from 5g ipads to 32 core max there's a lot of rumors swirling about future apple devices
let's dive in stick around
hey everyone welcome back to today in tech i'm juliette beauchamp and i'm here with
macworld senior writer michael simon as well as computer world executive editor ken mingus
so can mike first of all thank you of course as always for joining and i want to first touch on
these 5g ipads and ken i'm gonna go to you so obviously apple just came out with the first 5g
iphones and that's huge it seems like the natural next step for an apple 5g device would be a 5g
ipad so can you tell us a little bit about those yeah uh thanks julia well you know what prompts us
uh johnny evans had a blog post on cdw on computer world uh a few days ago a couple weeks ago talking
about this i was actually sort of surprised to see that apple would be moving so quickly to put
5g in an ipad i mean it's natural that it do so uh but given the fact as you just said that you
know the iphone 12 just came out and also given the fact that 5g is still you know rolling out
in different permutations around the country it's a bit of a surprise but we are talking you know
three six months down the road um and i think it does make sense because apple has been trying
with mixed success i think to to sort of pitch the ipad as a more enterprise-worthy device
and certainly you know building in 5g access into it would make computing on the on the go
uh you know a lot a lot easier for a lot of people again assuming they're in an area that's
served by 5g um i'll be surprised you know to see it show up in the iphone mike and i were
just talking about this a little bit a little while ago um i mean we we're talking about 5g
and i was talking about whether or not apple's going to do 5g as part of the system on chip
et cetera et cetera we don't think that's going to happen for a couple years so i assume
this will be qualcomm's 5g but uh you know it would certainly be a big advance for the ipad
i mean i guess i mean it's 5g i mean it depends on where you live it depends on what what plan
you have it depends on etc etc etc uh yeah sure it's logical um i'm sure it'll be there
in the next upgrade because i don't think apple's going to wait another 12 to 18 months
particularly in the pro to add 5g because that's you know that's the buzzword that's what people
want and they've already proven that they can do this without increasing costs without affecting
battery life the things that are important to these you know mobile devices so yeah i'm i'm
sure it's coming will it be a watershed moment for the ipad no it's just another thing that it needs
there's a lot that apple needs to do to the ipad i mean sure you can say 5g is one of those things
i just i don't think a faster mobile network is going to solve the problems that i don't
think anyone's using an ipad and saying man everything's perfect but this lte is just so slow
i don't think so no i don't i don't think the lack of 5g is is is what's holding back ipad use i
agree you know we've talked about this before that you know apple certainly has taken some steps with
the with the ipad os to try to make the ipad more enterprise e uh and you're right 5g is is sort of
like table stakes at this point for new devices uh you know i i do it's one more building block
you know is it gonna is it gonna you know uh spur millions of people to buy ipads all of a sudden no
but you know if you don't have it you don't want to wait until 2022 or 23 to put it in there so it
makes perfect sense that it's going to show up it i tell you what i'm waiting for and johnny
johnny evans had also written about this for computer world is you know apple's apparent push
or move to build 5g into the you know the system on chip that it's got you know the the whole
m1 processor with 5g built in will open up a lot of doors for 5g to show up in a lot of apple
hardware yeah the i mean the mac it's funny with these m1 chips all of a sudden the mac is not only
the fastest mac apple has ever made one of the fastest pcs that you can get at
that price range but it's it's way more attractive than the ipad right now because
you know it does all the things that you needed to do with the exception of touch
but you know the ipad over the last i guess two generations
has been going more towards the mac end you know with the magic keyboard and with the cursor
so apple is realizing that you know the ipad i'm not going to say it's not ready because they sell
you know 12 million a quarter and there's tons of them out there and it's a fantastic device
what i don't think it's ready for i don't think it's ready to replace that pc mindset which is
a keyboard uh uh maybe maybe a clamshell design that you can throw into a bag
opening up you know your your apps in a dock in in a in a drawer and the things that we want to do
on a mac um like basically people want a mac on their ipad which is never going to
really happen because they're different devices with this m1 chip and yeah i agree i think 5g
should i hope it comes apple's never made a laptop with a cellular connection as far as i know
certainly not recently so yeah that would open up a whole new kind of era of the mac
because it wouldn't be tied to either tethering through an iphone or a wi-fi network it could be
that ipad like device and then that opens up the door towards maybe the mac is the thing that that
the ipad becomes closer to and the mac gets touch and then the ipad kind of gets phased out but
i don't want touch on a mac though please please note well not not in its current iteration no okay
but i think down the line you would have said four years ago and i said and i'm sure i wrote it
somewhere if you could find it the ipad doesn't need a keyboard i could i certainly wrote it
doesn't need a cursor maybe maybe i said it did you curse i don't know whatever the case may be
it's it's it's it's evolving yes it and i think the mac will too now that apple controls the whole
system and you know once we move past intel completely and rosetta's gone and you know
these things the m1 becomes faster and faster and faster the prices drop new models come out
you know we're talking a couple years at least but i think the mac all of a sudden i mean you
call it a renaissance call it a rebirth but i think the mac where we thought at one point was
going to gradually phase out i'm not so sure and i think that the ultimate 5g device for for for uh
productivity or or whatever you enterprise that's the word you use i think it's going to be more
you know more the mac with an iphone than an ipad with an iphone yeah you know and it's interesting
this is it's a good time to segue because one of the things that's been been talked a lot about our
future m1 iterations with you know multi i mean the current the current version has eight cores uh
they've been talked about 32 cores 64 cores did i even see something like a 128 core maybe oh
graphic profit for graphics okay i mean you're talking some serious computing you know and they
have to do that to compete with their own mac pro because those machines those aren't for you know
normals like we wouldn't we wouldn't know what to do with the mac pro if somebody gave it to us
but the people who need that stuff they demand that kind of power they demand you know we're
talking about rendering farms and and you know things like that that need these insane teraflops
of power that you know the normal consumer has no idea what those speeds are even like
and yeah so apple's gonna have to do that and i'm i wasn't surprised to read that report uh 32 cores
that's more than what apple sells now for like twenty thousand dollars well i mean and and and as
built into the m1 i mean the m1 with eight cores is already crazy fast i mean and you're right you
know if you're someone you know i'm thinking video editing whatever for whom time is money that's
that's a serious it should be a very expensive investment but you you know the roi would be
amazing yeah and you know you see say hey coors the the the rumor and i don't know how that is
these are these are high performance cores i mean so the eight cores in the m1
are i mean they're they're mind blowing and if you had you know you multiply that by a factor of of
four i can't even like i can't even count and then multiply that by a factor of four again
yeah you know success i mean then you're taking the pressure off the the system memory you're
i mean it's just it's unbelievable what what apple would be able to do if they can
produce a chip at at volume to put inside the mac pro i'm sure they will be able to it's just a
matter of when well and and one of the points that uh johnny made i think this was in his piece today
was talking about the move from like you know i think seven nanometers to five to eventually three
you know when you can get chips that small soc is that small then you're talking about different
form factors maybe apple glass glasses you know something like that you can see whole new product
lines evolve just because these things are so powerful i mean you know two cores maybe for
your apple glasses is all you need yeah i don't know i mean it's like the watch like the watch
has a fantastic chip but it's not the iphone chip it's its own thing because you know once you once
you reach that level of fabrication where you can you know take an a14 chip and make it faster
and slower at the same time it's you know as you said the possibilities are just you know somewhat
endless i don't know what i would do with 128 core m5 you wouldn't mac bro but i i'd try to find i'd
find some reason to get one so i could try it you know of course it might cost thirty thousand
dollars well that's the question will it no maybe it won't maybe instead of a base of 6 000 it's a
base of 3 000 which you know that's a that's a huge production if that's the case yeah you know
i mean they're delivering the macbook air it still is still a grand but look at how much faster it is
if you can cut down like if you if you look at the mac pro and all those configurations
there's um i don't know eight or ten different different steps of the chip that you can get
if you cut that down to like three you know three thousand eight thousand twelve thousand
or something and all of a sudden it becomes way more affordable to outfit your entire operation
with with you know with mac pros and you're also future proofing yourself essentially
yeah clearly that that's where apple's gonna wind up while we're talking about expensive hardware
i i it's not really an enterprise play but i i have to ask what you think about the uh the new
apple headphones i mean i think they're insane for for for only 549 or something i mean we've
heard about this rumor for a while i expected 3.99 which is still expensive which is still expensive
yeah when i saw the price i literally was like why unless these things have an m1 in them i'm
not interested you know i mean they don't and i'm not interested the first impress it doesn't even
have a u1 chip if you want to if you want to break down the specs the that's uh for those who don't
know that's the ultra wideband ship that's in the watch and the iphone that helps with spatial
stuff and will eventually help with location once they once they released their apple techs but the
so first of all they're they're named wrong
airpods max implies a bigger version of the other one so the airpods pro should be the
airpods max and the enterprise mac should be the airpods pro but aside from that
i don't know what they're bringing to the table i don't know what they're bringing to the table that
justifies its price even if we're talking about super high fidelity audio which they probably
have in fact the the early impressions are out a couple of people got them and they said yeah
they sound good they sound really good fine so do both so do sony airpods for a lot less
yeah my airpods bro are fine like you know so i have a sonos arc thing that i just bought in my
living room and you know i can tell the difference between that and like a normal tv speakers
i most people could be able to i don't think anybody would be able to put on a pair of two
hundred dollar you know big headphones and then switch to apple's 550 and say wow these are worth
350 times more it's the the sound how much better could it possibly be to justify 550
bucks i mean there are headphones like super high ultra niche headphones that are like three grand
but i mean those are that's not what this is these are consumer level headphones that apple's not
selling to sound engineers they didn't do any of that like usually all right so take
that pro xdr display that's six grand yep when they sold that when they debuted that
it wasn't hey hook this up to your macbook air no it was this is a 45 or 20 thousand dollar display
calibration uh nano etching all that stuff that they did to it they were appealing to
you know uh a photo engine uh that engineers a photo people photographers high-end people
these headphones are headphones that's it they're airpods they're not you know apple didn't have i
don't know pharrell trot out there and say these are the users these are better than my three
thousand dollars maybe because there's nothing for pharrell to say i think that's true i think that's
true i mean i i just i don't know what it is but they're backwards on march so maybe i'm wrong
well they you know they they do come with a fetching a fetching carrying case i think
that that case is almost like it's almost like a saturday night live sketch i don't understand
to me it reminded me of the queen's purse but uh yeah yeah purse or or a brassiere
or whatever you want to call it it's a weird it's a weird thing man well there won't be
many of them under under the holiday trees this year he's carrying that around it's just weird
well if you're buying if you if you're ready to buy the uh overpriced headphones and i guess you
want the carrying case to show i mean at least at least it comes with it i mean at least apple
didn't charge extra they could have done that yeah i mean i'm not surprised i wouldn't be
surprised if it was like 100 bucks on top of the 550 they are charging for the audio cable that's
35 dollars lightning to you to three and a half millimeter you can't that doesn't come with it
neither does a charging cable uh a power adapter yeah so you're looking at about 600 by the time
you're out the door easy yeah well and they don't support fast charging you can charge you
know they charge at the same speed no matter what charger you use five wide or 100 wide
i was just going to say i know what not to get you for christmas this year hey listen if you
want to buy me a pair i'll take them yeah you've already turned me off sorry they're not worth it
i mean you know you can get almost get an iphone for that price you can you can get like half of
an ipad air it's just nuts it's nice but you know apple has this weird blind spot
when it comes to audio they they have nailed things in the past the ipod obviously never gotten
it right well that never i mean the ipad the ipod was awesome the uh obviously i mean in the last
say 10 years yeah yeah i mean you know ipod airpods notwithstanding uh uh ipod hi-fi was
a joke that was 250 bucks and it was it cradled your ipod and it was this huge speaker and it was
you know it did like the your ipod fell out and uh homepod listen the sound is is is very good it's
not 300 dollars good or 350 whatever it was when it launched um homepod mini i have issues with you
know there are just things that you know apple for whatever reason you know i mean another great one
is itunes i mean obviously that was perfect like they they know what they're doing when it comes to
like the general audio thing but when it comes to these specific products i don't
know if they spend so much time researching and engineering them that they just can't price them
properly but 550 is is is nuts it's nuts but they're going to sell because they're apple
there's not even an apple logo on them i know how come where is this where's the embossed apple logo
so i'm wearing 550 bucks on my head i want people to know it damn it you're damn right
uh so juliet i think i think back to your original question uh yes on 5g ipads yes on
multiple multiple core m1 chips down the road and i guess it's at least two thumbs down for
the headphones i mean hey listen if you want to buy one and you have the money go ahead
and let us know yes let us know if they're amazing yeah sure and you know maybe they are maybe
they're they're transformative and i'm crazy but i don't know like all right airpods are expensive
but i understand the value there you're getting that that ease of use set up you're getting you
know really comfortable uh earbuds you're getting the noise cancelling and it's it's it's 250 bucks
which isn't outlandish you know you can get uh powerbeats pro for 200. i mean there are things
in that price range uh beets and bows and you know they're around there the bow is sell for 300. the
bow is 700 uh the bose headphone 700 whatever i think something something 700 the you know the
real good ones the the the sony uh i forgot the name wx397 something um those are also 300 ish and
they're awesome you know those are like the the the benchmark that's why i figured 399 for airpods
that's fine a little bit of an apple premium you got aluminum you got the ease of use you got the
the airpods thing fine 550 i i just i can't justify it i can't he's out he's out he's done
so it seems like you know airpods max aside it's there seems like you know there's a lot of sort of
future looking um on apple's part when it comes to 5g 32 core max and i don't know maybe maybe a
theme for next week is apple 2021 as we sort of close out the new year but i think we'll
leave it at that for now thank you both so much for calling and i really appreciate it thanks
and you know listen apple had a fantastic 2020. so let's not let airpods sully that
cheers totally everything the cherry this has been a good year for apple
all right well there you have it thank you all so much for watching this episode of today in
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and let us know in the comments below let us know what you think of a 5g ipad is it worth
it to you 32 core max same deal and perhaps you know most the topic of the hottest debate
this episode airpods max if for whatever reason you got them and you love them or you hate them
let us know in the comments below thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time you