Apple Event March 8, 2022
apple.com
apple.com
Imagine you are a developer who are going to talk about a product you worked on, and you are aware that millions of people[1] are going to watch you present. You're telling me you wouldn't want to do everything in your power to be well-rehearsed? You wouldn't try to do things like learn how to stand still or not stutter?
Like, that is just... I absolutely cannot comprehend that you would prefer to appear unrehearsed to people. Rehearsing is not weird, it is not unusual, and it is not unreasonable. There are soooo many valid complaints to make about Apple and Apple culture, and I just don't think "they over-rehearse their presentations!!1!" even remotely makes the list.
[1] This website claims some 2.7 million people watched the September 2021 event live: https://streamscharts.com/news/apple-event-sep-14-viewership
Like a stand-up comedian who makes it sound like he's telling an anecdote (that just happened to come to mind) for the first time, even though he's told it a million times on stage before.
("Acting is acting like you're not acting.")
[Comma 3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLiehrC2DQ
In the middle, perhaps lies Steve Jobs:
[Handling Criticism] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
[iMac announcement] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiWd8ujtK5k
You should not be memorizing your exact lines and intonation, unless you are an excellent actor (Which you aren't, because you are a developer). It's creepy and robotic, and people know you are lying when you are barking words someone else wrote for you, that you don't understand or believe yourself.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=conservative+power+pose&t=ffab&iax...
I don't think I've seen a single person who doesn't think it looks ridiculous.
I really struggle to watch Apple’s events these days. As slick as the production is, they’re almost becoming parodies of themselves.
There are lot of people selling Snakes Oil, especially targeting those that are rich and powerful. The biggest problem is who the heck green lighted this at Apple. As if without Steve, they have no idea what to do or what not to do, but let's try every idea and see what sticks. If this sounds vaguely familiar that is because Google does exactly this.
I imagine Steve would be very pissed off seeing it.
Edit: and god damn again at it being in something as small as the new Mac Studio. Interested in price...
Edit 2: $1999 for the base Mac Studio with M1 MAX. $3999 for the base M1 ULTRA model.
Not cheap, that is only certain. Probably starting at >$7K for M1 Ultra
I'm wondering if one of the reasons to get an Apple silicon Mac might be to natively/locally run ARM-based containers, which might be the future.
I actually hope somebody is challenged enough by this to really push for competition as this level of performance asymmetry will ultimately result in further pricing asymmetry as competition breaks down.
It is even more astounding when you look at the utter shitshow that Google's Tensor has been!
Only the M1 Air is truly fanless, the Pros do have fans, they're just silent most of the time.
The Lenovo X13s reportedly offers even more battery life at around 70% the multicore performance(based on demo device score) and is fanless as well.
Still doesn't beat the M1, but comparing the TDPs of M1 and Qualcomm's 8cx gen 3 in the X13s, it appears that it's TSMC's 5nm node that's doing all the magic.
Personally I'm happy that we're getting proper fanless laptops now - I hate moving parts in mobile devices, because they tend to fail first.
But at around 60% of single core performance. That is basically half the speed.
In the context of a $4000 Mac Studio with something like FinalCut Pro allows them similar creative power that the inaccessible, siloed $10,000 workstations.
You're much more likely to see a Mac Studio in a school, library or computer lab where underrepresented people live. I had a gig a few years ago that took place in a public library with a lab of trashcan-style Intel Mac Pros, which were more expensive and far less capable than a Mac Studio.
It's not a waste of money when you bring expensive equipment to tens of thousands of people to use.
A single $4k computer for a 1000+ student school should be an afterthought, spread that cost over 5 years and the cost per student is minuscule. This is not a Chromebook you get for every student, you'll need one or two max - unless the school specifically focuses on A/V production.
This is equally true for a $10k computer, spread over all the students. It's great to save money. But Apple's diversity claim just doesn't add up.
"Now we're going to have designers from different backgrounds, different voices, different experiences, being able to have a seat at the table." (34:30)
Absolutely. I'd say FaceID might be even a downside
I'm happy with TouchID (ok not on Apple). I don't want to stare at the phone to unlock it.
Seems you’re a bit sensitive to that.
No more stupid absurd "borderless" Screen. You even make the false positive detection of holding a phone perfect. Or you make a simple border around it.
Touch ID and Home Button is a trillion times more intuitive than swiping. It is one of those question like single or double mouse button. People dont understand why double mouse button isn't exactly a great design.
Currently thinking about getting the 13 mini but I love TouchID too much so it's really a debate between TouchID or better battery life, ugh...
If the thing is built to require a case that would increase its thickness by the amount of the camera protrusion, why not just make it that thick to begin with.
I really pine for a flat back (despite any thickness that would add), square edges, and a back material with a higher index of friction. The SE1 frame was like this.
Good phone otherwise though, fast, battery ok if you charge regularly, etc.
I think they’ll make some triumphant return to Touch ID in the power button at some point, because they don’t really seem to feel like making Face ID better right now either. I’m not sure what the big draw is, as in the best case it’s as usable as Touch ID was.
You can flip a switch in the settings to turn off the requirement to look at the phone to unlock it.
Touch ID and Face ID are both mixed bags. Would be great if they had both, but I understand that space is at a premium and they may want to push for a single authentication solution.
As usual with Apple the Siri message notifications and unlocking while masked work fine if you have AirPods and an Apple Watch, everything is always optimized for the integrated experience. Personally I prefer faceID and the chinless display plus not having to find the touch pad on the back like a pixel phone.
For carplay though, you really should enable it before you hit the road, even with touchid.
You can't look at your phone for a nano-second while driving? If still no, then here are your alternates you can explore -
1. Setup an alternate appearance: like side pose
2. Turn off "Require Attention for Face ID"
3. Unlock phone with voice commands - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeJQHBBpUPs
4. Allow access for CarPlay when locked - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8519499
With Touch ID, I can reach into my pocket, place my finger on the button as I'm taking the phone out, and by the time I got the phone out it's already unlocked, played the unlock animation and is on the home screen.
If the phone is on the table/etc I can just put my finger on the button and unlock it - so again by the time I actually grab the phone it's unlocked (that is - if I need to grab it - maybe I just wanted to glance at the notification I just received, or pass it to another person).
With Face ID, the phone needs to be in front of your face just to begin the unlock sequence, and needs to be at a certain distance and in clear view of your face. Masks break this, but so do even pre-pandemic things like being in bed and having some of your face obstructed by pillows/blankets.
That said, my wife gets quite dry hands and has never been able to use the fingerprint sensor reliably so this is a golden age for her. Would be nice to have the option of both going forward.
(One problem with designing products in California is that they don't have public transportation, so nobody beta testing the phone is standing on a crowded subway, hanging on with one hand and trying to use their phone with the other. The SE was great for one-handed use. The subsequent phones are difficult there.)
I often want to look at the lock screen, perhaps to tell the time or to read / interact with a notification, or to swipe from the left to interact with the widgets.
Quite a lot of my phone usage is like this: recency based (driven by notifications) and/or not wanting to open the phone and then search for the app I want, launch it, get to the right screen and blah blah. Much lower overhead to get the job done.
I don't tend to open my phone and doom scroll when I have a moment. I understand that's the major use case for most people, and for them perhaps your model would be appropriate.
It doesn't. On my iPhone, just picking it up to look at the latest alerts activates FaceID. I find it annoying because more often I just want to see the notifications, not jump back into whatever app I was using six hours ago.
If you and I are having opposite problems, there must be a setting for this.
Other comments say it's so you can read the notifications after you unlock, but I rarely want to do that.
BART does not count?
I never encountered it. When I lift my phone, it's already lit and once my face is positioned with the camera - it gets unlocked.
If it unlocked fully, I'd just see a bunch of icons, not the notification and I'd need to swipe to see them.
It's probably not a hack, but just the towering complexity of all the different software systems developed under tight deadlines.
Make 100% sure you have multiple backup though because backup corruption is still a thing forever reason. Apple just haven't bothered to fix it.
What's that based on? There are 19 different Android phones available for me to buy right now in the €360 - €400 price range that came out in the last six months.
Now though we're at a place where nothing you build yourself with off the shelf parts can come close to what Apple is doing. It's cool for the industry, and incredible how compact and efficient Apple's designs allow their systems to be, but it's also a little sad the way the industry is going. Intel and AMD likely won't be able to catch up. Maybe Qualcomm does with Nuvia, but they'll just take the same integrated approach.
16 + 4 cores and 128GB RAM
And it seems that Apple aren't currently planning on making a bigger chip for now. While that's very fast, I have to say I'm kinda surprised they haven't gone for a bigger and/or modular option. I guess it is pretty Apple to go all-in on a single monolithic design paradigm.
EDIT: Oh damn "Just one more product to go: the Mac Pro". I take back what I said. They are still doing a Mac Pro!
I suppose it might even be an advantage to unify RAM, so you don't have to copy back and forth between the CPU and GPU?
Doesn't matter if Apple has interest in the server market; the server market has interest in Mac Studios.
I can see a rack of these in someone's datacenter. Can you imagine the render farm that could be created?
The 13 mini is a bit smaller, the battery is significantly better, the camera is also a lot better and the portrait is available to mostly everything (not just a human face for the SE). It has all the good things I've been wanting. The only thing missing is the finger print reader, but the iOS 15.4 allows us to use with a mask on. So far the FaceID seems accurate and convenient most of the time.
If you're using an SE 2nd, consider a 12 mini or 13 mini.
On the other hand, if I needed that level of performance, esthetics would no doubt take a back seat.
Edit: I'd be happy to live with the uglier display design, given the extra flexibility in adjusting height and tilt.
Given that the GPU and memory are on the chip and unswappable, the vast majority of people will only need to swap out the hard drive. Most people can just get by on external peripherals.
The Ultra with all those 'neural engines' is a steal at four grand, if you need it.
Also, with Coronavirus, there's no live crowd energy or guest artists/creators. And with Steve Jobs gone, there's no personality on top and no underling willing to show personality.
I do miss the old Steve Jobs keynotes.
Steve cares about their product. So how much time each product gets to on staged. To the point sometimes he is willing to launch it without mentioning it in keynote and just drop something on a press release, just to give more spotlight for other products.
Now every Apple keynotes are no longer a showcase of excellence and craftsmanship, where a company used to care about making insanely great product for our customers. Instead it is lots of virtue signalling and sales pitch.
Edit: To phrase this a bit better, it's too bad the "mini" model doesn't seem likely to continue into past the 13 mini.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/apples-new-iphone-se...
As someone who feels that the mini lineup was already getting too large, I'm not a fan of the decision.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/25/iphone-14-features-roundup/#h...
I hope that Apple will make another attempt at a small iPhone before/when the 13 mini becomes end-of-life.
My guess is that when 13 mini is no longer available new, Apple will have another small-phone solution available. If not I will hold on to my 13 mini the same way other folks hold on to Touch ID. This mini size is perfect.
They usually only sell the mainstream models longer. The iPhone 6/7/8 form factor was continued with the SE 2020 and now 2022, but the Plus wasn’t. So I’m not too hopeful for the mini.
EDIT: At the end of the presentation Apple said Mac Pro refresh is coming later so let’s wait and see
I think and assume they will continue to stick with LPDDR5 rather than standard DDR5 with DIMM slot.
Of course there is the HN Superstar who needs 1TB just to get their IDE open, but for most people the 8GB works as well as 16GB on the Intel versions.
This event probably won't tell us much, I am sure all the graphs will be relative scaled with cherry picked benchmarks, making comparison difficult.
Maybe their GPUs that they keep teasing but even that's a stretch, IMO.
https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-locks-down-all-remainin...
https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/16/apple-secure-majority-...
I expect them to release an M2 chip earliest in the fall of this year or early 2023.
Can't wait for June to see what the actual Mac Pro will look like. Good thing they mentioned that.
Hopefully it lives up to the promise. It really packs quite a punch into a little box.
Just watch intel come out with a 500 watt CPU and then say "see, we beat the M1 Ultra"
edit: starting at $1,600. Better than I expected, TBH.
it is scary how delusional and inefficient "modern" developers are
And it's not like the rustc devs haven't been working on performance improvements.
I need/want a “Studio”. Well, I need a new Mac. Well, the “studio” is more than I had hoped for, and certainly more than I need, but now that it’s there, it’s hard to see why I’d get anything else… except the obvious problem of the price.
Still, the price is not that crazy, and the computer is.
Today, I’m “that guy” refreshing until I can order a studio
Edit: It looks like the 27" has disappeared from the web site.
I've always stuck with entry-level MacBooks for that reason - it's a more reasonable amount of money to lose and allows me to not care too much about it even in sketchy situations where you wouldn't want to bring a 4k$ non-waterproof device.
M1 Ultra has 90% better performance than the "fastest 16-core PC desktop chip available", which is probably the 5950X.
M1 Ultra has better performance than the "highest end discrete GPU available" (probably the Radeon RX 6900 XT?) while using 1/3 the power.
So I'm not exactly sure I'd call your build same ballpark, and I also can't imagine it was only slightly over $2k given that the CPU[1] and GPU[2] you specified alone cost $2200 on a good day...
The 3080 beats the Ultra in perf for games/ml. The 5950x is not 90% slower, but it is slower.
Like I said, it's not going to be equal to the $4000 M1 Ultra. But it's in the ballpark (and does beat it in certain use cases such as games/ml).
The thing is these are 2 year old parts at this point. If we see 4x series from nvidia and/or Zen 4 this year all this could change dramatically.
While a lot of Apple's M1 claims have lived up to scrutiny, their GPUs ones are limited to very specific test cases that benefit from Apple's architecture.
So will it hit 3060TI levels on some stuff? Yeah, likely, it will. But that doesn't mean it will be hitting those levels across the board and only independent testing will give us an accurate picture.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-macbook-air-2022-r...
Back then you bought Apple if you were a sound engineer or into graphic/media design.
I used to tell people I’m a die-hard PC user simply: Mac sucks!
Fast forward to around 2009 and I’ve been a happy Apple user since then for all my software engineering needs.
Is the platform perfect? Nope! And nothing is.
Is it expensive? Yes, but the quality is fantastic and if one really wants to can get 5 years easy out of any Mac computer…I’ve got 11 years out of my family’s Mac mini that I was able to upgrade a few times.
Which brings me to my only real gripe: the lack of upgrade ability and the obsession with “thin” design.
Please address that because everything else I can mostly get over.
Also, never have I ate my own words harder with the “Mac sucks” thing.
At the end of the day I’ll use what works.
macOS' recent updates have been a massive downgrade in terms of usability, try to force garbage on me that I don't want (no, I don't need Apple TV+ nor News on a work machine) and reliability on the M1 Air is bad - just yesterday the thing half-locked-up for 30 seconds (caps lock still responded, but everything else froze) with no explanation, not to mention the occasional kernel panics and constant nags for permission for every goddamn thing (you've implemented the notifications permission system to prevent apps from spamming me, but your solution is to spam me with one for every app that I run even for apps that never actually send notifications?).
I just need a machine that works and gets out of my way. It used to be as everyone else was trying to get in your way, Apple was mostly content with just charging a huge premium. That seems to have changed in the last couple years.
MS only “injected” $250 million in Apple. Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy Power Computings Mac assets. The $150 million left did not “save” Apple at the rate it was losing money.
Oh, the stand is extra!!! HAHAHAHA!
It's actually 2000$ with the 'height-adjustable' stand - the exact price of an iMac from 2015 that came with the exact same LCD monitor - except, you know, there was also a computer in there!
1600$ for a 2014 LCD monitor remains fucking outrageous.
The high-end camera, array of microphones, and speakers are worth at least a couple hundred bucks — especially for remote workers.
The connectivity is also pretty nice, and didn't exist back then.
I don't know how the overall value stacks up, but I was pleasantly surprised the price was this low. I was expecting $2,000 to $2500 after hearing the specs. I'm still not buying one, but I am about to email my wife to ask her company if they can cancel the order they just put in for a $900 not-very-impressive monitor and get her one of these instead.
Kills the need for a dock, kills the need for a separate power brick at the office, and makes videoconferencing much better (I don't think she'd thought about how she would do a video call if her camera is on her laptop and her big monitor is off to the side).
While they claimed that modularity was a goal, I honestly don't see how that could possibly be the case given the form factor.
There's also a new Studio display going along with it.
EDIT: It may be that their understanding of modularity is having -- what they consider -- a lot of IO, i.e. a bunch of Thunderbolt 4 ports.
They claim M1 Ultra is up to 60% faster than the 28-core Xeon in the Mac Pro. Color me sceptical. (I'm sure it's true for certain workloads, but I doubt it holds across the board).