706: No One Is Getting a Good Deal Tonight
https://atp.fm/706
M5 Ultra and M6, new Mac Mini and Mac Studio, @siracusa‘s new app, and yes, even a new Polishing Cloth.
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I want to suggest something extremely controversial. @siracusa should try a base model (or near base model) Mac Mini at least for a few months. To acknowledge up front, he would be miserable and need external storage for more than just his photo library. However, it would make for great content and I think it would be much more usable than he thinks. If Quinn Nelson can use a Neo, John could survive on a Mini.
I suggest this not just to torture John. I suspect the speed difference from his Intel Mac Pro would be an appreciable improvement and the use of swap would not be an issue, even for him.
@TheCodeLorax @atpfm @siracusa I would ALMOST agree with that, with one major exception: I wouldn't wish a 256 GB SSD on anyone using it as a regular computer.
The minimum for anyone wanting to do modern Xcode development without much pain should be 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD. But then we're at $1799. 🤣
@TheCodeLorax I’m sure it would be fine (other than the storage space hassles). But that’s no way to live!
I have another suggestion: Apple should send me a highest-possible-spec M5 Ultra Mac Studio so I can see what I’m missing!
@atpfm @siracusa not buying the 256gb Mac Studio is the biggest L in the shows history. Claude level LLM models are already here and they’re only going to get better. Eg. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next
@vaxso It's not too late! Send me the difference in price and I'll change my order!
@felixthehat I could, but I think Photos libraries might need to be on local storage. (And even if not, it would be sloooow.)
@siracusa hmm i was thinking more to uncheck Download Originals to this Mac on your new studio, but keep the old hoss around with Download Originals to this Mac enabled on it and back that one up as the source of truth
@felixthehat I definitely want originals on my main Mac too.
@atpfm @siracusa Regarding SSD Enclosures: I can recommend the Acasis TB501 PRO (80Gbps M.2 NVMe), compatible with TB5/TB4/TB3 & USB4/3 - https://www.acasis.com/products/acasis-80gbps-ssd-enclosure-with-intel-jhl9480-chip-compatible-with-thunderbolt-5
@siracusa Fan never kicks in during my usage: drive only temporarily connected for SuperDuper! and Time Machine backups.
@domingo I think I like those even less!
@siracusa @domingo I discovered I loved low-profile too much after years of laptop and Apple's chiclet keys, but eventually went on the mechanical-customization quest.
What I landed on (for now) has been a Keychron K3 w/ Banana switches (some might prefer the weightier Mint). It is as close to what I recall from my love of the AEII. Lite and quick, yet with a bit of that early-beak-over tactile effect.
Might get a K1 for better arrow-key arrangement (or you can get a K5 for full-layout).
@marcoshuerta Codex and Claude, mostly CLI, but sometimes in Xcode. And Gemini on the web when I don’t want to burn tokens on something easy.
@atpfm i’m getting really tired of the defenses of vibe coded slop. just because you think it’s valuable for your use cases doesn’t make it good for the world. programming is an art and treating it like it’s only good for the things it can create is offensive.
and yes, of course i also care that apple is AI coding bug fixes, that windows is, that linux is. it makes me respect all of these platforms/companies/people less.
@starling I hear you, and I feel it too. But I don’t think the art is dead yet. (Maybe someday, but not yet!)
@siracusa Would love to know why not! Or about things like Paddle and other services I encounter when I buy indie apps. (Not a dev myself, so don’t know the details. But I always try to buy outside the App Store if I can.)
Like, if you could sell it through someone who gives more freedom and take a smaller cut, I would think that’s interesting.
@havn Remeber that Apple only takes 15% from me, not 30%, thanks to the Small Business Program.
@atpfm @siracusa John, if I understand correctly, you just bought your first Apple Silicon Mac. What I don’t understand is how you can be comfortable selling apps that officially support Apple Silicon, without regularly testing them on **your own** Apple Silicon hardware. I recall you mentioning you occasionally used your wife’s Apple Silicon Mac for some minor testing. But as a commercial developer, I think you owe it to your customers to properly test your apps on all relevant supported platforms.
@leonzandman I have several Apple Silicon Macs, including an M1 Max Mac Studio and and several M* MacBook Airs.
@lukeburrage The good news is that plain Jetty has no way to know if the trash is full, so you get your wish there. But I’ll think about adding an option to never show a full Trash in Jetty Pro.
