, they're just like sudden jolts, just like one boom jolt. That's it, not like the, everything's moving. Fingers crossed, right? Find some wood, knock on it right now. Knocked. Okay, let's get on with the show. So we're going to start off a little bit different today. We're going to jump straight into a review. Griffin's been testing out the AirPods Max 2, which you might notice on his head right now. They look very shiny thanks to the window in front of him. And you know, we're going to talk about what he thinks about it. What do you think? Well, yeah, this is my first time with the AirPods Max. I never had the original $550 original models because they're $550. Yeah, the design is unchanged from the previous one, still like the giant, you know, unadorned aluminum cans on the side. I believe it's called a metal earmuff. Yeah, yeah, if that's exactly what they look like. Yeah, except, you know, like 20% larger than a regular earmuff still. I really think they've become kind of like an iconic design. Like you see somebody wearing these and you're not mistaking it for anything else. If it is, you're mistaking it for an AirPods Max, like obvious knockoff because no other headphones looks like these. It's like, you know, giant square blocks on the side of somebody's head. It's really easy to spot, you know, just like the, I don't know, it's almost becoming as iconic as like the white corded earbuds that people associate with like the early iPod days, you know, I mean, go to any airport. That's where I see them. I don't live in the, you know, tech hub city like San Francisco or Seattle, but like, anytime you go to an airport, I see at least five people wearing these things. Yeah, yeah, they seem to be popular. They seem to me to be more popular than you would think, you know, given the press about them. But like, you're right, we live in San Francisco where it's not very typical. Yeah. The materials and build quality are still excellent. Like, yeah, the design didn't change, but you know what? It's a really nice design. Like, I, you know, like the fact that the ear cups themselves are so simple, it draws your eyes to all of the details, like the little stainless steel, like little bands that you can barely see around my giant hair. But those are really nice. Like the, where they, where the little steel headband joins with the, with the ear cups themselves, it's like a spherical like ball joint in there, like a, you know, joystick on a Nintendo controller so that the, the ear cups can like freely rotate and swivel around. When you go to take them off, you pull them and then you can feel them like bottom out against like the metal sticks, like, you know, the metal touching the metal and it makes it really satisfying, like clicking noise. When you adjust the height, you just like, you know, pull the little ear cup out and the little steel bar like extends and it's like so smooth, like it's been really refined as, you know, like pulling a piston out of like a, you know, like a, like a hydraulic pin or something like that. Like it's, it's really nice. It's super smooth, not like every other pair of headphones where you pull it and it's like plastic, clacking, janky, really nice. And also the headband itself, you know, I didn't realize this, but like the little rubber around the outside that again, if you're watching the video version, you're not missing much because you can't really see the headphones. Anyway, around my tall hair, but like the little rubber around it is like the softest touch rubber you will ever feel in your life. It's, it's really nice. I didn't expect it to be that material or feel that way. That's the difference between like just looking at these things to the product videos and actually using them. The headband is really comfortable, like the little mesh that sits because it's, you know, so big and wide that it, you know, makes a really wide surface area on the top of your head, pretty comfortable. I didn't find the weight to be as bad as everybody complained about. I've heard, you know, people, podcasters talking about how heavy they are, you know, for the last five years, but maybe I'm just used to the Vision Pro because I don't really know this. You've been training for years. Right. Look at your neck. It does look pretty wide. Yeah. Yeah. You got that Mike Tyson neck. Yeah. I should put both of them on simultaneously, the Vision Pro and the AirPods Max. See that that's like, oh my God. Real workout. That I have not seen. I was kind of surprised looking at the product pictures, the cups of the headphones look much thinner than they actually are in person. Like I always thought, oh, you know, they're big metal cups, but, you know, looking at the product photos, like the, they look like they're really thin. And I was surprised that that's not really the case. I have like two other cheap headphones that I compared them with. These are the, the one, both of the ones our colleague Dave Snorrika recommended to me. These are by EarFun. And like, yeah, they're a little thicker, but not really that much. I have another pair by Edifier and they're just about the same thickness. Like they still protrude kind of a lot, especially with the big plus, like, you know, ear pads that stick to your ear. Like, you know, they, they pretty much double the thickness. So they are actually pretty substantially thick, just about the same as other headphones. There were early complaints about condensation on the inside. Do you, have you had any problems with that? I am a pretty sweaty person. However, I have not noticed condensation on the inside of my ear pods max. There was a big, there was a big, you know, that was the gate, wasn't it? The sort of sweat gate when they originally came out. There was a lot of, Yeah. And people are wearing the gym and stuff. I mean, I can't wait till you're tooling around your yard in the 98 degree Ohio summer, he mowing the grass on a lawnmower with those things. Yeah. So they, they do fit really well on my head, you know, just stationary, but I'm amazed that anybody works out in these because, well, I don't find the weight uncomfortable. I do find that anytime I get up and start walking around, they start to slip and I have to like, pull them forward again. I'm constantly readjusting them. If I'm wearing them while I'm walking around. So I don't know how people possibly like go on a treadmill or something like that with these because you're, they bounce around a lot, even just like letting my dogs out on a leash outside. Like they, they start to slip up a bit. So I don't know how people do that. Well, at least they, but they don't, I guess they don't clamp your head though, which is, you know, probably the advantage of that. Yeah. Yeah. Not as much. I mean, I will say that these, I have both large ears and large glasses. So a lot of headphones I find uncomfortable and the only headphones, typically the only headphones that stay on my head very well are the ones that give me a headache after like more than an hour. And these don't, I don't get that at all. Like the ear cup, the pads are so big and plush, much, much bigger than the little crummy like faux leather ones on these. So big and pillowy that, you know, they, they distribute the force very evenly. I don't feel it squeezing my glasses into my, into my head or anything. In terms of sound quality, obviously that's not like I can play the, the sound to you, but I came up with a good metaphor to sort of describe what the sound quality might be. So a lot of people have expressed the opinion that Apple should make a full-sized, like dedicated camera, you know, if the iPhone is so great, taking excellent pictures and its sensor is, you know, only this big, imagine how powerful and incredible like a full-sized camera made by Apple would be with like, you know, a full-frame sensor. And similarly, when I was reviewing the AirPods Pro 3, I said, you know, these aren't just good sounding earbuds for being earbuds. They're excellent sounding on their own, right? Impressive range. Well, the AirPods Max are the like audio equivalent of like, you know, going from an iPhone to a full-sized camera as it is going from the AirPods Pro 3 to a full-sized pair of headphones. Like you already think the AirPods Pro 3 sound really good. You haven't heard these, like the, no matter what kind of music you play, like just the incredible clarity that you get at like every spectrum across the, you know, human hearing frequency just sounds bigger, bolder, clearer in a lot of ways. You'll notice like so many extra layers to your music in these, you know, these are easily the best, I mean, the most expensive headphones I've ever used for an extended period of time. And yeah, I can see why people like them. Very, very great. Well, Lewis, you've got golden ears, you know, and you, you, you, you reviewed the original ones, and so they were wonderful, you know. Yeah, I love the way they sound, you know, and it's like, uh, I think, I think I was talking about like, you know, listening to a Motorhead song and you could like almost like smell the cigarette on, on Lemmy's breath, you know. It was, but yeah, they're just such an intense like separation of sound and the soundstage is awesome. I mean, everything is clear, you know, I listen to songs like Steely Dan songs that I'd listened to hundreds of times and I was hearing parts that like, maybe that I, maybe not parts I had never heard, but like heard them in a different way. And it was, uh, it was really, I mean, I, I'm not kidding. Like even as I'm thinking about that, I'm getting like goosebumps on my flesh. I can't believe I didn't buy a pair of these things, because I really did love the way they sound. Um, but I, you know, I think we were talking about it last week. It's like the problem for me is I just almost never, ever wear full-size headphones. And, uh, so, but yeah, I thought they, I thought the sound was awesome. And I've, I've listened to a lot of different headphones. Like when I did that review, I listened to some Sony ones and some, you know, all the, all the popular ones that cost like around 300 bucks or whatever. And like, yeah, okay, they're all right. None of them had that same like magical kind of, in fact, when you were talking about the iPhone, you know, you're saying iPhone camera metaphor, what I was thinking was the iPhone camera metaphor for the, for the AirPods Max is that yeah, plenty of cameras take just fine pictures. iPhone with all the computational stuff turns to just a regular quick snap into this like beautifully detailed kind of magical thing. It's just, it's just sounds, those things just sound better than other, the other headphones scientists. And I mean, I, you know, I haven't tried like super high-end headphones. I'm sure there are ones out there that are more expensive and you've got some nice bios and Wilkins, Daniel. Yeah. Yeah. And they sound good, but they did not, to me, they did not sound as good as, as AirPods Max. I'm sorry. They just, to me, and again, this is what, five years ago. So I haven't, I haven't tried them in five years, but when I was listening to music on Apple Music, by the way, I mean, I think that's a key part of this. I think if you're listening on Apple Music, there's something about the way that that service delivers streaming audio and the way that AirPods Max work with it, that is just, I think it's kind of, in my experience, unbeatable. Yeah. I should say, if you're, if you're testing headphones, don't listen to music on Spotify. Spotify intentionally compresses their music at like half the bit rate of Apple Music. And that's before you even get into the loss list or Dolby Audio or Spatial Audio. Like the one thing I hear from everybody who switches from Spotify to Apple Music is, oh my God, I can't believe how much better my music sounds. And that's just like listening to it, you know, over Bluetooth in the car with all that road noise. Like I have a lot of music in my library that's, you know, music that I imported like 10, 15 years ago from a CD. So I intentionally, you know, tried to make sure I was playing the version on Apple Music of the highest quality in Spatial Audio. You know, they're special mixes for that. In terms of noise cancellation, Apple only gives like relative weird metrics for comparing the power of noise cancellation between models and generations. Like if you go to like Apple.com slash AirPods slash compare, and you, you know, plug in a few different models, it'll say AirPods Pro 2 offer twice the noise canceling power of the original AirPods Pro and AirPods 4. And then you go to AirPods Pro 3 and it says it has twice the power of AirPods Pro 2. So you can then do the math and figure, okay, so AirPods Pro 3 are four times canceling noise power of the regular AirPods 4. And then you compare the AirPods Max 2. And it says twice the noise canceling power of the original AirPods Max, or no, not even twice, it's like one and a half times. And then you go to the original AirPods Max and it says Pro level noise cancellation. So I don't know what the conversion is between the two, but I think these are a little more powerful than the AirPods Pro 3. Well, you're getting a lot of passive noise cancellation just by the ear cups. Yeah. So that's got to account for a bit of it. Yeah. Yeah. And you also get, you know, greater passive noise cancellation on the AirPods Pro 3 because they have the foam insert inside the ear tip. And that's responsible for a lot of it in addition to the H2 chip inside these. So it seems a little bit better than the AirPods Pro 3, but not like noticeably so, you know, vacuuming, I can still hear a bit of the vacuum just like with AirPods Pro 3. It's not like the entire world is completely silent. Like you can still hear a few things. Actually not as impressive as like a difference as I was expecting it to be. Well, the Pro 3s, I don't know, you know, like when I first put them in, I thought they were really remarkable. And I'd been using the AirPods Pro 2 for a long time and they were significantly better. And it was like, I thought that was kind of, I remember thinking initially like, wow, this is, I'm in some weird bubble of silence. How did this happen? It was, it was kind of perfect. But then again, I haven't been on an airplane and test them and all been in a super, super noisy environment, you know, these are, but walking down, I, uh, walking down Mission Street, you know, walk, which is a noisy, noisy street, there's buses and all kinds of stuff going on, you know, it really did a great job of blocking all that out. In fact, kind of remarkably, so I was actually really surprised at how good it was. I think they're really good. I did try putting in both the AirPods Pro 3 inside, as I put them on the AirPods Max on top of them to test to that. I had the volume really low because I didn't want something to go wrong and like, you know, some weird electronic feedback that shrieks inside my ears. But, um, it was very tricky to do because the automatic pairing thing, you know, between your Apple devices, once you'd only have one output device, you know, so it took a lot of manual fiddling with menus to get it, you know, AirPods Pro on my iPhone and AirPods Max on my Mac, both with active noise cancellation on. And when I turned on active noise cancellation with both of them, I actually heard a little bit of white noise. But when I turned them off on the AirPods Pro, then I was immersed in complete silence, like the passive noise cancellation of the Pro 3 with the active noise cancellation of the Max outside of them. That was like, you know, cone of silence. So that was funny. I mean, you basically just stuffed up your ears. So I'm, you know, not very surprising. Yeah. Yeah. Although putting the AirPods Max on on top of the Pros, they didn't quite fit in my ear as right. Like when I took the, the Max off, they were like, you know, out pulled out of my ear a little bit. I don't know if they're like, you know, smushed up against the, against the cans of the, of the AirPods Max. How confusing are these two product names? I mean, I, I keep going back and forth between them. And if you don't know like what these are, then it's got to be really confusing. It's weird naming conventions. Next thing are the controls. So the AirPods Max have both the digital crown and the button to change the listening mode. And you can click and hold it to pair with the Bluetooth device. I think clicking that button to instantly change the listening mode is so much nicer. Like, especially if you have like, you know, if you want to toggle between three different listening modes on the AirPods Pro where you have to click and hold, it takes a long time to like cycle through all of the options, especially if you're actually starting on the mode that you wanted to begin with. And then you click to cycle and, oh, I have to click and hold it three times in a row. It's not nearly as fast as click, click, click, like super fast on the AirPods Max. I like that a lot. What I don't really like is the digital crown because on the Apple watch, it's really obvious which way you need to turn it to turn the volume up. It the way it's oriented, oh, I spin it upwards to turn the volume up. It's really obvious. The digital crown on the AirPods Max is mounted sideways. So it's kind of like a coin flip. Like, do I spin it clockwise or counterclockwise? Neither of those really scream volume up to me. So you're rolling the dice. And in system settings on a Mac, and I presume on an iPhone as well, you can change which way it is. I think the setting says increase volume by rotating digital crown. Any two options are back to front and front to back. I tried it both ways. And it's about as effective as determining whether the coin is header tails before you flip it. Because you're just changing which way it is wrong that you're going to do it the first time. And also, when you're changing the volume on a Mac, you hear a little clicking sound to indicate you're changing the volume. But the clicking doesn't get any louder or quieter. So if you're wrong, then your either like turning the volume completely off, or you're turning it up to a definite volume and you have no idea which way until the next sound plays on your computer. So I don't like that at all. It's also just way more sensitive to like the digital crown on the Apple Watch. You have to spin it like a good few times to actually make like a meaningful difference to the volume. And that's kind of like a safety feature, because it means that if you're, you know, if your finger slips, you don't accidentally turn it up way too high. But on the AirPods Max, like a single rotation 360 degrees around takes it from maximum to mute. So it's really sensitive. Like you have to be very precise. Well, I find that changing the, you know, the on the Apple Watch, the delay that, you know, I find that annoying, to be honest, because it's, you know, it's, I'd rather have it more instantaneous, but the delay is annoying. But the fact that like, you know, it takes a few swipes, it's, it makes it about as equivalent to like, you know, clicking a button a few times on your, your phone, you know, so that you don't like swipe it too far accidentally. I found that for the media controls, I just hit the play pause button and volume up and volume down from my Mac keyboard. And on my phone, I just, you know, reached for the volume keys in my pocket because doesn't work obvious how to use. Oh, the, the charging case. So, so everybody said AirPods Max, they're so heavy. And then I try them myself and that's not that bad. Is the same thing true about the charging case? No, this thing sucks. It's, it's so bad. I mean, when you, when you don't have the AirPods Max and it's just like floppy and flaccid, it doesn't instill confidence. I mean, and then you put the AirPods Max in them. Looks like a brassiere. I know. And then you put the AirPods Max inside and it's like, okay, well, these are full like aluminum cans. Are they really any more protected by this like thin little layer of like fake leather? I mean, yeah, like the, it feels nice. Like the, the felt on the inside is all soft, but then like, you really look close and like the edge where it meets like along the side, it just kind of looks like it's frayed, like, like poorly molded plastic that has like that spew on the edge of every corner. Like it, it doesn't look good. And the edges are really sharp too. Like weirdly sharp. I don't like it. It's not nice to hold in the hand. And Apple designers will tell you, oh, you know, it's so impressive how we made this entire charging case out of a single sheet that we just folded up. Like, yeah, that's impressive. If you're, if you work in manufacturing, or I guess if you're a topologist, you know, a mathematician, but otherwise it's just weird. A origami fan. Yeah. Like it, it just ends up with like this weird giant crack on the front and on the back. There's this like weird little crease where they come together. There's this weird seam down the middle. And it also means that like the part that it's supposed to cover up the ear muffs aren't completely covered up because it can't cover the corners, which are the most likely thing to hit the ground if you drop them. And it also doesn't protect the headband, which is the most likely thing to get punctured if you like throw it in a backpack and you know, a pen stabs through it. And I went back and read reviews of the original ones and they say that, you know, I think it was Evan Tanki, maybe, or maybe a different Apple designer who said, oh, well, you don't have to worry about the headband not being covered up, because we just made it strong enough. Well, okay. I don't know. I'm still worried about something puncturing through the mesh on the top. And I don't know. It's, it's garbage. I don't like it. I checked Amazon. You can buy a replacement case for $40. So I would just do that. Well, Waterstone designs, you know, it's a local company here in San Francisco. They have a nice case. Waterfield. I was just gonna say the same thing. Waterfield designs. Yeah. Yeah, they actually make a fantastic charging case. You got one reviewed it, I think, Leander, right? And it's like, oh, it's a beautiful case. It's smaller than that piece of garbage there. And it actually protects the thing. I mean, to be honest, that case, that was a real big reason why I was going, I would never, I would never actually buy these because I hate that case. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it functions. I hate everything about it. It looks like a purse. It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a disgrace because those headphones are fantastic. They sound great, but man, that case is a piece of crap. They're strong, strong opinions. I think the case was too bad. I quite liked it. It's nice and minimal, you know, like, and it's pretty easy to put it in and get them out. It doesn't take up any room. It's minimal in the way, in a way that doesn't make it a good case because it doesn't protect them at all. Well, I think it mostly protects them. Protects them. The part that's already protected because it's made of metal with a thin layer of felt. It's, yeah, well, true enough, but I mean, actually, it would be better if they folded up. I quite like the folding designs, you know, but that's a completely different design altogether. Like the Soundcore, I think the new Soundcore Pros, they fold up really nicely. They fold up to like in this kind of sphere. It's very clever. That sounds neat. I've always said, if Apple is going to do something weird and different, the end result should be something that looks obviously cooler, like the iMac G4 is like swiveling, articulating arm, but not this. This is not it. It would be really impressive if it was like, you know, a piece of like cardboard packaging, but it just doesn't work as a product. Right. That's almost what it looks like. Yeah. And it also, that's the on-off switch. Right? Yeah. So you're stuck with that thing unless you, you know, get a different case. Yeah. Other third-party cases have magnets in the right spot to put them in their special low power mode as well. I mean, the one thing that it does have going forward is that it's really easy to put it on and take it off because you just slide it in. You don't have to unzip anything, but I still don't like it. That's not good enough. That's not good enough to justify the rest of it. What color are those? What color are they? They're really nice looking. What's the color called? These are the purple ones. Silver. And I think they're just called purple. Those are purple? Yeah. Yeah, they look silver. Yeah. Freaking apple with its colors, man. It's non-colors, right? They do look very obviously purple in person. I think like the white balance in my room, because it's very yellow, sort of offsets the purpliness of them. I'd say like in terms of color vibrancy, I'd put this in the same category of like the MacBook Neo or the iPhone 17. It's really obvious that the colors are what they are in a normally white balanced room, but it's not like they're most extreme colors like the regular iPad or the cosmic orange. So the big question is, 550 bucks, are you keeping them? No. All right then. I understand. I mean, for nothing else like the case, I mean, if it was 450 and they didn't come with the case, although the cases were probably cost them about buck and a half to produce. If it was $400, I would really consider keeping them. But in the time that I spent with them, I was also really taken by the number of times that I wear my AirPods that I can't really wear over the headphones, because like it was raining a little bit yesterday and I had to take the dogs out and was like, oh, well, I don't want to take these out in the rain. The AirPods Pro are like water-resistant. I don't know if these are. So I had to like take them off, then put in the AirPods, let the dogs out, come back in, take the AirPods out, put these back on because I was testing them. And it's like, if I wasn't intentionally trying to wear these as much as possible to review them, I would just keep the earbuds in instead. Yeah. That's your point. You just cannot beat the AirPods Pro for convenience. It just can't be done. I'll just look at some of the used prices. I mean, it looks like they're going for about 200 bucks, 220. No way. That's got to be the original ones. And not these H2. Yeah, the original. Sorry, I beg your pardon. The original ones. Yeah, the original ones. But yeah, they're basically the same sound. Same sound. But the whole point of getting these ones is that they're the first actually new ones. All right. Well, there you go. Another $550 out the window. Coming back in the window. All right. Let's talk about, well, you know, this Mac Pro, this last week Apple killed the Mac Pro. It was very, very sad. I guess all six users who have one are going to be really devastated. But we have a really cool Mac Pro setup, which is probably the ultimate Mac Pro setup ever with not one, but two Mac Pros. What else we got here, Lewis, in this picture? Well, once again, it's one of these things that makes me just really just feel sad about my life. I look at my setup. It's pathetic. I look at this thing. It looks gorgeous. He's got two giant screens. What are they? 32 inch Dell screens, side by side on this giant wide desk. It's completely uncluttered. He's got these two. And oddly enough, the Trashcan Macs from one of those are 2012, I think. Black Trashcan Macs. Oh, 2013, excuse me. Sitting there on a side table with what looks to be a printer. Apparently, there's a gaming PC hooked up to this too. It looks like there's an iPad or something out of this. It's just got so much stuff everywhere. And it's all so orderly, so beautiful. Mac Pros are both six core computers. One with a two terabyte SSD, 64 gigabytes of RAM. The other with one terabyte and 32 gigabytes of RAM. More RAM than I've ever had. Bigger hard drive than I've ever had. I'm really just feeling, I'm just getting depressed here. What's going on with my life? Those two screens, you know, giant 4K Dell screens on dual monitor arm. Always thought about getting one of those too, but I never had two monitors. Apple Magic Keyboard. Logitech mouse, of course, because that's the best. This has become very existential and depressing. I'll tell you, man, you start looking at some of these setups, you go, man, people have their life together. And I do not. My desk is a disaster zone. I thought about taking a picture of it and sending it to you guys, just so you'd know. I'm not kidding. It's just terrible. Don't send it to me because we'll start doing a setup too about it. Let's see. Anything else about it? Oh my god, he's even got a Synology and I always wonder how you pronounce it. I've heard NAS, but then I was listening yesterday to a Ugreen video and they pronounced it NAS. A NAS. I've never heard it that way. People call it a NAS, right? Yeah, NAS. NAS. Yeah. I do more than S. NAS. S sound, not a Z. NAS. NAS. So here's another thing. How do you pronounce the car, the electric car company that sells the most luxury cars? How do you pronounce it? Tesla. That's exactly how it Tesla Elon Musk himself pronounces it Tesla. Jay Leno adds an R at the end. Tesla. Tesla. Well, that sounds British. Yeah. Anyway, so the Synology NAS. What did you say? NAS? NAS. NAS. NAS. NAS. NAS. NAS. Rhymes with the... Nosey. Nosey. Yeah. Okay. Big, yeah. Multiple headphones and speakers, trusty brother, laser printer. Yeah. That's actually the thing that makes me the most jealous of this thing. He's got enough room to... I keep saying he could be a woman. I don't have any idea. There's this table, a side table. So his... There. I'm saying his. So the printer, I hate saying there too. So the printer, you can actually get to it. You can put paper into it. You can take paper out of it. If you get a jam, you can get to it. Mine's like jammed underneath my desk in such a way that I hit my head every time I try to do something. This has turned into like a bad life Olympics and I'm winning. Well, if it makes me feel any better, look at that right-signal of what cable's behind. I mean, the cable management could be could be a little better. Yeah. I mean, they have the Mac Pros like on a side table and the printer, like how long are all of the cables that they use to reach the monitors because they're kind of far away and it's a standing desk as well. So that's got to be like a lot of long cables. Yeah. So you got to have some play. Yeah. Yeah. You know that I don't know how much people ever think about getting a standing desk. I love a standing desk. Used one for years now, but man, you really have to have like enough rope basically because you start moving it up and down and stuff starts shifting because the cable's not quite long enough. You know, it's a challenge. So yeah, I wonder how long it must have like 10 foot cables to get from those Macs to those monitors, right? At least. I mean, it's a nice looking setup. A lot of black though for my taste. I like, you know, a bit of a brighter room, you know, props to him for having two Mac Pros. I mean, why did he keep them so long? This post is actually from 2021 and it says they were holding out for an M1X chip. That's what we thought it was going to be called at the time. And a high-end Mac Mini in the early first year and a half of Apple Silicon, like you couldn't get a replacement for this computer. Like you couldn't get one with that much storage or certainly that much RAM until the pros came out. So I wonder what they're using now, maybe a Mac Studio, maybe the high-end Mac Mini. I don't know. At least two of them probably as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's the post that we wrote oddly enough on the X, ran this on the exact same day. Later that day, they killed the Mac Pro. I actually felt kind of guilty about it. Like did we cause this? We featured it in the newsletter. Like, you know, this is our feature story, the top 10 Mac Pro setups. And I guess that reminded somebody in Apple that they still sell that computer and like, oh, weren't we supposed to discontinue that like a year ago? Yeah. Tim Cook said, get off the website right now. I really liked the look of the final Mac Pro. I always loved that thing, you know, the giant like exaggerated cheese, greater look and all that stuff. So I was surprised that we kind of dealt with the trash cam a lot more in these setups. But again, you know, I suppose it's possible that there's just been more of them sold over the years. But yeah, I don't know. You know, that 2019 Mac Pro, it was the best Mac you could buy for all of six months. It was just really unfortunate timing. It they announced it at WWDC. It didn't come out until December of that year. And then six months later, they announced this transition to Apple Silicon. So it was a short reign. Wouldn't that be a great feeling? I spent $6,000 on the $7,000 on the computer. And now it's it's been bested by laptop. Yeah. So like if you look at one of the other ones in the setup, it's got the Pro Display XDR with that massive thing. I mean, that was a very distinctive look of those machines. Although I never noticed that they actually have the actually put the name of the thing on the back of it, Apple Pro Display XDR. I never noticed that for some reason. Maybe because you've never seen that. I mean, good. Yeah, I never have seen one in person. It's an intimidating look that gnarly, punctuated, whatever, you know, all I can ever think of is cheese. Oh, there's one. There's there's a setup that's got three rack mounted ones with the giant cheese grater front. It actually looks dangerous. It looks like shred your flesh. But I loved it. I loved the look of that. And I am sorry to see it go. I never ever used one, never have any reason to use one if he's gone over and over in all these podcasts, like, I'm typing and once in a while, I edit an image. So I don't think I need a Mac Pro. All right, let's move on. Let's talk about Apple's 50th birthday. So this week, obviously, was Apple's 50th anniversary. Apple's 50th birthday was founded on April 1, 1976 by three two steves and a guy called Ron Wayne. And, you know, 50 years later, it's kind of unlikely. It's pretty impressive that Apple has survived this long. I don't think are there any of the original computer companies still? I guess IBM, but they're not quite the same as they used to be. But all those early ones, BBC Micro, Acorn, Common Oil. Heel Packard. Heel Packard predates Apple. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's a few then. But of course, Apple, you know, went through, it almost went out of business in the mid nineties, came very, very close to shutting up Sharp. And then Steve Jobs came back and engineered the greatest turnaround. You know, I think it is probably argument that it is, I mean, it's got to be, that's the greatest turnaround in business history. Apple being one of the biggest companies in the world right now for four trillion dollar market cap. I mean, they make, what was the number I saw? They're making, I can't remember what it was. A million dollars over 90 seconds, something like that. Yeah. Something crazy like that. Mad, mad, mad, mad numbers. I mean, has any other company had such an impact on so many different fields? It's, you know, computers become so central to everyone's lives now, the iPhone and smartphones. And, you know, it's, it's revolutionized everything, culture, communication, community, so many different impacts that, that it's had an amazing company. So we want to talk about the 50 years of Apple's most important products. And, you know, I don't know the story about this, we did a post, not the greatest post, but it was okay. Apple's history doesn't unfold. What's interesting though, I thought, you know, about it was, it wasn't, you know, like, when you make a list of these most important products, it's okay, the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod, you know, that kind of stuff, the Apple II. But it's not quite as simple as that. You know, not almost none of these products were hits right off the bat. It was almost, it's a, it's a, it's not a straightforward parade of instant hits. It's, you know, like a series of successful second acts, early misfires, half-formed ideas, underpowered debuts that set the stage for a category defining breakthroughs years later. So I think it's always a mistake, like this, they make people to say that with the Vision Pro. You know, it's not, it's a dud, but it, you know, it hasn't had long enough to, to, to fully mature as, as, as Apple products do. And a good example of this is that the Apple II, you know, like it, the original Apple II was revolutionary, but it didn't really take off until the Apple IIe, which was the third model in the series. And, you know, the Apple II sold pretty well, thanks mainly to Visigalc, which was a sort of the, the original killer app, a spreadsheet program that, that made the Apple II indispensable for a lot of businesses. But sales really skyrocketed after the introduction of the Apple IIe, which, you know, was faster, had more storage, but actually the big breakthrough, the big defining feature of the Apple IIe was the fact that it could do uppercase and lowercase text. The, the version was on the application. That just sounds unbelievable. Oh, uppercase, lowercase text. The other Apple IIs had like a really common like expansion card that you could add in to add that after the fact, but the Apple IIe had it built in like right out of the box. You didn't have to buy anything else. That was big innovation. Like another good, good thing of like, another revolution of the Apple IIe was that it was so much more cheaper to manufacture than the early ones because, you know, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were designing the first Apple II, which the Apple II plus is basically the same design as they designed it to be easy to be built by hand because they were building them by hand, not easy to be assembled by a machine. The Apple IIe was the first one that they like fully redesigned internally to, to be, you know, built by a machine. And so I think I was like reading a piece about this just last night that the IIe was like between 50 to 60% cheaper to manufacture just by that alone. And that significantly brought the price down. It's what, that's why it's stayed in the education market for as long as it did. It was on sale until 1993, the longest surviving Apple product unchanged for 11 years. Yeah, 11 years. And that's crazy, isn't it? It's a long, long time in tech, long, long time. Yeah, that's the longest machined Apple sold, right? The single model. Yeah, yeah. I think closely followed in terms of the Mac, the longest selling Mac was the Macintosh Plus, which was like six or seven years, followed again closely by the 2013 Mac Pro of another six years. Like, you know, that's, that's, that's like the equivalent of if Apple were still selling like the iPhone 11 today. Yeah, yeah, pretty unthinkable, pretty unthinkable. Another one was the Macintosh, right, Lewis? After the initial right, yeah. Super exciting. We came out in 1984. Remember the great ad? The big brother ad. Huge, huge success right off the bat. And then after everybody bought the initial shipments, sales, sales slump, you know, it's like, Oh my God, what's going on? That, you know, we're not selling as many of these as we thought, but it's all changed with, as you're mentioning, the Mac Plus. And that came out. And then there's also some pretty important software that came along. All this desktop publishing software, PageMaker, before it was owned by, you know, bought it by Adobe. It's all this, it's all this still in business. I can't remember. Did they get bought by Adobe? Should have looked that up. Anyway, that and Adobe's PostScript language and the Laser Rider. And all this comes together and desktop publishing happens and suddenly the freaking Mac is just indispensable. Everybody has them. Everybody can now use, you know, they can make their stupid newsletters or annual reports or whatever they want to do, you know? I mean, honestly, you remember like Clipart and all that stuff, like getting, getting like a mailed newsletter from a church or a, you know, government office or something and the silly little Clipart that everybody can now suddenly use because now suddenly everybody was a graphic designer. It was kind of, it's kind of funny actually, kind of charming in its way. But you can also do amazing stuff with it, right? So, I mean, where are we going to talk about? Yeah, I think we were, that whole aspect of the desktop publishing through that was like really just took off when I was in college and getting out of college and my first job and everything. It's like suddenly everything was easier to do, better to do, you could, you know, try different page layouts really simply and say, oh, look, this looks great, or oh, we need to change that. It was, it was such an amazing time to be, you know, starting to use a Mac, but it took a while for the Mac to take off. It wasn't just an instant. I mean, it was an instant. It made a splash, but it wasn't, wasn't a massive hit. Yeah, well, I like talking about items, you know, that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the, Guide to the Galaxy author famously said it was, you know, underpowered and slow, but it was the promise of the machine, you know, the potential, that, you know, what it signaled. He totally fell in love with his Mac, but then actually using it was, was a horrible nightmare. And I had the same experience too with some early Macs. I mean, like usually it wasn't a lot of fun. They were crash at the time and you had to swap floppies in and out, especially with only 128K of memory. Like if you're a writer, that's only like 10 pages worth of text in Mac write before it would run out of memory, which Douglas Adams, I don't know if you've read any of his books, they are longer than 10 pages floppy disks. Yeah. You know, that's actually the same thing that, the same thing with the Apple watch, right? I mean, that thing came out. I got, I've had, you know, had a watch on my wrist every day since then. And the first version was like maddeningly slow, but it was like so obvious this is going to be great. Once, once it gets up to speed, basically, it's going to be awesome. The iPod is another one, right Griffin? The, you know, this, the, when it first came out. Yeah. So when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod in 2001, the world yawned, it really took off as a second and third generation iPod, which added Windows support via music match jukebox. And eventually iTunes came to Windows as well. But then USB connectivity, the original iPod was only over Firewire, but not even every Mac had Firewire, it was still relatively new. Like I think the, you know, the iPod came out in 2001. There were still like tons of iBooks from 1999 that didn't have Firewire on them. It was a pretty new connector as well. So it was really like a niche within a niche, you know, the original iPod. But, you know, then later they got USB connectivity, you know, so any Mac and basically any PC at the day could use it. That was when it took a, you know, huge boost. The launch of the iTunes music store so you could actually buy music right from your Mac, the cheaper iPod mini in 2004, and the iPod nano just a year later in 2005, like that is when the iPod absolutely took off. Skyrocketed. They saw more of that than all the other previous iPods combined. And people thought they were crazy because Steve Jobs killed off the iPad mini, iPod mini, to make room for the iPad nano. And it was kind of like, you know, it had smaller storage in it. So it was kind of a downgrade for a lot of people, but it was crazy popular because it was so small and so thin and it really, really took off the iPod nano. That was when the iPod really went crazy, 2005, four years later after the original. And the iPhone was like that as well. Every model of iPhone that Apple introduced outsold every previous iPhone combined, like the iPhone 3G outsold the original one, the 3GS outsold both previous models, the iPhone 4 outsold all three of them combined. And they did that every year through the iPhone 6. The iPhone 6 was the last model to outsell every previous model, because I think a lot of people were just like holding out for a phone with a big screen by then. The 6S was the first one where I think sales slumped a little bit, but you know, six straight years in a row of just skyrocketing sales on the iPhone. Yeah. Well, which Apple product was a hit right out of the park, like from the very get go? I mean, I guess they all would, you know, successful enough for them to be continued, but not... I mean, if you consider the iMac a brand new product, kind of, because it looks different, but I mean, functionally, it was basically the same computer as the Power Mac G3, all in one that came out the year before. And it wasn't really a new platform, because you know, Mac OS had been around for four years at that point. That's a single model though, you know, that's a good example. That was a super big hit, massive hit from the get go. I mean, Apple these days has the benefit that nothing's starting from scratch. Like they have the foundation of Mac OS 10. So every platform that they roll out has a solid software foundation, same programming language, you know, everything that they roll out now has an app store that builds on the app store that built on the iTunes Music Store from 2003. Like none of them are starting from scratch anymore. The closest you get to that is the Vision Pro, which is not a runaway success. All right, well, let's talk quickly about how we joined the Cult of Mac. We're going to talk about our first Apple products. This is also a post we have on the site where we asked all the Cult of Mac writers to talk about their first experiences. I talked about how my dad introduced me to the Mac when I was about 19 years old. He was a professor at the Open University and the psychology department where he worked got an early Mac. I can't remember which... probably it was a 512K. It might have been a Mac Plus. I don't think it was the original Mac, but it was in the... he used to take us down to the department after hours when everyone had gone home and me and my brothers would play with Mac paint and print out our pictures on these giant dot matrix printer with a tractor feed paper. And the thing was so loud and, you know, so aggressive it would shake the whole building. They were in these kind of huts, temporary huts that they would literally shake with the thing. And then he put all these pictures up everywhere, these dreffel pictures that we made in Mac paint. And we played load runner as well, quite a lot of that. But it was kind of... it was completely magical because, you know, like the computers we had at school were these Commodore Pets and the ZZ Sexperman, probably some BBC Micros, probably even maybe the Apple II as well. But, you know, we tried to teach us how to program in basic, you know, do basic sort of hallow world programs and you had to save these on a tape drive and the command line interfaces, it was just, you know, it was completely underwhelming. I could not see the point of it at all, you know. But I was sort of a Nazi, Nazi kid. And then it comes along, comes a Mac and it's a completely different experience, absolutely night and day. So easy to use. So easy to use the mouse, took us about a second, really intuitive, 30 seconds and you're, you know, you've got it. You can understand how this thing works. And fun, you know, like we would spend hours and hours immersed in this thing, whereas before I was allergic to computers. The British home computer market is like very... it's like another world compared to the United States because you had so many companies that never broke through here. We had so many companies over here that never broke through there, like Amstrad, completely formed Americans, like so many niche computers. The ZX Spectrum, as you mentioned, was everywhere and that was so cheap. Like, it was basically like an Apple one in terms of like capabilities, just a keyboard that you connect to and display so little memory. It had color support, but like virtually no sound. It was, it was a great as well. I think it was just a keyboard, really. It was a computer and a keyboard and you played it to your TV. It was good for playing games. I think we played some, we had some early games that were kind of fun and had fun rubbery keyboard. It was like the keyboard was super fun. It was like this completely squishy rubber thing. Fun is a bold way to describe it. I've heard everybody describe it as like the one of the worst keyboards ever made. He actually, Clive Sinclair was, you know, was like sort of the Elon Musk of Seven is Britain. He came out with this, the C5. Do you guys ever hear about that? It was a little electric scooter, three wheels, I think, and you kind of sat in it like it was almost like a sled, an electric sled. And there was such a hype about it at the time, you know, they said, oh, this is going to revolutionize, like the Segway. Remember when they talked about the, when the first, before the Segway came out, it was going to re-architect cities and revolutionize transportation. They did talk about this thing too. Yeah, it didn't work out at all. What was your first experience, Lewis? Well, you know, I had been bashing away on my MS-DOS PC and started working at the school newspaper and they had this horrible old antiquated, I don't know what kind of system it was. It was just horrible, you know, it's just terrible. And oddly enough, I mean, this is like right after I started my, you know, journalistic career because I basically fucked out of organic chemistry, which I could not bother to get up in the morning to go to 8am, Tuesdays and Thursdays, sorry, couldn't make it. So I started taking journalism classes and soon enough I'm working at the school paper, writing on these horrible old things, and it's like, oh my God, it's like something terrible. But then all of a sudden they switched to max. And this was like 85, 86? I'm not exactly sure. It was probably 86. And so it was very early Mac, I don't know if it was a 512K, magnetized plus one, whatever, but they switched it. It's like instantly, oh my God, this is so much better and so much easier. If you remember the Apple Talk network, those little connectors that look kind of hilarious these days, but I mean, they were like, wow, they're all connected. You know, you have to just like take your, I mean, they even had smaller floppy disks, not the giant five and a half inch or five and a quarter, whatever they were, super floppy disks. We used to have to run those things from one computer to another. And I can't tell you how many times my story would get eaten. You know, like you'd just be working and just die. And the same thing happened with the Macs occasionally, you know, like you would get that bomb thing. I remember that. It's funny, Leon and I both mentioned the classic bomb icon. That was such a horrible thing to see on your Macs. It was like, oh my God, everything was going so great. But all the raps, all the raps, all the raps that we're doing about the machine, there was a lot of bombs, wasn't there? There was a lot of, I remember starting up, I was writing some paper for college and I was, it was like, I don't know, four in the morning, five in the morning, I'd been up all night working on this thing. I'd finally got it done. And then it crashed. That kind of, it's indescribable, the bewilderment, that this cannot be happening. And then followed by the old, that, you know, the denial, the five stages of grief, isn't it? Terrible. Yeah, it crashed. It was. Yeah. But, you know, it also, I mean, it completely transformed our newsroom there, you know, suddenly, you know, I remember the copy editors who were the page layout people, you know, they were using these, I think they must have been radius, you know, those vertical monitors. That's the first time I see anything like that. It's like, wow, look at that. They can put a whole page of the newspaper on the screen. That's right. I remember those, yeah. But there were CRTs, one thing, so they were absolutely enormous. Yeah, there were CRTs. I'm not sure about that. I can't remember. I honestly can't remember. I just remember being amazed at how big the screen was and how, because I mean, the Macs themselves, the screen was tiny, right? Like it was the size of an iPhone almost, I mean, or two iPhones. And they, I remember they used, they used PageMaker, they used QuarkXPress, which I think is actually still, I think you can still use that. I haven't looked at it in years, but early page layout and, you know, graphic design software, and it was, but it was just magical, right? And suddenly they could just print out a whole page. Before that, they would have to, you know, send your story in, you know, they'd have to type in some kind of like code gibberish, you know, I don't even remember. I mean, I never did it, right? So I don't know what it was, but they would have these strings of code they would have to type in, and then they had to, you know, hit send, and that would send the thing to, send the story to this printer that would print out. It was like, it wasn't even paper, it was like some kind of like plasticky kind of thing. And they would print out the copy in long strips, right? And then they'd have to like cut that with an X-Acto knife, cut it off, and I remember, like, and then so then they're like taking that and dipping it in wax and taking that wax covered thing and putting it on a giant sheet of paper the size of the actual page. And you'd have to like, you know, like that was back in the days, and it was like, oh, I need 12 inches on this story. And if you filed 14 inches, they would just, they would edit it with an X-Acto knife. Boom. On the bottom up. Yeah. Got a philosophy paragraph. It was absolutely crazy. And the way that that whole desktop publishing didn't change, because then suddenly they could, if they needed to, like, oh, it's slightly too, if the story is slightly too long, well, they could, A, they could adjust the, what is it, kerning, I believe, or and make it slightly more condensed on the page, basically just reduce, not basically exactly reducing the space in between the lines, they could, and I ended up doing this stuff too, because I became a page layout guy, you know, you could, you could like, oh, actually delete a sentence from a paragraph or tighten a sentence up. If it's, it's just two sentences too long to fit on the page. Okay, well, you can manage that as opposed to have to like, cut it with a knife. I mean, it sounds crazy saying this stuff out loud and remembering how much of a change that was. It was just, it was just shocking. We still had to, we would still run the things out, print out the pages and, you know, dip them in wax and put on a big sheet of paper, because you had to take the boards to the printing press. But, oh man, that was, that was quite a revelation. Anyway, I, I was hooked on the Mac and I, I very lucky, my parents very, got me a Mac SE 30 and a laser writer. Whoa, you had your own one at home. Crazy. Yeah, and, and, you know, well, not at home, at, at, you know, when I graduated, it was a graduation present, you know, I didn't get a car, I got a Mac and a laser writer. About the same amount of money. Probably the same price. Yeah. Yeah. And, but the thing about it was that I took that to my very first job, you know, I, I was suddenly like the, the, I had, I had all the means of production. It was crazy. Is that what they hired you? I don't know. I'm sure it didn't hurt. But, you know, I was just working for like a little crappy, well, it wasn't crappy. I mean, it was one of two independent weekly, actually it was bi-weekly. Alternative press papers in Cincinnati and it was called Everybody's News. And it was, it had been run by this guy for years, you know, using old schools. I don't even know how he produced the thing. I worked for him briefly. But then that guy sold it to this other guy who was like, oh, you know, we're going to bring it into the future and all this. I'm like, hey, you know, I, I worked here before and I know how to do this stuff and I'm excited about it. And I have a Mac and a laser writer and we can set the, we can print these things out on our own. And it was, it was awesome. I mean, I had a good time at that job. I only stayed there for like a year before I just bailed and went to California. But it was, it was fun. Yeah. Yeah. Good old days. What about you, Griffin? What was your first experience? Well, you know what I worked in the newsroom in 1988. No. My, my, my experience isn't quite as extreme. I wrote an abbreviated version of this story in this piece, but I guess I'll tell the full story here. My first computer, I was surrounded by computers growing up. My dad had a bunch of computers. He gave me my first one in 2002 built out of like spare parts. I don't know exactly what the specs were because I wasn't enough of a nerd before the computer was lost in a fire, a house fire tragically. Wow. I actually don't even have, I don't think I have any pictures of that exact like case that I had on it. I remember my brother's computer very well because I had like a very distinctive, you can tell this is after the 1998 iMac because I had like a, a big like teal plastic part on the front of it. Like the whole computer is beige, but I'd have this bright green section on the front out of plastic. So my mind wasn't that fancy, you know, being the younger child, I guess I get the second rate computer that's just all beige all around running Windows 2000. So, you know, not that I grew up with like a text based system, but I grew up with, you know, a graphical user interface that was entirely shades of gray and, you know, ugly pixelated icons, internet Explorer for, I know, not, not as good of a sob story as the two of you, but again, like Windows 2000 was the only thing I knew. Until in school, we are taken to a special computer lab that was entirely iMacs of some kind. I actually don't remember if they were like, I don't think they were colorful, which makes me think they were probably eMacs, like the education version of the iMac that was all white and ran off of a G4 processor. Either iMacs or your eMacs of some kind, but either way, these were running Mac OS X and I see for the first time the Aqua interface, everything is translucent. The windows have all these pinstripes and bright vivid colors. I'm using the same application that I'm used to at home, Microsoft Office, except Microsoft Office for Mac at that time, like just the icons were so much cooler. They were this like radical, like abstract, shiny Aqua shapes. As it turns out, they're designed by the icon factory, which is why they're so awesome, legendary design studio that actually designed a lot of Microsoft Office icons. It was like my whole world was turned upside down. Finally, a computer can be cool and fun and exciting. You click on an icon and it takes a few seconds to launch, but it's like bouncing in the dock when things need to get your attention. Like a sheet comes down and it animates and its buttons are pulsating blue and cool. I knew that it was like a fire had been lit inside me. I can't get a Mac now, but I want a Mac. I would get another PC later in 2006 at Crummy, like Acer laptop running Windows XP, which was the Microsoft's pale imitation of the Aqua interface that was miserably slow. It had a seller on processor, 800 megabytes of RAM. After a year or so, the right 20% of the screen broke. It just turned black and never came back on again. For a while, I had a paper binder clip that I could clip on the top of the screen on the right side and bring it back to life. Even that stopped working after a while. It was like a flaw in the LCD that just broke the right 20% of the screen. The workaround was that- I remember crap like that happening. The workaround was I made the taskbar really giant, dragged it to the right half of the screen and then minimized it so that I could still maximize a window and not lose anything. This thing was a mess. After my grandfather died, and that side of my family were all Mac people, but I only saw them once a year. I got a little extra taste of the Mac once a year, every once in a while. After he died, we were going through his house and my dad and my uncles and my aunts that are all picking things out of each room like, oh yeah, I want those sofas, I want that rug. We get to the office and nobody really says anything. I say, I'll take his computer because he had a 2006 Mac Mini. Everybody else looked around and be like, okay, sure, Griffin can take the computer. It was the early 2006 Mac Mini, one of the first Intel Macs they ever made, and one of the slowest they ever made. Was it one with a pretty large- it was actually quite a large box, like the first Apple TV. They were actually quite big. They weren't that mini. No, not really. I guess mini by 2004 standards, which is when it was first introduced, but it was actually quite large because it had to be big enough to fit a full-size like CD because everything had an optical drive back then. So it's, I think, six inches by six inches by two inches thick, pretty big actually. It was the only Intel Core Solo 32-bit Mac they ever made, so it got two software updates from Tiger to Snow Leopard, and it was abysmally slow. As soon as you turn it on, you hear the fans whine. This computer is, at the time that I got it, only a bit over two years old, and it's already having all of these problems, but it was better than my 2006 Acer laptop, so I loved it. I used it all the time. Eventually, there were more stops and starts. I got another PC laptop in 2010. Another two years later, I bought a four-year-old MacBook Pro, alternating between crappy PC laptop and crappy old used Mac. What were you using them for? Were you programming or anything like that? Oh, I mean, every and all kind of creative pursuit. Basically, everything that I do now for Cult of Mac, but professionally and actually on a better level, like graphic design, video editing, web design, all kinds of stuff. It's where I cut my teeth on all kinds of creative things. One of the best things that was ever done for me is that somebody gave me a legally acquired version of Adobe Photoshop CS2. 20 years ago, I started just fiddling around with it every day. Eventually, I actually became a good graphic designer. The early functional computers, but it was just enough for me to do a little bit of everything, even game design, because I got a program called Game Maker, where I made a few games and even a little web browser for Windows XP, lots of fun stuff. You mentioned how much cooler it was. Leander and I were both talking about the bomb air. I don't know if people listen to this podcast. If you're not old enough, it was a dreaded thing to see, but it was really cool. It was a... I'm not an expert on graphic design or whatever, 8-bit or whatever, but it was just awesome. The original Macintosh was 32-bit. But it's this really cool-looking bomb, a round circle with a fuse that's lit and the screen that pops up says, sorry, a system error occurred. Just the fact that they put that icon on there made it just seem like something from the future. It's like, oh my god, this is a fun machine. It was not fun getting that bomb, but at the same time... But it's more fun than the blue screen of death. Yeah, and that icon was designed by Susan Kerr, where you can see all those early icons. I mean, they were fun. They were cool. It was so much different from everything else that I had ever experienced from a computer. You get a really catastrophic error, and you see the happy Macs little icon, except he has crosses on his eyes and he's frowning with a hexadecimal error code. You really don't want to see that one, but you're glad you did, just to see that icon. Even the spinning baseball of death, it's like... There's a playfulness about that, right? I mean, it's so much more approachable than just error code, 29629XYX100. It's pretty awesome. Even when it crashes, yeah. Okay, well, I think that's wrap it up. I think that's about the end of this week's show. Please give us a five-star rating or a review in Apple Podcasts and share it with anybody who's thinking about listening to this show. Texas on iMessage at Cult of Mac Podcasts at iCloud.com. That's Cult of Mac Podcasts at iCloud.com. Send questions, comments, feedback for the show. You can also send an audio message or a short video for us to play too. So thanks everybody for listening. Thanks for watching and we'll see you all next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Goodbye. See ya.