 Hello and welcome to the live stream. Today we're going to be talking about some of the new announcements that Apple announced this week at WWDC. I'm not going to go through everything. There are plenty of other folks doing that out there, but specifically I'm going to be talking about a couple of the devices or a few of them and specifically how they relate to content creation and live streaming and really a little bit selfishly the way that I'm thinking of them for my ultimate setup going forward. Just as we speak I'm already seeing that my processors on my little M1 Mac mini are kind of almost maxing out again so it's just the right opportunity to get a case of the gas, the gear acquisition syndrome. So I'll be talking about some thoughts that I've got on to future upgrades in that respect as well. Hi to everyone who's tuning in. Hey Chris in the chat, great to see you here and obviously the fine folks in the Discord backstage. Look at that, my overlay out of place right from the beginning, great stuff. Okie dokie, so the first thing that I'm going to talk about is the last thing that Apple announced which is really the biggest announcement of WWDC which was the Vision Pro goggles and I think they've just sort of knocked it out of the park with this to be honest. I know that there was a lot of sense of shock I should say with people watching this live when the price came out at $3,500 for what people are calling a VR headset. It's actually far more than a VR headset though isn't it? In fact it's more like augmented reality because what it is doing is it is actually laying stuff over your view of your environment so this is what they look like on a person wearing them and you would think that this is actually sort of semi-transparent that you know you can see through to the people's eyes but what is absolutely amazing about this is actually the full front of it is in fact a screen or at least part of it sort of behind the glass I should say and that is actually not the person's real eyes but rather a projection of the person's eyes to give the illusion that they are looking out of the device. There's so many things about this that are actually really creepy as well which I'll get into a little bit later but just from a technological point of view what they've achieved is pretty amazing and what this is doing is when you're looking through the goggles you are seeing a projection into your environment and the crucial thing here is that just as you can't see into it from the outside actually when you're wearing them you're not looking out at your real environment but rather it's got a whole array of cameras that are looking at your environment and then projecting that onto the screens that you're seeing in your eyes. It's pretty mind-blowing stuff and by all accounts from the very few people who have actually tried this on and there are very few people who have done that in the tech press world they've all said that the eye tracking and the realism that they've got from it is on another level it is actually really realistic which is something that has let down a lot of these devices in the past where it looks like you're looking through tunnel vision but let's take a little look at the device in a bit more detail so if I come over to this scene here you can see that this is what it looks like from the front you can also see then that there are these sort of faint little cameras down here that you maybe can't see too easily but if we tilt the device up then there you go you've got cameras on the sides on the bottom you've also got cameras here that are looking down because the way that you interact with this device is through movements of your hands so hand gestures for pointing and swiping but you also interact with it with your eyes so if I just come back to this shot for a moment maybe we need to put this into context in terms of what you're actually seeing this is how you would be looking let me just come here for a second I'll just go through all of their things this is basically what you could potentially be looking at in your field of view so you're seeing your actual environment but you've got all of these different virtual windows so potentially no more massive banks of monitors you could be looking at all of these different windows and apps effectively floating in free space although as I say it's actually just a video of free space that is projecting back to you so then you have got to think well how are you going to interact with this and this was the point I was making that it's done by eye movement so you are essentially just looking anywhere on the screen and if you look up at a field that you want to enter some data in you can just look at the field and it knows where you're looking and then you can either dictate it or you know you can still use a keyboard with this there is also kind of like a virtual keyboard you can kind of see it there in that shot in fact just in front of them floating in free space so I can imagine they didn't specifically show this but being able to just sort of type on this virtual keyboard and it is tracking your hand movements and then also there is a whole series of other sort of gestures that you can use to control this with as well so they made a big point about this actually that these new devices that Apple has released there have been some key innovations that have made these things possible and they talked about you know the mouse with the Mac and then obviously multi-touch with things like the iPhone and the iPad and so on but then with this device now it's all about these gesture controls so it is a kind of completely new way of computing and of course just the eye tracking and as I say by all accounts first impressions are that the eye tracking is exceptionally good as we would expect from Apple so let's carry on looking at the sort of walk around of the device then so as well as these different cameras then you've also got the straps that hold it onto your head one thing about this is that people were concerned about was the weight and it is quite you know a large device however once again people have said that the few people who have tried it on have said that it has been relatively comfortable or very comfortable I should say certainly for the time that they've been using it now you can see on the the bands here it does have some speakers here I would guess that you can use these with headphones as well rather than just these things that are right next to your ears so that you know you can have a more personal experience and then you've got the headband and although it's not shown in here there is in fact an over-the-top headband as well that goes on to add that extra bit of stability but this is the one that sort of holds on to the back you've got that little adjustment wheel there to move it around this is where it gets interesting though you know what's going on inside and as you can see here you've got these two different lenses there or those two different screens if you do need eye correction or you wear glasses you can obviously wear contacts with it but you can actually get custom-made lenses that will pop into there as well to correct for your eyesight next is what they call the light seal this thing around the front then in terms of controls you've got the digital crown there similar to the type of input device that you'll find on the Apple Watch this is for adjusting things like the level of immersion that you've got whilst we've shown how this sort of fits into your environment where you can see your whole environment in the background you can also fade that out if you want and have a completely immersive experience where you're not actually seeing any of your environment as well and apparently the digital crown can be used to sort of zoom that in and out so if I come back to here again we've also got a top button which is for power and things like that and then in terms of power there is a attached battery pack and it clips onto the side here and then that runs down to a small battery pack that can power it for up to two hours apparently but then there is also a socket on the power bank that you can then plug in directly so if you just want it sort of tethered in that sense then you can do that obviously this is a first generation device so as with all of them it's a bit like when the Apple Watch came out the first generation Apple Watch or the first generation iPhone they were a bit lacking in terms of things like power and functionality and all of that kind of stuff but it was a first step on that path and obviously quickly they evolved from there and so this is very much a Gen 1 device and I don't expect massive widespread adoption however I think it's going to be really compelling for a lot of people however there are also some aspects to it that I just find really quite odd and just coming to the use case as well about this I mean we've shown that it is for you can view your windows and I've just shown this particular thing but also it is for viewing movies and that kind of thing so you could have your whole sort of cinema effect going on in your living room and then also for things like video calls and this is the first thing that I found really quite odd because they made a whole sort of play on this and how you can use this for your zoom calls and things like that however they were showing you in a meeting where you're basically seeing all of the other people out there in front of you and all the way through them talking about this I was wondering about what are the other people in the meeting seeing if you are on this device and this is where it gets a little bit creepy because what they've done is you can sort of scan your face and then it is going to create almost like a personal deep fake of yourself and that is projected into the meetings and the eye tracking is going to adjust the eyes they're going to I guess somehow be looking at your expressions as well and so what the people on the other side of the meeting are seeing if you're watching if you're in your zoom meeting wearing this is they're actually going to see almost like a virtual representation of yourself so I'm going to be really interested to see how that actually looks but the whole concept of it to me just seemed like really quite really quite creepy and the other thing about this is they showed lots of things where the majority of the demo was a woman sitting down in a sofa wearing this on her wearing the thing and then they were showing family members would come in and then they would just sort of appear into view as they got close whereas if they were sitting further away they wouldn't be in view and I did kind of feel like yes I can't see this initially being something that's going to be a real inclusive family experience they also talked about how all of the cameras that you've got on board you will be able to take immersive 3D videos as well that you can then watch back in the device afterwards and have the full sort of 3D effect I'm not sure that I'd want to be playing with my kids wearing one of these to capture family moments but as I say this is only a Gen 1 device so obviously over time this thing's going to get all these kind of devices are going to get much smaller, much slimmer and just in the same way that all of the other Apple devices have done as well but yeah certainly from the outset it's not something that I can see sort of integrating in the same way that my wife and kids sit down with the the kids and play whatever games that they want to play and will play together like all on our iPads or whatever they've got me into Roblox recently so playing some kids games and that is fun because you feel like you're still interacting with each other you're sitting right there next to each other you can look at each other, yeah I don't think it'd be quite the same experience with a set of goggles like these on however from a professional point of view I mean 20 years ago when I was in the aerospace engineering field we were using stuff similar to this although nowhere near similar to this and also it cost about 100 grand a piece but that was a device for 3D CAD so actually wearing a virtual headset so that you can do engineering design and you can manipulate 3D models but actually get inside to see the way things are interacting in wiring looms or precision pieces of engineering and it was that kind of application certainly this is very going to be very useful for those kinds of applications where you do actually want to manipulate things in 3D space and my background in architecture as well I'm used to doing that, manipulating 3D objects with a 3D mouse controlling the other things with my other mouse well now if we could do a lot of those kind of applications those kind of works those kind of jobs with this 3D headset certainly there is a a big opportunity there and so when you talk about the sort of price point of $3,500 or whatever it was there about for me that did not come as a surprise at all and when you look at what's actually inside it let me go to this other view on the Apple website because it's quite amazing and I'll just come back to this one for a second just incidentally this sort of shows what you are likely to see in your sort of view so you can adjust where your field of view is you've got apps there that are just sort of floating in virtual space it's just really amazing interface and I can imagine it's going to look great but if I just keep scrolling down here this is where we see what is going on inside and as I say it isn't completely transparent you don't see through it in any way so although they call it augmented reality it is really a projection of the outside room rather than stuff like Google Glass for example where you did have a set of glasses and it was projecting things onto the top of your natural vision this isn't doing that this is filming the environment and it's projecting it onto the screens which are then looking at and here you can see what's inside so they've got the outer glass they've got this thing here which is basically the screen that the people from the outside are seeing what's going on inside with your eyes weird and then here you've got the sort of heart of it which is where you've got the screens and the processing on board because inside here you've actually got an M2 chip so when we start talking about the price I'm sure they're not making any profit on this in terms of just what's gone into it to have an M2 chip in there first of all all of this different array of sensors that they've got these are as they say very sophisticated sensor array they've got to be to do what they're doing and especially these ones here with the eye tracking as well to be able to see exactly where you're looking and project things they're doing some really really interesting stuff here in terms of the resolution and quality one thing that lets down these kind of virtual devices and you know sometimes people say they feel motion sickness and things like that it's a combination of first of all the thing not doing what you're doing so obviously if you move your head it's got to seem like you are literally looking in that direction so that's the first thing that could let this down although by all accounts it doesn't and the other thing is the frame rate as well so this has got a frame rate of a thing about 82 frames per second something like that so yeah it's it's not going to give you the motion sickness but there is a lot going on here and as I say I can see where all of these things lead into the cost but here you can see it's got the M2 chip in it amazing that this is in a set of goggles and then it's also got the R1 chip which is a new chip that they have designed that is specifically bringing together all of these different sensors and doing all the things that are specific to this particular device so and the privacy thing as well it can do retina scans as well so that is how you activate it you know just putting it on it's going to recognize who is watching who is using the device yeah it's a pretty amazing device I'll certainly be trying one out for sure because it's kind of like the next step I think that this is where things are going to go certainly not with this gen 1 device but I can see how how this can evolve in the in the future let me just quickly check in with the chat hey Lester great to see you here hey Keeley great to see you too and a mac studio indeed yes this is what I've been debating Lester is the mac studio or the mac pro and I'll talk about the difference between those a little bit later and yeah the XR hybrid between augmented and virtual reality and it certainly is that because it's kind of virtual reality is a virtual version of actual you know the reality that you're augmenting over the top of and yeah so I want one so badly but 3400 dollars have some serious justifying to do I know the thing is the thing is it is obviously a gen 1 device but I think that it's going to be an interesting thing to be at the the head of in terms of you know seeing how this development goes because it is it's only going to be become more prevalent in lots of things the eye tracking indeed has been round for for decades and it's great to see in a refined small space like this headset yet the thing of what Apple tends to be quite good at not always they sometimes do completely miss the mark is you know they're not necessarily always first to market on these things but when they come to market they've generally got something that is a step up from you know the the other things in the you know market competitors although in this case significantly more expensive than than some of those hey great see you here thanks for stopping by and Mac rumors hi marinex Mac rumors is reporting a vision pro with mystery usb-c adapters spotted in WDW DC yeah I mean if they've got the the power bank that comes off it it has the usb-c socket in that that you can then tether it to the you know to your mains power and I know a lot of people were saying well are they going to allow third party power banks if you want to have you know using their proprietary connector that they've got on the side are we going to see you know third party things being able to lock into that I'm not sure that they're going to open up that connector necessarily however the power banks just got a usb-c socket on to plug it into mains power as well and then technically any other power bank would be able to plug into that too so I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to though by the way marinex but nevertheless so vision pro next model naming vision pro ultra and vision pro max yeah there's no no end of options from there but yeah it's really interesting to see this as a new device and I'll certainly be giving that giving one ago they're not out until when is it they said early next year so you know that could be anywhere from 1st of January till you know end of June however it's probably more likely to be sort of March April time but we'll see how that how that goes the thing that I'm most interested though about in the announcements was the new mac pros and I say mac pros I'm also talking about the mac studios as well because those are let's not forget pro devices so when the Mac mini came out I was just talking with Jeff in the discord just before we jumped on here and we're talking about the M1 and you know when when we got the M1 it seemed like it was just lightning fast compared to anything else but these days mine does seem to get clogged up quite quickly in terms of the processing in terms of the processor when I'm doing things like this you know live streaming I'm also going live into discord right now so I've got that going I'm doing screen sharing and various other things which is typically more processor intensive as well and then when it comes to doing things like zoom workshops and so on or doing things where I'm using zoom ISO bringing different people in really I'm pushing the mac one the M1 Mac mini to its limit and yeah so it's time to think about an upgrade especially to be you know talking about the best ways to do things I'm certainly not using the correct equipment for some of the things that I'm doing so the mac studios then came out when was it just I guess last year and those basically added a lot more power to the Mac minis in any case so taking the M1 chip from the Mac mini and then having the M1 ultra which was M1 ultra I might be getting the name wrong now I'm getting mixed up myself with names but it basically gave a lot more power on board and the mac studios really are pro devices let's not make any let's not get this wrong that these are pro devices even though they don't necessarily have pro in the name they are certainly pro devices well now what they've done is as well as upgrading the mac studio and let's just take a look at the mac studio as well as upgrading the mac studio with the M2 max so it's now got the M2 chip and the M2 max which is a sort of larger more substantial chip than the M2 they've also got the M2 ultra which effectively is to M2 max chips joined together so I mean they've not just glued them it's part of the printed circuit board the architecture of them but it's basically got two of those together well now they've also added the Apple silicon M2 chips and the M2 ultra chip specifically into the mac pro as well and I've heard a few people saying that well it seems like now the mac pro is overpriced because it's basically you know they can have the same chips as the mac studio so why would you have a mac pro well there is a good reason for this and this is the expansion capabilities that you've got because one of the key differences between the mac pro versus the mac studio is although yes they can have the same chips and in fact if we come to the mac studio you can see it's obviously you've probably seen this all by now but it's about a double the thickness of a regular mac mini but it's got more connectivity at the back the other thing that is different about this is it's just got a lot more power in it here with the M2 max M2 ultra come down here let's take a quick look in on the inside I mean when you look at some of these stats by the way it is just kind of mind-boggling you know up to 15.8 trillion operations per second yeah it's quite quite amazing support for up to five displays up to 10 streams of 8k pro res video feedback and so on I'm not going to go through all of the specs of all of these I should say that you know any one of these mac studios is going to be more than ample for the majority of people doing any live streaming in fact I would argue that probably just the you know M2 series mac minis with the you know the the highest spec is going to be fine for the majority of people but I'm coming from an M1 and do need to think about the upgrade and some of the things that I'm doing are going to be pushing even those mac minis to their technical limits or at least you know if I want a future proof next 12 months here we're looking at the mac studio with M2 Ultra where they're talking about how much faster it is than these different chips I don't know why they still compare it to the Intel chips to be honest with you that seems a little bit redundant now comparing it to an Intel iMac we all know that the M series is just massively more powerful here's what we've got inside that's the reason for the big amount of space that you've got on the top of it it's all for the the cooling fans that you've got inside if we look then at the mac pro one thing that I was really interested about with the mac pro was the fact that if I find the picture it's not just available as a desktop but they've also got a rack mounted version and effectively you can think of this as a mac studio in a case with a lot more cooling but then also this is the crucial part here the PCI expansion slots that allow you to plug in extra expansion slots and I'll talk about expansion cards I should say and I'll talk about what you may want to put in there or what I may want to put in there more to the point but if we have a look at the tech specs and here's the rack mounted version by the way it's got the same sort of milled aluminium front I guess it's aluminium I'm not sure exactly the material we've got the same material same milled look on the front as the desktop version but this just slots into a rack a rack beam a standard thing that you use to mount electronic devices I was already thinking of building a rack mounted system and I'll talk about that in a moment and so this may well actually be what I use instead of that and when we look at the cost of the mac pro versus the mac studio if we see the mac studio here I've got this comparison up so you've got the mac studio and then the mac pro here then there's the mac mini as well but they actually have very similar configuration so if we look at the M2 Ultra of the mac studio versus the M2 Ultra here it's the same M2 chip 24 core 72 core GPU 76 core GPU up to 192 gigabytes of memory up to 8 terabytes of storage all of this looks very similar so you are really getting a mac studio in a mac pro case but as I say there are some added benefits specifically with those upgrades here again the memory options 64 gig this is for the mac 64 gig for the ultra 128, 192 again this is for the mac rather than the ultra so if you compare the ultra mac studio to the mac pro they are pretty much like for like in terms of those specs the same here in terms of the hard drive configurations support for the same number of displays but like I say the mac studio is very much a pro device so don't think that they are letting down the pros by not giving the same in the mac pro the mac pro is basically now from my mind just a different enclosure for the mac studio with expandability so when it comes to the rack mounted system then let's take a look at the prices if you just have the sort of base mac studio of the m2 ultra chip then it's 399 if you have the exact same configuration on a desktop then it's 699 so there is $3000 different there for that exact same chip the same memory the same storage and so on but it is for those expansion slots that is what people are going to be buying this for if you don't need expansion slots essentially you don't need the mac pro you know the studio is going to be still just as much of a powerhouse when it comes to the rack mounted option that is adding some extra I'm not quite sure of the reasoning for that additional cost there maybe it's just the limited run but that is quite a significant upgrade from 699 up there to 749 so an extra $500 for that I guess there is some extra sort of hardware if you look at the gallery here of this one then I mean it does look beautiful doesn't it you've got the sliders there to slide it out of the rack this is what it looks like on the back there you can see that we've got the Thunderbolt and USB sockets there on the back and the HDMI and then you've got all of these slots here which is where you can add in all of your expansion I mean it looks beautiful on the back doesn't it even you're not really going to see that but it does look nice but here is the inside so it looks very similar to the desktop version of the mac pro with these slots and some of them are single height and then these ones down here you can see there's a bigger gap between them these are double height so some cards that you may use in this some of them are sort of deeper in terms of all the height of them is higher so that gives you space to add those in so just want to comment on do you remember when computers were all just a mass of different chips and components I don't know if you ever used to build PCs or even max in the olden days when you could do that and they were a lot more customizable there was usually a lot more sort of things going on in here this looks very much like you know there's very few things in here there's a couple of chips in here that you can see but I was just struck by this sort of minimalist appearance of how this looks overall it just looks stunning inside and out to my mind and there's the accessories so I need to look at those for the time being so what I'm talking about in terms of what you may want to plug into these well as I say I was looking at creating an updated system for my studio and I was actually looking at creating a racked system and what I was looking at doing before this was announced was I was looking at the Mac Studios and the reason I wanted to create something with a rack was just to bring in all of these different things rather than having lots of different devices lots of different docks all over the place and a jumble of wires just have something in a neat little enclosure and there's a company called Sonic Tech and they make something if I come over to here by the way if you go to the Sonic Tech website they do have this someone's expansion for the new MacBook 2023 sorry, Mac Pro 2023 as I just coughed for a second and here are some of the things just to give you some ideas of what you might want to put in here so you may want to have just a load of extra storage in there up to 64 terabytes just directly in the enclosure we all know probably if you've spent any time around Apple the Apple's memory is typically very expensive compared to general market prices so this could be a way that you could get a lot more extra storage in at a lot lower cost than just getting it directly from Apple and also just the upgrade ability that you've got there that's obviously another thing with these PCI expansion slots is the ability to swap things out and upgrade as you go high speed networking as well 25 gigabit networking card here this is a big one for me is the USB-C expansion card so we all have had issues I guess with docks at one time or another Keely who is in the chat and in the discord as well just yesterday setting up her streamer X there was an issue with plugging it into a dock and then suddenly it didn't recognize the camera and the fix was to unplug it from the dock plug it directly into the computer and then magically when plugging it back into the dock it was recognized again and that wasn't anything to do with the streamer X that would have been to do with the bandwidth or whatever over the USB bus from this particular dock and what you have to remember is even if you've got a powered dock you've usually just got one single cable going into your computer so you are sending a hell of a lot of information potentially and if you get into sort of daisy trade chaining different docks together as well you've got a hell of a lot of information going over a single cable I know that I've done a bit of a rewire of my studio and now I've found that the performance of some of my peripherals is suffering because I've obviously got things plugged into slightly the wrong combination and maybe got too much stuff going over one particular USB bus so having separate things that are plugged directly into the computer in the PCI expansion slots with for example eight separate USB sockets giving you 10 gigabit per second over each port directly in over its own bus is something that's going to be really really useful when it gets to plugging in all of these peripherals for live streaming and virtual events and things like that but I digress slightly these are specifically just on the sonnet tech website and you'll see that that's right on the front page but what I was looking at though was these devices that they've got which is where is it now if I come to the right device it is here let me have a look so this was a rack mount system that they provide for the max studio so this is again from sonnet tech but here you can see just behind this grill there is a max studio in there and then this provides an expansion card slot that can give you up to three different PCI expansion cards so the way it works is you can slide this part out here if you take a look inside there's like a gap there and you can slide this separate module in and it's got two calling fans in the front but it allows you to plug in up to three PCI expansion cards much like we can do now in the mac pro so I was already looking at this as a rack mount system for the max studio now when it comes to pricing of these these are here we go for the max studio with the echo 3 which gives you three card expansion slots that's already $1500 just for that before you've added in the studio and the cards obviously but now comparing that to the difference between the max studio and the mac pro that we looked at previously now that differential in price is not looking actually that bad if you were going to be looking to do something like this so as I say it was previously $399 up to $699 is the jump up from the studio to the mac pro but you are getting even more expansion card slots than this and when I was thinking about expansion card slots as well as obviously the USB-C that I've just mentioned the main thing that I'm talking about or that would be using this for would actually be for if I can come over to it these things the deck link quad 4k so if I go to the right right page it might help right scene rather we switch over to this so this is the my e-cam seems to be lagging it's my computer that's lagging it's not e-cam by the way but if I just come over to this scene here when it switches as we wait for my computer you see why I need a more powerful computer now this is not switching let me try to do this let me do this the old way the manual way where is this scene gone here my scenes list there we go we're on it so this is the black magic deck link quad hdmi capture card and this is allowing you to plug in up to four hdmi inputs but they then go into your computer and you get to see all of those different cameras individually and this solves one problem that you have if you're using multiple cam links for example or indeed if you are going to use multiple streamer X's so maybe you're going to use that for one camera and cam links for the other is that you've then got all of these different devices to your computer you're taking up more USB sockets to then just bring in all of your different camera feeds so I'm using obviously I've got my main camera here I've got a couple of others around the studio as well but then also for feeding in things like a presentation from a secondary computer for example there's lots of reasons why you may want to have more hdmi inputs so the deck link quad 4k actually solves that problem by giving you this card that then brings all of those 4 devices in as one single feed now I was looking at adding a couple of these in actually because I wanted to route the hdmi from up to 4 or 5 cameras but then also as I say from secondary computers and different devices that I'm testing out as well so having a couple of these in one of those sonnet devices to then use it with a with the max studio would be one solution but just having these directly in the Mac Pro would also just be a lot more of a a much more efficient way to do that the other things that you may want to have plugged in if I just come over to here where are they now if I just get them up is I've mentioned the sonnet Allegro so this is for type A USB connections my thing is just really slow it's typical isn't it I'm just talking about the need to upgrade and my computer is sort of agreeing with me here it seems there is my USB with this is the one with 4 USB sockets regular USB this is the one that has got 8 USB C and if I come onto this one this is the those expansion things that I was talking about I'm just trying to see if I've missed anything from here and these are the different studio enclosures you can get these enclosures by the way for the Mac minis as well and so I was actually looking to get one of these for my mini that I'm going to be obviously retaining as a second device as well you can actually add those into a rack as well the other things that I was looking to add into the rack then as well was also if you have heard of Synology who make network attached storage devices and they also make rack mounted versions of those too and a NAS is definitely something that I need to add into the system it's not something that I've got around to doing as of yet but it definitely needs to come sooner rather than later because I am finding that I'm running out of space rapidly and need to do a better job of organizing all of that so if I just switch over to here you can see that Synology do have their full range of network attached storage devices in a rack configuration as well so it would probably be something like this that I would be looking at a 4 bay given the size of drives given how much stuff I need to store I'm not really needing to get into these big 12 bay things here so something like this 4 bay is probably what I would be looking at and the rack mounting system these things are measured in U so 1 U is this thing here so it's kind of like 1 unit but then these are 2 U so they are double the height and then 3 U and so on the Mac is I understand I think it's a 5 U height for the Mac Pro and then these are 1 U the other thing that I would be looking to add in as well because it is important to have solid power going to these devices so there are a couple of devices there I already use an external UPS well I've got a few of them actually that are clustering up the floor so you can actually get rack mounted UPSs that are built into the rack system that you're building as well so if I come back over to here then this is an example of a rack mounted UPS so you would see this on the front it would tell you your power and so on and then at the back is where you've got your sockets and they would obviously connect to the other devices that you've got within that rack. Next up then as well is especially over here in the north of Thailand having a power conditioner that is useful so that you make sure that you're not getting anything that is going to cause any issues with the tech hardware that you've got in the rack and given that we are adding in potentially rather expensive equipment it's important to make sure that they are protected from that point of view so a conditioner is actually different to UPS the UPS just maintains power in the case of a power outage but the conditioner would go above that between that and the actual devices themselves to make sure that that power was delivered consistently so that is kind of what I'm looking at in terms of a potential system here basically the condition of the UPS then the Synology but then using the Mac Pro to have all of these cards in and the cards that I'd have would be two of the deck links to have those four HDMI feeds going in or up to four per card and then also the expanding the USB outputs as well or inputs so that I can plug in a lot more devices there is one other thing that I'm looking to do though because I do do things where I'm doing this audio routing from one computer to the next or potentially from wanting wanting to use the same video feed that I've got from my cameras but actually use them in multiple different ways I'm testing out some hardware devices at the moment for video switching and video routing so I want to be able to use the cameras that I've got for multiple different devices for multiple different computers so something like this which is a hardware switcher which gives me access to up to four cameras and I can switch between them and it's got a little thing on the front I'm testing this out I'll make a video about that in due course but also things like the ATEM I'm going to be looking at making some content around the ATEMs a little bit later as well because I do see where those are fit for some people obviously I prefer ECAM it just with the power that we've now got in the max you know the days of saying oh well we need a hardware switcher versus a software switcher because the hardware switch is more reliable you don't have to worry about processing issues and stuff like that as I'm experiencing right now but with these more powerful machines that is less and less of an issue so I do certainly prefer the software version with ECAM but I have got clients who are looking at doing things where they just want to wear capabilities of something like the ATEM or maybe this device the cine live C1 which I'm just testing out at the moment I digress slightly the point is that I want to be able to root the video from my various different cameras and inputs and outputs or inputs and have them going to various different outputs and there is a device from Blackmagic so they are the ones that make the ATEM Mini they make the deck links that I was just talking about but they also make if I can find it where have I put it they make this thing called the video hub and if I come back to this view I'm going to give up on my stream deck for a moment there we go wrong one wrong scene they also make this one here so it's seeming like it's not switching to that one they make the Blackmagic design video hub 10 by 10 so that is 10 video inputs and it's got 10 video outputs on the back as well and what that allows you to do is basically root the video to whichever places you want so you can have up to 10 inputs and up to 10 outputs they've also got one which is probably going to be a little bit overkill or in fact actually maybe the 20 the 40 is certainly overkill for me but that allows you to root the inputs so you could have one camera coming in from one source but then you might have it going out to multiple different sources so this is the thing of having a single camera but I want to be able to use it on my primary computer but also on my primary computer and then also potentially for some hardware devices as well for testing and for me it's for testing but it's also for demo purposes so often you'll see people doing demos where they get this infinity effect where they're trying to show something on the screen but then because they're recording the screen it's doing that sort of whole tunnel vision thing so I often try and get around that by running the demo on a separate machine so I want to get into both machines but then also just with some video stuff for video conferences and virtual events having being able to root the video to multiple different places is what these devices are used for so this is also another rack mounted component that would go into that that ultimate rack there so I mean I've digressed a lot from the Apple products but I just really wanted to talk about because we were talking about this in the weekly Q&A in the Take One Tech Academy this week was what is the use case of the Mac Pro and have they drop the ball by positioning the Mac Pro at such a higher price seemingly but with very little in terms of additional power compared to the Mac Studio and just wanted to reiterate that the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are both Pro devices the people who are buying the Mac Pro will be buying them for this expansion capability and specifically I can see a lot of people buying the rack mounted ones for things like this in studios because a lot of musicians have a lot of cards that they need to use or want to use and so having those in their rack with all of that other audio gear I can see working really well there was something else that I wanted to talk about in terms of the announcement there was obviously announcements related to iPad, iOS and all of this and there was as well whilst we were talking about Macs they did announce the larger 15 inch MacBook Air as well with the M2 chip so I'm sure that is going to be a powerhouse for the vast majority of people as well I mean for most general users the MacBook Airs are more than adequate when it comes to obviously video production streaming and stuff like that then it's ideal to have a little bit more power than that I haven't talked about editing obviously one of the things that they talked about in the announcement was just how faster this is at rendering things and producing these edits and they talk specifically about people using DaVinci Resolve as well and how much quicker it is with that I'm not really doing all of that that's my whole thing take one tech take one no edits but nevertheless obviously it will be a lot quicker for that and this is when you start thinking about the cost of these things and sometimes they can seem quite expensive how much time is it actually saving you and how much is your time worth and how much will that sort of add up over the weeks and the months that you're using this for before the next upgrade comes along and that's what it's all about really it's like how much does it actually add value to your business and what you're trying to do there was one other thing though that they mentioned which was in the new Mac OS operating system and it was a little feature now I can show you a short clip of this of what they said because it's sort of best to sort of see this in practice but this is something that is relevant I guess to academy members in my audience and the sort of things that we talk about on this channel which is to do with levelling up your online presence in meetings and it was this little feature so let's just play this and I'd got it on double speed so maybe I'll just put it on single speed I always watch things on double speed but it doesn't really work well does it when you're doing a demo let me try that again starting with video conferencing we spend a lot of time on video calls but when you share your screen your face and presence can get lost this year we have great new ways to help you present remotely a new video fact called presenter overlay elevates your presence by including you on top of the content you're sharing with small overlay your face appears in a movable bubble so it's easy to be seen while showcasing your work with large overlay you remain prominent while your shared screen is framed beautifully next to you we separate you from the background and layer your screen in between so you can walk talk and move in front of your content thanks to the neural engine and apple silicon you get amazing quality so I'll just stop it there but what I loved about that obviously is my whole thing about presentations and things in zoom meetings is that so many times people are either they're just on screen they're just talking to some slides and usually what happens then is if you are doing a presentation then you will have the presentation front and center for everybody and then and then you will have sorry I'm just checking the comments so then you will have your presentation front and center in a little box somewhere and that's the benefit of using something like e-cam live to do a virtual presentation is that you've got all the power of e-cam to bring in different scenes much like I've got different scenes here in this live stream and you can take all of that into zoom so the question is is this going to be something that I'm going to be recommending to almost replace that and the fact is it's really not however there is some benefit to using this just as a as a way to augment that and the fact is that this capability that it's got is going to be something that I think we will be able to bring into e-cam itself so almost as I understand it because it is almost like a camera effect we may be able to just bring this into e-cam so we'll have to see about that but you still have the issue here with although you are in the presentation you still have the same sort of slightly disjointed nature in terms of the way that they've got their slide set up so you'd have to be sure that you're not going to be over the front of the slides whereas with e-cam you do have a lot more control over that and for me when I'm doing presentations it's not just about the slides it's about and by the way I don't really do slides I shouldn't call them slides because that gives the impression of a powerpoint slide with a load of crap for one sort of better word on the actual slide itself so I'm much more of the opinion that we should have things where you're just sort of bringing information onto the screen as and when it's needed and then it's sort of getting out of the way afterwards obviously that's quite a simple slide that this chap has got here behind him relatively but I will say that the text is probably a little bit too small and you don't want to get people into this habit of just basically bringing their powerpoint poorly designed powerpoint slides into the meeting it is a great feature though because it actually works in practice how easy it is to toggle on and off obviously using something like Ecamm the ability to switch between multiple different presentations multiple different scenes at the touch of a button it's going to be really interesting to see how this does integrate but for the vast majority of people it's going to be a really easy way to sort of enhance their presentations and I would say that combining this with something like the Streamer X which is the new device from RODE which is a video and audio capture device or video capture device in audio interface giving you the ability to have high quality video coming into your meeting, high quality audio and then the little feature that Streamer X has got on it which I really love the ability to control your powerpoint or your keynote presentation this combined with this effect could actually be a really nice way to just sort of level up your meetings for a lot of people let me just have a quick check through the comments the Mac Studio where are we? the Mac Studio can have a max of 6 Thunderbolt 4 ports while the Mac Pro comes with 8 and PCI slots also the Sonic Tech Echo Express yeah that's the that's the external box so that was what I was also looking at obviously I've gone into a lot of stuff since that comment but yeah that was the other option there if you want to get those expansion slots you can get just an external box that basically plugs into your Mac Mini and you can have them separated like that I went down the whole rack route for just another whole reason there so yeah that is where I am in terms of these devices I am sort of still leaning towards the Mac Pro I may still consider the ultra the Mac Studio though we'll have to see about that I've still not got to finalizing all the details and spec that absolutely everything but yeah certainly it will solve my processor issues that I do have with my Mini when I'm trying to do too many things like today for example now my processor by the way is around about 60% 70% but at times during that it was getting up to more like 95 something like that and I'm just slowing things down I'm really interested to try these out really interested to hear what everyone else thinks if you've got any comments or feedback about any of the devices as you as and when you get them then be sure to come and join the Take One Tech Discord and leave any comments and feedback you've got in there and obviously your opinions of these devices too I haven't really covered a lot of the the WWDC coverage here or the WWDC keynote I should say just the devices that are top of mind for me I'll definitely be in line to try out the Apple Vision Pro when they do come out and expect to see some sort of new tech hardware in the studio Take One Tech very soon so thanks for coming and hanging out if you've got any comments or questions leave them down below in the in the comments section that would be a good place and of course don't forget to like and subscribe I always forget to mention that I'll leave a link though to some other Mac related videos over here on the right hand side when for people watching on the replay thanks to all of my channel members and also to my Academy members too great to have that to continue conversation with you all Have a great day everyone, I'll see you soon