The Art of Predicting Apple's Next Move: A Conversation with Pete

As we sit down to discuss Apple's latest developments, it's clear that Pete is passionate about his predictions and analysis of the company's upcoming products. He begins by stating that he and his team have been following the rumors and speculation surrounding Apple's next move, but instead of regurgitating content from other sources, they've taken a more logical approach to predicting what's to come.

"I think it's fair to say that we've used logic rather than listened to all of the rumors that are going around," Pete explains. "We've looked at things from a business perspective and tried to anticipate what Apple is likely to do." This approach has served them well, as they were able to predict many of the announcements made during recent events.

When it comes to Apple's upcoming silicon products, Pete is optimistic about the performance that can be expected. He notes that the current machines are "unprecedented at these price points" and that the next generation of products is likely to be even better. This sentiment is echoed by his audience, who are eager for more information about what's to come.

As a professional user, Pete understands the frustration that comes with waiting for new products. He acknowledges that the anticipation can be overwhelming, but reminds listeners to remain patient and excited for what's to come. "I think it's fair to say that we should all just sit tight and look forward to it," he advises. "I think next year we should see some really interesting developments, particularly in terms of professional-grade machines."

One of the biggest questions on everyone's mind is when we can expect to see Apple's new silicon products. Pete believes that there will be a stepped upgrade like an M1X or something even better, and that more ports will be addressed. He also expects to see more RAM options, possibly as an optional upgrade.

In terms of the chip itself, Pete speculates about what we can expect from the next generation of processors. "More performance is definitely what I'm looking for," he says. "I think it's fair to say that they'll address the port issues and provide us with more options." He also notes that the new machines will likely have improved software capabilities, which could be an exciting development for fans of Apple products.

In terms of his own predictions, Pete is tight-lipped about what he'll be drinking during their next podcast. "I'm going to need something special," he says with a grin. "Maybe we can get someone to send us some whiskey and we can have a smoothie-making episode?" The anticipation is building, and fans are eagerly looking forward to finding out what's in store for them.

As the conversation comes to a close, Pete thanks his audience for their support and invites them to share their thoughts on social media. He reminds listeners that they'll be continuing to discuss Apple silicon and software on future episodes, so stay tuned for more updates from the team at Constant Geekery. With any luck, we'll see some new products launch soon, and Pete will have a chance to put his theories to the test.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwell pete it's that time again and i think we need to have another go at doing one of these lockdown podcasts what do you reckon well i think it would be rude not to let's do it so welcome everybody it's episode seven of the constant geeky podcast uh whether you're watching on youtube that's uh youtube.com forward slash constant geekery or listening to your favorite podcasting platform uh we're very pleased to have you with us and this week we're gonna be talking about the new apple silicon we've got the new m1 chips we've got the m1 max are you excited about all of this pete i am really excited about it dave and i have to say the thing i'm most excited about is the fact that we called it with the chip naming convention it is indeed the m1 and we called that and i've never been right about anything in my life so i'm quite pleased about that uh in fairness i think we said it might be an m14 so um but we were half right let's just take it take the wins when you get them pete that's the way forward yeah still still never been right in my life but i'm almost right i just gotta say again uh i'm gonna be um because it's evening time i'm having my my evening whiskey and uh this week i'm getting this could be a regular feature i don't know uh this week i'm going with a bit of american bourbon and i've chosen tin cup and i really like tin cup whiskey because you get a tin cup every time you get a bowl so i've got quite a collection of these tin cups but they don't hold enough for my taste so you you could use it for tiddly winks but um i do feel that this is going to become a feature and i don't have a drink again which is probably a mistake when you're doing a podcast but maybe maybe i don't drink alcohol so maybe some or anything with sugar in it so maybe some suggestions from those listening in on what they'd like to see me drinking week we can start some kind of little uh tradition liquidized potatoes with added swarf actually i've got to tell you i gotta tell you a story i went to visit some clients once and uh they they're of a particular sort of eco persuasion that sounds really bad i don't mean anything bad by that at all but they they they like their health foods uh they were the kind of people we've had i'm pretty sure on the same visit they lectured me about not drinking mcdonald's milkshake because it's got um sawdust in it to thicken it apparently yeah i know okay and then she proceeded to to give me this this uh smoothie that they'd made and it was green and gritty and possibly one of the most disgusting things i've ever had in my mouth ever and i think at this point we should probably move on i think we should yeah so what are we talking about again smoothies with swarf and apple silicon uh so the m1 chip let's talk about that first so we got we've got an eight core cpu and an eight core gpu of course we didn't know what we were gonna get beforehand so are we pleased with that outcome uh yeah i mean it's interesting we did muse how different it would be from the a14 bionic so uh we're seeing two additional high performance cpu calls as a result and four additional gpu calls so we were excited about how the a14 bionic was benchmarking and that got us excited about what apple silicon could bring and that's just really been confirmed by the addition of these extra cores and particularly the gpu cores yeah i find that quite exciting i just want to step back a moment though obviously the because this is arm architecture those eight cores break down into four uh high efficiency cores so these are cores that are used for low power background tasks um that help keep the battery life strong i think they're about they use about one tenth of the power of the high performance cores and then uh the high performance cores obviously are handling the the heavyweight stuff now in the a14 bionic you've got four of those efficiency cores and two of the high performance cores so the two additional cores that we're getting are high performance cpu cores and that's that's a really key point which will help explain the benchmarks that will come onto but the gpu cores uh you know we were pretty astonished with the a14 bionics um gpu performance it was benching at about half the level of the 5300m that's in the 16 inch macbook pro so if we've now doubled the gpu core count does that mean that this gpu will be on par with the 5300 well i think it's reasonable to assume it is going to be which is astonishing yeah i mean there could be there could be some overhead issues but it's going to be closes and it's going to be in that ballpark and we weren't really expecting it to get quite that high so i think yeah astonishing really good yeah very exciting beyond what we expected really it is and our expectations were high yes they were they were i i think that's uh you know we are talking about uh machines that don't have dedicated gpus so to have the performance of something that does have a dedicated gpu or be a a mobile gpu i think that is very impressive uh we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go through um the other thing that's on this chip of course we've got that 16 core neural engine and that just simply means that we're we're bringing machine learning to the mac so there's apis that developers can take advantage of to access machine learning ability i think that'll be good news for people you know scientists who work in particular fields but also for everyday users you know that just uh they're using it for instance to clean up the image on the webcam um which remains resolutely a 720p webcam of course yeah it does but uh significantly that is becoming in in 2020 where uh so many more of us have been forced to work from home whether we want to or not uh having a decent quality webcam that works particularly in lower light conditions without having to shine you know multiple super trooper lights on your face uh that's going to be good it's going to improve communication and collaboration so and of course people will use it for communicating with family and things as well so it's not just professional so that's that's really the the slim shallow end of the pool for machine learning but a welcome one for consume consumers i i'd say yeah it'd be interesting to see what it gets used for i i saw a demo a couple of weeks ago or maybe last week i'm losing track of time but uh it was adobe and i assume it was after effects they were using but there was a drone shot if you can imagine this a drone shot going along a beach and there was a rider on a horse on the beach and they used a ai tool to erase the horse and its rider and that was last week it looked good you know that's stunning yeah that's the kind of thing where ai comes in and you've seen it now in a lot of photo editing programs as well you know sky replacement and various other other exciting things and just touching on something we mentioned i think in our our last podcast about removing or actually it might have been the podcast before about removing creativity we talked about how with new iphones it was kind of taking away from the creatives i would say this is where actually being able to remove something like that is is a good shortcut to workflow and it doesn't stifle creativity actually aids it because you're not doing something laborious and mundane that anyone who's learned how to use say photoshop will get to know how to do to a greater or lesser skill level this this enables you to focus on the end result so i would say this is where ai actually aids creativity yeah i think so too and i look forward to seeing that um obviously i suspect it would have had a much harder job if the backdrop was you know a load of trees and bushes or something i was trying to trying to replace but still it's it's good to see stuff going that way and you know it'll be interesting and i've seen this in the comments actually it'd be interesting to see how the m1 chip compares to say something like um you know nvidia's um compute cards and and is it tesla they they call it their desk side super computer system anyway be interesting to see yes let's move on anyway um what about the ram how do you feel about that well it's on chip isn't it so that means it's shared between the cpu and the gpu so a little bit different maybe from how we've become used to those things being done in the past uh interestingly though only eight gig and 16 gig gig options on the first machines to be released so i think it's going to be very fast um because it's on chip but a few eyebrows raised by many including in some of the comments on some of the other constant geekery videos you've put out in the last week or so about is that a bit bit low particularly for some of the tasks that we saw demonstrated but um i think you touched on the fact that we probably need to rethink this a little bit more i think we're going to talk about that a bit later so um yeah it'll be interesting to see that but certainly what we saw uh from the event is some very impressive things being done with less memory than we've been used to in the past yeah i do feel that we've got to get out of this mindset of you know fast x86 processor plus system ram plus gpu with you know dedicated uh video ram i this is a different system it's a system on chip it's unified memory um simple truth is that you know in a system a traditional pc system you're not using all of the system ram and all of the video ram at the same time usually so we don't need as much in total in all likelihood the other thing is as well that it's likely to be very quick because it's on on chip so i i think i would like to reserve judgment until we've actually got the machines in to test them my suspicion is that it won't it won't be the same as what we're traditionally used to yeah and i think that's a really important point isn't it that we we really need to hold judgment on on any of this until we've seen how this it's a whole new system it's a whole new architecture we've been so ingrained with x86 for well as long as i can remember almost you know apart from the very early dates that that's what's seared into our brains but this is a different approach it's really exciting it is a it's a bit of a leap forward it's almost you know we keep using car analogies but you know it was always bigger engines bigger engines more um cubic capacity that was the secret and now suddenly what you're finding is it's going the other way even high performance models with smaller engines and other ways of making uh the or giving the performance um even down to some tiny tiny engines uh it's it's a mindset change and i think we need to see how that pans out once we get our hands on some gear and have a play with it okay so let's talk about the gear so we'll just quickly run through the three machines so we've got the macbook air now we were expecting apple to introduce a fanless model um i don't think this came as any great surprise to anybody at all but what i find interesting about the macbook air is when you look at the entry level model so this is the 1 000 version it's uh got a seven core gpu and i've been you know i'm sort of thinking about this and wondering why they've done that uh i assume it's because of the way they've been in the chips so um you know when when uh when foundries make silicon wafers you know with loads of processors on it's not an exact science it doesn't always work you know so what happens is the the manufacturers will will bin or they'll switch off certain cores so for example they might they might aim to make an eight-core cpu for example intel might make an eight-core cpu uh they find that you know one of the cores doesn't work so they block off two of them and sell it as a six core it's that kind of i'm simplifying it but that's that's the idea yeah so the question is you know is this just apple being really efficient and making use of the you know their entire production yield um is it the case that their yield is you know perhaps they're actually trying to go for for more than eight cores and they're they're blocking off those other cores you know is there something held in reserve or is this a deliberate measure to keep the pricing in check across the range of models you know switch off a core give give them slightly less at the entry level point just to give people a reason to upgrade and you know a reason to still go and buy the the the macbook pro any thoughts it's almost alien to me that apple would would do something like that to encourage you to go up to the next level of machine learning um that was good timing don't waste it you made me spit out my whiskey don't waste it um yeah apple apple have always been very very canny or very very um strategic with their pricing they know how to price um to encourage people to upgrade so i think you're probably on to something here you're right the the yields are probably a reflection on this but it may even be like you say that there's there's more than an eight core out there it's just that it's not in these models because they want to keep something back for when they start introducing the more prosumer models that we're anticipating to come next yeah so uh pricing wise it's um it's 999 dollars for the seven core version and that has 8 gigs of ram and 256 on the ssd or for an extra 250 dollars you get an 8 core version with a 512 gig ssd what's important to know about the macbook air is that they are replacing the the intel macbook air so you can't get the intel macbook air anymore not from apple anyway uh of course that means great time to go and try and find one of those if you're particularly after an intel macbook air there should be some deals around um so that that's the macbook air not no great surprises there and then we've got the macbook pro 13-inch yep so the main difference of course is active cooling yeah yeah now what this says to me is if if apple are shouting about the cooling and they did did do that in the event you know this is gonna you know sustain performance etc etc then what does that tell you about the macbook air uh that it it could do more if it had active cooling yeah i think so but um how much difference that actually makes in the real world we'll have to wait and see so um specifically though apple are replacing the two port version of the 13-inch macbook pro they are but the the four-port one the four-port intel version is still available yes it is and there's always been two different versions of these laptops and i did cover this in the other videos we won't go into detail again but the four port version is different internally so it's uh you know it's the the entry-level macbook pro that they're replacing and it starts at thirteen hundred dollars yeah so the next computer is the mac mini and we weren't specifically expecting this um this was quite a nice surprise i think yeah i mean we we mooted maybe there being a a new smaller form desktop that had had the chassis a smaller version of the the mac pro chassis didn't we but we we weren't expecting a mac mini which is something different um so that that is nice it's got active cooling again so did they make mention of how many fans that's got is it still just the one same as in the macbook pro it is uh it's one fan yes i mean it's larger than the one that's in the macbook pro but whether it it moves more air or not is another question i mean i think it's important to say the mac mini has always been mobile components so whilst it is sold as a desktop machine it's mobile processors and uh you know effectively laptop um equipment got you okay i didn't know that um that makes sense though now i've now said it i'm doubting myself and thinking maybe it isn't so uh no doubt someone will correct me in the comments if if i've got that wrong but i thought that was the case um and again with with the mac mini there was always quite a range of pricing wasn't there you could you started off with that i3 and you could go all the way up to the six core i7 so yeah apple are replacing the entry level mac minis but not the top end intel mac mini you can still buy that that's the six core one isn't it yeah so i think it's a a standard it's a six core i5 i think you can expect a six core i7 uh something else that's important to know as well uh is that the intel mac mini is space gray and the m1 mac mini is silver and there's no color choice ah okay and that is incredibly important because obviously space gray is faster isn't it it's a faster color space gray is definitely faster yeah yeah but not as fast as say gold yes so uh what else doesn't it have that the new mac mini doesn't have 10 gigabit ethernet yeah and i think this will this will matter to some people but i think the people that it matters to could still buy the intel mac mini um uh you could also do it via thunderbolt as well you know you could i mean this is apple you know it's the dongle life isn't it let's buy another dongle yeah yeah it's environmentally friendly to do that um what about the price well 700 um which which is is the cheapest way to access the the new apple silicon at the moment well outside of getting an ipad um i must admit i've always been a little bit confused by the the mac mini um simply because the the imax always seemed more attractive because of the screen and the fact you get a magic mouse and keyboard but for seven hundred dollars you're getting into apple silicon now if you've got a screen the mouse and the keyboard or you're prepared to stump up for one of those it's a great way to access those things yeah definitely and uh you know i mean look at my situation here i'm i'm sat in front of a very nice 4k display i don't i don't need to have an imac so i've got my keyboard and touchpad so i would sorry trackpad i would just buy the mac mini in fact that's exactly what i have done so just to be clear for the for the purposes of testing on the channel we've got a mac mini coming with 16 gigs so our expectation is that of the because they're they're basically all three the same machine and our expectation is that the mac mini is probably the quickest of them because it will sustain the you know the cool the cooling is going to be optimized in that that chassis isn't it yeah i'd have thought there's probably not much in it at all between that and the macbook pro the difference is the macbook pro has a battery if you're charging the battery that adds heat so the mac mini doesn't have that issue i'm just speculating here yeah good point i it's more useful to me i'm perfectly happy with my intel 4 port macbook pro 13 inch for now so for me the mac mini makes a lot of sense but we also then decided to get a macbook air as well and we've got the the entry level model with the eight gigs of ram and that seven core gpu because that's going to be interesting to test so we we've essentially got fastest possible versus you know the strongest versus yeah that should help us to really get a good range and a good idea of the performance of these these various models i think however i'm gonna just gonna go and say it i i don't think for everyday usage and for most consumers i don't think you'd really notice much difference between any of the models that's my prediction for a consumer just doing general purpose computing i i think you'll only start to see those differences when you really push the machines so we'll see if i'm right yeah so i suppose our our comment at the moment if you're wondering which one to buy is uh by by the form factor that suits you most rather than worrying about which one's going to be the quickest because probably if you're looking at one of these it won't make that much difference to you um yeah i completely agree with that obviously we didn't mention battery life strongest battery life is in the macbook pro but that's not to say the macbook air is weak in any way at all we'll come on to that in a minute first of all though let's talk about let's talk about the bad let's do the good and the bad and we'll start with the bad pete yeah it's the bad and the ugly as far as i'm concerned it's the the lack of i o um on these machines of course that's that's been an issue we've we've raised with the the two port intel machines you've only got two thunderbird thunderbirds that's something complete yeah standby for action that's different again that stingray thunderbolt 3 ports or usb 4 ports which of course means if you want more connectivity you go for the ugly which is dongle heaven which we don't like we do not like that and on top of that uh these these machines can only support one display via these ports so up to a 6k 60 fps or 60 hertz which is pro xdr level screen of course the mac mini can drive a 4k 60 hertz screen via the hdmi which is hardly surprising because the laptops already have a screen so essentially each device can support two screens but that's it yeah and this is going to be a problem for for some users but i i think possibly not in the the target demographic but we'll get to that in a moment but i've certainly been chatting with folks on the youtube channel on uh one guy's got two of the lg 5k ultra fines another one had two of the 4k ultra fines so these are the monitors that apple produced in conjunction with lg and they're thunderbolt driven and of course normally you can daisy chain them but our expectation is of course that isn't going to work at all and i think this must be down to limited pci express lanes with the system on chip so i suspect this is something that will get fixed but at the moment uh you're limited on the number of displays um and there's well almost certain there's no egpu support that's what i'm being told are you are you going to try anyway of course i'm going to try it anyway i don't expect it's going to work no no i i don't think it will work and what do you think for future models as well um well it's entirely possible that it might happen for a future model where i yeah i've i'm not my best isn't beth i can't get my words out tonight my breath is not baited so no i think i think you might be disappointed because i think apple a distance distancing them they're there i can't get my words out now moving away from egpu um very very rapidly so i hope to be proved wrong because i know uh your forays into egpu been quite interesting but we'll have to wait and see yeah i'm i'm not massively bothered about it because i i'm secretly thinking that i may yet still uh move over to a pc possibly even with linux for my video editing rig and i could still use the egpu in that capacity so i'm not really worried about it um possibly that means you will knowing you well this all comes down to you know i i'm quite i quite like to have some of the new amd um silicon you know i'd like to have a play with that but sir they seem to have failed even more than nvidia did with their launch you've instead of just having people buying these things and sculpting them on ebay you've actually got retailers themselves price scoping the the new amd chips even on pre-orders it's absolutely crazy let's save that one for another podcast um let's what else that what else don't we like about this uh well i don't know about me it's not something i particularly dislike but certainly i know a lot of people are upset about upgradeability so for example the ram obviously is on chip you can't change that the ssd is soldered on but what i will say is is that any different to the machines that these are replacing the macbook air no soldered on ram soldered on ssd macbook pro sold it on ram soldered on i think and so it goes on the mac mini is exactly the same it's no different and you know it as you say it probably doesn't matter for the vast majority of this target market which is you know consumers general purpose computing users who probably never even consider that they buy a machine and they use it and they don't care about that i think this just goes back to that that mentality that we had drummed into us over a long time of upgrade upgrade put more stuff in more numbers bigger numbers go on to go on and go on yeah i i yeah we've got to get ourselves out of that mindset i suppose uh these are not you know desktop machines designed to be modular designed to be upgradable apple does provide one of those it's not very cheap actually i've got something nagging in my brain i think the mac mini might have been you might have been able to upgrade the ram in the mac mini i lose track i haven't had one of the latest generation never mind though next question though is also to do with ram lots of people saying why can you only have eight gigs or 16 gigs of ram well um there's a couple of reasons for that uh it's on-chip ram so it's very expensive relatively speaking compared to discrete ram that we've been used to um and as we've touched on already we need to start thinking about ram differently so um 16 gig may be more than enough it may be the equivalent of 32 gig on an on a traditional intel based architecture we won't know until we get our hands on the goodies but that's our expectation based on the example um applications that we saw running in the apple event yeah so i yeah like you say i think we just gotta wait and see change our mindset potentially but i'd also say as well that this is no different to to what to the current situation is it particularly with the notebooks anyway i'm pretty sure they're only available with eight or sixteen um and you know you go out and buy a gaming machine you know a gaming pc most of those are you don't really need more than 16 gigs of ram in a gaming pc uh unless you're editing you know 6k video um or doing a lot of layers you know you probably don't really need more than 16 gigs for that either so i i'm sure lots of people will have different opinions on that and would argue different scenarios but it's it's a difficult thing to assess because everybody's workflow is different you know what how you use the machine is different um so it's very difficult to say i i don't think it's an issue personally for the type of users that are going to be buying these machines yeah let's uh let's talk about pricing we also included this in the bad section yeah so it gets expensive fast um with with upgrades um but that that again is is not uncommon for apple products so um the the trend continues i think yeah i mean it's 200 for everything you do it seems i i don't know if you remember this pete when they when they updated the 13-inch macbook pro earlier this year it was it's obviously an eight gig model and you could upgrade to 16 gigs for a hundred dollars i remember making a video about it and then apple quietly pulled that and changed it back to 200 so they there's a specific reason why they price things the way they do and it does get eye wateringly expensive so i yeah i'm disappointed that it's only the mac mini that reduces the entry price i've got a feeling and i hope again i'm not wrong on this that it's a hundred dollars cheaper than the previous entry-level intel mac mini yeah be careful what you say because they might then hoik the price on that as well but it ceases to become a cheap machine when you factor in the cost of a decent display a decent keyboard you know well you want the mac keyboard and mouse don't you see it's it's what's always held us back from buying them for the studio isn't it because every time we've looked at a mac mini on the surface of it you look at it and you go that's pretty good good value for money but you then have to think well yeah you do want an apple keyboard and mouse really if you want to give your uh the people who are using it the right tools for the job and you want a nice display and then you're suddenly thinking well why wouldn't i just get an imac so that's why i've always found the mac mini a bit confusing but a reduction of 100 on the price makes it more interesting particularly as it's apple silicon yeah so a nice way to get into it if you've already got that kit to test it what about the good stuff oh well lots here um can i talk about i think we've seen the benchmarks yeah i was guessing i think we've seen some leaked benchmarks and i know that you are the bench king well at least when it comes to benchmarks so um yeah i'm going to put some caviar spell beans i i okay i don't want to to get too excited until i've been able to test one i don't know what exact system these are i don't know how people who are testing these or who is testing them because they haven't been shipped yet even to reviewers i don't believe so i do i do believe the benchmarks and we're talking in geekbench 5 of single core performance measured at over 1600 so that's faster than the a14 barnet that is on pretty much level pegging with the brand new amd chips the ryzen 5000 series it's the multi-core performance so that's particularly interesting and if you remember the a14 bionic on which the m1 chip is based it's not completely the same but it's based on that um bench is at about 4 000 in geekbench 5 for multi-core adding these two high-performance cores pushes it up over 7000 so it's a big difference it's knocking on the door of the multi-core performance in my 12 core 2013 mac pro it's outperforming the i9s in the 16-inch macbook pro uh i'm i'm quite excited at that possibility and i'm pretty sure that was a macbook air although i have to say geekbench doesn't in any way stress the thermals of the cpu the test isn't long enough to to really push it so i think when we get these machines we'll do some longer testing uh to really assess it but for your if your average computer user the kind of person that would go out and buy a thousand dollar macbook air i think they're going to be pretty chipper about that performance wouldn't you say it's it's absolutely breathtaking let's let's not take anything away from those leaked benchmarks if it's anywhere near that it is going to be amazing i haven't seen any benchmarks for gpu that doesn't mean they don't exist i've just been deliberately not trying to look and i stumbled upon the other benchmarks um the gpu performance of course we've already spoken about this we expect that to be way beyond where we thought it would be um certainly getting up to the levels that you see in the 16-inch macbook pro certainly knocking on the door of it anyway um what other good things have we got battery life right uh this is this is a big thing um uh just incredible on both the notebooks i think it's like is it 15 hours uh wireless web and um 11 hours of video streaming on the macbook air something like that and even more for the macbook pro um and i can't remember if it was a comment on one of the the other constant geekery videos or something else i i read where we're gonna start considering our notebooks like we do our phones so we just use them all day long and we just put them on charge at night you know it's never a case of oh you know like my mac is plugged in now and that that's normally how i operate and make sure i'm near a charger even though it's got great battery life this intel mac uh macbook pro 16. um i think it's going to change our relationship with chargers as long as we stop using microsoft teams and um google chrome well yeah absolutely but you know maybe maybe those developers have looked at the apple silicon and been inspired by its efficient uh approach to things and and decided to write their code in a more efficient way it would be nice to be able to get through a two-hour microsoft teams meeting you know without having to play without plugging in yeah definitely anyway that's another story for another day if you were to take an equivalent pc laptop to the macbook air or the macbook pro 13 inch at the same price point or similar price point with the same level of build quality you know we're talking a unibot unibody chassis you know good build quality premium notebook i i'm struggling to think of many pc laptops that would compete there are a few you know the dell xps they're really good but are they going to get anywhere close to the performance of these these new apple silicon notebooks i just i can't see that they are i think no i think unless you've got discreet graphics in your notebook uh the apple silicon has probably got it beat yeah absolutely and if if you have got discrete graphics you're probably paying more or compromising on chassis quality at this price point it's not to say you can't go out and get something with discreet graphics and an amazing chassis like you say that the higher end xps is or the hp specters but yeah it it really does make this a very attractive proposition uh and great timing releasing these just before christmas um it may make people who've perhaps had um pcs pc laptops to now reconsider their choices at this point very exciting times if you're about to take the plunge or thinking about it into apple well tim cook said that um the people buying mac 50 of them are new to mac and the macbook air is their best selling platform so this is not going to change that for in a bad way you know it's going to bring more people to the platform it's going to accelerate it it's going to accelerate it and i think i was actually sorry no no no after you i was i was just we talked about tim cook and you know you always get some exciting figures i was surprised to see uh that there was no statement that you know their their range of laptops at the moment have not solved world peace or anything like that at the moment because normally we have some kind of highfaluting statement like that but um maybe they're working on it they did a pretty good job of typecasting and generalizing what sort of person uses a mac uh i certainly didn't identify with um with the the type of individuals that they were displaying using them but there we go i think and that's the great thing that apple is open to everybody and lots of people use it in lots of different ways yeah definitely for the the average person the average consumer on the street wanting to buy an ultrabook you know a thousand dollars thousand pounds is there a better laptop to buy you know you're going to be delighted aren't you if if all of these performance things are to be believed as long as you can run the software that you want to run and that's a you know that's another discussion for another day i think people are going to be very very happy with these new macs yeah and i've got a little experiment that i'm going to be doing to test that out which i'll explain more about in a future podcast but uh yeah to basically really see how someone who's not a geek like uri um or many of us listening to this how they feel about one of these new apples so they can laptop so i'll report back on that intriguing look forward to that so on our next point a lot i'm sort of trying to gauge the mood of the comments you know from other videos i've posted on the youtube channel and again that's uh youtube.comforwardslash constant geekery if you've not already had a look at the channel um check us out there there's more video content about apple silicon and people are asking you know why didn't apple make new chassis you know for these macs why didn't they add more ports why didn't they give it upgradability you know why is apple if i had one commenter i saw today said you know apple was trying to sell a lemon um and i i totally get where he's coming from i do understand where he's coming from because he doesn't fit into the demographic the target demographic for these particular machines so they don't appeal to him but i think to call them lemons is not fair so why is it that apple has done this anyway what do you think well and to be fair i think we can we can relate if we weren't doing what we are doing with constant geekery with this podcast with this channel we probably wouldn't be buying a mac mini and a macbook air no so um but to call them lemons is a bit unfair i was anticipating that we might have some new or so tweaked chassis designs for sure just to make them stand out but actually when you think about apple and the way they do things it makes complete sense because they still have a lineup of intel max but they've got the support and they need to keep selling if they suddenly bring out something that is upgradable has more ports has perhaps a killer new look that people go oh that's gorgeous i've got to have the latest latest no one is going to buy those intel macs and that kills half their product line why would apple do that you know everyone will say well they want to make money it's like well yeah they're a business and they're very good at making money and they're not going to sacrifice that at this well at any stage so that's why they've done it yeah i think you're you're absolutely right there some there's a slight something else as well that i think is this factoring in on this and that is the you know because people would come back and say well why don't if apple did that they'd just sell more apple silicon maxing to make up for the intel max that they're not selling but they've got users who are stuck on intel because there's still software shortages uh there are certain things that aren't going to work yet on apple silicon there are there's a certain group of users that are not going to be moving to apple silicon anytime soon lots of people have spent vast sums of money on new intel max and apple said they would support them and they need to be seen to do that if you're an intel user who's bought an intel mac recently and suddenly you see apple wipe out their entire lineup of intel max what's that going to do for you is that going to give you confidence in the brand or are you going to look to jump ship well it could cause a lot of bad feeling um apple apple know what they're doing they know who their target audiences are for each machine uh they're not gonna just alienate a load of of their customers uh by going too too hard too quick uh this is very considered and uh what would what we're seeing here is actually a mass stroke of marketing yeah and product and product management what it is so they're going with a staged release that's the way i'm looking at it and which makes way more sense you know they need to stick with excuse me they need to stick with known quantities so yeah you know when you launch a new product you've got this plethora of things that can go wrong you know they've got potential issues with the hardware potential issues with the software um if you can eliminate the chassis from that you know we're not going to have problems with the keyboard because we're using the new magic keyboard we've sorted those things out we know the touch bar works we know the screen works we know the chassis works we know the batteries work you're just taking out a whole load of unknowns and making your job a whole bunch easier so i think that's part of the reason for for sticking with the look and i think apple needs to hold something back when you think about it when if you recall pete we did a video some months ago where we tried to break apple users down into categories i think we came up with three different categories in the end so you know this is the consumer the general purpose computing user someone who is consuming some content they're using office apps they're browsing the internet well these machines have got spades of performance for that kind of user they just they're never going to come close to you using the all of the performance of the machine so it's perfectly adequate for them but next you've got your enthusiasts your prosumers your some sorts of professionals you know your wedding photographers your web developers the kind of people that are professionals but i need a little bit more horsepower and a little bit more functionality with from their computer but they don't need you know a 28 core mac pro for example no and i suspect apple will go for those users next and then right at the end they'll tackle those top end users you know that really need massive computing power what do you think yeah i agree i i agree with that uh it fits as you said we've kind of got this idea that apple broadly segment their their customer base into those three targets and this is for that first customer base that consumer casual user but who wants the the premium laptop feel they want to have an apple device but they don't need a mac pro they don't even need a macbook pro because let's be honest the the entry level macbook pro is just it's a macbook pro in name uh only not notwithstanding the new performance at the performance of the new apple silicon but you know this this audience most of them don't need more than two two displays no i don't use in fact i've actually gone back to predominantly just using one display these days and i would consider myself to be a pro user um so you know the laptops that these have replaced only had two ports anyway yeah that's it so they have not changed anything have they no except on the mac mini of course which does lose two but you can still buy an intel one if you're desperate for more and you need that so they've been very careful not to alienate anyone with that um and who knows how long ago it was they made the decision to have the two ports knowing that apple silicon was coming did they make that decision quite a while back when when it was still intel we had no sniff of apple silicon um it's all strategic nothing's done by accident yeah don't forget that that 12-inch macbook that they brought out and that only had one port on it which was it wasn't even thunderbolt was it was just uspc um so this is not unprecedented for apple um i think something that's quite telling is that because apple haven't replaced the four ball four bought four port macbook pro 13-inch and they haven't replaced the top intel mac mini and what i would say is that indicates that apple has something else in store to replace those machines that seems reasonable to me so absolutely they'll bring out something better for that particular demographic sometime next year but it it doesn't doesn't it just make perfect sense to start with the less demanding the least demanding demographic which is your general consumers um and you know apple are well known for using their consumers as beta testers as well you know so they are they'll work out they are all of these people are going to work out all the kinks for you pro users out there and um you should be very grateful for that i think um apple being considerate of that but you know we we joke about it but think about it for a minute if you take your average macbook air user or even your macbook pro 13 with the two ports you look at all the apps that they've they've developed that will be available in big sur all the apple apps and and the the big ones from adobe and microsoft how many people using those devices are ever going to have more than that on there very very very few i would wager i would imagine most of them will be using those apps and that's it so if you were suddenly to foist apple silicon as the only option on pro users with all the you know workflows that they depend on you're in for a massive headache whereas this gives apple a chance to just test the waters with as you say the least demanding uh segment of their audience um so yeah we should be grateful as more more pro focused users that we haven't had that dropped on us yet yeah i agree with that and you know the performance that we're getting in these machines i'd say is unprecedented at these price points and indicative that what comes next is going to be even better still so if i if i'm a pro user i understand people who get frustrated because like us you know the announcement comes you get excited and then the products get launched and uh you know i'll be honest when i watch the event i was a little bit oh really um because we want more but we just need to be patient because that that will come and when it does come it's going to be even better than what we've got now and i think what what's coming i mean yes we still need to test it we still need to do our tests but indications are that what we've got coming is already amazing so to get something better than that next year perhaps in the spring well i'd say you know sit tight and look forward to it i i would say next year we should see the prosumer and enthusiast grade machines possibly get that new imac at some point i really hope so and what do we expect from the next iteration of the chip whether that's a stepped upgrade like an m1x or something or whether we see an m2 or something what do we expect to see from these new machines uh well obviously more performance will be would be the first thing we expect to see so um as as we sort of wondered apple holding stuff back will there be more cause um will we just see more blistering performance i expect so um i think it's fair to say that they'll address the port issues the i o port issues have more ports and i expect we'll see more ram or at least as an optional upgrade well look forward to all of that i think in conclusion we're quite gratified that you know we've used uh logic rather than listen to all of the rumors that are going around and regurgitate content and do all of that we've just tried to look at things logically from a business perspective you know what is apple likely to do what makes sense and uh it turns out that you know apple have basically done exactly what we predicted they would do so if you like your tech channels accurate and on point then constant geekery's got you covered so hopefully you enjoy the podcast on whichever platform you're listening to it on again just mentioned the youtube channel it's um youtube.com forward slash constant geekery there's all sorts of content on there uh lots of apple silicon um there is other content as well although i have to say that the audience seems to get a bit upset i uh when i i posted i posted a a very short video today about the new um nintendo gaming watch you know the 35th anniversary version and um i think it's fair to say my audience did not appreciate that i actually lost 14 subscribers in the first five months it's just wow i don't understand that don't understand that anyway um don't worry people you know just because i decide to feature something else on the channel doesn't mean that uh there's no more apple silicon coming there'll be plenty to come we've got two machines coming in uh we're going to do various testing with them obviously we'll we'll do the obvious benchmarks and other things if there's something you want to see let us know in the comments section we'll try and uh cover that off we have access to a good deal of software uh maybe that we need some of you guys out there to help us out and send us some files for testing or whatever it is you want to do with i'm sort of thinking making quite a few shorter videos where we just run a few sort of tests and we've got a web studio with lots of different apple macs to choose from so we can probably do a representative test for most different machines as well so again if there's something you'd like to see just let us know we'll try and accommodate it as much as possible uh definitely i think that's it really i'm i'm guessing that next week pete will probably be continuing to talk about apple silicon maybe have a look at the um the software side of things unless of course the machines have arrived in which case we might be you know drooling over those instead yeah quite possibly quite possibly and of course the biggest question of all is which whiskey will i be drinking next week well tune in to the constant geekery podcast to find out and and what what should i be drinking let us know i still gonna a smoothie some disgusting smoothie come on someone send us a recipe pete has to make it and drink it on the podcast how about that let's do it excellent thanks so much for listening or watching whichever whichever you've done and we'll catch you next time on the constant geekery podcast cheerio excellent good we're finished finish my whiskey youwell pete it's that time again and i think we need to have another go at doing one of these lockdown podcasts what do you reckon well i think it would be rude not to let's do it so welcome everybody it's episode seven of the constant geeky podcast uh whether you're watching on youtube that's uh youtube.com forward slash constant geekery or listening to your favorite podcasting platform uh we're very pleased to have you with us and this week we're gonna be talking about the new apple silicon we've got the new m1 chips we've got the m1 max are you excited about all of this pete i am really excited about it dave and i have to say the thing i'm most excited about is the fact that we called it with the chip naming convention it is indeed the m1 and we called that and i've never been right about anything in my life so i'm quite pleased about that uh in fairness i think we said it might be an m14 so um but we were half right let's just take it take the wins when you get them pete that's the way forward yeah still still never been right in my life but i'm almost right i just gotta say again uh i'm gonna be um because it's evening time i'm having my my evening whiskey and uh this week i'm getting this could be a regular feature i don't know uh this week i'm going with a bit of american bourbon and i've chosen tin cup and i really like tin cup whiskey because you get a tin cup every time you get a bowl so i've got quite a collection of these tin cups but they don't hold enough for my taste so you you could use it for tiddly winks but um i do feel that this is going to become a feature and i don't have a drink again which is probably a mistake when you're doing a podcast but maybe maybe i don't drink alcohol so maybe some or anything with sugar in it so maybe some suggestions from those listening in on what they'd like to see me drinking week we can start some kind of little uh tradition liquidized potatoes with added swarf actually i've got to tell you i gotta tell you a story i went to visit some clients once and uh they they're of a particular sort of eco persuasion that sounds really bad i don't mean anything bad by that at all but they they they like their health foods uh they were the kind of people we've had i'm pretty sure on the same visit they lectured me about not drinking mcdonald's milkshake because it's got um sawdust in it to thicken it apparently yeah i know okay and then she proceeded to to give me this this uh smoothie that they'd made and it was green and gritty and possibly one of the most disgusting things i've ever had in my mouth ever and i think at this point we should probably move on i think we should yeah so what are we talking about again smoothies with swarf and apple silicon uh so the m1 chip let's talk about that first so we got we've got an eight core cpu and an eight core gpu of course we didn't know what we were gonna get beforehand so are we pleased with that outcome uh yeah i mean it's interesting we did muse how different it would be from the a14 bionic so uh we're seeing two additional high performance cpu calls as a result and four additional gpu calls so we were excited about how the a14 bionic was benchmarking and that got us excited about what apple silicon could bring and that's just really been confirmed by the addition of these extra cores and particularly the gpu cores yeah i find that quite exciting i just want to step back a moment though obviously the because this is arm architecture those eight cores break down into four uh high efficiency cores so these are cores that are used for low power background tasks um that help keep the battery life strong i think they're about they use about one tenth of the power of the high performance cores and then uh the high performance cores obviously are handling the the heavyweight stuff now in the a14 bionic you've got four of those efficiency cores and two of the high performance cores so the two additional cores that we're getting are high performance cpu cores and that's that's a really key point which will help explain the benchmarks that will come onto but the gpu cores uh you know we were pretty astonished with the a14 bionics um gpu performance it was benching at about half the level of the 5300m that's in the 16 inch macbook pro so if we've now doubled the gpu core count does that mean that this gpu will be on par with the 5300 well i think it's reasonable to assume it is going to be which is astonishing yeah i mean there could be there could be some overhead issues but it's going to be closes and it's going to be in that ballpark and we weren't really expecting it to get quite that high so i think yeah astonishing really good yeah very exciting beyond what we expected really it is and our expectations were high yes they were they were i i think that's uh you know we are talking about uh machines that don't have dedicated gpus so to have the performance of something that does have a dedicated gpu or be a a mobile gpu i think that is very impressive uh we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go through um the other thing that's on this chip of course we've got that 16 core neural engine and that just simply means that we're we're bringing machine learning to the mac so there's apis that developers can take advantage of to access machine learning ability i think that'll be good news for people you know scientists who work in particular fields but also for everyday users you know that just uh they're using it for instance to clean up the image on the webcam um which remains resolutely a 720p webcam of course yeah it does but uh significantly that is becoming in in 2020 where uh so many more of us have been forced to work from home whether we want to or not uh having a decent quality webcam that works particularly in lower light conditions without having to shine you know multiple super trooper lights on your face uh that's going to be good it's going to improve communication and collaboration so and of course people will use it for communicating with family and things as well so it's not just professional so that's that's really the the slim shallow end of the pool for machine learning but a welcome one for consume consumers i i'd say yeah it'd be interesting to see what it gets used for i i saw a demo a couple of weeks ago or maybe last week i'm losing track of time but uh it was adobe and i assume it was after effects they were using but there was a drone shot if you can imagine this a drone shot going along a beach and there was a rider on a horse on the beach and they used a ai tool to erase the horse and its rider and that was last week it looked good you know that's stunning yeah that's the kind of thing where ai comes in and you've seen it now in a lot of photo editing programs as well you know sky replacement and various other other exciting things and just touching on something we mentioned i think in our our last podcast about removing or actually it might have been the podcast before about removing creativity we talked about how with new iphones it was kind of taking away from the creatives i would say this is where actually being able to remove something like that is is a good shortcut to workflow and it doesn't stifle creativity actually aids it because you're not doing something laborious and mundane that anyone who's learned how to use say photoshop will get to know how to do to a greater or lesser skill level this this enables you to focus on the end result so i would say this is where ai actually aids creativity yeah i think so too and i look forward to seeing that um obviously i suspect it would have had a much harder job if the backdrop was you know a load of trees and bushes or something i was trying to trying to replace but still it's it's good to see stuff going that way and you know it'll be interesting and i've seen this in the comments actually it'd be interesting to see how the m1 chip compares to say something like um you know nvidia's um compute cards and and is it tesla they they call it their desk side super computer system anyway be interesting to see yes let's move on anyway um what about the ram how do you feel about that well it's on chip isn't it so that means it's shared between the cpu and the gpu so a little bit different maybe from how we've become used to those things being done in the past uh interestingly though only eight gig and 16 gig gig options on the first machines to be released so i think it's going to be very fast um because it's on chip but a few eyebrows raised by many including in some of the comments on some of the other constant geekery videos you've put out in the last week or so about is that a bit bit low particularly for some of the tasks that we saw demonstrated but um i think you touched on the fact that we probably need to rethink this a little bit more i think we're going to talk about that a bit later so um yeah it'll be interesting to see that but certainly what we saw uh from the event is some very impressive things being done with less memory than we've been used to in the past yeah i do feel that we've got to get out of this mindset of you know fast x86 processor plus system ram plus gpu with you know dedicated uh video ram i this is a different system it's a system on chip it's unified memory um simple truth is that you know in a system a traditional pc system you're not using all of the system ram and all of the video ram at the same time usually so we don't need as much in total in all likelihood the other thing is as well that it's likely to be very quick because it's on on chip so i i think i would like to reserve judgment until we've actually got the machines in to test them my suspicion is that it won't it won't be the same as what we're traditionally used to yeah and i think that's a really important point isn't it that we we really need to hold judgment on on any of this until we've seen how this it's a whole new system it's a whole new architecture we've been so ingrained with x86 for well as long as i can remember almost you know apart from the very early dates that that's what's seared into our brains but this is a different approach it's really exciting it is a it's a bit of a leap forward it's almost you know we keep using car analogies but you know it was always bigger engines bigger engines more um cubic capacity that was the secret and now suddenly what you're finding is it's going the other way even high performance models with smaller engines and other ways of making uh the or giving the performance um even down to some tiny tiny engines uh it's it's a mindset change and i think we need to see how that pans out once we get our hands on some gear and have a play with it okay so let's talk about the gear so we'll just quickly run through the three machines so we've got the macbook air now we were expecting apple to introduce a fanless model um i don't think this came as any great surprise to anybody at all but what i find interesting about the macbook air is when you look at the entry level model so this is the 1 000 version it's uh got a seven core gpu and i've been you know i'm sort of thinking about this and wondering why they've done that uh i assume it's because of the way they've been in the chips so um you know when when uh when foundries make silicon wafers you know with loads of processors on it's not an exact science it doesn't always work you know so what happens is the the manufacturers will will bin or they'll switch off certain cores so for example they might they might aim to make an eight-core cpu for example intel might make an eight-core cpu uh they find that you know one of the cores doesn't work so they block off two of them and sell it as a six core it's that kind of i'm simplifying it but that's that's the idea yeah so the question is you know is this just apple being really efficient and making use of the you know their entire production yield um is it the case that their yield is you know perhaps they're actually trying to go for for more than eight cores and they're they're blocking off those other cores you know is there something held in reserve or is this a deliberate measure to keep the pricing in check across the range of models you know switch off a core give give them slightly less at the entry level point just to give people a reason to upgrade and you know a reason to still go and buy the the the macbook pro any thoughts it's almost alien to me that apple would would do something like that to encourage you to go up to the next level of machine learning um that was good timing don't waste it you made me spit out my whiskey don't waste it um yeah apple apple have always been very very canny or very very um strategic with their pricing they know how to price um to encourage people to upgrade so i think you're probably on to something here you're right the the yields are probably a reflection on this but it may even be like you say that there's there's more than an eight core out there it's just that it's not in these models because they want to keep something back for when they start introducing the more prosumer models that we're anticipating to come next yeah so uh pricing wise it's um it's 999 dollars for the seven core version and that has 8 gigs of ram and 256 on the ssd or for an extra 250 dollars you get an 8 core version with a 512 gig ssd what's important to know about the macbook air is that they are replacing the the intel macbook air so you can't get the intel macbook air anymore not from apple anyway uh of course that means great time to go and try and find one of those if you're particularly after an intel macbook air there should be some deals around um so that that's the macbook air not no great surprises there and then we've got the macbook pro 13-inch yep so the main difference of course is active cooling yeah yeah now what this says to me is if if apple are shouting about the cooling and they did did do that in the event you know this is gonna you know sustain performance etc etc then what does that tell you about the macbook air uh that it it could do more if it had active cooling yeah i think so but um how much difference that actually makes in the real world we'll have to wait and see so um specifically though apple are replacing the two port version of the 13-inch macbook pro they are but the the four-port one the four-port intel version is still available yes it is and there's always been two different versions of these laptops and i did cover this in the other videos we won't go into detail again but the four port version is different internally so it's uh you know it's the the entry-level macbook pro that they're replacing and it starts at thirteen hundred dollars yeah so the next computer is the mac mini and we weren't specifically expecting this um this was quite a nice surprise i think yeah i mean we we mooted maybe there being a a new smaller form desktop that had had the chassis a smaller version of the the mac pro chassis didn't we but we we weren't expecting a mac mini which is something different um so that that is nice it's got active cooling again so did they make mention of how many fans that's got is it still just the one same as in the macbook pro it is uh it's one fan yes i mean it's larger than the one that's in the macbook pro but whether it it moves more air or not is another question i mean i think it's important to say the mac mini has always been mobile components so whilst it is sold as a desktop machine it's mobile processors and uh you know effectively laptop um equipment got you okay i didn't know that um that makes sense though now i've now said it i'm doubting myself and thinking maybe it isn't so uh no doubt someone will correct me in the comments if if i've got that wrong but i thought that was the case um and again with with the mac mini there was always quite a range of pricing wasn't there you could you started off with that i3 and you could go all the way up to the six core i7 so yeah apple are replacing the entry level mac minis but not the top end intel mac mini you can still buy that that's the six core one isn't it yeah so i think it's a a standard it's a six core i5 i think you can expect a six core i7 uh something else that's important to know as well uh is that the intel mac mini is space gray and the m1 mac mini is silver and there's no color choice ah okay and that is incredibly important because obviously space gray is faster isn't it it's a faster color space gray is definitely faster yeah yeah but not as fast as say gold yes so uh what else doesn't it have that the new mac mini doesn't have 10 gigabit ethernet yeah and i think this will this will matter to some people but i think the people that it matters to could still buy the intel mac mini um uh you could also do it via thunderbolt as well you know you could i mean this is apple you know it's the dongle life isn't it let's buy another dongle yeah yeah it's environmentally friendly to do that um what about the price well 700 um which which is is the cheapest way to access the the new apple silicon at the moment well outside of getting an ipad um i must admit i've always been a little bit confused by the the mac mini um simply because the the imax always seemed more attractive because of the screen and the fact you get a magic mouse and keyboard but for seven hundred dollars you're getting into apple silicon now if you've got a screen the mouse and the keyboard or you're prepared to stump up for one of those it's a great way to access those things yeah definitely and uh you know i mean look at my situation here i'm i'm sat in front of a very nice 4k display i don't i don't need to have an imac so i've got my keyboard and touchpad so i would sorry trackpad i would just buy the mac mini in fact that's exactly what i have done so just to be clear for the for the purposes of testing on the channel we've got a mac mini coming with 16 gigs so our expectation is that of the because they're they're basically all three the same machine and our expectation is that the mac mini is probably the quickest of them because it will sustain the you know the cool the cooling is going to be optimized in that that chassis isn't it yeah i'd have thought there's probably not much in it at all between that and the macbook pro the difference is the macbook pro has a battery if you're charging the battery that adds heat so the mac mini doesn't have that issue i'm just speculating here yeah good point i it's more useful to me i'm perfectly happy with my intel 4 port macbook pro 13 inch for now so for me the mac mini makes a lot of sense but we also then decided to get a macbook air as well and we've got the the entry level model with the eight gigs of ram and that seven core gpu because that's going to be interesting to test so we we've essentially got fastest possible versus you know the strongest versus yeah that should help us to really get a good range and a good idea of the performance of these these various models i think however i'm gonna just gonna go and say it i i don't think for everyday usage and for most consumers i don't think you'd really notice much difference between any of the models that's my prediction for a consumer just doing general purpose computing i i think you'll only start to see those differences when you really push the machines so we'll see if i'm right yeah so i suppose our our comment at the moment if you're wondering which one to buy is uh by by the form factor that suits you most rather than worrying about which one's going to be the quickest because probably if you're looking at one of these it won't make that much difference to you um yeah i completely agree with that obviously we didn't mention battery life strongest battery life is in the macbook pro but that's not to say the macbook air is weak in any way at all we'll come on to that in a minute first of all though let's talk about let's talk about the bad let's do the good and the bad and we'll start with the bad pete yeah it's the bad and the ugly as far as i'm concerned it's the the lack of i o um on these machines of course that's that's been an issue we've we've raised with the the two port intel machines you've only got two thunderbird thunderbirds that's something complete yeah standby for action that's different again that stingray thunderbolt 3 ports or usb 4 ports which of course means if you want more connectivity you go for the ugly which is dongle heaven which we don't like we do not like that and on top of that uh these these machines can only support one display via these ports so up to a 6k 60 fps or 60 hertz which is pro xdr level screen of course the mac mini can drive a 4k 60 hertz screen via the hdmi which is hardly surprising because the laptops already have a screen so essentially each device can support two screens but that's it yeah and this is going to be a problem for for some users but i i think possibly not in the the target demographic but we'll get to that in a moment but i've certainly been chatting with folks on the youtube channel on uh one guy's got two of the lg 5k ultra fines another one had two of the 4k ultra fines so these are the monitors that apple produced in conjunction with lg and they're thunderbolt driven and of course normally you can daisy chain them but our expectation is of course that isn't going to work at all and i think this must be down to limited pci express lanes with the system on chip so i suspect this is something that will get fixed but at the moment uh you're limited on the number of displays um and there's well almost certain there's no egpu support that's what i'm being told are you are you going to try anyway of course i'm going to try it anyway i don't expect it's going to work no no i i don't think it will work and what do you think for future models as well um well it's entirely possible that it might happen for a future model where i yeah i've i'm not my best isn't beth i can't get my words out tonight my breath is not baited so no i think i think you might be disappointed because i think apple a distance distancing them they're there i can't get my words out now moving away from egpu um very very rapidly so i hope to be proved wrong because i know uh your forays into egpu been quite interesting but we'll have to wait and see yeah i'm i'm not massively bothered about it because i i'm secretly thinking that i may yet still uh move over to a pc possibly even with linux for my video editing rig and i could still use the egpu in that capacity so i'm not really worried about it um possibly that means you will knowing you well this all comes down to you know i i'm quite i quite like to have some of the new amd um silicon you know i'd like to have a play with that but sir they seem to have failed even more than nvidia did with their launch you've instead of just having people buying these things and sculpting them on ebay you've actually got retailers themselves price scoping the the new amd chips even on pre-orders it's absolutely crazy let's save that one for another podcast um let's what else that what else don't we like about this uh well i don't know about me it's not something i particularly dislike but certainly i know a lot of people are upset about upgradeability so for example the ram obviously is on chip you can't change that the ssd is soldered on but what i will say is is that any different to the machines that these are replacing the macbook air no soldered on ram soldered on ssd macbook pro sold it on ram soldered on i think and so it goes on the mac mini is exactly the same it's no different and you know it as you say it probably doesn't matter for the vast majority of this target market which is you know consumers general purpose computing users who probably never even consider that they buy a machine and they use it and they don't care about that i think this just goes back to that that mentality that we had drummed into us over a long time of upgrade upgrade put more stuff in more numbers bigger numbers go on to go on and go on yeah i i yeah we've got to get ourselves out of that mindset i suppose uh these are not you know desktop machines designed to be modular designed to be upgradable apple does provide one of those it's not very cheap actually i've got something nagging in my brain i think the mac mini might have been you might have been able to upgrade the ram in the mac mini i lose track i haven't had one of the latest generation never mind though next question though is also to do with ram lots of people saying why can you only have eight gigs or 16 gigs of ram well um there's a couple of reasons for that uh it's on-chip ram so it's very expensive relatively speaking compared to discrete ram that we've been used to um and as we've touched on already we need to start thinking about ram differently so um 16 gig may be more than enough it may be the equivalent of 32 gig on an on a traditional intel based architecture we won't know until we get our hands on the goodies but that's our expectation based on the example um applications that we saw running in the apple event yeah so i yeah like you say i think we just gotta wait and see change our mindset potentially but i'd also say as well that this is no different to to what to the current situation is it particularly with the notebooks anyway i'm pretty sure they're only available with eight or sixteen um and you know you go out and buy a gaming machine you know a gaming pc most of those are you don't really need more than 16 gigs of ram in a gaming pc uh unless you're editing you know 6k video um or doing a lot of layers you know you probably don't really need more than 16 gigs for that either so i i'm sure lots of people will have different opinions on that and would argue different scenarios but it's it's a difficult thing to assess because everybody's workflow is different you know what how you use the machine is different um so it's very difficult to say i i don't think it's an issue personally for the type of users that are going to be buying these machines yeah let's uh let's talk about pricing we also included this in the bad section yeah so it gets expensive fast um with with upgrades um but that that again is is not uncommon for apple products so um the the trend continues i think yeah i mean it's 200 for everything you do it seems i i don't know if you remember this pete when they when they updated the 13-inch macbook pro earlier this year it was it's obviously an eight gig model and you could upgrade to 16 gigs for a hundred dollars i remember making a video about it and then apple quietly pulled that and changed it back to 200 so they there's a specific reason why they price things the way they do and it does get eye wateringly expensive so i yeah i'm disappointed that it's only the mac mini that reduces the entry price i've got a feeling and i hope again i'm not wrong on this that it's a hundred dollars cheaper than the previous entry-level intel mac mini yeah be careful what you say because they might then hoik the price on that as well but it ceases to become a cheap machine when you factor in the cost of a decent display a decent keyboard you know well you want the mac keyboard and mouse don't you see it's it's what's always held us back from buying them for the studio isn't it because every time we've looked at a mac mini on the surface of it you look at it and you go that's pretty good good value for money but you then have to think well yeah you do want an apple keyboard and mouse really if you want to give your uh the people who are using it the right tools for the job and you want a nice display and then you're suddenly thinking well why wouldn't i just get an imac so that's why i've always found the mac mini a bit confusing but a reduction of 100 on the price makes it more interesting particularly as it's apple silicon yeah so a nice way to get into it if you've already got that kit to test it what about the good stuff oh well lots here um can i talk about i think we've seen the benchmarks yeah i was guessing i think we've seen some leaked benchmarks and i know that you are the bench king well at least when it comes to benchmarks so um yeah i'm going to put some caviar spell beans i i okay i don't want to to get too excited until i've been able to test one i don't know what exact system these are i don't know how people who are testing these or who is testing them because they haven't been shipped yet even to reviewers i don't believe so i do i do believe the benchmarks and we're talking in geekbench 5 of single core performance measured at over 1600 so that's faster than the a14 barnet that is on pretty much level pegging with the brand new amd chips the ryzen 5000 series it's the multi-core performance so that's particularly interesting and if you remember the a14 bionic on which the m1 chip is based it's not completely the same but it's based on that um bench is at about 4 000 in geekbench 5 for multi-core adding these two high-performance cores pushes it up over 7000 so it's a big difference it's knocking on the door of the multi-core performance in my 12 core 2013 mac pro it's outperforming the i9s in the 16-inch macbook pro uh i'm i'm quite excited at that possibility and i'm pretty sure that was a macbook air although i have to say geekbench doesn't in any way stress the thermals of the cpu the test isn't long enough to to really push it so i think when we get these machines we'll do some longer testing uh to really assess it but for your if your average computer user the kind of person that would go out and buy a thousand dollar macbook air i think they're going to be pretty chipper about that performance wouldn't you say it's it's absolutely breathtaking let's let's not take anything away from those leaked benchmarks if it's anywhere near that it is going to be amazing i haven't seen any benchmarks for gpu that doesn't mean they don't exist i've just been deliberately not trying to look and i stumbled upon the other benchmarks um the gpu performance of course we've already spoken about this we expect that to be way beyond where we thought it would be um certainly getting up to the levels that you see in the 16-inch macbook pro certainly knocking on the door of it anyway um what other good things have we got battery life right uh this is this is a big thing um uh just incredible on both the notebooks i think it's like is it 15 hours uh wireless web and um 11 hours of video streaming on the macbook air something like that and even more for the macbook pro um and i can't remember if it was a comment on one of the the other constant geekery videos or something else i i read where we're gonna start considering our notebooks like we do our phones so we just use them all day long and we just put them on charge at night you know it's never a case of oh you know like my mac is plugged in now and that that's normally how i operate and make sure i'm near a charger even though it's got great battery life this intel mac uh macbook pro 16. um i think it's going to change our relationship with chargers as long as we stop using microsoft teams and um google chrome well yeah absolutely but you know maybe maybe those developers have looked at the apple silicon and been inspired by its efficient uh approach to things and and decided to write their code in a more efficient way it would be nice to be able to get through a two-hour microsoft teams meeting you know without having to play without plugging in yeah definitely anyway that's another story for another day if you were to take an equivalent pc laptop to the macbook air or the macbook pro 13 inch at the same price point or similar price point with the same level of build quality you know we're talking a unibot unibody chassis you know good build quality premium notebook i i'm struggling to think of many pc laptops that would compete there are a few you know the dell xps they're really good but are they going to get anywhere close to the performance of these these new apple silicon notebooks i just i can't see that they are i think no i think unless you've got discreet graphics in your notebook uh the apple silicon has probably got it beat yeah absolutely and if if you have got discrete graphics you're probably paying more or compromising on chassis quality at this price point it's not to say you can't go out and get something with discreet graphics and an amazing chassis like you say that the higher end xps is or the hp specters but yeah it it really does make this a very attractive proposition uh and great timing releasing these just before christmas um it may make people who've perhaps had um pcs pc laptops to now reconsider their choices at this point very exciting times if you're about to take the plunge or thinking about it into apple well tim cook said that um the people buying mac 50 of them are new to mac and the macbook air is their best selling platform so this is not going to change that for in a bad way you know it's going to bring more people to the platform it's going to accelerate it it's going to accelerate it and i think i was actually sorry no no no after you i was i was just we talked about tim cook and you know you always get some exciting figures i was surprised to see uh that there was no statement that you know their their range of laptops at the moment have not solved world peace or anything like that at the moment because normally we have some kind of highfaluting statement like that but um maybe they're working on it they did a pretty good job of typecasting and generalizing what sort of person uses a mac uh i certainly didn't identify with um with the the type of individuals that they were displaying using them but there we go i think and that's the great thing that apple is open to everybody and lots of people use it in lots of different ways yeah definitely for the the average person the average consumer on the street wanting to buy an ultrabook you know a thousand dollars thousand pounds is there a better laptop to buy you know you're going to be delighted aren't you if if all of these performance things are to be believed as long as you can run the software that you want to run and that's a you know that's another discussion for another day i think people are going to be very very happy with these new macs yeah and i've got a little experiment that i'm going to be doing to test that out which i'll explain more about in a future podcast but uh yeah to basically really see how someone who's not a geek like uri um or many of us listening to this how they feel about one of these new apples so they can laptop so i'll report back on that intriguing look forward to that so on our next point a lot i'm sort of trying to gauge the mood of the comments you know from other videos i've posted on the youtube channel and again that's uh youtube.comforwardslash constant geekery if you've not already had a look at the channel um check us out there there's more video content about apple silicon and people are asking you know why didn't apple make new chassis you know for these macs why didn't they add more ports why didn't they give it upgradability you know why is apple if i had one commenter i saw today said you know apple was trying to sell a lemon um and i i totally get where he's coming from i do understand where he's coming from because he doesn't fit into the demographic the target demographic for these particular machines so they don't appeal to him but i think to call them lemons is not fair so why is it that apple has done this anyway what do you think well and to be fair i think we can we can relate if we weren't doing what we are doing with constant geekery with this podcast with this channel we probably wouldn't be buying a mac mini and a macbook air no so um but to call them lemons is a bit unfair i was anticipating that we might have some new or so tweaked chassis designs for sure just to make them stand out but actually when you think about apple and the way they do things it makes complete sense because they still have a lineup of intel max but they've got the support and they need to keep selling if they suddenly bring out something that is upgradable has more ports has perhaps a killer new look that people go oh that's gorgeous i've got to have the latest latest no one is going to buy those intel macs and that kills half their product line why would apple do that you know everyone will say well they want to make money it's like well yeah they're a business and they're very good at making money and they're not going to sacrifice that at this well at any stage so that's why they've done it yeah i think you're you're absolutely right there some there's a slight something else as well that i think is this factoring in on this and that is the you know because people would come back and say well why don't if apple did that they'd just sell more apple silicon maxing to make up for the intel max that they're not selling but they've got users who are stuck on intel because there's still software shortages uh there are certain things that aren't going to work yet on apple silicon there are there's a certain group of users that are not going to be moving to apple silicon anytime soon lots of people have spent vast sums of money on new intel max and apple said they would support them and they need to be seen to do that if you're an intel user who's bought an intel mac recently and suddenly you see apple wipe out their entire lineup of intel max what's that going to do for you is that going to give you confidence in the brand or are you going to look to jump ship well it could cause a lot of bad feeling um apple apple know what they're doing they know who their target audiences are for each machine uh they're not gonna just alienate a load of of their customers uh by going too too hard too quick uh this is very considered and uh what would what we're seeing here is actually a mass stroke of marketing yeah and product and product management what it is so they're going with a staged release that's the way i'm looking at it and which makes way more sense you know they need to stick with excuse me they need to stick with known quantities so yeah you know when you launch a new product you've got this plethora of things that can go wrong you know they've got potential issues with the hardware potential issues with the software um if you can eliminate the chassis from that you know we're not going to have problems with the keyboard because we're using the new magic keyboard we've sorted those things out we know the touch bar works we know the screen works we know the chassis works we know the batteries work you're just taking out a whole load of unknowns and making your job a whole bunch easier so i think that's part of the reason for for sticking with the look and i think apple needs to hold something back when you think about it when if you recall pete we did a video some months ago where we tried to break apple users down into categories i think we came up with three different categories in the end so you know this is the consumer the general purpose computing user someone who is consuming some content they're using office apps they're browsing the internet well these machines have got spades of performance for that kind of user they just they're never going to come close to you using the all of the performance of the machine so it's perfectly adequate for them but next you've got your enthusiasts your prosumers your some sorts of professionals you know your wedding photographers your web developers the kind of people that are professionals but i need a little bit more horsepower and a little bit more functionality with from their computer but they don't need you know a 28 core mac pro for example no and i suspect apple will go for those users next and then right at the end they'll tackle those top end users you know that really need massive computing power what do you think yeah i agree i i agree with that uh it fits as you said we've kind of got this idea that apple broadly segment their their customer base into those three targets and this is for that first customer base that consumer casual user but who wants the the premium laptop feel they want to have an apple device but they don't need a mac pro they don't even need a macbook pro because let's be honest the the entry level macbook pro is just it's a macbook pro in name uh only not notwithstanding the new performance at the performance of the new apple silicon but you know this this audience most of them don't need more than two two displays no i don't use in fact i've actually gone back to predominantly just using one display these days and i would consider myself to be a pro user um so you know the laptops that these have replaced only had two ports anyway yeah that's it so they have not changed anything have they no except on the mac mini of course which does lose two but you can still buy an intel one if you're desperate for more and you need that so they've been very careful not to alienate anyone with that um and who knows how long ago it was they made the decision to have the two ports knowing that apple silicon was coming did they make that decision quite a while back when when it was still intel we had no sniff of apple silicon um it's all strategic nothing's done by accident yeah don't forget that that 12-inch macbook that they brought out and that only had one port on it which was it wasn't even thunderbolt was it was just uspc um so this is not unprecedented for apple um i think something that's quite telling is that because apple haven't replaced the four ball four bought four port macbook pro 13-inch and they haven't replaced the top intel mac mini and what i would say is that indicates that apple has something else in store to replace those machines that seems reasonable to me so absolutely they'll bring out something better for that particular demographic sometime next year but it it doesn't doesn't it just make perfect sense to start with the less demanding the least demanding demographic which is your general consumers um and you know apple are well known for using their consumers as beta testers as well you know so they are they'll work out they are all of these people are going to work out all the kinks for you pro users out there and um you should be very grateful for that i think um apple being considerate of that but you know we we joke about it but think about it for a minute if you take your average macbook air user or even your macbook pro 13 with the two ports you look at all the apps that they've they've developed that will be available in big sur all the apple apps and and the the big ones from adobe and microsoft how many people using those devices are ever going to have more than that on there very very very few i would wager i would imagine most of them will be using those apps and that's it so if you were suddenly to foist apple silicon as the only option on pro users with all the you know workflows that they depend on you're in for a massive headache whereas this gives apple a chance to just test the waters with as you say the least demanding uh segment of their audience um so yeah we should be grateful as more more pro focused users that we haven't had that dropped on us yet yeah i agree with that and you know the performance that we're getting in these machines i'd say is unprecedented at these price points and indicative that what comes next is going to be even better still so if i if i'm a pro user i understand people who get frustrated because like us you know the announcement comes you get excited and then the products get launched and uh you know i'll be honest when i watch the event i was a little bit oh really um because we want more but we just need to be patient because that that will come and when it does come it's going to be even better than what we've got now and i think what what's coming i mean yes we still need to test it we still need to do our tests but indications are that what we've got coming is already amazing so to get something better than that next year perhaps in the spring well i'd say you know sit tight and look forward to it i i would say next year we should see the prosumer and enthusiast grade machines possibly get that new imac at some point i really hope so and what do we expect from the next iteration of the chip whether that's a stepped upgrade like an m1x or something or whether we see an m2 or something what do we expect to see from these new machines uh well obviously more performance will be would be the first thing we expect to see so um as as we sort of wondered apple holding stuff back will there be more cause um will we just see more blistering performance i expect so um i think it's fair to say that they'll address the port issues the i o port issues have more ports and i expect we'll see more ram or at least as an optional upgrade well look forward to all of that i think in conclusion we're quite gratified that you know we've used uh logic rather than listen to all of the rumors that are going around and regurgitate content and do all of that we've just tried to look at things logically from a business perspective you know what is apple likely to do what makes sense and uh it turns out that you know apple have basically done exactly what we predicted they would do so if you like your tech channels accurate and on point then constant geekery's got you covered so hopefully you enjoy the podcast on whichever platform you're listening to it on again just mentioned the youtube channel it's um youtube.com forward slash constant geekery there's all sorts of content on there uh lots of apple silicon um there is other content as well although i have to say that the audience seems to get a bit upset i uh when i i posted i posted a a very short video today about the new um nintendo gaming watch you know the 35th anniversary version and um i think it's fair to say my audience did not appreciate that i actually lost 14 subscribers in the first five months it's just wow i don't understand that don't understand that anyway um don't worry people you know just because i decide to feature something else on the channel doesn't mean that uh there's no more apple silicon coming there'll be plenty to come we've got two machines coming in uh we're going to do various testing with them obviously we'll we'll do the obvious benchmarks and other things if there's something you want to see let us know in the comments section we'll try and uh cover that off we have access to a good deal of software uh maybe that we need some of you guys out there to help us out and send us some files for testing or whatever it is you want to do with i'm sort of thinking making quite a few shorter videos where we just run a few sort of tests and we've got a web studio with lots of different apple macs to choose from so we can probably do a representative test for most different machines as well so again if there's something you'd like to see just let us know we'll try and accommodate it as much as possible uh definitely i think that's it really i'm i'm guessing that next week pete will probably be continuing to talk about apple silicon maybe have a look at the um the software side of things unless of course the machines have arrived in which case we might be you know drooling over those instead yeah quite possibly quite possibly and of course the biggest question of all is which whiskey will i be drinking next week well tune in to the constant geekery podcast to find out and and what what should i be drinking let us know i still gonna a smoothie some disgusting smoothie come on someone send us a recipe pete has to make it and drink it on the podcast how about that let's do it excellent thanks so much for listening or watching whichever whichever you've done and we'll catch you next time on the constant geekery podcast cheerio excellent good we're finished finish my whiskey you\n"