Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome to examining a technology focused podcast that dives deep.
I'm Erik Christiansen.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: And I'm Kris Hans
[00:00:24] Speaker A: And welcome to another episode of Examining the Technology Focused Podcast that Dives Deep. Good morning, Kris. How are you today?
Good morning.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: I'm doing well.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: We have a full slate on the podcast. So I think we have talking about some AI training.
We're going to talk about this really cool article from McLean's and then we're going to talk about some of the more surprising aspects of the new hardware that Apple revealed. So perhaps we kick it off with the, with AI training and maybe start with the Alberta AI Academy. Does that seem reasonable? Sure.
So the Alberta AI Academy in the province of Alberta, they have a website that says AI is already reshaping how organizations operate and how people do their best work.
I think we could debate that, but fair enough, it's here now. That's maybe what it should say. The Alberta AI Academy was created so the public servants are not on the sidelines of that shift and they are leading it. And so there is a masterclass or series of masterclasses that you can take on AI skills.
And so this is kind of led by Deputy Minister Janek Alford, that's his name, isn't it?
Yeah. And so what do, what do you make of this Government of Alberta masterclass for AI? Is this for the public or is this just for civil servants?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's for public servants, but you know, I'm sure anybody could probably take it. But I thought it was pretty interesting because that's where conceivably, you know, the, especially with all the, the people were working as civil servants, you know, there, there could be a lot of productivity gains that they could have with the technology. And so just being aware of how the technology can be applied, it's a good thing for sure.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Did you watch any of the videos?
[00:02:40] Speaker B: I, I haven't yet, but I've just read about it.
You know, I see how they've structured it to make sense.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: The videos aren't bad when you know what part of. I think it's well done. Overall, it's a really good platform. It's a website, it has this like you can, it's self paced, there's like assessments built in. So maybe I'll work my way through this because it looks like they cover kind of high level stuff and kind of works its way down into individual examples, which I really appreciate. So it's, it's looks like it's well structured, you know, based on my Cursory evaluation from kind of an instructional design. I like that there's kind of an assistant, there's like an action AI chat so you can ask questions about the Masterclass while you're in it.
Really interesting. Probably a great place for people to start if they, if they, if they want to learn more about AI tools and gain some competency since, you know, your tax dollars paid for it.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely.
[00:03:38] Speaker A: You might as well use it. I mean, I will say that I have to, I, I have, I would have to caution people to use the term masterclass because there's a really great learning platform called Masterclass that has just absolutely terrific production quality. And by calling it Masterclass you're really setting yourself up for a comparison.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean those are really well produced for sure.
But, but again, you know, this is where if you look at it like Alberta, we are one of the leaders in the world for AI. And so you know, in terms of the overall AI ecosystem, I mean I believe this was put together part of, you know, if you look at the broader ecosystem, we have a company up in Edmonton called Alta ML. Yeah, that is helping just, you know, and the, this is prior to this whole AI, you know where. And then it's in their name itself, the machine learning where you could go and help from an efficiency standpoint. And then we have the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Amy, up at Edmonton, that was actually spun out of I believe the University of Alberta.
Even if you look at Google, the they bought out, I believe it was DeepMind and that was spun out of the University of Alberta. So you know, we do have core strength here on the AI side.
And again in the world between Edmonton and then probably Toronto next we have some of the leading minds for AI.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Lower energy costs too to run data centers and stuff.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Actually funny enough I don't think I told you this. I was asked to do an interview on the 660News and especially with this whole.
Right now we're for this month of March we have the water restrictions are back on in Calgary and so while
[00:05:45] Speaker A: they're finishing our water feeder. That's the reason. Yeah. So for people who don't know, a couple of years ago we had a huge water main water line break in Calgary area which was terrible.
But you know, to the city's credit and the province, they're actually getting that fixed pretty quick. They're replacing the whole line but I think they have restrictions intermediately while they replace large sections of it.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the, the questions that I was asked about because you know, the, the reporter and I guess the people in Calgary in general wanted to know is how is water used when it comes to AI data centers?
And you know, especially I guess there's pushback with, because when you're, when you're allowed to only take three 3 minute showers and you got to skip flushes and all these aspects, you know, so. But I, I think this is where people.
And again, I, I don't know all the specific details with the data centers that we have locally, but one of the things that makes us attractive is that they have been innovating and they're using, you know, just because we are in a colder climate, they're not relying on water necessarily. They're using cold air to go and cool down the computers that are so that they don't overheat.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: And so yeah, I would think if you had some sort of like, not a heat pump but some sort of like cold air ventilation, you could probably do a lot without having to, you know, have liquid coolant and stuff like that.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So and that's why you know, Alberta, if you look at the power that we generate too, there's, we have some of the solar wind so I mean it's not just water in terms of cooling down the, the computers, but there's also just the energy use in general.
And so in here we are well positioned for those data centers.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, because I mean Calgary area, Alberta is pretty sunny. You got to clear the snow off the panels which is doable. But like you know, sunshine hours is especially in the Calgary area is very high. It's one of the sunniest places in Canada and so it's well positioned for both. Obviously we have lots of oil and gas in Alberta, but that is well positioned for solar energy too.
We kind of have the best of both worlds which trades off our harsher climate.
Right? Yeah. So like today it's super cold.
Yeah. It makes sense that they put together this academy. I might walk through it.
It's interesting.
I'm always open minded to stuff like this and I suspect there's always something to be learned.
In related news, Mount Royal University Library. So Mount Royal is our employer.
We put together, we had an AI guide.
So if you go to the section of the libraries, it's Library Mtrel, ca. But if you do slash AI that used to take you to an AI page that was a very high level page. It was put together by a colleague of mine with some other folks and it's now called Understanding AI but it Used to be our AI kind of flagship page, but it was very high level, you know, definitions of what generative AI is, you know, what is training data, machine learning.
And it was a very good starting point. But students, you know, kind of wanted some instruction on how the tools work, like how they could be implemented in education context. So we kind of redid our site, so there's a splash page now. So when you go to slash AI, you can go to either the old page or you can go to this new page. So I, I took the lead on writing this new page, but of course these things are never done in a vacuum.
I sat down not, you know, and drafted the first draft and with a colleague of mine as kind of my sounding board. But we had some, you know, this is a lot better as a result of the input from my colleagues. And so it's called generative AI Applications.
And so we can put this in the show notes. But this is basically, you know, a guide for students, like check your AI class policy, things you can ask your instructor before you go and use things.
Talk about, do I need to use AI all the time? You know, what are some of the reasons why you might not use it? Sometimes it's not the most efficient tool.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: And then we go into talking about copyright and accessibility.
Some of the popular things that you can, not only the popular tools, but the features that tend to be present across tools.
So explaining like what custom instructions do and how to make custom AIs and how the memory system works, how does deep research work as well as how some of the models differ between like, you know, those quick models and those chain of thought, thinking reasoning models and why you'd use one over the other. And so we put this together. So far I haven't received a ton of direct feedback a little bit, but my understanding is that it, it's, it's been received quite well.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: So, you know, putting training together and teaching people how to use these tools in a particular context in which they work, I think is a good use of time because these are, these are generalist tools. Right. Just like, you know, project management tools are implemented very differently depending on your place of work or where you're employed. Right. So. And we have to teach people these things in the context that they're in.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I, you know, I.
Good on you to go and, you know, put this together. I, I like how you structured it.
I also like how the use cases because I think a lot of times, especially in the education sector, a lot of people are looking at hey, how are students just using it to go and you know, make their homework easier or whatever their submissions, essays or what have you. But I like how you touched on the other applications of, you know, for studying and you know, there's now applications where you could go and create flashcards. I mean, there's, yeah, a lot of interesting things that you've put together. It's quite comprehensive.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: I appreciate that. And I think one of the underused cases of AI, one of the things that I'm going to spend time investigating, I have spent time using it as a research tool, but also because of the, especially with ChatGPT, but also Claude and Gemini, they connect to a lot of external apps. So you can kind of use it as like an AI enhancement to things you already have. So for instance, I have Chat GPT connected to Notion, so I can create Notion notes, It can amend them, it can search.
Right. So you can kind of use it as a search assistant if you really brave. You can, you know, install Claude Cowork on your PC or your Mac and you can have, give it full file file system access and it can search everything on your computer and it can make system level configurations and so they, they can be used as a connector to enhance existing tools.
Well, you know, one of the things I find interesting from a student perspective is that, is that overcoming the, the challenges with prompting, but also the potential for kind of gray literature search. So we did an episode, I did a solo one a while back when, when you were away, talking about why prompting is hard.
And, and so we have an example in that guide of like, here's what a search would look like in a database and here's what the prompt would look like. And it's very different. Right. Cause we've been teaching people keyword search and Boolean operators for so long. But you know, of course when you go to do a prompt and you have to be a lot more specific, one of the things that's been interesting in classes is a lot of students in particular disciplines, they'll use academic literature. But it's also really valuable that they understand what's coming out of say, professional associations that are related to their area. So like if you're athletic, therapist or something like that.
And historically it's been very difficult to search what we call grey literature. So all the things that don't go through the traditional academic peer review process. So the gray literature, the number of things that fall under this definition of gray literature is much broader.
And that's one of the areas where I Found these AI tools to be incredible because there's like a hundred repositories that you could search for gray literature, institutional repositories, association websites, you know, international organizations.
But you know, with, with some clever prompting and some parameters and a good deep research tool, you can comb through a lot of that stuff a lot easier. Right. So to me as like if you're, or if you're in market research or if you work in industry, so just some of the research opportunities for unearthing what used to be very, very difficult to find documents dispersed in other places.
It's really useful.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
I also, I really appreciate, like I haven't investigated as much but this notebook, LLM, I think that's, you know, some students of mine have told me about it and, and this is powered by Google Gemini. But it's seems really interesting application because you can go and upload a bunch of materials, create flashcards. You can as in your guide you mentioned even like, you know, I thought that was a kind of cool application of taking a bunch of text and making it into like audio podcast or what have you so that you can listen to it.
So yeah, it's amazing. I think the technology where it's come.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: It's interesting you mentioned that. I think sometimes we focus so heavily on these, this idea of this chat bot, but I've.
This is getting increasingly expensive because I have chat GPT plus and Claude. So I'm going to have to make a decision here. But I, I go between them.
One of the things that I think ChatGPT is ahead on is their voice mode. I really underappreciate it. Of course you can use study mode as well, but you can do all these things in voice. And so I think before you're cut off from, you know, data requirements, I think you get like an hour of just like constant back and forth. So like imagine you're preparing for a job interview and you just upload all the questions and, or the whole application plus the job and you go into voice mode. It'll just randomly ask you interview questions, behavioral questions and it'll, you can ask it to give you feedback and you know, you, you talked for too long. If you tell it, you know, I should only have my answers two minutes. It'll time each answer and so it's just a terrific coach, especially if you've given it a lot of information to work with.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:16:29] Speaker A: We have an interesting article from McLean's so it's called maybe this is our next jumping off point. So it's called AI has entered the cubicle. Yeah.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: So this one, it was interesting because it's talking about some Canadians, for Canadians and just how they're having to use it in the workplace and some of the implications. I mean I look at like for example the, the first person was a marketer in there and you know their, their bosses are pushing them to use AI.
They aren't really providing much for training. And so again like you know the, it's a tool but it's, it really, it comes down to a lack of leadership. They talk about in the article that the managers don't understand the tools and they don't know what they're asking them for.
Um, and they think that it's going to save them time. But you know, there's other aspects that come up and if, if you execute it incorrectly it could have catastrophic repercussions. So I mean in, in one of the, the cases they cited or in that marketing one that there was a company that, or it was actually a McDonald's ad that was done in the Netherlands and it was just total AI generated slop and it was a video that was created and, and it be. It was pulled back afterwards because it came across as being too creepy.
So you know, and that, that's just one use case. There was an, another one where they, they talked about a lawyer that was up against somebody who was self representing themselves and, and then the person, you know, actually used ChatGPT to help prepare for that legal case and all the, the actual cases that were.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: The person they were self representing or the lawyer used it.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: No, no, the, the person who was self representing. So they were, they were going and self representing and all the cases that they were using did not exist or there was, you know, so at the end of it the judge dismissed it.
But yeah, the person that was self representing actually had to admitted that they were using ChatGPT.
But again, so I guess the workflow is changing a little bit. So now it's, they're having to fact check more and double check all this and so you know, actually verifying whether this, you know, the case law even exists or not.
And you know, and then the, the other case that I found interesting was this HR leader where they said that about 1 in 10 applications started sounding the same. And so then the hiring takes longer, there's more rounds, there's more tests they have to go.
And so yeah, maybe so because they're
[00:19:40] Speaker A: AI generated they're harder to differentiate.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Yeah. And then it's just they want to double check and go and verify again, you know, in terms of whether the person can actually do whatever they're saying in terms of their applications.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: So, you know, this idea that.
There was this idea that when computers came about, it was very. I think if you look at the coverage of computers in the cubicle, in the workplace at the time. So this would have been probably starting in the 1980s, I think the 70s you had computers like the Apple II and some of the competitors in the office space, but it wasn't as mainstream. But by the, in the early 1980s, it's probably, especially with the IBM PC, some of the coverage talked about, you know, the productivity gains, but in reality what happened is that there was a lot more work for everybody else to do. Now I don't know if that'll play out the same. It just meant that everybody could take on more because they didn't have to do anything. Everything with pen and paper. Right. So like accountants, for instance, could take on far more clients with. But through the use of electronic spreadsheets rather than the huge paper ones they used to have on big desks.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: And so is that, do you think that'll be similar for AI because it creates and introduces problems. I mean there's this tariff, this worry about automation and people all being automated and all these layoffs. But I don't know if the layoffs are always directly connected to the, to the, the AI tools themselves. I think that's more. There's economic forces at work there too.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I mean, yeah, it's interesting if you look at the. Even just recently how, you know, companies like, for instance, like block laying off 25% of their workforce, it's just, they're citing AI. But I don't know if like you say like the economic pressures, I mean if you look at their stock, it's gone down.
You know, the workforce is a huge expense for them. So that could be one way that they could increase their bottom line. So.
But yeah, it's, yeah, it's hard to say. Like, I don't know, I see the, like a company, like many companies, these tech companies, they're just laying off like crazy and I find it hard to believe that it's just being replaced by AI.
There's been some companies that have done layoffs and then had to rehire people because the AI didn't do what they thought it would do.
So.
But yeah, definitely, I think it's, it has introduced like, I mean in all of these cases, in this McLean's long read article, Here it feels like there's a lot more verification and, you know, double checking aspects that you got to do because people are using AI and so it's changing their workflow and so it's not necessarily resulting in higher productivity gain in the current way that it's being used. I mean that you also have to keep in mind, I find, I think, you know, and there's been productivity kind of papers that have been put out now recently, but people are not using it the way that you think that they would be using it either the technology. And it looks like many people are using it like similar to how they would use Google for search. But as you've pointed out with prompting it, it's not the same.
It takes a lot more thought and care in terms of going and developing those prompts. And so you can't take that same approach. And this is where again, that AI literacy training is something that needs to be, you know, factored in.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Yeah, like I, I certainly find myself.
Once I can do something effectively in AI, it, it saves me a lot of time.
So if I set up a custom GPT or, you know, I give really good instructions, but if I'm doing something new, it often takes quite a bit of effort to set it up.
And so I'm very careful about is this something I'm going to do once or is this something where I'm going to do it over and over again? And I think that that's perhaps something that companies aren't really thinking about.
Automating tasks that are repetitive, that have to be done over and over and over again. So the time investment is clear. But I don't know that that's always the case.
There's like general guidelines for getting good answers for the AI, but I think in terms of the automation and being able to connect it to other systems to improve workflow, I think that stuff takes a lot of work to implement. And of course it has to be maintained too. Right. Like, I've developed workflows with AI and then they've broken.
I don't know why they broke. I have to go and reconfigure it. And so it's not, it's not like a set it and forget it.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: No, totally. I mean, it's, it is kind of crazy to think that, you know, we've gotten to this, you know, especially with these AI agent, you know, applications where you're just going to let it do whatever you, you, you know, have it full access. And really we, like you say, like we haven't it could break. There could be issues, there could be catastrophic issues if you don't map out things properly and figure out those workflows.
I mean, that's why I think, you know, the ones that have been using some of these tools like the, There was that. What was it? I think OpenAI bought him out.
What was it called? The one with.
I can't even remember the name now. But you know, people, there's been a rise in, I mean it'll probably dovetail nicely into our next topic by the people buying like Mac Minis just to run these AI agents. And they work really well though. Yeah. And just giving them access to certain files so that you can test things out. Right?
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Like I have Claude cowork on my computer. I just didn't give it full access to my whole computer. I, I, I made a little folder called Claude and it can, I can put stuff in there and I can access that. I let it amend my Apple, but that's about it. Right.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Oh, it was open Claw Open openclaw.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting.
We'll see.
Speaking of AI enabled computers.
So there were some Apple announcements recently.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: So we can, we don't have to cover them all in depth. We don't, we don't really do that on this show. We tend to highlight.
I'm trying, I'm trying to think. I was, someone asked me the other day, it was like, how would you define the show? And I was like, well, I think we, we can't cover like all the news in a week because we're not that kind of operation. We're not this week in tech. We're not trying to compete.
I think what we do is we pick the things that we think are the most impactful and spend more time on them.
And so we've covered Apple Silicon many times in the past. So just as an overview for folks, Apple released a whole week's worth of products.
They don't do the events anymore. It's not as fun. But they have the iPhone 17e, that's their low end phone, which seems perfectly fine.
Yeah, spec bump over the previous one. The iPad Air, which is the iPad I recommend to Everybody, has an M4 chip. So it now has the same chip as my Pro.
I think it has more RAM too.
Yeah, I think mine has 8 gigs of RAM, not 12, but anyways.
Or it's maybe up to 12 depending on the storage size. Sometimes it's not clear.
The MacBook Air got the M5 chip, which is probably faster than my M1 Pro.
I mean all our stuff gets old eventually.
Interesting that it has Wi Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.
That's a huge advantage.
And then the MacBook Pro got M Pro 5 and Pro Max chips. They introduced a new studio display with Thunderbolt 5 and a webcam, a Studio display XDR which is like, you know, their high end kind of reference display.
And a new MacBook line which is I think what we were going to talk about called the MacBook Neo. I will say that this year they're still going to update the Mac Studio, the high end Mac mini, to Max Ultra chips. They still have a HomePod probably to introduce.
They probably have a redesigned MacBook Pro iPad Mini. Intro iPad, new phones in September.
So you know, a Mac Mini probably. I don't think the Mac mini has an M5 chip yet. So there's a bunch of stuff left to announce this year and it's pretty early. But the MacBook Neo is pretty interesting. So Apple has tried just to preface, to introduce smaller low cost computers in the past. So we all remember the MacBook, the plastic ones, those are still like a thousand bucks, twelve hundred bucks at the time, which is like with inflation a lot now are there 8, 900?
And there was the. I had almost like this marshmallow shaped white plastic MacBook. I had one of those that was quite cheap in the day.
They had 10 years ago in 2015 they released the MacBook.
So it sat below the air, but it was quite expensive. It was super compact. But this is pre Apple silicon. So these were running intel chips. It was a pretty pokey device.
So the MacBook Neo is interesting. I'll just do a run through of the specs and then we can talk about it. So it doesn't use an M series chip.
So it's not a laptop desktop class. It uses the A18. So it's essentially a phone.
Yeah. The logic board from what I've seen from teardowns, looks very similar to the 16 Pro phone.
It has eight gigabytes of unified memory. So eight gigs. We don't get a 16 gigs of memory. And that memory is. There's only two configurations of this computer. There's. So the memory is the same regardless. There's a 256 gigabyte model with a standard keyboard. And then for a little bit more you can get a 512 gigabyte model with the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.
It's SRGB. There's no true tone display that matches the color temperature of the room. It's fanless, just like the MacBook Air, they say 16 hours of battery life.
I think video playback, it's probably 12 or 11 mixed use.
Comes in blush, citrus, indigo and silver 1080p webcam.
And it starts at, well, us. It's 599, but then I think it's 500 with the education discount. I will find out momentarily what the Canadian prices are. So it's.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: 800 bucks.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: 679 for the 256 and 849 for the 512 with Touch ID.
There's no backlit keyboard. It's a very nice keyboard, but it's not backlit. So there's some corners cut. It only has two USB ports. One's USB 3, one's USB 2, no magnetic connector.
So there's obviously some corners cut here. Yeah, but it's pretty interesting.
So far.
The reviews tend to be very positive.
Everyone said it would be super slow and be able to handle everything.
So far, the reviews don't show that.
I think it kind of also speaks to, you know, eight gigabytes of RAM isn't really the same in the Mac world and the PC world because it's unified memory that can be accessed by everything. It's not like a separate component.
So, you know, Ijustine did a very short edit. It was a short clip, but, like, you know, five layers of, I don't know, raw 4K footage. And it seemed to just chug. It was a bit of stuttering, but it chugged through that pretty fine.
And so if you can edit raw 4k with this thing, I can't even. A short video with some stuttering. I can't imagine unless you have, like, every Adobe suite app open. People were doing Photoshop exports. Illustrator.
It didn't seem to really slow down too much.
What do you think about this? Does this make the iPad, like, irrelevant?
I mean, is it going to cannibalize the sales? It's an interesting value proposition, right?
[00:32:45] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's. And I, I look at it just from a market segment standpoint.
Yeah. I mean, I, that was something that we talked about. Would it cannibalize the. The sales of the iPad by releasing this? But I think the use case is a little bit different.
The other thing I, I think what Apple is doing is that from a target market, it's going after people that would have never thought about Apple before just because of price point.
And so now, I mean, imagine the people who are looking at something that's like 6, 7, whatever, 100 bucks for like a, a PC laptop.
Those people will probably seriously consider this. And you know, it may seem like, yeah, you're using a 16 Pro chip and, but like it's still, for the, the average public, it's probably still doing pretty decently.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: All right.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Plus, it's not.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Yeah, they've cut corners, but at the same time it's still, you know, you have metal case.
Right. So it just looks a little bit higher end. Yeah. I mean, compared to like, what would be the, I think the, the equivalent of something like this, like from a industrial design standpoint would maybe be the Microsoft Surface, but the price point of that would be way higher.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Well, the Microsoft Surface is very expensive.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know if like in terms of the finishes and the look, I mean. Yeah, it would probably get people who would. Not necessarily. And again, this is where Apple, I mean, if you recall, like they, historically they had a low market share.
It would only be.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: They still do. They're still only single digits. I don't think they've ever breached 10 or 11%.
[00:34:41] Speaker B: But you know what, what happened though?
And you know, we've seen this where people were going and using, let's say they had the iPhone and then it's like, oh, well, you know, my iPhone's working well, maybe I'll get a MacBook or, you know, imac or whatever. And then somehow, like magically. Again, I, I can't even explain how it works, but somehow like, you know, all your imessages show up if there's like that, you know, integrated workflow that you can have.
So, you know, I, I honestly think this is going to be something that may actually increase their, their market share.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I've been rethinking. So I, I, you know, eight gigs of ram. Like if I was buying us. What do most students do? They're browsing the web. Maybe they have to edit a video for class using working with text documents. Right.
So if the iPad, like I have an 8 gigs of Ram iPad Pro.
I don't know if I told you this. I went an entire week, didn't bring my laptop to work.
I have a laptop at work. It's a Windows PC, which is good. It's really good. Dell. But I was working kind of out of the faculty center and I had to focus. I didn't want to get interrupted. So all I brought with me was my handy dandy vertical mouse that you have, my Logitech MX mini keyboard, which I have on my Mac right now. I have the big split keyboard. But because of the current setup I have, I had to get something smaller in here temporarily. And I just take these, these peripherals with me with the iPad.
And you know, my workflow is different because obviously I'm not working on a Mac. But you know, I started working with windowed apps on the iPad. So windowing multiple apps, you can only do it on one desktop at a time. You can have like multiple desktops of windowed apps. And so. But, you know, I had two things side by side. I had something floating, so I had like a little workspace.
But obviously my workflow had to change. But, you know, this thing just flew through my work. I mean, I. All the web apps I need, Google Docs, all that stuff worked in the web. I don't like the apps themselves.
I was able to do the graphics work I need to do.
I mean, so, like it worked really well. And so that's on an iPad now. The Mac, Mac OS is a lot more capable from a multitasking standpoint. And so, you know, if you're. The question has always been, can it, you know, can that operating system be optimized for something that's, you know, a simpler experience? And I think the answer is yes, to a certain extent.
I don't see a huge disadvantage. You know, eight gigs of ram, yeah, it's probably not going to last as long maybe, but I don't, I don't know. I mean, if they sell millions of them, they have to support them, right?
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: And it's like, you know, what are people really doing other than in, again, Adobe Creative Suite, editing video files. You know, if you're thinking about stuff like that, you should not buy this computer. But, but if you need to make the occasional imovie, you know, a handful of times through the entire lifespan that you own the device, this is not going to be an issue.
Like I said, I saw reviews where they. People are just trying to throw it if they can at this. And okay, you have a 30 layer Photoshop file. It's going to be a little slower.
But like, what are you doing with a 30 layer Photoshop file with this device? Like, this is not what this is for. Like, you wouldn't do that on an iPad, which is what I'm comparing it to, but it actually can handle it. It's just slower. And so my question is that like you and I, if I had it here, I could do this podcast and live record and edit this podcast with this device, no problem. Audio recording that we're only talking like a handful of tracks for audio I have effects. I have the intro outro is one and then I have us the speakers, maybe there's another one. If we do an interview, we're not talking about like a, of multi track audio that I'm combining here. And so it seems like a winner again. I always like to see more ram, but there's also like a RAM shortage right now because of all the AI data centers and RAM prices have skyrocketed. So I can understand wanting to keep the price point down by sticking to 8.
Maybe it'll go up to 12 when it's refreshed, which seems reasonable.
But yeah, it's also making me rethink like just computing that I need in the future. Like I don't do a lot of stuff. Like I'm a power user, but I'm not a pro user. That's the difference. Right. Like I use terminal. I like to work with lots of tools. But like, and again video and graphics are the hardest thing on a computer to run you and I don't do that. And I'm thinking like if this thing can handle that, like do I need, need, need a Pro level laptop next time? Because you know I can max out a MacBook Air 15 inch for a lot less money than an entry level MacBook Pro.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean again, I think it's funny, like really in many ways the reason why I went and I don't know if this would have been necessarily the reason why you went for a pro, but for me it was just having the HDMI port.
[00:39:39] Speaker A: Well, I agree with you. HDMI and also access to more ports because we have three, four or three USB C.
Yeah, there's three, three, three. Yeah. So the HDMI and I think there's,
[00:39:56] Speaker B: and there's Thunderbolt, I believe.
[00:39:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I mean like, but like if I was to buy a Pro, again, like I bought the base level, like mine has like a binned processor with 16 gigs of RAM. Like I would not buy, I'd probably maybe buy a Pro level processor or maybe even a Pro with a standard M series. It doesn't need a pro chip. Right. But like I agree with you that the chassis has some advantages.
But even if I was to purchase a pro level computer, I don't know that I would ever purchase anything but the base model. So I'm thinking they're souping up a mid range or buying the base of a pro level. Right. And so the reason I'm bringing this up is that I look back to this computer.
This is a 2013.
Oh, do you not see it? Do I have my background?
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's, I can see part of it.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: It's a 2013 Retina MacBook Pro.
Right.
And so it's not writing a supported version of Mac OS anymore, which is kind of a problem.
So I have Linux on it.
But in those days you really had to get, you know, if you wanted to do any even light level video editing stuff like that, you really did have to buy Pro.
But that's not the case anymore. Right. And I think that people are maybe overspending.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Well and especially that's where like it comes down to the use case. But I mean even all these reviews like you're saying, you know, it can technically like the, from it looks like all the reviews that we went through here. Yeah, it can do anything. It's just the pro level work hits the ceiling and so it takes longer.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: But nobody thinking about pro level work or even pro use prosumer work should be looking at this. This is not designed for that. You could, you could go to an entry level MacBook Air and you would get way better performance and be able to handle all that stuff. Photoshop, multi level audio, no problem.
So, and even there you only have to spend 1500 bucks or something.
You know, in the, in the era of computing that's, that's still not terrible for a laptop that lasts, you know, six, seven years.
But like if my kid needed a computer, a laptop and I wanted to get her a Mac, I wouldn't think twice. This is totally what I would buy.
Yeah, this does everything. And, and you know what, there's advantages too because it's all usb. You know, you don't need a proprietary charging. Yeah, the magnetic is nice but you know, I, it's, it's, there's handy things, but there's also proprietary things. I like things that are standardized. Right? Yeah, USB is usb.
So that's, there's nothing wrong with that. The trackpad, it doesn't have a force touch trackpad. For people who might not know this for 10 years Apple has put like a little motor in their trackpads to simulate the feel of a click. This has actual mechanical click.
A lot of people say it feels better.
Now the problem with the mechanical is that it opens up so you can get stuff and debris can fall in it. There's an advantage to using the replicated click. But you know, I, I look at this computer and I'm like, I wish, I wish I could get one. I don't want to buy one. Because I don't need it. But I, I, you know, I would love it if I could win one or if I, you know, found $850 on the street.
I would love to just have it as my day to day just to see if I even notice much of a difference.
Because so much of what we do is in the cloud. Right.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well then, and who knows, maybe that might be something that maybe they'll take this because they don't want to because it's lighter and you know, maybe it could be like a travel one that you don't care about.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, maybe it's also a beautiful case.
I mean now that being said, if I want to take a travel computer I don't care about, I have an old Mac with an intel chip that runs Zora and Linux which just flies. So yeah, you know, I can do all sorts of stuff with Linux. That's pretty impressive. But yeah, I, I'm kind of surprised by this computer.
Yeah.
It also makes me think about, so we talked about the iPad. Is there a need for the Air?
You know, they have a lot of computers in their lineup now.
I'm not saying that that's, there's anything wrong with that. Obviously Steve Jobs didn't do that when he came back to Apple he simplified the line. But that was also a different time, you know, when they had lots of products and they weren't doing very well. Now they're doing really well with all of their products.
And I'm looking at this list. If you go to the Mac page, apple.com cause I'm on the Canadian site, slash Mac, they have MacBook Neo, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac Mac, Mini, Mac Studio, Mac Pro.
To me it's like it is a lot of Macs. I don't know.
I mean. Well, I guess the Imac is popular.
[00:45:14] Speaker B: Let's see, for the desktops there's really, I guess it's just the three. Right. So you either have the Imac, Mac,
[00:45:21] Speaker A: Mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro 4.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Oh, I guess you have the. Yeah, but who's going to buy the, The Pro?
It's 9,000 bucks.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know if they really need this anymore.
Yeah, right.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: I mean for the laptops. Yeah. I mean we were kind of talking about this offline. It feels like the Air has almost like the Pro. The Air is the new Pro.
I don't know.
[00:45:49] Speaker A: Yeah, like it's just, it's getting quite expensive or like do you need a Pro level chip? Right. Like, would you Buy a pro level chip again,
[00:45:58] Speaker B: you know, that wasn't even the reason why, like I said, like
[00:46:01] Speaker A: my decision, if you had the option to buy another Pro, let's see, were buying a Pro because this one's old. No, you need a new one and you want to keep all the ports. Like there's. That makes sense. Would you buy an M5 Pro or would you just buy an M5?
[00:46:15] Speaker B: I think I would just get an M5 chip.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Yeah. That's what I'm thinking too. Because I'm thinking. Am I. Because it has a fan so it can sustain performance, it's not going to throttle from heat.
Would I, would I even notice the difference?
Yeah, right. I mean, I guess it's only a few hundred more bucks and that's how they really get you.
And then you get like, I can play games on it and stuff. Which is sick because I have my Steam library. But you know, it's not like critical.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: Well and who knows, like the, the rumors, I mean based on what Mark Gurman has put out there. But there's probably going to be a foldable iPhone and then there's probably going to be a touchscreen MacBook that's going to be released and so.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: So they have a foldable iPhone that they need. I, I guess what I'm kind of interested in for us because I've seen a lot of these podcasts and I, I like to separate us away from this. So looking at the lineup of the Macs or, or the iPad, like which devices in the next few years do you think are going to go away?
So they're going to keep the Neo because that's new.
Yeah. AR will probably remain and I'm assuming the MacBook Pro would remain. Like those are safe.
Do you think they're going to keep the imac around?
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I don't know.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: Or does the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro become one or the.
That seems like Mac Mini and Studio seem like it's pretty close.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: Are they going to keep the iPad mini if they have a foldable phone? Like, you see what I mean? Like a lot of this stuff doesn't seem like they have too many products now that eat each other.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I was also looking at their market share. It looks like their laptop, you're right. Like from a global, you know, just computer standpoint, they're like roughly 9 to 10%.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: But laptops is probably a lot more.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: Yeah, they're 18 to 19 for the.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: Still pretty low.
You know, I mean they Would be.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: Yeah, but back in the day.
Yeah, back in the day they were like maybe 5% of the market.
Right. And so again, it was only the creatives, the people who needed that pro, like, you know, let's say from a graphic design or video or something.
And so having that the, the exposure to the phone has opened up and increased their, the amount of business. But I mean, even I look at their, their stock price, it's insane. Like they're, they're getting close to.
Who knows, they might get to that 4 trillion.
So it just keeps.
[00:49:01] Speaker A: Should have kept that Apple stock.
[00:49:02] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
I thought, you know, it would probably taper off at some point. How many, how many Apple products do people need?
[00:49:17] Speaker A: It's incredible to me.
The Neo.
Yeah. I think we need to find a way to get one for free.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Well, hopefully maybe if al.
[00:49:28] Speaker A: Even the review unit, I don't need to have it forever. I just. It would be nice to have a review unit. I think that'd be helpful.
Yeah, I'd like to see it. But yeah, pretty cool.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: I think a lot of people, even the colors too, they're kind of.
They were striking, right? Like appealing.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I like silver.
Personally.
One of the downsides I found with Macs is that if you get a colored Mac and you put stickers on it, it means that the case. Because when it's exposed to UV light will age at different rates. So if you take the stickers off and you've used it where there's light, it'll actually show an outline of the sticker because the finished outline. So unless you get silver, you should never put stickers on it. Just as a hot tip for people, I do like the. If I was to pick a color, I like the indigo.
I'm not a big fan of like citrus or blush. I would never buy a blush laptop, nor would I buy a yellow laptop.
But I do like the Indigo.
I don't know even if I was getting it for a kid, if it's even worth getting the Touch ID. I guess so now it's getting to 850. Now it's getting kind of expensive.
[00:50:45] Speaker B: I don't know if it's necessary though. Do you need the Touch id?
[00:50:49] Speaker A: It would just be the storage, I think if you, you know, it depends how much you're going to run into. I don't know how much is left over on the MacBook Neo once the operating system is there.
Mm.
So I'm just kind of curious for available storage.
[00:51:10] Speaker B: But like you said, I mean, if, if things are in the cloud or what have you.
And I guess worse comes to worse, like you could always get some sort of like SSD.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So the, the 256 gig model only has 154 free outside after once with the OS and all the apps installed. That's the problem, which is not very much.
So you might have to get the larger version.
But that being said, it's pretty impressive. I also got a terrific, A pretty good score for teardown from iFixit too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think, I mean I don't know what all other. All the laptops.
From Apple R, I don't know how it compares, but I think it did. It got like a reasonable repairability score. I think the reason for that is some of the regulations coming into the EU that requires, you know, parts that aren't like all glued together and so, you know, so it's easier for people to disassemble. So I think it's the easiest user replaceable battery like ever because I don't think there's any adhesive. I think it's all screws and clamps and stuff like that, which adds weight but then is easier to fix.
So they said it was the most repairable MacBook in 14 years.
And so I'm trying to find out what the score they gave it was 6 out of 10.
So by, I guess compared to other MacBooks, that's. That's really good.
Yeah.
Cool.
Yeah. Interesting.
Interesting times. You know, we can run our computers with phone stuff.
[00:53:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:53:06] Speaker A: So I think it's super cool. I'm excited by this.
I'm going to find a way to get. To get one. Maybe. We'll see.
I'm thinking in the iPad in the future, would I need an iPad? If you can get this. I guess it's a different type of device. It's touch, it's different. Totally different paradigm.
So anyways, yeah, I think that's about it for today. Is there anything else you want to touch base on?
[00:53:34] Speaker B: No, I think, I think we're good. Went through the AI side and you know, this new product that has come out by Apple. So we'll see and maybe we, like you say, hopefully we can try to get our hands on one because I think it would be super interesting to try out.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: I agree.
Well, it was a pleasure chatting with you then and I will talk to you next time.
[00:53:55] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: Take care.
[00:53:58] Speaker B: You too.
