James: 00:09 Finally happened. Frank, I feel like I open up every podcast in the last week or two or four or eight with it finally happened. Frankly, the most amazing thing ever happened. Frank: 00:20 It's like you're trying to do a YouTube QuickBase title, but you never actually put that as our title. We do like these weird, maybe you can figure it out. Titles never the click baity 10 things that we have to say about what is it, what is our topic, what do we have 10 things to say about James? James: 00:38 Well, you know, episode one 70 was 10 ways to develop faster and better, which is kind of funny. That was very quick. Beatty. I forgot you. Let me have that. Thank you. Last week, I don't know if you, I don't know how your podcast app shows it, but originally the podcast episode was nullable enabled nullable like in the markup tag in the CSH prod, you know the [inaudible]. Frank: 01:01 Yeah, yeah. James: 01:03 Um, you shouldn't use HTML tags and the title for things though, Frank. Cause when turns out, yeah, when my podcast app, um, over or not over, I mean I don't know about overcast but um, PocketCasts and also if that's on that parsed it, it just came up as enable. Frank: 01:21 Yeah, that's exactly a, I use my own podcasting app, literally called Mo cast and uh, yeah, it was just called the navel and I was like, I know what happened here. I know exactly what happened here. So you actually put my, um, uh, bracket, knowable bracket. What did you put there? Like the uh, project file syntax. James: 01:42 Yeah. So I updated it to the pound nullable enabled later on and in good podcast apps, update it Frank: 01:50 to Mo cast, updated it just fine. Yeah, it's a tricky thing actually when you're doing uh, uh, a podcast player like this because you have to, you're downloading metadata constantly, so you have to be a little judicious about when you're actually updating the database. So I don't even want to make fun of too many apps if they didn't get the title update. I totally get why I haven't written one of these apps. Yeah, I am. James: 02:16 I am impressed. I mean, my assumption is that that title went into the RSS feed itself and then parsing the RSS feed just caused a bunch of problems Frank: 02:25 in general. I guess maybe I don't, I don't know. Well, the, the problem is like, so every episode has a unique ID. That's fine. You can always trace it back to a database record. But when you download an RSS feed for a long running podcast like ours that has, you know, a hundred, 200, maybe even thousands of episodes in it. And so when you're deciding whether to update the database, you're also deciding whether to read from the database. You know, so like it's, I have this list of unique entries. Do I decide whether the title changed? And in order to decide if the title change have to read from the database and guess what? We don't like to do it. It's slow. James: 03:03 Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's true. Uh, you don't want, it's not slow though, Frank. Frank: 03:08 Hmm. Segue segue. I should know the answer to this and I don't tell me what's not slow. James, James: 03:15 the new Mac book pro 16 inch Frank at finally happened, they increase the Mac book by one inch. Frank: 03:24 Is that what we're talking about this week? Are we going to just be gushing over new hardware? I love these weeks. So please say yes. Yes. Great. Awesome. Perfect. Yes. So the, the 16 inch is out. Uh, I'm personally not a big laptop user, but I couldn't help but to be a little impressed and wowed not only at the specs of the machine, but as always the price also. But it's a good machine. Let's talk about it for 30 minutes if we can. James: 03:55 I think so. Cause I put out a very clickbait blog posts today. Am I a today? I mean LA, late last week after listening. So I listened to red, the Gruber post. I listened to some videos on the verge and end gadget reviewing it. And I also listened to our good friend on the tech meme ride home. Um, Brian McCullough. And what, when, when Craig Dunn, he was in town, he was telling me about this. I didn't really think anything of it. And then on the podcast, Brian McCullough goes, you can upgrade this to 64 gigs of Ram or, and, and, or eight terabytes of SSD, eight terabytes of SSD, 64 gigabytes of Ram, Frank Krueger, 64 gigs of Ram. And this had me thinking, did Apple finally like put the pro back in MacBook pro? And is this the new ultimate developer laptop? Like did they just make the like, I don't even remember them ever doing this. And then when I went to configure it, I was, I was like, this is the most amazing thing that Apple's ever done. Like they, they listened to developers maybe or consumers, I don't know what happened, Frank, what happened? Frank: 05:10 Oh wow. That was, uh, that was your, it was all compliment, compliment, compliment, and then insulted. They listen to consumers as if they are not always listening to us. Consumers that are listening to us whine and complain about how we want the devices to be. But yeah, I think, um, I'm totally with you in spirit because the laptop I'm using is Mac book pro, but it's late 2013. It's quite old. And I very much specifically skip to this generation of a touch bar at the top and low key travel Mac books with USBC ports. That thing just kind of scared me. And the truth is I a as my main machine I use in high max. So life is good. I got my big powerful iMac and so I've just been letting my notebook get older and older and older and older. Uh, I, I can't wait to talk about this thing, but I feel like this constant debate I'm going to be having is, uh, am I going to buy this thing or not? And I hope that we're, we don't care the whole episode around that, but I'm going to be thinking about it for the whole episode. James: 06:18 Well, you know, the funny part is that you and I are in the same boat because I also have a MacBook pro late 2013, which has 16 gigs of Ram. I think it has two 56 gig or maybe five 12. If I was lucky, I'm not positive. Um, and this was, uh, this was a great machine. I think that some people say the 2015 the last version before I think touch bar and the new keyboard, I think the new keyboard touch bar was later, but this was a, this was a great year because 2013 late had some of the newer processors and have the original clickety keyboards that were super good, great track pad and had all the ports right. It had all the ports and I mean, it still, that machine can take the latest Macko us too. And it's, it's a, it's a machine and I just did a bunch of demos on it with signal R and pretty flawless to be honest with you. I was very impressed by that machine holding up for now. What, six years? Six years. Yeah. That's crazy. Frank: 07:17 I mean, one an amazing computer and specific to your point, I was running the a Catalina beta all summer on my laptop and at work sometimes even. Uh, but yeah, the, the hardware's fine. Uh, that's why I have this debate of um, uh, you know, choosing to upgrade laptops. It just doesn't feel like performance has really increased that much. Uh, these days. This last decade, all of the above. And so I think we look at other things like you said, the Ram. And for me a lesson that I keep not learning is hard drive space. Uh, so, you know, it's those kinds of things that actually do feel like consumables that were out on the computer. The CPS, uh, have felt fast for a long time James: 08:06 for me. Yeah, I agree. I think that even between my surface book one and my surface book two, which is my main machine, that's what I code on basically every day. The CPU. Yeah, I mean it's great. And even the computer I'm recording this podcast on is a machine I built six years ago or something like that. And it has the same processor. Um, I'm going to do about my machine right? Here we go. Let's go. Let's boot this puppy up. It is a um, I five processor. Um, I think it was a four core 3.4 gigs and as, but I upgraded it to 32 gigs of Ram. Like I originally had a, I think 16. And those things that you can easily update. You can update your CPU easily, but you can update it. But like this thing still flies it boots up and like 10, um, I'm uh, open up Android emulators super fast and it's six years old and I think that's the thing. James: 09:02 But if I look at my Mac book pro where I want to do real development and this is why I actually wanted to talk about this because you have a new I Mac pro iMac pro. Correct? Um, sure. Let's go with that. And the reason I want to talk about that is because when I go from like my new fancy, you know, surface book to laptop, which has 16 gigs of Ram, great SSDs and I go back to my Mac book pro. Yes, I can tell that my MacBook pro is not as good as my new fancy two year old, you know, lap, you know, surface book to it just in general. Right. However, my question to you is how does it feel to go between an iMac pro and a MacBook pro from six years ago? Right. You have like the super computer yeah. Over here. And then you have this megaphone and you can't update either of them. Right. I think that's the luxury of like a building your own desktop is you can just plug stuff in and I could upgrade the Ram and Oh, and now it looks, you know, faster upgrade the GPU. But those machines are frozen in time. Right. To what you can figure them with. For the most part. Frank: 10:07 Hypothetically, hypothetically you can update the iMac. You're supposed to take it to a certified retailer and all that, but chances are that's never going to happen. So yeah, effectively non upgradable, uh, you know, uh, okay. I just said the CPU is fine, but the CPU does feel sluggish. Sometimes you get used to a few things, but it's not just the CPU, it's that whole, um, it's the whole bus system. It's the whole memory bus, how the CPU talks to peripherals, all that kind of stuff. Uh, we used to call it the front side bus. I don't know what it's called anymore. Uh, that system is faster on newer computers. Uh, thank goodness. Like it's been croach approaching like the speeds of the processor lately, all of that. So I think you noticed that, especially when you're doing programming and accessing a thousand files, it's not just the speed of the SSD that matters. Frank: 10:59 It's the whole throughput of the entire system. You need to max that out. And a part of that is Ram. So when you, uh, told me you wanted to talk about the new, uh, computer here, I said, you know, how much Ram do I actually need? How much do I actually use? And I just pulled up on, uh, my iMac here and it says it's definitely using 24 gigabytes of hardware Ram. So I'm like, Oh, ouch. Okay. So, you know, I wanted to say like 16 gigs, that, that's enough. That was a good old ceiling. Oh, how could you ever need more than 16 gigs? And then just one glance at my computer. Yeah, you're right. I'm using more turns out. Okay. James: 11:43 Yeah, that is in one. The thing is, when I, when I wrote this article, I really thought about, well in 2019 for developer machine, I think 16 gigs, Rams totally fine for nearly almost everybody, right? In general. However, as a developer, what are we doing? We have a bunch of command line stuff open. We have a bunch of terminals open, we have visual studio open, we have an emulator, a simulator, we have email open, we have iMessage open, we have Slack open, we have teams open like I have office, Docker, um, Frank: 12:22 Marie how hug. Oh my God. I, I always thought, I thought I had a powerful computer and I start started running a lot of Docker. James: 12:30 And this is, this is the issue, right? I mean that you as you go, you need to either do an open less on your machine to, to make it feel that good. Because when I'm doing demos on my 2013, I, I just have visual studio open and an emulator feels pretty good. Right? But if I was on there doing all my work, I don't think it would feel as good. So you got to keep up. So, yeah, and that's the unfortunate part, so that's why I think for me, everyone's talking about, you know, the new touch bar, the new escape key, the new, the new keyboard. That's all great, Frank. That's all great. But that's not like a pro, right? What's pro is that I can put eight terabytes or 64 gigs of Ram in this puppy, like that's an option and I don't think it's ever been an option in a long time for a MacBook pro. Frank: 13:14 I hope we'll get to the prices of these options, but yeah, just the option. It's funny that the pro line has had that 16 gigabyte max up until whatever a couple of weeks ago now so that you were stuck. You could not get a pro pro a Mac. Now in the PC world, they have those crazy gamer laptops and I figure you could probably put 64 gigs of Ram in those. Right, right. I guess. Do you know anything about them? James: 13:44 Yeah, if you were to get like an alien ware or try to spec out stuff, yeah, you could definitely put up to 64 gigs. It'd be like a honkin honk and honk of a machine, Frank: 13:55 but we had no option in the Apple world. So yeah, this is a pretty big deal. I think a big part of me is just hoping this trickles down to the 13 inch line, which we know it will, but you know, we're going to have to wait a little bit longer. Oh, why are we, see, I knew this was going to happen. The more we talk about this, the more I want to buy the machine. But moving on, let's not talk about buying the machine. Let's talk about, um, let's talk about the escape key because Marco on ATP ring, the bell went on for quite awhile about the keyboard because I guess if a lot of people are upset, uh, with the, uh, design of that keyboard, I don't know. You had the, the adorable that had the crazy keyboard on it. How do, how did you feel about that keyboard James: 14:42 butterfly? Yeah, so like the butterfly keyboard, once you got used to it, I think that I thought it was just fine. I think that it wasn't, Frank: 14:50 yeah, I James: 14:52 thought so too. But I didn't have a laptop to actually use to compare it. I just, I always thought it's fine and maybe it feels a little bit funny. But like you would adapt to it in depth to every keyboard. Yeah. You had to adapt to it. The the biggest thing that for me was that no other laptop or keyboard or anything else that I had used. How that style, so going to it whenever I would use it, it felt weird. And then I got into this mode where the, I think the surface book is not butterfly but there they're more shallow than my normal keyboard that I have and we're more shallow than the MacBook pro that I had. So I ended up using my Mac, my MacBook, adorable a lot. So I really got used to those butterfly keyboards. It was totally fine. And then I went back to the Mac book pro third, the back book pro, uh, 2013 that I had. And the keyboard felt like super weird. Like it felt super awkward and I was like, I don't know how to use this anymore. And like the trackpad didn't have like the force touch or whatever on it. So I get also felt weird. I was like, what's going on? I can't tap on this. So I felt the same way. Going reverse. Frank: 16:02 I used to have a old magic keyboard when the key travel was a lot bigger and I would go from the new magic keyboard to that one and it would, I would say it felt like typing on marshmallows. I was like, what are these things? Why am I, why are they so fluffy and bouncy and all that stuff. So it sounds like though I never had to get used to it. I think actually, um, the iPad has that little cover keyboard that you can get for it and that has very low travel keys on it. But it's nothing like the magic keyboard or what comes with the surface laptops. But I think it's actually just fine to type with, I don't know, do I just have low standards when it comes to keyboards, but, but okay, I'll let you answer that. Do I have low standards when it comes to keyboards? James: 16:52 The thing is, I believe that a lot of the individuals that review the laptops and no shade on anybody, but they are reviewers, they are professional writers in which I believe they write more words than us, even when we're programming. Because how we program is different than writing a huge 5,000 word article over and over and over again. So if your life is the keyboard, my life is not my keyboard, my life is a combination of mouse, keyboard interaction with devices. So I'm in between those all the time. So for me, I'm not super imperatively that the keyboard is the, the lifeblood. Now if I, if I make mistakes because of it, then yes, that is definitely an issue. But I believe that sort of the difference in which people are using it now I'd like to see the yeah, Marco over time to see what he says. He is a developer, Frank: 17:51 um, that, that is doing active mobile development. So very similar to us. Like what does he think over the next, you know, year if he buys this keyboard and this laptop. I will say that it just sounds so petty. But, um, the inverted T a cursor keys and as a programmer I never liked became one of those VI people that searches around and can instantly get to what they want. I put my fingers on that inverted T on the inverted T cursors and I just move that cursor around and I play games so that I move in here and I move it there. Um, I grew up playing PC video games. I'm very good at using the inverted T cursors. And so, um, I, I actually didn't want to buy the new Apple laptops because they didn't have it and I always feared that they would never bring it back, but we'd be stuck with this stupid design of, you know, the half high up and downs and I'm just, it just sounds so petty and I hate it, but like it's that little detail. Frank: 18:58 I'm definitely in that camp of, Oh, I could definitely see myself buying this keyboard it again, I say that buying this keyboard, buying this computer again, the very expensive multi thousand dollar machine attached to this stupid keyboard. Yeah, it's true. You know, I never really thought about it too much. I definitely do like my full T inverted T my upside down T if you will. It's a, it's a, it's actually a Tetris shape is more accurate. Yes. Um, I like full-size up, down, left, right more than skinny up, down. I mean, just in general, I know that it's a laptops, you have reduced space. However, if you look at this laptop, I wish that they could have figured out. I mean, I guess you couldn't figure out how to do this so they have to shrink it. But I do believe that having those little spaces in there means you'll probably hit the less, right. Frank: 19:49 Less I guess I haven't noticed because everybody has used the fatter, I'm taller or I should say left and right arrows, but whatever. I mean if you, I think I can go either way. I don't know that blank spaces is important though. Um, here's a fun story. I don't think I can describe this well in audio form, but it's official thing. But when I used to work at general motors, we were talking about, um, the bash and how components fit into it and the shape of components and the dash. And something that was explained to me. Uh, that's very important in automobiles, which you don't think about much, is that you have to give affordances for people to be able to anchor their hand on the dash itself while they use their fingers to operate the buttons. It's a very common gesture that we do pretty much subconsciously, but everyone anchors their hands somewhere and then hits the buttons. Frank: 20:44 And so you have to have that on there. It's, it's important. And I think at the hat, I took that lesson really to heart and I apply it to a lot of things. And for me, those blank spaces are exactly those affordances. There are place for your fingers to rest or your hand to rest while you're not using those keys. But they also mean because they're in a fixed spot, you keep them in your mind. God, I can't believe I just told a story describing why these emergencies are so important to me. But yeah, that happened. James: 21:16 Well, I probably is the same reason why the escape key is so important to a lot of people too. It's that muscle memory of exactly that. This key is going to be there every, it's actually of the of the top row. It is the key that I do use the most to be honest with you. Frank: 21:32 Oh, for sure. Yeah. Especially on a Mac. You never know if those top keys are remapped or not, so I've just given up on them. I use them to make the monitor brighter and darker and to change the volume. I've completely given up on F keys. That's why I hate it. When a windows app skip ported to Mac and they still have the keys mapped or like I don't use those. I don't know how to use those. Stop it with the F key. They're gone on the back. Just assume they don't exist. James: 21:59 Well, let me tell you why I think this is the ultimate dev machine, but first, Frank, let's take a quick break and thank our amazing sponsor this week. Sync fusion. Listen, are you building anything? Literally anything. Do you need some beautiful user interface? Maybe some charts, some graphs, some beautiful list views, some data grids. I'm checkboxes, maybe just you know, some gauges, some, some backdrop, some, some image editors of PDF viewers you need, like anything that goes into an application. Sync fusion has it. Listen, they already wrote it for you. No need to reinvent the wheel. Sync fusion has hundreds upon hundreds of controls. Regardless if you're building web applications, mobile applications or desktop applications, they have beautiful Xamarin controls. UWP asp.net core Blaser controls react you JavaScript that got everything. WinForms WPFW they got it all. They got you covered. What's awesome about seeing fusion is that they're constantly updating their controls to be super performant, super beautiful, and literally anything that you need in your applications. You can get started today by going to sync fusion.com/merge conflict to learn about all the beautiful controls that they have. I'm a customer myself. Best part is they have a free trial if you're tracking it off for your company, but they also have a free community edition, so check that out as well. I love saying fusion, you'll love them to go to st fusion.com/merge conflict to learn a lot more thanks to st fusion for sponsoring this week's pod. Frank: 23:23 Thank think fusion, uh, you know, as actually just browsing their catalog the other day cause I was like, Whoa, what are all the controls? And I was just going through, I highly recommend everyone that they just browse through some time. It's really kind of interesting. All the things they've implemented. One of them is like a calculation engine and it's quite interesting. There is the weirdest stuff there. Go check it out. They do it like James: 23:46 a little like crazy little things like that. And uh, I do really like even just a little, a little like shimmers or something that I'm like, Oh, map could use that. That's nice. Okay. Um, all right. So here's why I think this computer is important. I put it in the blog article. I said it is the return of the pro, and I've mentioned it time and time again, 64 gigs of Ram, eight terabytes, SSD and Frank, here's why I think that this is really important, especially for mobile developers and desktop developers and like basically people that are building apps that need to run everywhere because in this world today we often need not just a Mac, not just a PC, but we need both of those things. Um, to be honest with you. And when you want to test something on windows, what do you gotta do, Frank? James: 24:29 If you're on a Mac? Oh, I run a virtual machine. I'm, I'm that cool. And in fact I can never decide from usually running a couple virtual machines. Yes. In fact, you're probably running Docker, which is kind of like a mini virtual machine too. And yes, like when I had my Mac book pro 13 no, 2013 I keep calling it a 13 inch because it is a 13 inch from 22, 2013. But what I wanted to do and what a lot of developers wanted to do is they wanted to use their full visual studio window setup at all time on their machine. But they didn't want their machine to slow down. Right. They wanted their full set up. They also wanted that full setup so they could easily connect to the Mac and then still debug and develop Mac applications. Maybe do some Linux development, maybe do some Mac development, maybe test their websites on windows and on Mac. James: 25:22 So you can easily go back and forth. The problem was, yeah, you're either are using VMware or parallels or something else. And guess what, when you're creating a VM, it needs resources, Frank. It needs all sorts of resources. So you're like, Oh, you know, okay, well I guess I'll give this machine eight gigs of Ram because I have 16 gigs of Ram and you know, I'll give it to cores cause I have four cores. And then the problem here and then you're like, Oh I'll give it a, you know, 256 gig SSD. And then you look at your machine and you've cut your machine in half, but your machine still needs to run the software that's running windows, right? So like your machine that you've cut in half, you've actually cut it down a lot more than that. But this machine, Frank has 64 gays, a Ram and eight cores, which means you could give that machine four cores and still have four cores on your main Mac, and you could give it 16 gigs or 32 gigs that VM. Right? And now you can have this on multiple monitors, or even on the same monitor. And like this puppy's gonna fly like you're gonna have windows and Mac and all your development environments all running in harmony on one machine. It's actually not going to cost you as much as you would possibly think. And I think that makes it, the ultimate dev machine to me is like, I can without compromise, really do this. That's my belief. And tell me if you think I'm wrong. Frank: 26:56 No, you're absolutely right. Uh, it's kinda the lifestyle I've been living my whole, the last few years I've been pretty lucky. Uh, so talking about windows, let's talk about windows in a VM. Pour little windows, squishing it into the box. Uh, I've run it with one core, with four gigs of Ram and it runs okay. It's fine. It's, you know, well virtual operating system, it's okay, but the moment you open visual studio is when everything goes wrong. Uh, every little operations seems to take forever. And so I have instances and then if you want to run two big apps on it, so I have VMs where I'm giving it four cores, so you're not exaggerating. Like, um, I had to give it four cores because there were two processor intensive things I wanted to run. He needed leave some cores leftover to keep the UI updated. It's just how things work. Frank: 27:52 And yeah, and along with those cores goes all your Ram. And so for the longest time I've been saying that 32 gigs of Ram is pretty much fine. And I still feel that it is, uh, as of 2019 it is. But I think it's also kind of the new minimum, unfortunately, especially for a computer that you want to last for five to 10 years again. Um, you've got to spend the extra few dollars. And I, I worry sometimes that pro means expensive, but I think in this case it kinda does. Unfortunately it's a one time expense. You won't have to buy one for a long, long time. Hopefully. James: 28:31 Yeah, it is. Well that's why I sort of put this together as I was going through and I said, okay, let me see what I can build. So I decided I'm, I'm on the config page. I'll post the link over here for you so you can follow along at home. So this'll be in the show notes and you'll see Apple MacBook pro customize. So I pick the bigger one. I pick the, you know, they have two options, like I don't know if it's high five or I nine or whatever, but I just, you're gonna pick the more expensive one because it's your base price. $2,800 now this is expensive already, $2,800 base config. And you do get the eight cores, you get 16 gigs, Ram and a terabyte SSD. So I do like that. It by default comes with the terabyte. That's sort of nice. Frank: 29:12 Yeah. Uh, just to interject, I think they're both [inaudible] processors, but the big deal for me, uh, is that there are different video cards and I've been doing so much with the GPU lately that, especially for a machine, I'm going to keep around for a long time. I'm going to splurge a bit on the video cards and we'll talk about that more later. But you kind of have to get the, uh, more expensive base price unit with the eight cores, slightly slower processor. This is normal trade off. You'd see in laptops, uh, you can have lots of cores, uh, running slowly or a few cores running fast. But basically we want the same power envelope in the same box. So it's a common trade off you have to make. But in this case, I would do the one with the more cores just because, uh, it got it. It gets here that uh, you know, video card, the five 50 M which I know absolutely nothing about other than in general cards with bigger numbers in their names go faster. James: 30:14 Yeah, that's true. There are better if it's a bigger number, it's better. Yeah. Now, um, I would, so here's my recommended, let's go through this together. Processor, you can do a one or 2.3 or a one or 2.4 for an extra $200. Do you do it? Frank: 30:28 Ah, this one I see they make you go in the wrong order. This one I would leave toward the end, but given that it's a pretty low stakes price probably, but I actually left it off in my first run through of this. Okay. But in the end together, okay. It's optional people because we're talking about 2.3 gigahertz versus 2.4 gigahertz. You're not gonna notice it. But if you're one of those people that likes to say, I got the fastest machine and you're willing to spend $200 to say that it's worth it. James: 31:00 Yeah. $200 I'm in, I'm in for the 200 all right. Ram and Ram. Now I'll do Ram. Frank: 31:05 It's in the, yeah. Okay. Okay. So I I, I would probably, okay. Realistically what are we talking realistically, what would you get or what do you want to get? Realistically? I think I would still get the 32 but I would hate myself forever cause I would want the 64 James: 31:23 so it's baseline 16 $400 for 32 so you're paying $400 for 16 gigs more and then another $400 to double it again for 32 mortgage. So 64 Frank: 31:37 the way I look at it as 16 gigabytes is basically table stakes. Right now a, you load up two apps and you're at 16 gigabytes. So 32 gigabytes for me is future padding. It's this machine will still be fine in five years. 64 is like, I don't even know if that's future padding at this point, but you know, maybe if you're a video person you need all that memory. But for me, 32 is probably just fine. James: 32:07 64 you got to go 64 Frank's wrong. You Frank's wrong. Because if I look now, now, now, here's how I'm framing this, by the way is I am a developer and I want to buy one machine, one machine only, and I want this puppy to go everywhere with me and I want it to last for the next eight years. Frank: 32:27 Okay, and with your virtual machine argument, if that's truly your use case, yeah, fine. Because yeah. Well, operating system doesn't want more memory. Yes. 64 gigs. That's the James: 32:39 right call. Right? So this is it. Frank: 32:42 Well, we're just going to pick the biggest option in every category. I'm trying to bring some reason to this argument and you're ruining it. James. You're throwing out my reason that said, let's go to graphics. Ready? Can we, are we, are we doubling the Ram? James: 32:57 We're done with Ram. What are the modern, what are options over on the 5,500 M Frank: 33:01 yeah, so in graphics, you still can upgrade the video card, the 50 505,500 ends. That's a lot of M's. The base model comes with four gigs from measly $100. You can upgrade to eight gigs, which you hundred percent wanna do for reference. Uh, the iPad pro has four gigabytes of memory and you can't have an iPad having more memory than you are or the same amount of memory as you on a pro machine. So this one, especially for the stuff that I do is a default a hundred hours. Yes. I wish, I wish they had the um, larger memory sizes available. There are weird numbers out there like there are 12 gigabyte video cards, but it's a niche people that want all that memory. So I get why they didn't do it. James: 33:56 Yeah. I, I will say that I believe that absolutely the right call here is to, to, to upgrade this one for $100. The price per gig is $25. So if you were doing it on price per gig of GDP, it's GED G DDR Frank: 34:12 six 50 Ram. Yeah. I've never even heard of that. Ram. I think we should be good professional podcasters here and professional users and remind everyone, all of these bumped up performance numbers comm at a cost, not just dollars a D, D our Ram. That's dynamic Ram. That means Ram, that needs signal sent to it constantly in order to keep itself from forgetting what it's supposed to be remembering. And those signals costs a power and that power is coming from your battery. So as we upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, your 64 gigabytes is gonna appreciatively decrease the amount of battery you get on this thing. But these are tradeoffs you make. If you want a powerful machine, you understand that batteries can last a little less. James: 35:00 No, it's very true. And that's a good thing to to look at. And I, Apple did outfit this puppy with them at a hundred watt, the maximum they made it the, the battery as big as they could to allow us to take it onto an airplane. Yeah. Frank: 35:11 I tweeted about this and it was so frustrating to hear because it never occurred to me that laptop battery sizes are dictated by stupid FAA rules. And I just, ah, you know, that number is arbitrary. I've been around engineers my whole life. I know how these meetings go. What's the difference between 101 2130? No one knows. And yet we're stuck with this arbitrary. The fact that airplanes are keeping me from having a giant battery just really upset me. Uh, the uh, FAA. I hate the FAA. You heard it here first people, I'm Frank. Hope you're not flying anytime soon. Yeah. Great. All right. Storage. This is where it really comes in with the most options in stores. So what hurts me though with this one? Hertz, Hertz, Hertz pain. Pain. James. Okay. May I preface this? I have been trying to learn the lesson of buy as much max storage as you can possibly afford when buying a new machine. Frank: 36:17 Because guess what? You're always going to need more. That is life. And so I keep telling myself, buy as much hard drive as I can. And yet the prices here, James, Oh my God, the prices here. Why don't you tell everyone? So you get one terabyte for free from Apple pay. And I mean, it's not free. So your baseline. So the numbers are very different than anything else, right? Almost everything else that we've talked about was like 200 entry or 400 and then it just doubled. So your Ram was expensive. Your Ram was nearly a thousand dollars. That was $800 to get your amazing amount of Ram. It was worth it. A hashtag. What is it? So you got one terabyte, you can do two, four or eight. So doubles every time the price more than doubles every time. So $400 $400 is the baseline to get two terabytes, then it's $1,000 to get four terabytes and then $2,200 that's a whole nother laptop to get eight terabytes. Frank: 37:19 It's thick. It kills my soul. It kills my soul. Okay, let me explain terabytes. Uh, my current status in the world is two terabytes is just enough for me to get by. And that's so sad. Like, you know, 20 year old Frank, 10 year old Frank would be screaming at me now. Oh, you can't get by Han two terabytes. Huh? But you know what, the stupid iPhone take six megabyte pictures. Every time you press that button, the stupid drone, those videos are huge. Like it's just, it's amazing how much junk I keep throwing onto my computer. So I would say I want the four terabytes. But man, they charge you a grand a fold G to get four terabytes. Ah, that is painful. Painful. So what do you do? Two terabytes? I don't know. I would have to learn. I would literally go around and just ask friends. Like, would you have a lower opinion of me if I spent this amount of money on a hard drive? And they would say yes. And then I would have to think about whether their opinion of me matters. It would be hard. This one would keep me up at nights. Um, realistically spur of the moment, two terabytes is probably fine because, um, it's a portable computer. Put your videos someplace else. Yeah. But if it's your only machine and it's supposed to last five or 10 years, it's a little harder. James: 38:54 Yeah. So I think for me on almost all, actually all my machines that I own, one terabyte is what I have and I've been just fine with one terabyte. However, how I am prefacing this as the ultimate dev machine, I think you have to go to two terabyte if you're doing either Docker or you're going to be doing these VMs because they take a lot. And that's the only reason why you got to go two terabytes, Frank: 39:17 dude. X code takes a lot. It's very true. I've been, we have been flying through X code versions and I literally have four X codes installed on my machine right now. And they're each like 80 James: 39:29 gigabytes stuff just takes up so much room these days. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, and I think that you could if you were, so for instance, using Android emulators, sorry, I just, it just popped into my head because I was thinking about all that Frank: 39:45 grass I've done of like, you know, I run out of space on my hard drives all the time. So I run those programs that show you cool drafts of where everything's allocated. And there's usually this huge chunk called Android James: 39:56 junk Android hashtag trunk. That's true. Android junk is pretty large. Yeah, no, I mean there's definitely issues in Android and it's a, it's development, right? You just clog up your machine with a bunch of junk to be honest with you. And you're going to clog it up twice because you're going to clog it up on your VM and you're also going to clock it up locally. So there's that. Yeah. So I think two terabytes is the right call. But I also think that there's a few things that you can do here. Frank. One is I use one drive and Google drive. I use both. Now, the one thing that I really like about one drive is that I already pay for office or I already get a terabyte included in that. But they had this really cool feature and maybe Dropbox does it and maybe other ones do, correct me if I'm wrong, but they have this feature called a virtual folders and virtual files. So what you do is you update, you upload all of your files to the internet and then it creates virtual icons for all of those files and then downloads them on demand. Does that make sense? Frank: 40:58 Yeah. Uh, this has been done a lot in the past. Uh, every week, all diehard Microsoft is our, like Microsoft has done that sense. Avista, it kind of has, uh, but it's, it's a really cool feature that I think is just now becoming popular because I noticed Dropbox is doing it and they're trying to do it on Catalina. I have to admit that I enabled the feature and I was not overly impressed because I kept trying to access files and it was quite slow for to realize that I want the file, download the file, get it over. It could have been my internet connection. It could've been the fact that I was on a beta of Catalina. It could have been a million things. But my first time experience with it, with it wasn't great. But absolutely I had to turn it on specifically because my late model, 2013 laptops, hard drive could not handle nearly my whole Dropbox anymore. So it's not my favorite feature, but it's a good feature. I think iCloud also does this. Does Google do it? James: 42:04 Google does not do this and it's is very upsetting because honestly the Google, that's where I actually pay a lot, my Google drive folder itself. I'm looking at it right now. I mean it must be like a hundred gigs cause it's all of our podcast recordings and all my videos and all my photos ever. And it's just, you have to, you can pick what folders you want, but like you can't do it on demand. So I was like I don't, I don't need the last hundred and 80 170 recordings that we've ever done, but it's going to put them there anyways. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I cannot find that feature. And on a one drive it's, I should just move it to one drive. I don't know why I don't feature Frank: 42:44 because I know specifically like the way Dropbox and Apple work, they just rewrote that part for Catalina, so it'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out. There is one alternative to, and I've actually done this with my iMac pro. I bought an external hard drive and it's interesting because uh, I don't like external hard drives. Number one, I hate having something dangling off of my computer. Number two, they're slow, they're just stupid, slow. I hate them. But I decided what would happen James, if I spent money, hard earned money on one of these drives instead of doing what I usually do and buying the cheapest one I can find at the convenience store because I desperately need some hard drive right now. So I read the reviews. Oh God. Tech reviews. So much fun. I read the reviews and I ended up getting a Thunderbolt three NBME external hard drive, so vulnerable three. Frank: 43:45 I think in the very beginning of this episode I was saying something about how I don't like USBC and all that. It's because I'm very slowly just learning USB-C and slowly adopt adapting to that ecosystem. It all got very confusing when it was explained to me that Thunderbolt three is using the exact same port as USB. Uh, uh, I came and say it anymore. USBC USB 3.1. So it's the same plug, but it turns out you need a special cable and special hardware to take advantage of it. And when you go shopping on Amazon, it's very hard to understand what's compatible with what, what's fast, what's not fast. Okay. Anyway, try to shorten this story and say, spent a lot of money, got the most amazing external hard drive I've ever had in my whole life. I copy files to and from it just for fun now because I love how fast it is. It's doing like two gigabytes a second. I'm just, I just, I just move files. I move whole virtual machines. I run all of my virtual machines off of this drive. Now it's my virtual machine drive and it's kinda awesome because I can take this thing around and run these virtual machines on any computer I want. Given that they have this very up to today, Thunderbolt three because that's what I guess is providing all the speed. USB 3.1 is not so fast. James: 45:14 Yeah, I was, I was amazed. I dunno if it was a Thunderbolt aura, USB three, um, USBC port. I'm not really sure what it was or how it worked on my surface book and whatever equipment they were using at ignite. We were recording some podcasts there and uh, the gentleman came in from AB to transfer it to me and he came in, he sat down and in, I dunno, 10 seconds he was like, here you go. And I'm like, wow. Huh. Why? You know, it was a big, big way file. It was like a, it was like a gig and uh, I was like, Oh, that's weird. It's this tiny itty bitty, like, I don't know, Nan and I don't know what it was that some Samsung really thing and I plugged it into my youth. It was USBC, so I plugged it into my USBC port on my surface and it literally transferred. It might not. I mean, might not have been as fast as yours, but even that, I transfer that gig and like five seconds, 10 seconds, I don't know. It was really fast and I was like, Whoa. Like that's amazing where I had these old spinning drives, you know, like, and I'm like, Oh, this is terrible. Frank: 46:13 Yeah. I used to run, um, my virtual machines off of USB three connections. And actually it was, it was generally fast enough, but when you were doing long compiles or something like that in visual studio, then it was really dying. So throwing this onto something modern is really helped. And we should say with a laptop, uh, my 2013 has an SD card reader. It has, uh, what else does I have? I think that's it. But I'd love that SD card reader and it has all the USB ports. These new ones just come with what? For USBC ports. And so you're in dongle town. And so I guess the good answer to all of this is, uh, these external drives are at least fast if you can tolerate having them connected to your computer. James: 47:03 That's true. So you're at basically this point, you're at what, like 3,600? I'm at 4,200 or so dollars down. Two and four. I think I would just talk for 15 minutes so I could avoid answering whether it's two or four terabytes, but you know, Frank: 47:21 Oh gosh, no. Okay. I'm at 4,500. I can't, Nope, not doing it. Not doing it. Can't do it. James. Two terabytes. 3,900. Oh, it's still too expensive. Uh, what can I back out out? I can't. Okay. James: 47:35 Is already noted. Two is, is $4,000 too expensive for this laptop? That's a final question then we'll get onto it. What do you, what do you think $4,000 is about where we're at with our config? What do you think for this machine? For the purposes we talked about? Frank: 47:48 Here's my problem, James. Um, I am so pleased with my iMac pro that, um, well I just realized I was answering the wrong question in the wrong order. Uh, that has absolutely nothing to do with this purchase decision. All it was was I realized that, um, buying a nice miss Jean is nice. It's nice having a fast computer. I really like it. And so is $4,000 worth of machine that I would probably use for another six years. Seven years. Yeah. It's fine. Absolutely. This is my job. It's my profession. Um, back in the day, I wrote all my code on a laptop. That was my main machine. And the better it was, the happier I was at my job. This isn't like spending $4,000 on a Caribbean cruise or Fort spending $4,000 on, I don't know what costs $4,000. I'm a cheap used Volkswagen rabbit car. Um, you know, it's not, this is, if it's your profession, then I think you can justify it. I think that it's important to have good tools in your toolbox. This is, uh, I like to think of myself as fiscally responsible, but when it comes to tools like this, uh, no, it's my profession. I want good ones. James: 49:05 Yeah. And I think that you sort of just sort of answered it, at least from your perspective. Not only that, but you did buy it already. You have that Mac book, iMac pro, right? Like you, you already did make that investment and you're very happy with it, which makes it hard because you're like, I could have something very similar in laptop form, right. That costs a lot, but what would be everywhere with you? So I think that for me the answer is I think that this is worth the money in the situation that you just, you, you just talked about at the same time, if you listening to this podcast or like Whoa, I have to spend $4,000 to be like a pro developer. No, no, not at all. You can, I want to preface that Frank and I both have a 2013 Macro-Pro. Yeah, 13 inch. James: 49:51 I think that free on Craigslist right now. Go get one. Yes, I and I, and my main development machine at home is one that I built for under $2,000 six years ago is like 20 years, like $1,500 and I put together myself. Right. So, and if slowly upgraded over time and you don't even need that, you can just go buy a cheap laptop or an a, an a Mac mini. I don't know anything really, whatever fits your need and your budget, but are you at a midlife crisis like I am? Do I want to spend $4,000 on this machine? Maybe I'm not going to because I don't need a new Mac. But if I did, if I had no Mac all and no, and I know machine and I was like, I to do this and I'm changing my career and I have $4,000 to blow or I haven't, if I hadn't upgraded my Mac book pro in six years, like now I might be thinking it like, Oh, maybe the time is now to do it because it's been six years since I made an investment. And I think that's the thing. But you don't have to do, I think it's silly, right? Frank: 50:49 Yeah. And speaking personally, personally, I myself, um, my 13 inch is fine as a travel device and I have always used a 13 inch so I would not buy this computer. What I'm really thinking about is when the 13 inch version of this computer is released, well, I buy it so that that's a decision I'll, I might even say probably no, I'd probably wait a year just because my computer's fine. But what makes me happy is knowing that this computer is available and that should my 13 inch starts stop feeling fine, then this is available because honestly up until now I didn't want to buy any of the other Mac pros, MacBook pros. Uh, so this is just, you know, my future planning relief that I'm, I'm happy this puppy's available. James: 51:40 Yeah, I agree. I think that was the biggest problem when I came to any of the, any of the other machines that I've ever been released. It's like, Hm, no, it's not really that pro that I'm looking for. Yeah, I did want them. I want this one simple as that. Well, if you want it to let us know. We did ramble on for literally just 15 minutes about the MacBook pro, but it was entertaining. I told that story about designing head units and general motors vehicle. That's true. And I talked about my MacBook pro from 2013 that I love still. Um, and that's about it. But I think that there's a lot of just different, I mean, I don't know, it's just, it's just I'm very happy that at least Apple is, is pushing. Here's what I'm really excited more. If you never buy and you're like, James and Frank are crazy. James: 52:31 Here's what I at least I'm excited about, is that Apple has put their foot into the ring to say, Hey, people need machines with these crazy amounts of Ram and storage, which means everybody else. And in a very beautiful design that's relatively lightweight. So that means everybody else get out there and start making some beautiful machines that I can spend a bunch of money on for windows as well. Right? Like let's make that happen because I want an elegant, beautiful machine as well on windows. Just like, you know, I have my, my, my surface book two, but I, I would like 64 gigs of Ram, but I don't want a big game. It's not a gaming computer. This macro pro is not a, you could play games on it. Yes. But it's not a gaming machine. It is a MacBook pro and that's, that's what I do kind of love about, about the Apple stuff. So I love that. I want the biggest, fastest video card, but I have zero interest in playing games on their computer. That's true of just how the world has out. Well, I'll tell you though, the one big benefit too is like for me, since I stream, I'm just upgrading my video card, OBS and slobs and the other ones, they now can offload everything to your GPU. So if you're not playing games, like the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting on my stream by the way. Frank: 53:44 Hmm. So did you splurge for the eight gigabytes? Pay an extra $400? Yeah. James: 53:51 No, no, no. I mean that's what I would do if this was my machine on my windows machine, I would do, I don't even know what I have. Um, my buddy gave me a card. Oh no, I have a, your buddy gave you a card out of the back of his truck. Yep. Got it. Did I have a no, no, no, no. I have a, I used to have a 6,800 uh, or six six 80 GTX. Now I have a nine 80 GTX, which is a few generations back. Maybe three or four years old, but I think it's eight gigs maybe. I don't know. It's a lot better. That's all I can say. Frank: 54:30 Yeah. I, I'm trying to remember if they skipped a generation. Like, no, they went nine 80 to 10 80 and now we're at 1180 ish, I think. 1280 what am I saying? I don't know. The more, the more GTX is you can get, the faster it goes. I hear. So get the born with a bigger number. James: 54:48 This one has four gigs. I think the most popular one still is like the 10 80 TEI. Maybe the ones, Frank: 54:54 yeah, I'm actually trying to buy one, but like the stupid things are holding their value. Um, yeah. Third grade and the machine learning area. James: 55:04 If I was building a new machine though, I would say, here's like now we're off tangent again, but if I was building a new machine, which I've really wanted to do, I almost like I almost convinced myself and then like I had a conversation with how there and I was like, I don't need this. I don't need to spend a bunch of money right now, which comes to this Mac book too. But if I was building a new machine, I would literally, it's time, I'm not going to do an Intel machine. It's all going to be AMD. Every now and then you rise in chips, AMD graphics card, everything from the ground up. That's what I would do because the new ones, they have like a 32 core consumer like chip or whatever's crazy. That's what I would want. Frank: 55:40 Yeah. They have ridiculous, uh, processors. They've been leading in the crazy process or market for a long time now. I think. Uh, yeah. Uh, for me though, I actually did this, I went on new egg and I specked out an entire machine, got the biggest, coolest video card I could get. And then I was like, Hmm, what if I got two of them? It's funny, you know, you, we, we say like $4,000. It is a lot of money. It's definitely a lot of money. But you spend 30 minutes on new egg and you can get a machine up to $4,000 pretty fast, James: 56:13 pretty fast. I think that the new rise in thread ripper, 32 core, the processor itself I think is $2,000. So that really, yeah, exactly. So yeah. The Frank: 56:24 other one, the puppy, James: 56:26 yeah, the, the 16 gig, I believe sister, the 3000 series, I believe that that one is like only like five or $600. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but it was like, that's the thing is you can get like astonishing chips basically for, uh, uh, these chips over here for just like a, a relatively low price compared to to am or to IBM. Uh, which is, which is crazy Frank: 56:52 Intel. Intel. Yeah. But like even the video cards I'm talking about are $900. So you're putting that much money into computers are expensive. They're simultaneously cheap. And you can bear built a very good cheap computer, but the high end, it stays expensive. [inaudible] James: 57:10 it's very true. Yeah. It never ends. All right. Well that has been one hour of us geeking out about ridiculous things. Tell us what you think. Merge conflict at AFAM or tweeted us at merge conflict. FM. Find me at Jane's mounts have chains. Vontu Magno Afra Clara from a tell us if we're crazy. We probably are, but um, you know, we'll be back next week with more craziness as always. So though then I'm, Jason wants a mag now Speaker 3: 57:33 and I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for listening. ACE.