Apple's Crazy Powerful $600 Computer

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Happy National Coffee Break Day ☕️ Put another pot on brew to celebrate and let's dig into this week's signals.

💻 Apple low-key dropped some exciting new Mac updates: MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips and a Mac mini refresh with M2 and M2 Pro options. Not big enough to warrant its own keynote presentation (and maybe they have a full schedule this year for the release of their AR glasses?), it's still really exciting for anyone needing powerful computing (hello video editors).

While the MacBook Pro is cool (and currently the only device where you can get a M2 Max chip), the price point for the Mac Mini is what really stopped me in my tracks: starting price, $599.

That's $600 for a crazy powerful computer. So it begs the question - for $600 with an M2 chip, do you really need the $2000 Mac Studio with the older M1 chips? This article has a bit of a breakdown of what use cases you'd want each. Pure processing power and lots of ports - get the Studio. But for regular video editing? Mac Mini with M2 will be plenty.

🐥 Are marketers flocking away from Twitter? No. In a new Hubspot survey, 67% of marketers said they're not looking to move off Twitter.

📻 Why do broadcasters talk with the same TV news voice? What's the voice? Just check out kaylareporting's TikTok, an actual reporter who spoofs the voice when talking about her kid. This article from Insider digs in - apparently, it's a holdover from the 70s and 80s when everything was less diverse and everyone was expected to sound the same to be 'professional.' Sounds like a great opportunity to stand out.

🕺 Brands are still bullish on the Metaverse. Coca-Cola, Walmart, Gucci, and more have all built out some sort of digital product (or in Gucci's case an entire world). One key part of their strategy seems to be tying virtual goods to real-life products, like Coca-Cola turning a limited edition digital flavor into a real product.

🖼️ YouTube Shorts is rolling out monetization soon. But there's more to come, including more Shorts analytics and custom thumbnails. Since Shorts typically play in-feed, I wonder how much of a factor CTR for thumbnails will play in people watching your shorts.

🐦 Birdflow: Twitter tool to automate DMs and host Tweet giveaways

🏞️ Thumblytics: Preview how your YouTube thumbnail will look in a mock UI across various devices

📬 Warmer.ai: Warmer uses AI to write unique icebreaker intros for your cold email campaigns.

ChatGPT is all the rage (even though it's been around for a few years)

Lots of debate circulating if Google will or won't penalize AI and if in 5 years every creative role will be outsourced to a robot.

We're not there...yet, but wanted to share a few things to keep in mind with what ChatGPT can't do and what you as a human can bring to your work to stand out from the AI noise.

3 things ChatGPT can't do:

1️⃣ Write from personal experience

You're a human. You have had (or are having) an experience, a story, that you can write about. You can draw lessons and generate insight from your experiences.

2️⃣ Do original research

You can think of things to test and ask, run surveys, do research.

Running a product review site? Buy the product and test it out. AI can't do that.

3️⃣ Interview and quote people

You can talk to people, interview them, weave their quotes into your work. Maybe a chatbot can do this in the future, but right now quoting first-person sources is something a robot can't do.

Not only does this stand out from the AI noise, it's great for Google's E-E-A-T quality rater guidelines.

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