Apple Event – November 2020

November 16, 2020
4 min read

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.

Apple PR

November 20, 2019
2 min read

Apple recently announced the 16” MacBook Pro. They’ve invited journalists to the private event in New York, gave them review units and when the embargo dropped everyone was ready with the story.

This is the MacBook that saves us all. The keyboard is changed to the old mechanism, there is a physical esc key and arrow buttons are the right shape. It also is a bit bigger, with a bit smaller bezels and in a recent Apple fashion it got heavier, because it has so much more battery. Everyone was happy, especially developers and other professionals.

What also was happening at almost exactly the same time – there was a rumor about Apple AR product. Reportedly Apple has held an internal meeting with a 1000 employees who are working on the AR headset where it was discussed that it is a 2022 initiative at best.

And this is Apple PR at its best. First, you don’t hold a 1000 employee meeting and not think it is going to leak to the press (you are probably hoping it will, at this point). Second, the news was perfectly released during all the hype about the new MacBook. Third, almost the only notable thing that came out of this meeting, was the release date. There are some rumors that Apple was planning to release some kind of AR headset in 2020, so now Apple is managing the expectations – no AR headset next year.

So bloggers and podcasters can talk about the new MacBook, how Apple is finally listening and making compromises in the right places, finally again. How we want the same laptop, but for the 14” model. And mention in passing somewhere rumor about the AR headset and a meeting, but it stays in your mind – don’t wait.

Perfect.

MacBook Updates

July 10, 2019
2 min read

Yesterday Apple updated it’s notebook lineup. Let’s start from the good news, MacBook Air got True Tone and lowered price of $1099 (with additional $100 discount for students) and MacBook Pro got quad-core processor from the start and there is no MacBook Escape now – every MacBook Pro has a Touch ID and Touch Bar. The starting price of the device is $1299.

This makes things a little bit more clear, until you start to choose. For $1299, which will you choose, baseline MacBook Pro or MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM (as $200 is the price for doubling the original 8GB). As someone who has an 8GB MacBook Pro, I would kill for more RAM, especially when trying to open a bunch of tabs and making reports in the Excel. But MacBook Air processor is much slower under heavy load. On the other hand the battery on the Air is amazing and it is a bit lighter. 

One would ask, but what about one-port MacBook, but there is none as of yesterday. Apple killed the most portable MacBook it had. So here is what Apple MacBook lineup looks like right now:

If you want Apple computer as of today you have a couple of choices – MacBook Air as a default for everyone, if you want something more fun and simple – iPad Pro and if you need something more powerful – MacBook Pro. 

With cleaning up iPads a couple of months ago and this I like that Apple is bringing back a bit of focus to its products.