It's an Exciting Time to Be in Tech

You know we're not Apple fanboys, we're not PC fanboys, we're tech fanboys. We just love tech, any tech we want, and this is a very exciting time. I don't think it's been as exciting of this but since you and I were growing up, and you know you had all these innovations in Spectrum Amiga ZX80s before that, uh Acorns, uh Archimedes, all that sort of thing that was a really exciting time. And then we kind of just got into this very predictable linear progression. But now we're into this exciting time where everything's getting mixed up and it will engender innovation and foster new ideas that I think will be good for everyone.

The Innovation Coming Back

This is innovating, not just let's throw more horsepower at it, let's throw more cause. It's this is innovating, creating specialist chips optimizing for that the ram sharing situation between the CPU and GPU that's obviously a good solution. Definitely and it's something that Apple has a head start on because they control the whole ecosystem. It's going to be hard for the others but you know Microsoft is working hard on the on arm computers, you know they've released an updated version of the Surface Pro X with a new Microsoft SQ2 chip in which they've been working on with Qualcomm which unfortunately doesn't really offer much more performance and is still considerably slower than the M1. But they're going down the road, you know, they're making a start on the journey and they're optimizing Windows for Arm as well, which is great news for M1 owners because it means at some point we'll be able to use Windows on our Mac computers. Yeah, in fact, someone's already done it through virtualization so that's pretty exciting.

Sci-Fi Predictions

You remember those sci-fi predictions from 2001: A Space Odyssey? The astronauts sat there using what looked like iPads. Go and check that out, folks, that's some prediction is that and if you're looking for a film over the holidays, if you've got some downtime, uh I'm sure most of you have probably seen 2001 but just watch it again. It is a great film for a film that was produced in the '60s, yeah, the special effects absolutely. You do have to go well apart from the ape suits um but um, i watched it with my 20-year-old son and I didn't tell him when it was made until afterwards, and he was astonished and he went back and watched it again trying to spot it still said this is a this stands up now in terms of its production quality it does. It's absolutely incredible, and part of the reason why it stood the test of time incidentally, is because they used models, large models with you know lots of detail and of course if you're using CGI that always gets dated doesn't it?

A Year That Was

It's been a horrible year in some ways, in other ways, a lot of people will tell you this has been a life-changing and not in a good way. Yeah, no um, so we'll be glad to see the back of it I think, and usher in 2021, and hopefully um i want my money back on 2020 I'll be honest with that, it's pretty poor in it yeah I agree so anyway this is this is it for us for for this year, so um i hope you enjoy your break whatever you get up to, and um yeah we wish you all the very best and thank you very much for listening to us in 2020 for joining the journey that we've been going on. Subscribers really appreciate it, yeah, it's been good, we're not I don't think we're going to hit our 10,000 by the end of the year but um it you know we're we're very close to it who knows uh certainly next year we'll get to that target we'll got lots of plans for next year and um some quite exciting but we're not ready to share those with you yet so we'll see how that goes in the meantime, hope you have a good break stay safe everybody and uh we'll be back in 2021 with the Constant Geekery Podcast Cheerio.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome everybody it's uh episode 11 of the constant geekery podcast and our last podcast p for 2020. well stick me in the gooseberry bush and call me jam actually i did have um i did have some uh gooseberry jam homemade gooseberry jam given to me the other day by a very kind lady because i helped her out with her technology lovely and it was yeah i've never had gooseberry jam before but it was like marmalade but with fruit instead of well i suppose marmalade marmalade is usually free yeah but instead of oranges which i think is normally what marmalade's made from it's gooseberry it's very pleasant on taste with a bit of butter lovely when i was growing up we had a gooseberry bush in our garden and we used to uh indeed enjoy the gooseberries but once a year we could collect just enough gooseberries to have a gooseberry crumble and that was a fine thing to enjoy but that has got absolutely nothing to do with tech so it was vaguely related because the gooseberry jam was as a result of helping someone with their tech well there you go so our top tip is help people with their tech and you may indeed get lovely food products in return indeed good uh so since it's our last podcast of 2020 because um we just we usually wind down at the end of the year we close the business for a bit and we we take a break and i don't see why the video stuff should be any different uh we've got a few videos queued up to to launch over the holiday period so don't worry about that uh but we'll certainly uh we'll be back anyway with more podcasting in the new year yeah i'm sure probably everyone's sick of the sight or sound of us or both i imagine so i am oh well thanks i speak for myself obviously you're lovely thank you thanks i would reciprocate but um don't do it an exciting year then for for tech yeah 2020. so i i just picked out a couple of highlights really from actually more recent months but nvidia really up the ante with graphics horsepower with their new line of carts it was incredible yeah very very exciting times um but they've kind of hit the news again recently obviously the the launch didn't go superbly well thanks to all the price scoping come back to that um but this week they've really upset the tech reviewer community i don't know if you've no i've deliberately obviously preparing for this i thought lay it on me and i can give a genuine reaction in the podcast to what's been going on here because i've been very focused on apple silicon over the last few weeks as you can imagine yeah so it's nice to take a break from that of course um so there's a channel an australian channel called hardware unboxed um i don't i mean a pretty big channel hundreds of thousands of subscribers so obviously they're getting uh gpus sent to them by nvidia but nvidia sent this email to the channel basically saying you're not going to get any more of our founders edition cards because you're not showing people the stuff that we want you to show them okay and they're banging on about ray tracing and how massively important it is which truth is it's just not most gamers are not really that fussed about ray tracing it yes it makes things look slightly better but it takes a considerable amount more horsepower to to do it so most people aren't aren't using it there's not a massive quantity of games still supporting ray tracing and the basic gist of it is quite a bullying email it basically says we and all the gamers in the world and everybody else don't agree with what you're saying you're not presenting the the correct viewpoint therefore we're not going to send you any cards anymore so this is nvidia saying that the channel hardware unboxed so they're they're speaking for all gamers supposedly in their email yeah which is a gross liberty yeah yeah this is their like head of pr that sent this i mean what uh what a dumb move because it's been picked up by channels like linus tech tips who have i mean linus had a proper good rant on the wan show about it uh which is worth listening to and um jay's two cents he's he's chimed in as well and others nobody's particularly happy about this and you know it's i think nvidia are kind of misrepresenting stuff as well they're saying that you know gamers don't get free graphics cards like you do like making out that they're just you know out of the goodness of their heart they're giving him a free graphics card which is utter nonsense yeah okay he gets the graphics card without charge but he has to do a whole bunch of stuff you know for nvidia for that card yeah i think this is a really important point because obviously you know we've invested in reviewing technology recently and we've purchased our own hardware to review because we're simply not big enough to be given stuff which is fine but actually purchasing the hardware is really the the tip of the iceberg it's the time uh and the energy that goes into doing a proper review which is where the value is so getting an nvidia graphics card or whatever it is is is is nothing it's the time and that's why nvidia send them and that's why other companies send them is because they know that they're going to get exposure for it like you say they're not doing it out the goodness of the heart no it's so in fact it's a pretty cheap marketing exercise you know if if they send a free rtx 3090 to jay's two cents for example i mean what's he got two two some 2.7 million subscribers i don't know what's the cost of a 30 90 to them a few hundred dollars to get exposure of that magnitude that's why youtube review channels are so popular it's it's um it's why instagram influencers are so popular it's the way things are now and we we want that as consumers because we want people to be able to say this this is what we think of this particular set of goodies yeah absolutely i think also you know let's let's not forget as well that it there's a huge amount of work at nvidia or amd or whoever's sending out this tech you know they've got to have staff to look after the reviewers and to liaise with them they've got to prepare materials so it's more than the cost just the hardware we accept that but um this whole notion of you know we're giving you free stuff therefore you should say what we want you to say well that's not how reviews work nvidia should know better so they they've upset a whole bunch of people what a bunch of wallies it's just one thing after another with them honestly they do seem to have scored some own own goals in the pr circuit this year don't they they yeah they do yeah and of course their competition amd good year of tech for amd they obviously have been involved in the launch of the new consoles they brought out some genuine intel beating cpus properly exciting uh surprised us with the new gpus and the level of performance yeah hugely uh although it seems that they they may have waxed lyrical about the 6900xt not quite as good as as as expectations were led to believe well they sort of had it they kind of were showing it trading blows with the 30 90 and it it doesn't really no it's more trading blows with the 30 80. which is still pretty good well it costs 500 less than the 30 90. so why would you expect any different i mean i think for the price it's absolutely fine but um it's not you know it's not quite as good they're not quite there yet but i'm pretty sure they'll get there particularly if nvidia keeps scoring own goals like they do their star is definitely rising i would say yeah particularly with as you mentioned what they're doing with the games consoles as well it makes it easier for games developers to to work across different platforms because they're working with those same architectures it makes it easier yeah definitely does so we've got um obviously the new xbox and we've got the new the new playstation so that's exciting for many people for tech don't don't forget as well nintendo have brought out a new game and watch they did yeah that's uh that's sold well um obviously you can't get any of this stuff um because of all the price sculpers and the the lack of availability and a lot of people are calling it a paper launch and for all of the mockery directed at nvidia uh it seems amd they had the same same problems didn't they yeah but in some cases they're sending massive stores just a tiny tiny number of cards and cpus and everything's out of stock everywhere so i'd be interested to know how many of our our listeners and or viewers if you're watching this on youtube that's youtube.com for slash constant geekery uh how many of you have tried to get hardware of any of this that we're describing recently and had these these experiences that we're seeing repeated be interesting to see let us know in the comments yeah i think that the biggest news in computer tech for 2020 well it's got to be apple silicon i was going to say the game and watch but yeah close second would be apple silicon uh and definitely not the apple airpods max so let's let's let's delve into this let's see if apple quietly launched these obviously they're doing the rounds on youtube so i'm sure you're aware of it already but the airpods max we thought they were going to be called airpods studio well everybody thought that but um they used that studio name with their beats line of headphones so i suspect that's why they've stuck with this airpods max not the best name just before we go any further not the best name it it reminds me of of things i won't mention on the podcast at best it reminds me of um nike air max very popular trainer um so that's the same as the same as the nike air max might well be uh depends where you come from in the country nike is uh how we used to say it from my part of the world but yes i know it's nike get off my back with your monkey yeah apple airpods max and whenever you put max on something it just i don't know apart from pepsi it's like back in the 80s when um everything was turbo yeah you'd get a pair of sunglasses isn't enough turbo written on that's right and then in the 90s everything was 2 000. if it had 2 000 at the end of it with the upcoming millennium that made it better somehow and those companies now that are like you know quant air 2000 seem very dated interesting that apple didn't go with the pro moniker which they like to use for non-pro products but perhaps they're reserving that for some new even more expensive airpods in the future well what sort of studio priced airpods you know that kind of thing yeah and you know because how much of these coming in at these airpods max so uh 550 of your uh united states dollars or indeed if you're of a uk persuasion there will be 550 imperial credits of the realm oh so as we say in this realm often that is cheap at half the price not i might be cheap at half the price i don't understand that expression it's obviously going to be cheap if it's half the price no no no no cheap at half the price do you know i'm going to go into this later with you because no one here wants to know what no expression it's one of those ones that's often misunderstood but 550 pounds of dollars that is well how much do because you've got um you've got some sony wh is that 1 000. well we'll come back to those okay all right yeah okay um but that's a lot of money it's a lot of money um in the in the world of audiophile headphones that's would be considered entry level or possibly not even entry level you know you can spend a lot of money on very expensive headphones and just like everything in life it's the law of diminishing returns you're paying a huge amount to get that extra couple of percent of quality now i haven't got a pair of airpods max has not sent us our free sample they've not sent us any samples but they do appear to have sent samples to others yeah so people who have reviewed them are saying that the quality is very good i mean i'd be disappointed if it was anything other than very good at that kind of price point they are wireless headphones and they support bluetooth 5 but apple typically for apple don't provide any information on the bit rates or the codecs that these headphones support i wasn't able to find any in my in my research if anybody knows the answer to that please leave a comment on on the youtube channel that'd be great um to my knowledge apple has only ever supported 256 kilobits the apple codec you know aac is 256 kilobits and it's the same whether that's wired or wireless i think it may go up to 320 now okay but that's still far short of is what you would want from an audio file yeah i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of arguments about high-res music and whether or not it's actually you know just snake oil and all the rest of it i don't want to get into that i think it all depends on the type of music you're listening to you can definitely tell the difference for example with orchestral music if you've got a lot of stuff going on and you listen to it on high-res because i've got some high-res flack files that i listen to on my music player and there's there is a noticeable difference does it also do you think depend on the the listener and how attuned they are yeah i think a lot of people wouldn't wouldn't notice until they heard the difference i mean i don't want to go too far down this road i can remember going to an uh an av show a long time ago i'm talking more than 20 years ago and they had some speakers there that were being demoed which were costing something like 10 000 pounds each wow and i've never heard anything like it but until you hear it you just yeah you know that that does remind me of a story i don't know if we've got time for a quick story on wine early on in my career i i was taken away by my boss and a few others i worked with to some kind of exhibition event in the north of england it's very exciting for me it's the first time you know been sort of out on what we call a jolly in the uk a bit of a bit of fun and we were we're all sat having a meal and the boss said well what would you like and brought the wine list out and me as a complete green i was you know early twenties i spotted a wine that i knew the name of and actually knew that i quite liked the taste of it but in the big scheme of things it was nothing but i said oh should we go for that to my mate next to me and he was going uh didn't know quite what to say and the boss said oh well i'm gonna have this who would like that so we the long and short of it is we ended up with a couple of bowls of this wine that the boss had chosen which was rather expensive and me saying oh no this this californian white's beautiful we're going to have that instead and i then got a sample of the expensive wine and the difference i i didn't like the one i then had chosen but up until then i knew no better so it's the same thing once you try something nicer it's hard to get back it is and i gotta say high-res audio high-fidelity audio is a slippery slope folks and um you you start off with just oh just get some better speakers i'll just get this and that and then you end up with someone i know who'd spent a thousand pounds on a on a kettle lead a power cable i kid you not a thousand pounds on a power cable you are winding me up no i'm not on the kettle leader yeah absolutely serious hundred percent yeah a thousand pounds that's that's the slippery slope just going searching after that those tiny little percentages anyway apple airpods max are not in that game they are probably very good sounding headphones for that most consumers would be completely delighted with the the audio quality um however to enjoy any headphones at their full potential you need a wired connection so you just you use the cable that comes with them then i guess if you want that well it it doesn't so much come with them as exist as a separate entity that you must purchase okay i had horrible suspicion for a moment that you were going to say actually no they're wireless only but it does come with a optional extra cable doesn't it yeah you have to get a lightning to three and a half mil cable which i think 30 35 or something of course you do so that's not included um of course with any expensive headphones you you need a case to put them in don't you what what to protect them and such like so for those who are watching on the youtube channel and again that's youtube.com constant geekery i'm about to put the uh the image of the headphones in their case on our tv screen here but if you are listening to us via a podcast why not open a web browser head over to apple's site if you go to the music section and then the the ipods map sorry airpods max if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will you'll see the same same picture so let me just bring this one up and we look at this uh this delightful image pete now it never fails i've seen this already it's not this isn't my first time seeing it although we probably wouldn't get through the podcast if it had been i i've got to say if you're listening and you're not able to go and have a look at the picture then we need to try and describe this for the viewers pete so um if you imagine the headband of the headphones as being the handle of a handbag or purse um that yeah it does have something of the hermes bag handbag about it or purse yeah so you basically got this this kind of um i guess it's faux leather sleeve with the headphone slide into with then this magnetic flap over the top uh the slight issue i would say is um that the each ear cup goes into sort of a separate compartment and the the compartments are therefore sort of split out in the middle a separate cup a separate cup yeah there's a kind of like like a cleft in the middle i don't know how else to describe it um pete mental imagery are you getting some mental imagery from these headphones yeah it it does look like a bra doesn't it a halter neck bra uh some kind of sci-fi whole net bra or a builder's bum in actual fact again i i love dropping in the odd sci-fi reference to the channel because i am a bit of a sci-fi geek um it reminds me of builder's bum that's what it looks like especially if they were gold that would be brilliant but yeah it's hilarious it does certainly have that look about it but the what i find interesting is that the case is open at the top so it's not protecting the top of the ear cups and then for some reason they've cut slits in the bottom as well the other thing i've got to tell you about this this case right okay so these headphones don't fold up so in order to transport them that is the way you've got to transport them so you could think to yourself well i'm not going to bother with the case because it looks ridiculous so i'm just i'm not going to carry around my headphones like a purse just just keep them on my neck because people on your neck yeah the thing is the only way to switch these headphones off as far as far as i've heard is the the magnetic flap on the case there so you've got to put them back in the case to switch them off or you have to leave them for a couple of hours and then they'll sort of go into a low power state yeah as in yeah well apple very concerned about energy conservation i am i'm absolutely mystified at this you know this is a company that has brought us some of the very best industrial design over the years uh and yes i think it's fair to say there's been a few misfires but this one is right at the top of the list as far as i'm concerned done yeah and um you know maybe you guys like the kind of um cleavage headphone case look um it's not for me so um hit or miss for you oh just i have to ask i do have to ask because it's apple does the case come with the headphones yes it does oh okay so you have to pay for that extra they do have a really nice design feature actually although i think the the actual cans themselves are a little bit kind of um let's have a look i mean some people are going to like it some people some people won't it's not to everyone's taste they've got quite a a vintage look about them and but these these cups that you see here the if you're if you're watching or looking at the website the the cups are magnetic and you can remove them and replace them with other cups okay that's that's good that's good so you could mix and match the colors oh i like that so to get some individuality and stuff get you get your look so um you know you go on the apple website obviously you buy your airpods you choose what color airborne max you want yeah and you get the same color cups so if you want to change the color you just have to get some other ones oh okay those come in the box do they no no that's just another 70 70 what so you get a pair of cups with it just to be clear but you can't customize the color so apple have made this this sort of set of headphones with the ability to be customized but then they don't give you the option to choose what color cups you want so you have to go and buy them and they're 70 dollars to buy wow so i wow i feel like that's a missed opportunity because when you buy your apple watch you can choose the color of your watch and you can choose your strap why don't they do the same thing for the airpods max yeah who knows um maybe it's got something to do with lots of um 70 dollar purchases i don't know just just speculating along with your cable so i mean our initial thoughts we haven't tested them so we're not making any comment on the sound quality and i've got no doubt for that kind of price they'll be good um you know the airpods the airpods pro are really good i mean they're not as good as the sony equivalents um according to what hi-fi um i've not personally tried both i do have the sony equivalents and i can say they're absolutely fantastic so i've got the in-ear wf sony's and i just wanted to mention this the sony wh 1000 xm4 so this is the it's sort of become the industry leader if you like for wireless headphones and the reason why is because the noise cancelling is just fantastic the audio is fantastic they are the most comfortable headphones i've ever worn and you rate the comfort is fantastic i would say it's fantastic good i i'm blessed with um being larger of the ear thanks to my my family genetics uh i used to get called the fa cup at school people used to ask me actually if i could pick up satellite tv on those things but did you ever get the old jodrell bank comment no okay so like satellite tracking okay yeah thanks thanks for adding to my to my misery there peter my pleasure so you um i struggle with over-the-ear headphones uh these ones that we're wearing for the podcast are fairly basic headphones i think he's about 80 pounds or something like that and i don't find them particularly comfortable for extended periods of time no my ears are already hot and i don't like that um whereas i can wear the sony's all day with a few issues they are really comfortable they fold up you get a nice hard case with them which comes with all the cables that you might conceivably need including an airline adapter oh so you can you know plug into your airline seat as well for those days when we used to go in planes yeah remember those yeah vaguely now you can buy the wh-1000xm4 for 329 pounds on amazon or you can buy the previous version the xm3s i've found those for 219 pounds the ones i've got the xm3s so okay you're talking less than half the price so if what you care about is really good quality wireless audio and the ability to plug a wire in and enjoy you know with great noise cancelling and portability in a nice case you for less than half the price of the apple airpods max you can have the sonys so i'm not saying that because we're being sponsored by sony or anything like that what i'm saying is airpods macs have got to go some way to be better than that yeah and you know for the price difference they need to be quite a lot better yeah i i i see that but you just know that apple will sell them by the bucket load they will i think they're sold out in a lot of places and you also know that you're gonna you know if you're in a city or whatever you're just gonna see loads of people walking around with these things you know uh because it will be it's a fashion statement as well isn't it i can afford to spend 550 on headphones people who would never have considered spending 550 on you know headphones before yeah yeah they will because because of what it is yeah i see a good parody video there coming up but maybe not for this channel perhaps not anyway i'll put some links to the um amazon links to sony headphones in the description and let's think about next year now pete we mentioned apple silicon earlier i'm sure lots of people are getting a little bit fed up with apple silicon content so what i wanted to do is just talk about the rumors for 2021 and just share our thoughts on that really yeah let's do that because we've we've stayed away from that largely up until now yeah um waiting to see the rumors develop really so the first rumor we heard was the m1x or the mix as i like to call it okay and um what are the rumors saying uh four additional high performance calls yeah so so at the moment the m1 is four efficiency cores and four high performance yes so they're talking about adding another four for the m1x yeah and that in itself is pretty astonishing well you think about the you know we we've tried to to give a sensible coverage of the m1 on on the channel and try and avoid the hype and because there's been so much hype it's actually kind of pushed us a little bit further towards you know calm down guys de-hyping yeah which i feel a bit aggrieved about because we haven't you know i felt like we needed to to balance the what people are hearing um so don't misunderstand us at all the the m1 is just stonking oh it's so amazing it's really good that's that's a word from the 90s right there yeah well only 90s kids will understand this i wasn't a 90s kid but then again um four additional performance course obviously you don't need additional efficiency cores four is enough but adding four additional performance calls what will that actually do to performance well it could potentially double i believe some of the benchmarks that we've been seeing it could do i think the the software has to be optimized for it so i i don't know whether you're you're aware of this but for for the longest time of course processors were quad core you know we sort of went dual core then it was called core and for quite a long time it stayed at quad core so a lot of software developers particularly game developers optimize their games for core processors and putting additional processors in doesn't really make a lot of difference so um if the software is optimized for it there is the potential to vastly increase performance i'm not convinced we see double across the board it might be possible to do that typically that doesn't happen the other obstacle that you have with multi-core processors is that you're you're putting a lot onto the silicon yeah so the heat generation is higher so what you typically find is that the cores don't ramp up to their maximum potential exactly so if you're using single core uh you'll get the full frequency now depending on the design of the processors and i did a bit of a breakdown with this for the mac pro looking at the different xeons and what you'll find is that the different models actually can sustain higher frequencies across more of the cores okay which makes for example when you compare the 8 core and the 12 core for the the old 2013 mac pro what you find is it's actually only at the very end of the scale you know if you really need those sort of eleven cores or more that's where you see the benefit everywhere else you don't so it's that marginal gains thing we were talking about again yeah yeah okay so that may that may impact it i mean the actual way for itself is not very big you know you look at the size of the the m1 chip compared to say an amd thread ripper which is enormous you know so i suspect they'll increase the die size and you've got to think you know apple will will be able to take into account the fact that to really ring the performance out these additional calls the software does need to to take advantage of that yeah completely agree so m1x i would suggest that this will probably feature in more of the enthusiast grade machines because there's talk that apple are testing cpus with up to 16 performance cores so we've just been talking about eight performance cores now we're talking about 16 performance cores plus four efficiency calls a 20 core processor and that potentially apparently could come as early as the end of next year wow that is that is staggering i'm i'm sort of you know you're thinking three to maybe three times the performance of the existing m1 is that would that probably be a reasonable speculation if you could do that well that gets you to the level of very high performing that's beyond the kind of performance of the latest amd 5950 you are getting up into the kind of enthusiast or professional-grade xeon chips and um you know amd threadripper it's starting to border on that territory so do you think if something like that came along that might be because obviously up until the announcement of apple silicon you were looking at 2019 mac pro weren't you yeah so do you think the 16 performance core models may be where where you'd place your bets possibly except for the fact that there's also talk more rumors again i know what you're going to say of 32 calls 32 calls 32 apple calls see what you did there yeah thank you 32 calls and that's 2022 but some people are saying could even appear in 2021 so i just want to say uh you know we thought about apple's two-year transition and we thought that was optimistic i'm not so convinced anymore they're really putting their foot to the floor aren't they yeah you know 16 performance scores 32 calls everything depends on the price of course at the moment the m1 is performing as well as computers that cost two and a half three times the price is that going to happen is that even going to be a wider margin you know i mean a 32 core m1 would be definitely on the kind of i mean we've got to be getting up to the levels of that 28 core xeon which is the current top processor in in the macro in the mac pro yeah it is one of those things isn't it where the just going back to that that transition period now that we've seen just how good the m1 really actually is actually using it day to day it has blown for a lot of things intel chips out the water now you know we've obviously established that's not always the case and these new amd's can beat it in many ways for now but it does make you stop and think well apple knew what they had on their hands and think well we can't drag this out too long because the the golf between intel max and and apple silicon max is so vast that people won't buy the intel ones i wouldn't so maybe that's why they their plan has always been to you know roll it out as quickly as possible yeah i i think so so here's my i'm gonna just put my neck on the block and make a prediction but i would say the the four port 13-inch macbook pro and the the better you know the intel mac mini those those will get replaced yeah the imacs people are talking about that i think they'll stop the imac pro and there'll be two new imacs lots of talk of that happening so i think we'll see all of that next year and the 16-inch moving over possibly more towards the end of the year yeah or later in the year with with some of these really big um cpus then there's talk of a half-size mac pro sharing the same design in 2022 so an actual cheese grater yeah it could be i'd love to see it baby most people don't need that enormous case i don't need the enormous case so half price half sized one said half price well if it was half price but half size mac pro lots of people call in for that and to be honest it's giving me a lot of pause for thought because i'm in that position at the moment of changing the machine or thinking about changing my machine shall i make do with the m1 and step up we'll see thinking about it stay tuned in 2021 for dave's continued decision slash indecision yes the thing is with the with the m1 when you're doing stuff that it's optimized for it's very good but we showed with our video testing last week and you know at the end of the day your mileage will vary without video testing you get different results from all the time but what we did see fairly consistently is that the imac with the eight core i9 processor and the vega 48 graphics was better overall um i think the the m1 did beat it in or did it not sure it did no we'll test we're going to test it again anyway i'll just um in case anyone's interested i'm going to test all of the blackmagic raw codecs so i'm going to shoot the same scene for all of the different codecs and i'm going to run it on the m1 mini and the imac just to just to see and i'm hoping that blackmagic will release a new a new version of resolve as well so we can kind of test that at the same time because they have been doing sort of weekly updates yes i noticed that and putting them on different places on their website as well yes so um that's pretty exciting but the point there that i was trying to make is that the the intel imac is still a worthy contender to say the least from from our testing it was yeah for now absolutely change this up though put that additional power in and the gap starts to close a bit more but the biggest deficiency is not cpu ram yeah only 16 gigs isn't enough um and also the gpu isn't fast enough no so let's talk about the gpu rumors uh well rumors are there testing 16 and 32 core gpus now that is going to be impressive i am baited well as if you think about it at the moment so currently it's eight an eight core gpu well seven in the entry level map okay of course yeah um i think you can pretty much double the performance expectation when you're adding gpu cores um because the gpu itself is optimized and the the metal framework should be optimized to take care of that rather than the software could be wrong but yeah no i think i think you're right i'm actually i i misspoke earlier when i was talking about double performance we were of course talking about cpu cores and it was the gpus that i had in mind so yeah i think you i agree with you i think that's where we'll see it so if you take what they're currently doing um and double it where does that take you well in truth not a million miles away from the vega 48 we've been testing in that imac take it up to 32 now you're you're comfortably in the territory of the 5700 xt yeah and you know that is that is not a slouch so if they can get the 32 core gpu organized and get that into an imac next year along with you know one of more cpu cores then the new imac next year will be in a position to defeat the current imac so they if this is true if these rumors are true then apple can replace all of their consumer intel machines next year and that's good for everyone because you either go for your apple silicon model or as we've established the imac with the with the 48 vega graphics in is still it's no slouch and the prices on those will be i would imagine very favorable you know end-of-line ones um so you could pick yourself up something that's still an amazing performer probably for a lot less than it is now yeah i think i just need to say that the 2019 imac is the one with the vega but of course the the newer one doesn't come with the vega that's all now um big navi cards so you can have it with the 5700 yeah okay yeah i think it it so it comes with a 5000 series something else as well that we didn't mention in our video test last week is that it has a t2 chip the new one whereas the the imac we're testing didn't right okay so what i suspect is that that would improve the performance of the the imac even further with the h264 h265 codecs so the imac is the intel imac is a beast you know if you if you need a computer right now for doing heavyweight video editing work i would definitely go with that but let's not forget the price difference you know the m1 mini okay i mean it wasn't a million miles away from that computer in a lot of the tests and it's a third of the price yeah so well you have to add the keyboard and screen and i guess your device but yeah even so actually that's that's a really fair point the 5k screen in the imac uh that as somebody who's come from using an imac to another computer that is the hardest thing to replace i love my dell 4k screen but it's not as good as what you get in the imac and i think that makes the imac a fantastic value computer definitely so um yeah we just have to wait and see and in terms of um these new imacs that we're hoping to see next year talk that they're going to follow the design language of the xdr screen yeah i think that would make sense especially if they're going to do a half size mac pro it's a lovely design language the imac the current imac look is starting to look a bit dated it does and we haven't yet seen as well a chassis that's specifically designed for apple silicon because understandably you know apple just used the existing chassis for the macbook air macbook pro and the mac mini they've not really what the design hasn't really changed so to see something that is properly designed around it i mean bear in mind if you open up the mac mini half of it is empty space in there it's quite a small board you know so i think if they were designing from scratch and apple silicon chassis is going to going to be different definitely so looking forward to that million dollar question go on will the new imacs come with a stand yeah of course they will yeah here first books how can they how can they not um yeah i mean i understand you know we mock apple for for not including the stand i understand why they didn't include it this is a professional monitor most professional uh users would have a visa swivel arm mount for their for their screen and those don't cost very much money so it's a vanity kind of thing it's not a particularly great stand either it's got no um lateral spinny movement has it no i think it's very easy to break things on it as well yeah well we'll see i mean apple are not ones to shy away from making some extra profit but sticking with gpu performance there are rumors that late in 2021 or even pushing into 2022 there's talk of 64 or even 128 gpu cores yeah that's i mean that just that will redefine for those who can afford those that will redefine workflow won't it well it basically that would that would that would easily compete with the the top cards that you can put in the 2019 macro and i think if this rumor is true it kind of is a death knell isn't it for amd graphics cards within within mac computers and you know i'm i'm sure that's what apple want to go for a completely closed ecosystem but suppose that your your m1 chip came with i don't know 32 graphics calls and then you could drop in or 64 graphics calls or whatever and then you could drop in an npx module you know in that mac pro chassis with more cores and just increase the number of calls i i it will be amazing until apple decide in two years they're going to stop supporting and go a different direction but they don't normally do that with hardware or things do they i've got a pretty good track record especially with the mac pro you know don't just put something out there and leave it for seven years or anything like that yeah i mean egpu is a really good example of that yeah no wait it isn't ah the sarcasm so i mentioned earlier on the channel jay's two cents he did a response to that nvidia email yes something he said in that uh video which resonated with me is that you can like a company's products and you can hate the company yep and i think that's how i feel about apple i don't like all of their products i like their mac lineup and and those those air pod maxes they're gorgeous they're amazing yeah i'll about the iphone at the end of the day i'm not that fussed about a phone if it makes calls i'm kind of happy that that's you know that's just me everyone's different and i like the mac i like mac os so i don't like all of their products but i do like the products that i like i really like yeah and i love my macbook pro i don't care that the m1 is faster i love my intel macbook pro it's it's a great computer i think i feel the same at the moment as well but apple as a company you know you got tim cook speaking to was it the un about the need for climate change and everything else and yet at the same time they're stopping people from repairing their products and you know they just want to want to chuck everything away or recycle it i should say but i i find that the the direction of the company very difficult to agree with to like you know i think they're pricing decisions on things like the monitor stand you know it doesn't need to be a thousand dollars i understand not including the stand but it doesn't need to be a thousand dollars it's not worth a thousand dollars it's a joke you know why why do they do this themselves and and the wheels for the mac pro you ever seen those no so i think they're just uh they're four hundred dollars so it's a 100 bucks a corner right to put these like really cheap and nasty looking if you can imagine like a really cheap rim cover on your car to make it look like an alloy wheel like a chrome alloy they're kind of from memory that's what they look like so you can put these wheels on onto your computer but of course there's no break on them so if like many people your floor isn't entirely level your mac pro will will just escape oh they do do some strange things don't they i don't understand a lot of their decisions i really don't uh i understand them i just don't agree with them yeah so um yeah i don't know if that's useful content or not anyway what does this mean what does this mean for the computer landscape if apple is doing all of this stuff and gets it to market within the next year to 18 months it's it's scary exciting like i say it's going to redefine expectations on how we interact with computers you know um we we've been saying that the the m1 is game-changing yeah and so that yeah because it starts a change and it has changed the game of what you can expect for your dollar yeah in terms of performance i will pull this off this is game ending yeah yeah absolutely we're into a new realm of as i say how we interact with stuff it's it's going to be instant and it's tying in with you know greater speeds in terms of connectivity our whole experience is going to be seamless and instant yeah we've seen it in science fiction for a long time and science fiction often predicts what we go on to see and actually sometimes is behind waiting for my flying carpet well they do exist they do exist it's just that they um they only give them out to no i was going to go off some crackpot conspiracy theory there but i lost my train um but you do see it you know um and interacting with the computer and doing super complicated calculations just like that is something that we've seen in science fiction whereas we're going to be seeing that in reality it's yeah you're right it's completely it will completely change everything and other manufacturers need to get in on the game on this and i'm sure they will you know nvidia's acquired arm and i'm sure they'll start working but they are quite a long way behind i mean something that a lot of people don't appreciate is that apple apple actually used to own part of arm they did in the 90s and so they've been working with arm for for some time they i'm pretty sure they started their hiring of the gpu engineers around 2013. yeah what we're seeing now is the product of lots of years of hard work and they've been patient in in bringing it to market so the rest of the teams are behind the curve on this and they there's no reason why amd nvidia microsoft can get together and produce something that does the same things and that extracts that same amount of performance intel is already starting to make processes with this you know they haven't used the atom cores as efficiency cores and then they've got performance course so it's coming for pc owners don't feel left out um but there is going to be this transition period where unfortunately if you're a pc fan boy you're going to need to eat some humble pie well i and i don't mean that in an inflammatory way maybe that's not the right term you're gonna have some catching up to do yeah it's it's going to be tricky to um to argue the case for pcs beyond beyond gaming if and this is a big if for pc owners and bear in mind i'm a pc owner i love pcs and i'm also about to embark on building one with one of these new amd everything's including the fancy motherboard and that because why not so if this is you know it's it's just uh it's just oh you can probably tell i'm struggling to even find words it's an exciting time to be in tekken you know we're not apple fanboys we're not pc fanboys we're tech fanboys we just love tech any tech we want tech and this is a very exciting time i don't think it's been as exciting of this but since you and i were growing up and you know you had all these innovations in in things you know in spectrum amiga zx80s before that uh acorns uh archimedes all that sort of thing that was a really exciting time and then we kind of just got into this very predictable linear progression whereas now we're into this exciting time everything's getting mixed up and it will it will engender innovation and foster uh new ideas that i think will be good for everyone yeah and and that is the exciting thing is the innovation coming back it's not just let's throw more horsepower at it let's throw more cause it's this is innovating um and you know creating specialist chips optimizing for that the the ram sharing situation between the cpu and gpu that's obviously a good solution definitely and it's something that apple has a head start on because they control the whole ecosystem it's going to be hard for the others but you know microsoft is working hard on the on arm computers you know they've released an updated version of the surface pro x with a new microsoft sq2 chip in which they've been working on with qualcomm which unfortunately doesn't really offer much more performance and is still considerably slower than than the m1 but they're going down the road you know they're they've made a start on the journey and they're optimizing windows for arm as well which is great news for m1 owners because it means at some point we'll be able to use windows on our mac computers yep in fact someone's already done it through virtualization so that's pretty exciting basically i'm i'm excited for the future definitely me too you said about sci-fi predictions you remember in uh 2001 a space odyssey yes the astronauts sat there using what looked like ipads yes okay go and check that out folks that's that's some prediction is that and if if you're looking for a film over over the holidays if you've got some down time uh i'm sure most of you have probably seen 2001 but just watch it again it is a great film for a film that was produced in the 60s yeah the the special effects absolutely you do have to go well apart from the ape suits um but um i watched it with my 20 year old son and i didn't tell him when it was made until afterwards and he was astonished and he went back and watched it again trying to spot and he still said this is a this stands up now in terms of its production quality it does it's absolutely incredible and part of the reason why it stood the test of time incidentally is is because it they use models yeah large models with you know lots of detail and of course if you're using cgi that always gets dated doesn't it you know you watch the original jurassic park now and it uh you can see that it's you know you know where the cgi is um but yeah like you say 2001 what a great film anyway this is this isn't a podcast about movies maybe we should constant movery is something we should think of perhaps so uh it's been a it's been an um it's been an interesting year it's been a horrible year it has been a pants year in some ways in some ways a lot of people you know it's this has been a life-changing and not in a good way yeah no um so we'll be glad to see the back of it i think and usher in 2021 and hopefully um i want my money back on 2020 i'll be honest it's pretty poor in it yeah i agree so anyway this is this is it for us for for this year so um i hope you enjoy your break whatever you get up to and um yeah we wish you all the very best and and thank you very much for listening to us in 2020 for joining the journey that we've been going on uh subscribers really appreciate it yeah it's been it's been good we're not i don't think we're going to hit our 10 000 by the end of the year but um it you know we're we're very close to it who knows uh certainly next year we'll get to that target we'll we've got lots of plans for next year and um some quite exciting but we're not ready to share those with you yet so we'll see how that goes in the meantime uh hope you have a good break stay safe everybody and uh we'll be back in 2021 with the constant geekery podcast cheerio youwelcome everybody it's uh episode 11 of the constant geekery podcast and our last podcast p for 2020. well stick me in the gooseberry bush and call me jam actually i did have um i did have some uh gooseberry jam homemade gooseberry jam given to me the other day by a very kind lady because i helped her out with her technology lovely and it was yeah i've never had gooseberry jam before but it was like marmalade but with fruit instead of well i suppose marmalade marmalade is usually free yeah but instead of oranges which i think is normally what marmalade's made from it's gooseberry it's very pleasant on taste with a bit of butter lovely when i was growing up we had a gooseberry bush in our garden and we used to uh indeed enjoy the gooseberries but once a year we could collect just enough gooseberries to have a gooseberry crumble and that was a fine thing to enjoy but that has got absolutely nothing to do with tech so it was vaguely related because the gooseberry jam was as a result of helping someone with their tech well there you go so our top tip is help people with their tech and you may indeed get lovely food products in return indeed good uh so since it's our last podcast of 2020 because um we just we usually wind down at the end of the year we close the business for a bit and we we take a break and i don't see why the video stuff should be any different uh we've got a few videos queued up to to launch over the holiday period so don't worry about that uh but we'll certainly uh we'll be back anyway with more podcasting in the new year yeah i'm sure probably everyone's sick of the sight or sound of us or both i imagine so i am oh well thanks i speak for myself obviously you're lovely thank you thanks i would reciprocate but um don't do it an exciting year then for for tech yeah 2020. so i i just picked out a couple of highlights really from actually more recent months but nvidia really up the ante with graphics horsepower with their new line of carts it was incredible yeah very very exciting times um but they've kind of hit the news again recently obviously the the launch didn't go superbly well thanks to all the price scoping come back to that um but this week they've really upset the tech reviewer community i don't know if you've no i've deliberately obviously preparing for this i thought lay it on me and i can give a genuine reaction in the podcast to what's been going on here because i've been very focused on apple silicon over the last few weeks as you can imagine yeah so it's nice to take a break from that of course um so there's a channel an australian channel called hardware unboxed um i don't i mean a pretty big channel hundreds of thousands of subscribers so obviously they're getting uh gpus sent to them by nvidia but nvidia sent this email to the channel basically saying you're not going to get any more of our founders edition cards because you're not showing people the stuff that we want you to show them okay and they're banging on about ray tracing and how massively important it is which truth is it's just not most gamers are not really that fussed about ray tracing it yes it makes things look slightly better but it takes a considerable amount more horsepower to to do it so most people aren't aren't using it there's not a massive quantity of games still supporting ray tracing and the basic gist of it is quite a bullying email it basically says we and all the gamers in the world and everybody else don't agree with what you're saying you're not presenting the the correct viewpoint therefore we're not going to send you any cards anymore so this is nvidia saying that the channel hardware unboxed so they're they're speaking for all gamers supposedly in their email yeah which is a gross liberty yeah yeah this is their like head of pr that sent this i mean what uh what a dumb move because it's been picked up by channels like linus tech tips who have i mean linus had a proper good rant on the wan show about it uh which is worth listening to and um jay's two cents he's he's chimed in as well and others nobody's particularly happy about this and you know it's i think nvidia are kind of misrepresenting stuff as well they're saying that you know gamers don't get free graphics cards like you do like making out that they're just you know out of the goodness of their heart they're giving him a free graphics card which is utter nonsense yeah okay he gets the graphics card without charge but he has to do a whole bunch of stuff you know for nvidia for that card yeah i think this is a really important point because obviously you know we've invested in reviewing technology recently and we've purchased our own hardware to review because we're simply not big enough to be given stuff which is fine but actually purchasing the hardware is really the the tip of the iceberg it's the time uh and the energy that goes into doing a proper review which is where the value is so getting an nvidia graphics card or whatever it is is is is nothing it's the time and that's why nvidia send them and that's why other companies send them is because they know that they're going to get exposure for it like you say they're not doing it out the goodness of the heart no it's so in fact it's a pretty cheap marketing exercise you know if if they send a free rtx 3090 to jay's two cents for example i mean what's he got two two some 2.7 million subscribers i don't know what's the cost of a 30 90 to them a few hundred dollars to get exposure of that magnitude that's why youtube review channels are so popular it's it's um it's why instagram influencers are so popular it's the way things are now and we we want that as consumers because we want people to be able to say this this is what we think of this particular set of goodies yeah absolutely i think also you know let's let's not forget as well that it there's a huge amount of work at nvidia or amd or whoever's sending out this tech you know they've got to have staff to look after the reviewers and to liaise with them they've got to prepare materials so it's more than the cost just the hardware we accept that but um this whole notion of you know we're giving you free stuff therefore you should say what we want you to say well that's not how reviews work nvidia should know better so they they've upset a whole bunch of people what a bunch of wallies it's just one thing after another with them honestly they do seem to have scored some own own goals in the pr circuit this year don't they they yeah they do yeah and of course their competition amd good year of tech for amd they obviously have been involved in the launch of the new consoles they brought out some genuine intel beating cpus properly exciting uh surprised us with the new gpus and the level of performance yeah hugely uh although it seems that they they may have waxed lyrical about the 6900xt not quite as good as as as expectations were led to believe well they sort of had it they kind of were showing it trading blows with the 30 90 and it it doesn't really no it's more trading blows with the 30 80. which is still pretty good well it costs 500 less than the 30 90. so why would you expect any different i mean i think for the price it's absolutely fine but um it's not you know it's not quite as good they're not quite there yet but i'm pretty sure they'll get there particularly if nvidia keeps scoring own goals like they do their star is definitely rising i would say yeah particularly with as you mentioned what they're doing with the games consoles as well it makes it easier for games developers to to work across different platforms because they're working with those same architectures it makes it easier yeah definitely does so we've got um obviously the new xbox and we've got the new the new playstation so that's exciting for many people for tech don't don't forget as well nintendo have brought out a new game and watch they did yeah that's uh that's sold well um obviously you can't get any of this stuff um because of all the price sculpers and the the lack of availability and a lot of people are calling it a paper launch and for all of the mockery directed at nvidia uh it seems amd they had the same same problems didn't they yeah but in some cases they're sending massive stores just a tiny tiny number of cards and cpus and everything's out of stock everywhere so i'd be interested to know how many of our our listeners and or viewers if you're watching this on youtube that's youtube.com for slash constant geekery uh how many of you have tried to get hardware of any of this that we're describing recently and had these these experiences that we're seeing repeated be interesting to see let us know in the comments yeah i think that the biggest news in computer tech for 2020 well it's got to be apple silicon i was going to say the game and watch but yeah close second would be apple silicon uh and definitely not the apple airpods max so let's let's let's delve into this let's see if apple quietly launched these obviously they're doing the rounds on youtube so i'm sure you're aware of it already but the airpods max we thought they were going to be called airpods studio well everybody thought that but um they used that studio name with their beats line of headphones so i suspect that's why they've stuck with this airpods max not the best name just before we go any further not the best name it it reminds me of of things i won't mention on the podcast at best it reminds me of um nike air max very popular trainer um so that's the same as the same as the nike air max might well be uh depends where you come from in the country nike is uh how we used to say it from my part of the world but yes i know it's nike get off my back with your monkey yeah apple airpods max and whenever you put max on something it just i don't know apart from pepsi it's like back in the 80s when um everything was turbo yeah you'd get a pair of sunglasses isn't enough turbo written on that's right and then in the 90s everything was 2 000. if it had 2 000 at the end of it with the upcoming millennium that made it better somehow and those companies now that are like you know quant air 2000 seem very dated interesting that apple didn't go with the pro moniker which they like to use for non-pro products but perhaps they're reserving that for some new even more expensive airpods in the future well what sort of studio priced airpods you know that kind of thing yeah and you know because how much of these coming in at these airpods max so uh 550 of your uh united states dollars or indeed if you're of a uk persuasion there will be 550 imperial credits of the realm oh so as we say in this realm often that is cheap at half the price not i might be cheap at half the price i don't understand that expression it's obviously going to be cheap if it's half the price no no no no cheap at half the price do you know i'm going to go into this later with you because no one here wants to know what no expression it's one of those ones that's often misunderstood but 550 pounds of dollars that is well how much do because you've got um you've got some sony wh is that 1 000. well we'll come back to those okay all right yeah okay um but that's a lot of money it's a lot of money um in the in the world of audiophile headphones that's would be considered entry level or possibly not even entry level you know you can spend a lot of money on very expensive headphones and just like everything in life it's the law of diminishing returns you're paying a huge amount to get that extra couple of percent of quality now i haven't got a pair of airpods max has not sent us our free sample they've not sent us any samples but they do appear to have sent samples to others yeah so people who have reviewed them are saying that the quality is very good i mean i'd be disappointed if it was anything other than very good at that kind of price point they are wireless headphones and they support bluetooth 5 but apple typically for apple don't provide any information on the bit rates or the codecs that these headphones support i wasn't able to find any in my in my research if anybody knows the answer to that please leave a comment on on the youtube channel that'd be great um to my knowledge apple has only ever supported 256 kilobits the apple codec you know aac is 256 kilobits and it's the same whether that's wired or wireless i think it may go up to 320 now okay but that's still far short of is what you would want from an audio file yeah i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of arguments about high-res music and whether or not it's actually you know just snake oil and all the rest of it i don't want to get into that i think it all depends on the type of music you're listening to you can definitely tell the difference for example with orchestral music if you've got a lot of stuff going on and you listen to it on high-res because i've got some high-res flack files that i listen to on my music player and there's there is a noticeable difference does it also do you think depend on the the listener and how attuned they are yeah i think a lot of people wouldn't wouldn't notice until they heard the difference i mean i don't want to go too far down this road i can remember going to an uh an av show a long time ago i'm talking more than 20 years ago and they had some speakers there that were being demoed which were costing something like 10 000 pounds each wow and i've never heard anything like it but until you hear it you just yeah you know that that does remind me of a story i don't know if we've got time for a quick story on wine early on in my career i i was taken away by my boss and a few others i worked with to some kind of exhibition event in the north of england it's very exciting for me it's the first time you know been sort of out on what we call a jolly in the uk a bit of a bit of fun and we were we're all sat having a meal and the boss said well what would you like and brought the wine list out and me as a complete green i was you know early twenties i spotted a wine that i knew the name of and actually knew that i quite liked the taste of it but in the big scheme of things it was nothing but i said oh should we go for that to my mate next to me and he was going uh didn't know quite what to say and the boss said oh well i'm gonna have this who would like that so we the long and short of it is we ended up with a couple of bowls of this wine that the boss had chosen which was rather expensive and me saying oh no this this californian white's beautiful we're going to have that instead and i then got a sample of the expensive wine and the difference i i didn't like the one i then had chosen but up until then i knew no better so it's the same thing once you try something nicer it's hard to get back it is and i gotta say high-res audio high-fidelity audio is a slippery slope folks and um you you start off with just oh just get some better speakers i'll just get this and that and then you end up with someone i know who'd spent a thousand pounds on a on a kettle lead a power cable i kid you not a thousand pounds on a power cable you are winding me up no i'm not on the kettle leader yeah absolutely serious hundred percent yeah a thousand pounds that's that's the slippery slope just going searching after that those tiny little percentages anyway apple airpods max are not in that game they are probably very good sounding headphones for that most consumers would be completely delighted with the the audio quality um however to enjoy any headphones at their full potential you need a wired connection so you just you use the cable that comes with them then i guess if you want that well it it doesn't so much come with them as exist as a separate entity that you must purchase okay i had horrible suspicion for a moment that you were going to say actually no they're wireless only but it does come with a optional extra cable doesn't it yeah you have to get a lightning to three and a half mil cable which i think 30 35 or something of course you do so that's not included um of course with any expensive headphones you you need a case to put them in don't you what what to protect them and such like so for those who are watching on the youtube channel and again that's youtube.com constant geekery i'm about to put the uh the image of the headphones in their case on our tv screen here but if you are listening to us via a podcast why not open a web browser head over to apple's site if you go to the music section and then the the ipods map sorry airpods max if you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will you'll see the same same picture so let me just bring this one up and we look at this uh this delightful image pete now it never fails i've seen this already it's not this isn't my first time seeing it although we probably wouldn't get through the podcast if it had been i i've got to say if you're listening and you're not able to go and have a look at the picture then we need to try and describe this for the viewers pete so um if you imagine the headband of the headphones as being the handle of a handbag or purse um that yeah it does have something of the hermes bag handbag about it or purse yeah so you basically got this this kind of um i guess it's faux leather sleeve with the headphone slide into with then this magnetic flap over the top uh the slight issue i would say is um that the each ear cup goes into sort of a separate compartment and the the compartments are therefore sort of split out in the middle a separate cup a separate cup yeah there's a kind of like like a cleft in the middle i don't know how else to describe it um pete mental imagery are you getting some mental imagery from these headphones yeah it it does look like a bra doesn't it a halter neck bra uh some kind of sci-fi whole net bra or a builder's bum in actual fact again i i love dropping in the odd sci-fi reference to the channel because i am a bit of a sci-fi geek um it reminds me of builder's bum that's what it looks like especially if they were gold that would be brilliant but yeah it's hilarious it does certainly have that look about it but the what i find interesting is that the case is open at the top so it's not protecting the top of the ear cups and then for some reason they've cut slits in the bottom as well the other thing i've got to tell you about this this case right okay so these headphones don't fold up so in order to transport them that is the way you've got to transport them so you could think to yourself well i'm not going to bother with the case because it looks ridiculous so i'm just i'm not going to carry around my headphones like a purse just just keep them on my neck because people on your neck yeah the thing is the only way to switch these headphones off as far as far as i've heard is the the magnetic flap on the case there so you've got to put them back in the case to switch them off or you have to leave them for a couple of hours and then they'll sort of go into a low power state yeah as in yeah well apple very concerned about energy conservation i am i'm absolutely mystified at this you know this is a company that has brought us some of the very best industrial design over the years uh and yes i think it's fair to say there's been a few misfires but this one is right at the top of the list as far as i'm concerned done yeah and um you know maybe you guys like the kind of um cleavage headphone case look um it's not for me so um hit or miss for you oh just i have to ask i do have to ask because it's apple does the case come with the headphones yes it does oh okay so you have to pay for that extra they do have a really nice design feature actually although i think the the actual cans themselves are a little bit kind of um let's have a look i mean some people are going to like it some people some people won't it's not to everyone's taste they've got quite a a vintage look about them and but these these cups that you see here the if you're if you're watching or looking at the website the the cups are magnetic and you can remove them and replace them with other cups okay that's that's good that's good so you could mix and match the colors oh i like that so to get some individuality and stuff get you get your look so um you know you go on the apple website obviously you buy your airpods you choose what color airborne max you want yeah and you get the same color cups so if you want to change the color you just have to get some other ones oh okay those come in the box do they no no that's just another 70 70 what so you get a pair of cups with it just to be clear but you can't customize the color so apple have made this this sort of set of headphones with the ability to be customized but then they don't give you the option to choose what color cups you want so you have to go and buy them and they're 70 dollars to buy wow so i wow i feel like that's a missed opportunity because when you buy your apple watch you can choose the color of your watch and you can choose your strap why don't they do the same thing for the airpods max yeah who knows um maybe it's got something to do with lots of um 70 dollar purchases i don't know just just speculating along with your cable so i mean our initial thoughts we haven't tested them so we're not making any comment on the sound quality and i've got no doubt for that kind of price they'll be good um you know the airpods the airpods pro are really good i mean they're not as good as the sony equivalents um according to what hi-fi um i've not personally tried both i do have the sony equivalents and i can say they're absolutely fantastic so i've got the in-ear wf sony's and i just wanted to mention this the sony wh 1000 xm4 so this is the it's sort of become the industry leader if you like for wireless headphones and the reason why is because the noise cancelling is just fantastic the audio is fantastic they are the most comfortable headphones i've ever worn and you rate the comfort is fantastic i would say it's fantastic good i i'm blessed with um being larger of the ear thanks to my my family genetics uh i used to get called the fa cup at school people used to ask me actually if i could pick up satellite tv on those things but did you ever get the old jodrell bank comment no okay so like satellite tracking okay yeah thanks thanks for adding to my to my misery there peter my pleasure so you um i struggle with over-the-ear headphones uh these ones that we're wearing for the podcast are fairly basic headphones i think he's about 80 pounds or something like that and i don't find them particularly comfortable for extended periods of time no my ears are already hot and i don't like that um whereas i can wear the sony's all day with a few issues they are really comfortable they fold up you get a nice hard case with them which comes with all the cables that you might conceivably need including an airline adapter oh so you can you know plug into your airline seat as well for those days when we used to go in planes yeah remember those yeah vaguely now you can buy the wh-1000xm4 for 329 pounds on amazon or you can buy the previous version the xm3s i've found those for 219 pounds the ones i've got the xm3s so okay you're talking less than half the price so if what you care about is really good quality wireless audio and the ability to plug a wire in and enjoy you know with great noise cancelling and portability in a nice case you for less than half the price of the apple airpods max you can have the sonys so i'm not saying that because we're being sponsored by sony or anything like that what i'm saying is airpods macs have got to go some way to be better than that yeah and you know for the price difference they need to be quite a lot better yeah i i i see that but you just know that apple will sell them by the bucket load they will i think they're sold out in a lot of places and you also know that you're gonna you know if you're in a city or whatever you're just gonna see loads of people walking around with these things you know uh because it will be it's a fashion statement as well isn't it i can afford to spend 550 on headphones people who would never have considered spending 550 on you know headphones before yeah yeah they will because because of what it is yeah i see a good parody video there coming up but maybe not for this channel perhaps not anyway i'll put some links to the um amazon links to sony headphones in the description and let's think about next year now pete we mentioned apple silicon earlier i'm sure lots of people are getting a little bit fed up with apple silicon content so what i wanted to do is just talk about the rumors for 2021 and just share our thoughts on that really yeah let's do that because we've we've stayed away from that largely up until now yeah um waiting to see the rumors develop really so the first rumor we heard was the m1x or the mix as i like to call it okay and um what are the rumors saying uh four additional high performance calls yeah so so at the moment the m1 is four efficiency cores and four high performance yes so they're talking about adding another four for the m1x yeah and that in itself is pretty astonishing well you think about the you know we we've tried to to give a sensible coverage of the m1 on on the channel and try and avoid the hype and because there's been so much hype it's actually kind of pushed us a little bit further towards you know calm down guys de-hyping yeah which i feel a bit aggrieved about because we haven't you know i felt like we needed to to balance the what people are hearing um so don't misunderstand us at all the the m1 is just stonking oh it's so amazing it's really good that's that's a word from the 90s right there yeah well only 90s kids will understand this i wasn't a 90s kid but then again um four additional performance course obviously you don't need additional efficiency cores four is enough but adding four additional performance calls what will that actually do to performance well it could potentially double i believe some of the benchmarks that we've been seeing it could do i think the the software has to be optimized for it so i i don't know whether you're you're aware of this but for for the longest time of course processors were quad core you know we sort of went dual core then it was called core and for quite a long time it stayed at quad core so a lot of software developers particularly game developers optimize their games for core processors and putting additional processors in doesn't really make a lot of difference so um if the software is optimized for it there is the potential to vastly increase performance i'm not convinced we see double across the board it might be possible to do that typically that doesn't happen the other obstacle that you have with multi-core processors is that you're you're putting a lot onto the silicon yeah so the heat generation is higher so what you typically find is that the cores don't ramp up to their maximum potential exactly so if you're using single core uh you'll get the full frequency now depending on the design of the processors and i did a bit of a breakdown with this for the mac pro looking at the different xeons and what you'll find is that the different models actually can sustain higher frequencies across more of the cores okay which makes for example when you compare the 8 core and the 12 core for the the old 2013 mac pro what you find is it's actually only at the very end of the scale you know if you really need those sort of eleven cores or more that's where you see the benefit everywhere else you don't so it's that marginal gains thing we were talking about again yeah yeah okay so that may that may impact it i mean the actual way for itself is not very big you know you look at the size of the the m1 chip compared to say an amd thread ripper which is enormous you know so i suspect they'll increase the die size and you've got to think you know apple will will be able to take into account the fact that to really ring the performance out these additional calls the software does need to to take advantage of that yeah completely agree so m1x i would suggest that this will probably feature in more of the enthusiast grade machines because there's talk that apple are testing cpus with up to 16 performance cores so we've just been talking about eight performance cores now we're talking about 16 performance cores plus four efficiency calls a 20 core processor and that potentially apparently could come as early as the end of next year wow that is that is staggering i'm i'm sort of you know you're thinking three to maybe three times the performance of the existing m1 is that would that probably be a reasonable speculation if you could do that well that gets you to the level of very high performing that's beyond the kind of performance of the latest amd 5950 you are getting up into the kind of enthusiast or professional-grade xeon chips and um you know amd threadripper it's starting to border on that territory so do you think if something like that came along that might be because obviously up until the announcement of apple silicon you were looking at 2019 mac pro weren't you yeah so do you think the 16 performance core models may be where where you'd place your bets possibly except for the fact that there's also talk more rumors again i know what you're going to say of 32 calls 32 calls 32 apple calls see what you did there yeah thank you 32 calls and that's 2022 but some people are saying could even appear in 2021 so i just want to say uh you know we thought about apple's two-year transition and we thought that was optimistic i'm not so convinced anymore they're really putting their foot to the floor aren't they yeah you know 16 performance scores 32 calls everything depends on the price of course at the moment the m1 is performing as well as computers that cost two and a half three times the price is that going to happen is that even going to be a wider margin you know i mean a 32 core m1 would be definitely on the kind of i mean we've got to be getting up to the levels of that 28 core xeon which is the current top processor in in the macro in the mac pro yeah it is one of those things isn't it where the just going back to that that transition period now that we've seen just how good the m1 really actually is actually using it day to day it has blown for a lot of things intel chips out the water now you know we've obviously established that's not always the case and these new amd's can beat it in many ways for now but it does make you stop and think well apple knew what they had on their hands and think well we can't drag this out too long because the the golf between intel max and and apple silicon max is so vast that people won't buy the intel ones i wouldn't so maybe that's why they their plan has always been to you know roll it out as quickly as possible yeah i i think so so here's my i'm gonna just put my neck on the block and make a prediction but i would say the the four port 13-inch macbook pro and the the better you know the intel mac mini those those will get replaced yeah the imacs people are talking about that i think they'll stop the imac pro and there'll be two new imacs lots of talk of that happening so i think we'll see all of that next year and the 16-inch moving over possibly more towards the end of the year yeah or later in the year with with some of these really big um cpus then there's talk of a half-size mac pro sharing the same design in 2022 so an actual cheese grater yeah it could be i'd love to see it baby most people don't need that enormous case i don't need the enormous case so half price half sized one said half price well if it was half price but half size mac pro lots of people call in for that and to be honest it's giving me a lot of pause for thought because i'm in that position at the moment of changing the machine or thinking about changing my machine shall i make do with the m1 and step up we'll see thinking about it stay tuned in 2021 for dave's continued decision slash indecision yes the thing is with the with the m1 when you're doing stuff that it's optimized for it's very good but we showed with our video testing last week and you know at the end of the day your mileage will vary without video testing you get different results from all the time but what we did see fairly consistently is that the imac with the eight core i9 processor and the vega 48 graphics was better overall um i think the the m1 did beat it in or did it not sure it did no we'll test we're going to test it again anyway i'll just um in case anyone's interested i'm going to test all of the blackmagic raw codecs so i'm going to shoot the same scene for all of the different codecs and i'm going to run it on the m1 mini and the imac just to just to see and i'm hoping that blackmagic will release a new a new version of resolve as well so we can kind of test that at the same time because they have been doing sort of weekly updates yes i noticed that and putting them on different places on their website as well yes so um that's pretty exciting but the point there that i was trying to make is that the the intel imac is still a worthy contender to say the least from from our testing it was yeah for now absolutely change this up though put that additional power in and the gap starts to close a bit more but the biggest deficiency is not cpu ram yeah only 16 gigs isn't enough um and also the gpu isn't fast enough no so let's talk about the gpu rumors uh well rumors are there testing 16 and 32 core gpus now that is going to be impressive i am baited well as if you think about it at the moment so currently it's eight an eight core gpu well seven in the entry level map okay of course yeah um i think you can pretty much double the performance expectation when you're adding gpu cores um because the gpu itself is optimized and the the metal framework should be optimized to take care of that rather than the software could be wrong but yeah no i think i think you're right i'm actually i i misspoke earlier when i was talking about double performance we were of course talking about cpu cores and it was the gpus that i had in mind so yeah i think you i agree with you i think that's where we'll see it so if you take what they're currently doing um and double it where does that take you well in truth not a million miles away from the vega 48 we've been testing in that imac take it up to 32 now you're you're comfortably in the territory of the 5700 xt yeah and you know that is that is not a slouch so if they can get the 32 core gpu organized and get that into an imac next year along with you know one of more cpu cores then the new imac next year will be in a position to defeat the current imac so they if this is true if these rumors are true then apple can replace all of their consumer intel machines next year and that's good for everyone because you either go for your apple silicon model or as we've established the imac with the with the 48 vega graphics in is still it's no slouch and the prices on those will be i would imagine very favorable you know end-of-line ones um so you could pick yourself up something that's still an amazing performer probably for a lot less than it is now yeah i think i just need to say that the 2019 imac is the one with the vega but of course the the newer one doesn't come with the vega that's all now um big navi cards so you can have it with the 5700 yeah okay yeah i think it it so it comes with a 5000 series something else as well that we didn't mention in our video test last week is that it has a t2 chip the new one whereas the the imac we're testing didn't right okay so what i suspect is that that would improve the performance of the the imac even further with the h264 h265 codecs so the imac is the intel imac is a beast you know if you if you need a computer right now for doing heavyweight video editing work i would definitely go with that but let's not forget the price difference you know the m1 mini okay i mean it wasn't a million miles away from that computer in a lot of the tests and it's a third of the price yeah so well you have to add the keyboard and screen and i guess your device but yeah even so actually that's that's a really fair point the 5k screen in the imac uh that as somebody who's come from using an imac to another computer that is the hardest thing to replace i love my dell 4k screen but it's not as good as what you get in the imac and i think that makes the imac a fantastic value computer definitely so um yeah we just have to wait and see and in terms of um these new imacs that we're hoping to see next year talk that they're going to follow the design language of the xdr screen yeah i think that would make sense especially if they're going to do a half size mac pro it's a lovely design language the imac the current imac look is starting to look a bit dated it does and we haven't yet seen as well a chassis that's specifically designed for apple silicon because understandably you know apple just used the existing chassis for the macbook air macbook pro and the mac mini they've not really what the design hasn't really changed so to see something that is properly designed around it i mean bear in mind if you open up the mac mini half of it is empty space in there it's quite a small board you know so i think if they were designing from scratch and apple silicon chassis is going to going to be different definitely so looking forward to that million dollar question go on will the new imacs come with a stand yeah of course they will yeah here first books how can they how can they not um yeah i mean i understand you know we mock apple for for not including the stand i understand why they didn't include it this is a professional monitor most professional uh users would have a visa swivel arm mount for their for their screen and those don't cost very much money so it's a vanity kind of thing it's not a particularly great stand either it's got no um lateral spinny movement has it no i think it's very easy to break things on it as well yeah well we'll see i mean apple are not ones to shy away from making some extra profit but sticking with gpu performance there are rumors that late in 2021 or even pushing into 2022 there's talk of 64 or even 128 gpu cores yeah that's i mean that just that will redefine for those who can afford those that will redefine workflow won't it well it basically that would that would that would easily compete with the the top cards that you can put in the 2019 macro and i think if this rumor is true it kind of is a death knell isn't it for amd graphics cards within within mac computers and you know i'm i'm sure that's what apple want to go for a completely closed ecosystem but suppose that your your m1 chip came with i don't know 32 graphics calls and then you could drop in or 64 graphics calls or whatever and then you could drop in an npx module you know in that mac pro chassis with more cores and just increase the number of calls i i it will be amazing until apple decide in two years they're going to stop supporting and go a different direction but they don't normally do that with hardware or things do they i've got a pretty good track record especially with the mac pro you know don't just put something out there and leave it for seven years or anything like that yeah i mean egpu is a really good example of that yeah no wait it isn't ah the sarcasm so i mentioned earlier on the channel jay's two cents he did a response to that nvidia email yes something he said in that uh video which resonated with me is that you can like a company's products and you can hate the company yep and i think that's how i feel about apple i don't like all of their products i like their mac lineup and and those those air pod maxes they're gorgeous they're amazing yeah i'll about the iphone at the end of the day i'm not that fussed about a phone if it makes calls i'm kind of happy that that's you know that's just me everyone's different and i like the mac i like mac os so i don't like all of their products but i do like the products that i like i really like yeah and i love my macbook pro i don't care that the m1 is faster i love my intel macbook pro it's it's a great computer i think i feel the same at the moment as well but apple as a company you know you got tim cook speaking to was it the un about the need for climate change and everything else and yet at the same time they're stopping people from repairing their products and you know they just want to want to chuck everything away or recycle it i should say but i i find that the the direction of the company very difficult to agree with to like you know i think they're pricing decisions on things like the monitor stand you know it doesn't need to be a thousand dollars i understand not including the stand but it doesn't need to be a thousand dollars it's not worth a thousand dollars it's a joke you know why why do they do this themselves and and the wheels for the mac pro you ever seen those no so i think they're just uh they're four hundred dollars so it's a 100 bucks a corner right to put these like really cheap and nasty looking if you can imagine like a really cheap rim cover on your car to make it look like an alloy wheel like a chrome alloy they're kind of from memory that's what they look like so you can put these wheels on onto your computer but of course there's no break on them so if like many people your floor isn't entirely level your mac pro will will just escape oh they do do some strange things don't they i don't understand a lot of their decisions i really don't uh i understand them i just don't agree with them yeah so um yeah i don't know if that's useful content or not anyway what does this mean what does this mean for the computer landscape if apple is doing all of this stuff and gets it to market within the next year to 18 months it's it's scary exciting like i say it's going to redefine expectations on how we interact with computers you know um we we've been saying that the the m1 is game-changing yeah and so that yeah because it starts a change and it has changed the game of what you can expect for your dollar yeah in terms of performance i will pull this off this is game ending yeah yeah absolutely we're into a new realm of as i say how we interact with stuff it's it's going to be instant and it's tying in with you know greater speeds in terms of connectivity our whole experience is going to be seamless and instant yeah we've seen it in science fiction for a long time and science fiction often predicts what we go on to see and actually sometimes is behind waiting for my flying carpet well they do exist they do exist it's just that they um they only give them out to no i was going to go off some crackpot conspiracy theory there but i lost my train um but you do see it you know um and interacting with the computer and doing super complicated calculations just like that is something that we've seen in science fiction whereas we're going to be seeing that in reality it's yeah you're right it's completely it will completely change everything and other manufacturers need to get in on the game on this and i'm sure they will you know nvidia's acquired arm and i'm sure they'll start working but they are quite a long way behind i mean something that a lot of people don't appreciate is that apple apple actually used to own part of arm they did in the 90s and so they've been working with arm for for some time they i'm pretty sure they started their hiring of the gpu engineers around 2013. yeah what we're seeing now is the product of lots of years of hard work and they've been patient in in bringing it to market so the rest of the teams are behind the curve on this and they there's no reason why amd nvidia microsoft can get together and produce something that does the same things and that extracts that same amount of performance intel is already starting to make processes with this you know they haven't used the atom cores as efficiency cores and then they've got performance course so it's coming for pc owners don't feel left out um but there is going to be this transition period where unfortunately if you're a pc fan boy you're going to need to eat some humble pie well i and i don't mean that in an inflammatory way maybe that's not the right term you're gonna have some catching up to do yeah it's it's going to be tricky to um to argue the case for pcs beyond beyond gaming if and this is a big if for pc owners and bear in mind i'm a pc owner i love pcs and i'm also about to embark on building one with one of these new amd everything's including the fancy motherboard and that because why not so if this is you know it's it's just uh it's just oh you can probably tell i'm struggling to even find words it's an exciting time to be in tekken you know we're not apple fanboys we're not pc fanboys we're tech fanboys we just love tech any tech we want tech and this is a very exciting time i don't think it's been as exciting of this but since you and i were growing up and you know you had all these innovations in in things you know in spectrum amiga zx80s before that uh acorns uh archimedes all that sort of thing that was a really exciting time and then we kind of just got into this very predictable linear progression whereas now we're into this exciting time everything's getting mixed up and it will it will engender innovation and foster uh new ideas that i think will be good for everyone yeah and and that is the exciting thing is the innovation coming back it's not just let's throw more horsepower at it let's throw more cause it's this is innovating um and you know creating specialist chips optimizing for that the the ram sharing situation between the cpu and gpu that's obviously a good solution definitely and it's something that apple has a head start on because they control the whole ecosystem it's going to be hard for the others but you know microsoft is working hard on the on arm computers you know they've released an updated version of the surface pro x with a new microsoft sq2 chip in which they've been working on with qualcomm which unfortunately doesn't really offer much more performance and is still considerably slower than than the m1 but they're going down the road you know they're they've made a start on the journey and they're optimizing windows for arm as well which is great news for m1 owners because it means at some point we'll be able to use windows on our mac computers yep in fact someone's already done it through virtualization so that's pretty exciting basically i'm i'm excited for the future definitely me too you said about sci-fi predictions you remember in uh 2001 a space odyssey yes the astronauts sat there using what looked like ipads yes okay go and check that out folks that's that's some prediction is that and if if you're looking for a film over over the holidays if you've got some down time uh i'm sure most of you have probably seen 2001 but just watch it again it is a great film for a film that was produced in the 60s yeah the the special effects absolutely you do have to go well apart from the ape suits um but um i watched it with my 20 year old son and i didn't tell him when it was made until afterwards and he was astonished and he went back and watched it again trying to spot and he still said this is a this stands up now in terms of its production quality it does it's absolutely incredible and part of the reason why it stood the test of time incidentally is is because it they use models yeah large models with you know lots of detail and of course if you're using cgi that always gets dated doesn't it you know you watch the original jurassic park now and it uh you can see that it's you know you know where the cgi is um but yeah like you say 2001 what a great film anyway this is this isn't a podcast about movies maybe we should constant movery is something we should think of perhaps so uh it's been a it's been an um it's been an interesting year it's been a horrible year it has been a pants year in some ways in some ways a lot of people you know it's this has been a life-changing and not in a good way yeah no um so we'll be glad to see the back of it i think and usher in 2021 and hopefully um i want my money back on 2020 i'll be honest it's pretty poor in it yeah i agree so anyway this is this is it for us for for this year so um i hope you enjoy your break whatever you get up to and um yeah we wish you all the very best and and thank you very much for listening to us in 2020 for joining the journey that we've been going on uh subscribers really appreciate it yeah it's been it's been good we're not i don't think we're going to hit our 10 000 by the end of the year but um it you know we're we're very close to it who knows uh certainly next year we'll get to that target we'll we've got lots of plans for next year and um some quite exciting but we're not ready to share those with you yet so we'll see how that goes in the meantime uh hope you have a good break stay safe everybody and uh we'll be back in 2021 with the constant geekery podcast cheerio you\n"