Devindra has been writing about the way technology intersects with our lives for nearly 20 years. He started the Amherst Student's first technology column, worked in IT support for many (many) years, and eventually moved to Brooklyn to cover New York's tech scene in 2009.
In this episode, Devindra and producer Ben Ellman recover from the election by discussing our final thoughts on the PlayStation 5 Pro, as well as Apple’s M4 Mac mini and new MacBook Pros. The M4 chip is a solid upgrade, but the M4 Pro is shockingly fast .
And the two MacBook pros, thankfully, Mr. Steve Dent over in France our wonderful correspondent there is doing the iMac review. So we were able to get that one out there. So yeah, that's what we'll be talking about. And a little bit about, you know, the state of the world and what we're thinking. As always folks, if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe to us in iTunes or your podcatcher of choice.
It's all that wrapped together. Anyway, I have not been anti trump to her, but she has just she's heard him on the news She has heard words. He said and he was like she was like, that guy Why why is that guy running for president or why people going for him? So to explain to her that donald trump won She said, well, I guess I'll have to do it then.
Cause you do not know how people are going to be feeling or what they're going to be doing. Yeah. Maybe some people will just stress by this thing, but yeah, this is a 700 game console.
We've talked about how the consoles have essentially just become PCs. You know, they're running AMD Hardaware. They're running AMD GPUs. They have a lot of the same graphical features as PC releases. So the whole notion of releasing a game across PC and consoles is much more of a reality now. Something even Sony has started doing.
That's pretty much it. There's a pro mode in Spider Man 2 and a lot of these supported games, which is just, hey, you want. You want 60 FPS? Great. Do you want a lot of those ray tracing features? Great. Do you want close to 4k rendering which they do with the thing called the PlayStation super sampling thing.
You just buy it. It's self contained. You don't need to worry about upgrading it or maintaining it all that much. And maybe this is the best option to get a kid into 4k 60 FPS. Iwell, first of all, yeah, kids will not be buying a 700 or parents will not buy a 700 nozzle for their kid, for aIt was already a stretch to be like, Hey, mom, can you get me the PlayStation five, which is close to 500? That was already fiveYeah, that was already a tough stretch.
I do it because I want to be like, I want to play a lot of games at the best quality possible. Right now, I have an RTX 4080 Super in this computer. That's a killer ass GPU, but like I could, I could do 4k gaming and crazy ray tracing features, but you have to stomach all these annoying setup things. So anyway, that is the setup for the PlayStation 5 Pro.
The city is just beautiful. I am like and this one goes into the other boroughs too. So it's I'm just, I'm gliding around Queens looking at potential neighborhoods where I'd like to move back to eventually the real humble brag for me is that I'm, I'm playing games on my projector folks. That's just how my basement is set up.
So I think we'll for big budget games, they're certainly going to do it. It's going to be a big calling card for that. Sony wants more people to buy these things. I, this system probably has three years, maybe to be the leading PlayStation until we hear more about the PlayStation six or something like that.
But as a, as a normal machine, I think it's, it's pretty good as a, as a console for gamers who need that sort of thing. Yeah.And especially if you're coming from the console world where 30 FPS is still more common, You don't really miss what you've always known. So if you go to a friend's house or something and you see the 60 FPS performance, you might be like, wow.
Okay. Election day, which just means that you were like stuck in your own basement and you could probably hear them goingI was like, still got to write, still got to do stuff. Oh, those numbers do not look good. Late on election night. Okay. I'm, I'm still writing. Yep. There's, there's. This is a crazy week that I'm pretty sure I will remember is just like how, how weird it is. But the new Apple Macs the Macs with the M4 chips are here.
So I think that's pretty useful. I think these are fast chips, but the M four PRO chip in particular on the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro 16 for me is kind of astonishing. It is just so fast. It is faster. In Geek Bench six and cine bench 2024. It is faster than the M three max was last year. Wow, it is so fast.
The Mac mini starts at 599 with the base M4, but for 1399, it is a full on workstation and much more powerful GPU and everything. What were you going to say?It seems to me like Apple has really hit its stride. Maybe with the M3, but seems definite with the M4, because, remember, it was just a few years ago that they said, okay, we're moving to this completely different ARM based design.
Finally, finally, finally headphone jack is up front. I also complained about that last time because I know video editor alsoamazing that A Mac mini has a headphone jack when you haven't had a headphone jack on any iPhone for years. Sure.I mean, the Macs have not dumped headphone jacks yet. Other people have Dell has but Apple has not even on the MacBook Air.
And I think if that is the case for you, if you think you'll be stretching it a lot of time, a lot of times, like daily in a shared office or something where it'll be annoying, then you probably need a Mac studio. If you are a super high end video editor, that's just the way. But if you're just editing on the weekends or you're mainly a photographer who occasionally does videos, I think this is perfectly fine for most people.
And so all of the stuff that I'm doing at the very beginning, as I'm starting to edit is stuff to remove the noise floor, remove hums that are in the like background dev. I have to say for you, there are a good number of homes just because you're in the basement, probably near the machinery of your whole house.where you're probably hearing. I am the kid that our camera has a fan, like the camera he says fan or something, but yeah, go, go,but whatever. Yeah.
Mac Whisper, I did some of those comparisons, definitely noticed some big big gains over the M3 chip and the M4. So, yeah, This is just a great computer. Mac mini, you could put this anywhere. You can make a little server. You can make a little family computer. If you already have a monitor keyboard and mouse, kind of a no brainer.
They get up to 1000 nits now for SD color. You know, the color range I also noticed outside in direct sunlight, they looked a little clearer. It was just easier to see what was going on too. So, I'm a big fan. We like the MacBook pros. The camera is better. The webcam is now 12 megapixel shooter. It supports center stage.
But it's expensive because Apple has to build them into its chip. So it's buying specialized modules. If you wanna get a one terabyte SSD instead of a 2 56 gigabyte SSD, another $400 a one terabyte, S-S-D-N-V-M-E thing, like you can buy that for under a hundred dollars right now. And they don't need they don'tLike you just have another thing sitting on top of the Mac. Well, I was thinking about doing it for a Mac mini. Youcould just have a external storage thing. Yeah.
And what I've learned is that there is another version of WhisperSync on the App Store that is fully subscription based. And honestly, it feels like a little bit of a scam because you're paying them like 30 euros. It's in euros. You could pay them 60 euros for a lifetime thing or 30 euros annually or something.
And this might be like an old Mac. Pro too. I remember seeing a picture of the actual computer that ran the needle. And I know that people online, this was back when Twitter was more usable a few years ago, people were commenting under that tweet, just like really shaking their fists at that one computer because of how much psychic damage that machine did to them.Anyway, we've got the New York Times tech workers. are on strike because they said they wanted to unionize.
I'm Also, wanted to shout out another couple of games that I've heard people talk about in the same breath as, like, all the New York Times games. I know some people like to play Redactal, which is Wikipedia articles, and there's just a bunch of redacted words, and you have to guess the words to eventually guess the article.
Let's move on to our picks of the week. I just want to shout out a thing that has helped keep me sane a little bit. And I forget, did I mention this last week? No, you didn't. So the second season of the diplomat, the wonderful Netflix series is out.
And I think that, that alone, That alone does it, but the show knows how to do those episodic cliffhangers. There are only six episodes in the second season, I think because of production issues and whatnot. But man, is it good. The diplomat is so good. If you want to feel good about, not, not necessarily good about politics because a lot of it is also about how terrible America and the UK can be when it comes to foreign relations, but just about people trying to do good in the world.
I also, I listened to the audio book actually. So he is reading the audio book. I love the sound of his voice and the way he reads his own text. I'm getting more and more into audio books because I think a lot of podcasts have just listened. Sometimes we just get tired of listening to people you know, banter around the microphone and they don't actually know what they're talking about.
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