Apple Silicon, Old Macs, and Why Working Gear Shouldn't Die

You are only be history. Welcome Hi. The Pro Audio Sweet. These guys are professional and motivated. With Chex the Leo Stars George Wisam, founder of Source Element, Robert Marshall, International Audio Engineers, Darren Robo Roberts and Global Voice Andrew Peters. Thanks to Tribo, Austrian Audio Making Passion, her Source Elements, George the Czech Wisdom and Robbo and AP's international demos. To find out more about us, check the pro Audio Suite dot com. And welcome to another pro Audio Sweet thanks to Austrian Audio Making Passion heard. I don't know, it's just. Well, we were going to. We're going to have a chat about Max this week because just before we started recording, and Ap is fine, by the way, Who I think he's dropped just dropped off the edge of the planet. He does live down the bottom of Australia, so maybe he meant for a walk a bit too far in his dropped off the end of the world or something. Yeah, we were chatting before recording here. We were talking about Mac how they've dropped a one of the versions of their Mac Mini, and was having a chat about their new laptops and stuff. So we thought they might be inuating that. Yeah, it's an interesting time. Because because I was saying, how good of a deal? Those M four's were I'm kind of addicted to used computers and whatnot, and I was saying, how you know, finally Apple has a value that I was like, I'm not buying a used computer and I was getting but are you know we we bought a couple of those fours for. A MACAM for six hundred bucks sixteen gigs of memory. The base machines were all eight gigs for a long time. What pushed them into sixteen gig at the base model was the neural engine, right, they needed. The extra the neural engine, Yeah. On chip processing whatever, you know, for all the AI stuff that they never did. Maybe they will, but they haven't. So basically, you're buying these comput they're like mini supercomputers, but they don't have the software to even utilize them. Well, guess what, there are some people out there who are using very very demanding software now called AI open Claw. It's one of them. That's a different episode. Well, they're they're realizing the Apple Macminie silicon architecture with all the neural cores and all this stuff. They're basically beasts of a computer at a very very affordable price. This is like the only time in history dealing with Apple where you can really say the Apple is the better price per performance than a PC. It seems like Intel has. Lost a lot of ground in there. They have chip competitiveness. Yes, yeah, yeah, well it got so popular that just recently Apple eliminated the entry point Macmini skew. So if you go to buy a new Macmini now you know you're looking for the five ninety nine and ain't there. They just don't have it. It's not out of stock, it's not you just can't buy one. And so I bet if you go on eBay and find one of those, I bet you anything, it's selling for more than it was new because. Or it's selling for exactly what it was new, not new. Yes, they're just not available, and it's a really weird time we're in because of the demand on those computers. But if you've got a Mac Minie really any of the generations of m Chip M one through the current M four, don't get rid of it because it's still an incredibly viable computer. I'm running an M one base Model one mine's not a base. It's got sixteen gigs of memory, but it's still fabulous facts. And that's from like twenty twenty. That thing's yes, yeah. Twenty twenty. Yeah, I'm I couldn't be more happy. And I'll say this funny enough. The new one, it's a little bit taller than yours, but it travels a lot better. So one of the things I did is I got the M four because I needed a better on the road computer for doing sessions. And it got to the point where my twenty nineteen MacBook Intel based it just wasn't cutting it for streaming video and running pro tools and running Source connect and running a sound effects. Library, and it just it would work. But you were always like kind of like sweating it if it was going to do something stupid or just do like a five minute pause. So I was, you know, I was looking at another laptop, or here's that M four for six hundred bucks. So an M four for six hundred bucks. No, it doesn't have a battery, a sixty dollars little fifteen inch seventeen inch screen, keyboard and mouse, and you've got a really awesome road computer and it travels like a laptop in the sense that it's just like, I mean, the thing fits in the palm of your hand. It's it's nothing. Yeah. The Macmini M four, the new Agenda, the new generation. It looks like an Apple TV. I don't know if you know what those look like, but they're pretty small, little rectangular, rounded little guys. The M four is similar form factor, it's just diminutive. It just doesn't make It's like. It's like two Apple TVs stacked on top of each other. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense that it could be that good for how. Small is you know, and I don't think it has a fan. It does You'll never hear it, You'll never Yeah, okay, but is it? Do you reckon? And you, guys are closer to the sort of probably Georgie even you closer to the cold face on this than than me. But do you reckon even that mac Minnie is partly overkill? Oh yes, like most of our audience of voiceover artists right for me, that mac Minnie would still be way more than you could ever possibly even that's closely pushing to the limit. That's why I steered Andrew to the to the neo. Yeah, because you know, it's like for the convenience, it's got the it's got the screen in there, it's got no fan, there's a there's a certain number of ages for a voiceover talent that doesn't necessarily need the power for video streaming and whatnot. And those NEOs are also I think seven hundred dollars are they? George, how much are those? I think five ninon nine US. Yeah, so they're also a good deal. And they're running off of a cell phone chip. But when you benchmark it, it's still competitive with a really top of the line computer from twenty twenty ish or twenty. I'd say that Neo just gets to where the best I nine or in that area of the I nine ships were that you were spending three thousand dollars on. So a thirteen inch Neo with I think it only has one spec and fifty bucks, yeah. Fifty that's a good play. Anything under a thousand bucks in Australia. Find absolutely, yeah, totally. It's just a great deal. So Apple, the Neo is a really interesting machine. I had a client of mine buy two because he likes to have duplicates of everything, and so we bought two and he was trying to just plug it into a four K LG monitor on this desk. You know, it couldn't figure out what to do with the monitor. It wouldn't it couldn't hang, it couldn't handle it, And so I started looking into its spec for external monitors. Well, it has two USB ports, but only one of them is display port compatible, so really only one of the ports will work with displays. And then it's still not a bad spec. It'll run a sixty hertz three fresh screen four K. But apparently just certain monitors are running out this fire. This is common Like the Mac Studio, not all the USB ports are equal, and only some of them work fully with certain displays. And I think I think the same thing's true of the Mac Mini. The crazy thing is the only display that this gentleman happens to own in his studio at home is a couple lgs and it's an Apple Studio display. Now a lot of well he's got two of each of the yeah, well, the Apple Studio display. Well, he has two of age because he has two residences, so he likes to have parody everything between the two. So there's two houses exactly the same. Exactly the same square feet, they're both twelve hundred and forty square feet. That would be really weird. That would be exceedingly weird that I have not seen yet. I've seen some weird slow yeah right A and set b reset said, A. Let's just got it. He's got a wife at that house. A wife. They're exactly the same dimension. They look, they look exactly exacme dog dog. I hope, I hope he's listening to this. He's laughing his ass off right now. But anyway, yeah, the mag the geo, the neo, sorry, just it would it played nicely with the studio display, but not the LG's, which is really weird because these displays aren't that different really in a lot of ways, they're really similar. So it makes me wonder, like, is there a special little handshake in the Apples display that it's just. I hey, gym is built someway. I don't put it past Apple. I mean Apple used to put chips on their power cords for the cell phone, right yeah, so. Like you know about that charge right? Wait, what you couldn't buy a power cord for a lightning cable? You go like, oh, look there's a lightning cable that's ten dollars and there's another lightning cable that's thirty bucks. I'll buy the ten dollars one and then one day you do the right update on your iPhone and your ten dollars lightning cable won't charge your cell phone because Apple put in what's called the Mai Fi chip and they went, oh, you're not an Apple charge cable. Yeah, I do charge. You have to license that now even if you want to make Yeah, they make. They make a licensing fee from everyone who makes power cables. And they claim they claim it's like for the safety of the phone, and it won't. Damn it's not. It's for the safety of the bottom line. That died with lightning, Yes, it died with Yeah. You have to think are European friends who who lobbied for the death of the lightning cable? Yes, they did. They were like I USBC or nothing and know what Trevor. Or what's what's a guy's name from comedy? Noah? Know what Trevor is it? Oh Trevor Noah? Yeah? Daily Show? Yeah he didn't. Hilarious thing about like you know, you know that the Europeans have got it really good when this is what they're complaining about like. It was this whole bit. Like I was sitting over at the doctor's office, which I don't have to pay for, and I was thinking like gosh, like, you know, it's so stupid that I have to have this cable in that cable. Why couldn't I just have one cable? And and I thought, you know this and that, and somehow he ties it into because I because I thought this was a genius idea, because I went to college which I didn't have to pay for. It's like all this time he's like, Okay, Europeans are now solving problems that like, yeah. Well it's crazy, but it's true. I mean, that's that's the reason Lightning is gone. So you know, now we're like looking at like, damn, here's a Mac Mini M four two fifty six gig for four ninety nine. But it's on auction. People, it's gonna it's gonna go for the full price. Yeah, it's not. It's not buy it now. I was gonna buy it. I was like I was literally gonna say, hang on, I gotta buy this Mac. But it's on. Auction, but is an impulse buy. Yeah, but the but the the neo. You know, I don't know. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. We were talking about lightning port. My sorry, the lightning port thing. Yeah, I'm glad to see it go. It's yeah, there's a lot of us with Apple mice and stuff that are lightning. You got to keep that cord around the charge home and stuff, and you. Can buy little lightning the USBC three adapters. Yeah, I've got little I've got little ones attached with a little like a little tiny silicone lanyard thing that hooks to the cord. So whenever my girlfriend plugs our iPhone twelve, then you know, it's got the little adapter she plugs it in, you know, and uh. But yeah, it's so glad to see that go because i mean, not only leaving that port behind solved so many problems, including just now that USBC is a standard that's cross platform. It means that you can take that same audio interface and as long as it's class compliant Passport VIEWO SSL scarlet is, you know, you can plug that into an iPad and iPhone. They will all talk to the device, record and playback like a normal device. So here's a cool little opportunity for everyone still running a Lightning iPhone if you've used them, the short MV eighty eight. Do you know what I'm talking about, the little mic that plugs into the base of the phone, right. Yeah, they're really good. Right, it's a little little, tiny, little tiny guy that's an MS microphone. Yes, my midside, right freaking good. And and I just snagged one for I think I got it for twenty five bucks plus five bucks shipping or something. There's sweet. Yeah, and that was like a lot more. I think probably those were one hundred. Bucks sure, MV eighty eight, right. Yeah, they have a new USB version of it, and those are more, but the Lightning versions are like people are just hawking them now. So if you're still you know, I'm still on a n iPhone eleven. Yeah, so and and yeah, it'll make a really good recording. Yeah, like a little twenty five dollars fifty dollars at the most. I wouldn't pay more than fifty bucks from And it's. A it's a series one buy now forty dollars free shipping, yep, for the good deal. It's a it's a really good we're talking short m V eighty eight stereo USB microphone. Yeah, yeah, but the lightning and how much the Ayahi three, but that's the USB C version. Still look for a lightning that's That's exactly my point. The lightning ones are now been devalued because. Yeah, because they're no longer Yeah. Well, so can you buy a cable that's a cute little clever adapter that goes from lightning USBC employed front. I don't know, because I mean, usually some of these things work. For instance, George, if you remember the Eleasis thing that you yeah gave me, I found a thirty pin to lightning adapter. Yeah, yeah, and it works nice. I can't get any software that's meaningful, you know, on it, but it's still kind of cool. You stick your iPhone eleven in there. No, I have an iPad. I can use it with an iPad one or an iPad air old iPad air. It's kind of weird. I have this weird thing about like, I just like seeing old things work again. I do too. There's just something about it. It's just like this thing got devalued in an arbitrary way, but it's absolutely still useful piece of hardware. It's just it's so frustrating that that's been made legal and normal you know, and I know we've had these right repair, Right to Repair Act things pass in the US and do they really have any teeth or not? And doesn't really matter. You know. I don't know if you know about this, Robbo, but we they really try to pass our law that says products have to be repairable. Yeah, well not only they have to be repaarable, but you, as the manufacturer cannot say that I am the only party that will repair this. Yeah, yeah, repairable by the user. By the user, you are allowed to get into it. Like Tesla caused this problem. A lot of manufacturers cause this problem. And if you open that ample might have been one of them. You open the bonnet or a hood of a Mercedes and there was literally a plastic lid over the fucking engine bay and it says there are no. Users or it's under this cover. Apple would come up with a new head for the screws every couple of years so that you'd have to buy some stupid screwdriver that they patented so that you couldn't get into it. And there was an. Example of Apple is the original Classic Max. They made the whole for the screw to get into it. So far you needed a screwdriver that was like a foot deep to be able to open it. There would just make it so that. You couldn't get into the goddamn thing unless you know it's like purposeful. Yes, they're like, here's one for you. This is this is a very odzye one. My old man gave me his chainsaw, which is he bought it back in the eighties. We used to have a dad had a was a country boy, grew up in the country, and we had a hobby farm that was thirty acres we used to go up to every weekend because Dad wanted to teach my brother and me nice that's good about the country life and all that sort of shit. So anyway, so he's had this chainsaw that long and he gave it to me recently because he's just turned eighty three and he's sort of like, I can't use this anymore. Do you want it? And I went, yeah, okay, I'll take it. And I tried to start it, and. Did he give you the hockey mask with it? It wasn't right, Yes, that's right, that's right exactly. So anyway, so look it's a still chainsaw, right, So it's a pretty good brand. So I took it to the local still place and sort of said, look, you know, this is the story. Can you fix it for me? And he looked at it and he said, I can't touch it, and I said why, I said, because you're still. It's just there's no break handbreak on the thing, so when you put it illegal now, so legally he's not allowed to touch it. And he said to me, But he said to me, don't tell anyone I gave. I told you this. But here's here's this guy Gordon, and here's Gordon's number, give him a call. Gordon's Gordon. Right, here's the thing, right, I feel good on two levels here. I just got a message from Gordon. Here's the treaty gas. Do you know how much Gordon charges an hour? Gordon charges thirty four dollars for his labor an hour. Oh my god, he's fixed my chainsaw. It cost me seventy two dollars. Right, And Gordon is about the same age as my dad. He's a little bit younger than my dad. He's in his early eighties and the only reason he's working is because his wife has cancer and he can't afford her care. So he's working again. So it made me feel good on a whole bunch of levels. But it's like, how fucked is that that? You know? Well, you can't you don't have but that, as I said, and that's my coal. If I'm stupid enough to cut my hand off with the chain sol, that's how's that your problem? That shit happens all the time though, Like I have an air conditioning system that like popped a leak and it just needed to be fixed, like it was possible to weld it, and they're like, I'm sorry, We've changed the fluid that that needs, so now you have to get a whole entire new air conditioning system inside units, outside units, Supposedly because it ran the wrong fluid through the tube, you have to change the tubes that go through the house, like really really huge, huge increase in price to to deal with this. And you're thinking, Okay, they changed the fluid because one fluid is more environmentally safe than the other, but what is the environmental impact of all new freaking metal units? And ah, I was. Like really the whole argument though. Yeah, it's it's literally the same thing that the air air conditioning guys like I am legally not allowed to fix this. Yeah, yes, totally unrelated. But you're on a tangent skis. If you take your skis into a ski shop or have them tune your skis your bindings, if they're too old, they won't touch them my seven or eight years or like, oh those are too old, I can't work on them. Wow. Yeah, I mean to bring this thing back on track though, I mean, it's just occurred to me listening to us talk about this though. Right, getting back onto the Mac subject is yes, you you know, even at these prices, you probably are paying a little more than you would for something that's not a Mac. But I think the other thing about Mac is its longevity. I mean, I've got a two thousand, and I think it's a twenty ten cheese grater sitting under my desk that still runs as reliably today as it did the day I bought. It until it goes okay, until it goes full freaking circle. Here's a funny Max story. Okay, so certain Macs can't get past High Sierra, and at this point, High Sierra is a pretty big cliff. You can't do proper web browsing. There's not the security. It's like, you really like like if you're doing anything that reaches out to the public world. High Sierra is now like it's it's the Voyager spacecraft and it's off. You can't get you can't get back to it. So but I'm looking at this Mac, this iMac, and I'm like, ah, like, I don't need it for like not reaching out to the internet. So I was trying to boot camp it. And if you know what boot camping is, it's basically installing Windows on it. Well, okay, I install Windows on it. The audio chip doesn't work. I'm like, no, I'm not going to be defeated. So I find out that if you run the boot camp in a specific way you can get the audio chip to work. You basically have to completely you can't dual boot it. You have to completely kill the Mac side and make it purely a Windows machine. Because we just doesn't like sharing it. Is that what it is? It's it's it's in the way it formats the hard drive. And because of the way formats the hard drive, the way it boots up, if you boot it up with this initial Mac boot, the Windows will never see the audio hardware. But if you initialize the bios with the original whatever Windows bios or motherboard bios. It has to run a virtual bios. If you're doing the dual boot. But if you don't run a virtual bios, then it sees all the hardware on the motherboard and you get the whole computer, I mean, camera, audio, the whole deal. So you know, the way they do the installers is in that you can't go straight to Windows ten. I to install. I had to go find Windows eight. You can't get it at the Windows I had to go download Windows eight, install Windows eight, upgrade Windows eight, Windows ten. And now I have my Mac Mini or sorry, my iMac for my mom, and it has a better life as a Windows machine than a Mac because at least Windows ten is still running. Actually Windows just deprecated Windows ten two. They just too, but it's still getting some security updates and it drives a little bit further into the sunset. Then why didn't you just put Linux on it? Be done with it. I'll do that with my dad's machine when he gets rid of it. It's the same thing. Because I did the same thing with a ten year old MacBook Air. You know it's my it's called MXMX. Oh yeah, it's just one of those things where I just stumbled on a YouTube video, you know, yeah, and I was like, this guy's are like, here's how you do it, you know, here's the links. And it was like, here's the problem with George and I George and I will throw four hours or a whole night at doing some stupid project like this. This was I'm not kidding. This was less than two hours. This was less than two finding the video, finding my MacBook Air on the shelf, finding an eight gig thumb drive, formatting it, installing the MX installer, plugging into the Mac Mini or Macwok Air, booting from the USB drive because it boots the system off the disc the drive. Then it says now you're running Linux and you're like, oh cool, and it's like it works. You want to install it now and you're like yeah sure, and then it installs it. It was like Jesus, this is easy. But I put him boon to on my old Pismo if yeah, the Mac Pismo if you know what that is, was like when they had the the black laptops. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't boom to on that at that time. I mean like you could run a web browser and that was it. Yeah, I know this thing runs. This thing has full access to all the hardware, the audio, video, the Wi Fi, everything works. I can browse the web, you. Know, eion they do. I think Reaper does make a. Link audio Audacity does for sure. I think Reaper does. Reaper may as well. Yeah, and it's. Funny like Linux is pretty bad ass and probably runs with a fiftieth of the memory that freaking Windows. The whole install Linux that installed, the whole installed was three gigabytes, right, so yeah, and you know, I think mac os Modern is twelve fourteen gigs, you know, at least, and I mean the installer. Yeah. Well, what's so funny is that the thing I ran into with doing this iMac was that in order to make the installation work, I had to install it from a DVD. And I got lucky because I only had two burnable DVDs left in my entire house and the first one failed and I was like, any yeah, I And one of the things I had to do is like mac Os would only let you burn the DVD at full speed, and that's what messed it up. And I found a separate burn program that would run at an app speed burn or two two eggs and that second one burned one that verified and I was like, let's boot it, and I got Windows eight in that thing. Oh man, that was so much nostalgia. I threw out so many blank DVDs and dvdrs and CDRs and oh my gosh, pancakes. You know that we have a stack of one hundred Yeah, yeah, I just put out by the dumpster and like hopefully somebody uses. Would piss me off as I found a stack in my basement of like and it was like it said DVDs, and I'm like, oh, a DVD, a DVD, And then the third one down was like CD, CD, CD CD. It's like, damn it, there like two DVDs on the top. By the way, yes, Reaper does have a Linux version. Oh there you go running Linux. Yeah. The total irony discontinuing on from that previous conversation, the total irony is that in this house now, the only cv CD and DVD player that easy in the house is my old Mac that sits under my desk. There's nothing right if I want to get because I still got the shit on CD want. So many people. Probably have a bunch of stuff and it's like go find like move your archives forward in the world because if not, like I I remember I had the chance to unarchive all my pro tool sessions that run dat DDS three. If you remember what that is it wrong? Yeah? I do. And it's like now like good luck if the drive even works or finding the software that runs the drive. That's right to get the It's like those archives. Dedicated software that everyone used to use. It gray Matter Response, Mezzo Mezzo. That's it. Yes, that's exactly it go because. All those discs, all those tapes are Meso, and and the glory of Meso is this. You could be the messiest MF in the world and have your protol session with audio files all over your whole desktop, like on everywhere on your computer, and you would just drag the pro tool session. This was back when Avid let third parties read the pro tool session. So Meso would read the pro tool session and go collect all the audience so. You didn't even have to think about it. You just knew it. Yeah, geez, that's pretty impressive for the time. Can you imagine that sort of sense of security now now you sort of you know, you know. Yeah, it almost goes back to that kind of right to repair thing, like there was a software that was enhancing another software and then Avid makes a move and kills it. And now like they locked up the pro tools fail format, and now the only people that can read and write a pro tools failers pro Tools. Here's here's a real life consequence of that, right, And I'm so lucky that I've never had to go back to this session. But about three years ago, I did a complete repackage for a station that I do some work for. I basically rebuilt. All the imaging on their station for them, and it was and at the time I just installed, I must have I must have rebooted. I was sorry, redone my computer like given it at a complete zapp and started again. But I hadn't clicked that, you know where it drags in pro Tools, where you tell it to drag the audio into your audio for it. I hadn't checked that in settings, so it was reading ever it landed, so I didn't. I didn't realize that, and I had to go. I wanted to go back to it about two years ago or a year or so ago because I wanted to find something to put on a demo that I had to do for someone, and it was there was nothing there, well most if it wasn't there. There was bits of audio here and there, but luckily I had the mixes still, the mixes was still there in the session because when I when I bounced down to the. You're rebuilding it from sub mixes instead of that. Yeah, so yeah, you know, but it's like, that's so fucking annoying. You know, it's nothing that does that. You know, you've actually physically got it. So now I've learned my lesson every time before. I you know, okay, shit is everything there. I'll tell you how I do it. It's product that lets you move your whole projects. It doesn't it doesn't hunt down the audio files you have to have. So this is what's called consolidating your pro tools sessions. And you said, because they can't read the pro tools file, no one can get into it. Nobody Avid ended that. So so here here's a little thing for the pro tools users, at least the way I deal with it. And I don't know about how you do with it. But I'm done with the pro tool session. I'll go over to the browser and I'll scoot over to the section of the browser where you're looking at all the audio files and you and you can sort it by path and then okay, so then you're looking at it and go to the top of the path. It's like, you know, whatever you look at like like like all the way through to audio files. So the root level all the way to the audio files folder is the same. Go down to the bottom and then you'll see if you have anything that's different. And if you have anything that's different, you just highlight those files. You write, click, and you say copy and relink and. I think the same, yeah, because that's the easiest way, right yea, And it's the only confidence way that you can do it too, really. And then you can move that session around as a self contained thing. See this is why I like twisted Wave in certain laughter. Okay, but twisted Wave to rebrand the radio station is probably a little difficult. It's a single single track editor. It does multi track now seems to be cold voice. Yeah yeah, yeah, dormo too exactly. The audio Sweet and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peters and mixed by Rovo. Got your own audio issues just ask robo dot com Tech support from George the Tech Window. Don't forget to subscribe to the show and join in the conversation on our Facebook group to leave a comment, suggest a topic, or just say good A drop us a note at our website our audio suite dot com.