MacBooks pumped up on power
Go to apple.com, and the first thing you’ll see on the website isn’t the gamechanging and ridiculously powerful new MacBook Pros that launched earlier in the week. Instead, you will see an iPhone 13.
This tells you a lot about how important Apple – a company that’s really good at selling things – thinks its new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are to the average user.
To put it bluntly: Apple doesn’t think its biggest story this week is as important as its news over a month ago.
It’s a pragmatic move, though. Everyone in the world wants and needs an iPhone 13. The same can’t be said for the new MacBook Pros.
In fact, I’d go as far as suggesting that fewer than 0.01 per cent of the world has a genuine use-case for the amount of power these MacBooks bring.
Questions have been asked about why Apple is releasing a product designed for the thinnest end of the wedge.
Its response was along the lines of: Apple hopes the power its MacBooks offer will help more users find more use-cases.
I suspect the real reason is closer to ‘‘because we can’’. And that’s fair enough too.
Here are seven things you need to know about the new (2020) MacBook Pros.
M1 Pro and M1 Max = more performance; less efficiency When Apple introduced the Armbased M1 chip last year, it changed a big part of the laptop computing market.
The new lightweight SoC provided great battery life and performance up to a point. However, there was still a clear ‘‘point’’ where Intel’s chips offered more performance, which is why Apple still sold MacBooks with Intel chips inside until last week.
The new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips replace those Intel MacBooks options. It’s a move that demonstrates the confidence Apple has in the new silicone chips it’s manufacturing, and a clear sign the (MacBook) divorce with Intel is final.
The M1 Pro and Max are built using the same 5nm process as the original M1. However, there are some big configuration differences in terms of CPU, GPU and RAM options on the M1 Pro and Max chips.
Both new chips offer up to 10-core CPU with eight performance cores and two efficiency cores, 16-core Neural Engine, Media engine for hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW and a video decode engine.
What the real-life ‘‘differences’’ these numbers mean will be revealed next week when reviewers get their hands on the devices.
But Apple is confident here, claiming the M1 Pro and M1 Max are 1.7 times faster than Intel’s current eight-core Tiger Lake chips. It also suggests the M1 Pro and Max consume 70 per cent less power at the same performance level.
Ports
The new MacBook Pro is littered with ports. There are 3 x USB 4.0 with Thunderbolt 4 support, SDXC card slot, HDMI, and even a MagSafe 3 port. ‘‘Pro’’ users will no doubt welcome this news as the dongle situation was/is a joke with respect to MacBooks.
It’s big news, as once upon a time the future of (Apple) laptops was a portless one. And it still might be (one day). But, for now, the U-turn Apple has performed by bringing ports back to the MacBook Pros is a big ‘‘mea culpa’’ moment. Apple seldom admits that it’s wrong on design.
Just don’t expect this to spread to other Apple products. The iPhone isn’t getting its headphone jack or charging brick back. Ever.
Screen
It looks like a solid upgrade to the screen too. Boasting 254 PPI, 1600 nits of brightness and 120Hz refresh rate on Liquid Retina XDR displays.
Webcam
After a solid 18 months of the business world functioning via Zoom calls, Apple has buckled on its line that a 720p camera with its image signal processing (ISP) is more than enough for a laptop, and 1080p has landed on the MacBook. Finally.
Battery
Apple has quoted the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros as having 11- and 14-hour battery lives for ‘‘wireless web’’.
The important thing to note here isn’t how odd ‘‘wireless web’’ is for a battery metric.
Instead, it’s that the numbers are significantly smaller than the quoted 15- and 17-hour battery lives of last year’s MacBook Air and 12-inch MacBook Pro.
The reason for this, I suspect, is due to the bump in display – 120Hz, 254 PPI, 1600 nits – and, importantly, the setup of the
M1 Pro and Max chips as they only have two efficiency cores (the standard M1 has four).
This is a big deal for an average user. I find that I rarely charge my 12-inch MacBook Pro, and when it is charged, I know that I can use it all day (easily) without worrying about plugging it in – it’s a feature I love.
I also have to concentrate and formulate a plan of attack to make the machine get out of first gear.
That is a long-winded way of saying I am not in the 0.01 per cent of ‘‘Pro’’ users who need the power the new MacBooks offer. And would be worse served by the new MacBooks than I would last year’s MacBooks.
No Touch Bar
Last of all, let’s pause for a moment to mourn the touch bar.
I really liked the touch bar. Yes, I’m aware that makes me a bit of a weirdo, and perhaps the exception that proves the rule.
But, for me, it provided a great way to bridge the gap between keyboard and a full-fat touchscreen laptop without the need to lift my lazy wrists from my desk.
The problem is that most highend MacBook users muchpreferred function keys to the touch bar. And they were/are quite passionate about it. A lot more passionate than those in my camp, it seems. Apple has U-turned here as well. The touch bar is dead. Long live the touch bar.
Pricing
They ain’t cheap. The price of the new laptops ranges from an (almost) reasonable NZ$3399 for the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro chip, through to NZ$10,599.00 for the top-spec 16-inch MacBook Pro with
M1 Max chip.