It was another instalment of the beautiful commercial made by Apple, filled with amazing transitions and views of the Apple Park.
The presentation was short with a couple of minutes of recap by Tim Cook of all the products announced in the last 8 weeks.
This time there was a lot of background music when presenters were talking and I didn’t enjoy it, as it portrayed the ad vibe even more.
In the end they showed a bit with a PC guy from the old Mac vs PC commercials, it was OK. Judging by Twitter old-time Mac fans enjoyed it.
One More Thing — The Mac
Right at the beginning Tim Cook emphasised that One More Thing this time was relating to THE Mac. So, no AirTags, AirPods Studio or other devices.
I was surprised to learn that over 50% of Mac buyers are new to the system. On the other hand, with such a strong quarter for Mac, it is not a surprise that those weren’t only those who updated their computers.
They’ve made a commercial (yes, a commercial inside the commercial) showing many celebrities with Macs and a lot of those were with glowing logo. In black and white it was noticeable that they made focus on that, as it looked cool, but Apple doesn’t make such laptops anymore…
MacOS Big Sur
What they couldn’t show before is how macOS is better with Apple Silicon. It is more similar to the iOS and iPadOS in some regards. I know the internet is all about scores for CPU, but everyday little things are more important for the experience, especially on the types of machines Apple introduced. It launches apps instantly and more importantly it instantly wakes from sleep, just like iOS.
M1
This is the start of the next generation of Mac. First System on a chip for low-power Mac computers. It has 8-core CPU (4 High and 4 Low performance cores) and Apple says the High-performance core is the fastest core in the world right now.
All the new Macs
Apple introduced 3 new Macs, and they are similar to each other — MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. For the first one it is a complete transition — you can’t buy Air with an Intel processor anymore. For the latter two it is the mainstream, low performance models, with Intel laptop and Mac mini still being sold as an option.
What they have in common is that all three have the same M1. You can choose up to 2 TB of SSD and 16 GB of RAM.
What is different is battery life in case of MacBook Pro and continuous performance. What that means is although the processor is the same because MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan and other two models do, they can not only reach the same speed as Air, but sustain it for longer periods of times.
It’s a shame that they didn’t update the camera in laptops. It is still the same 720p, very mediocre camera. Although the picture will be improved by the SoC thanks to Machine Learning.
Because Apple doesn’t sell any other display, it was funny how in every picture or video of people using Mac mini it was standing right on the stand of Apple XDR monitor, the stand for which costs $300 more than the computer itself.
I was blown away by the numbers provided regarding the battery life and am very optimistic about Mac lineup and will probably end up buying one of the laptops introduced (most probably MacBook Air). But of course the more exciting things will come out, when Apple will show iMac and Mac Pro with Apple Silicon inside. I can’t even imagine what will be possible with M1X (or whatever it will be called) where because of no thermal limitations there could be 16 cores and most of them would be High-performance.
