There were a few interesting things talked about at the Apple event on Tuesday.
A few smaller announcements but a couple that were pretty big given some of the things going on around them.
Let’s talk about the small stuff first.
PODCASTS:
The podcasts update is pretty welcome. The app itself has always felt like an odd app out compared to Music and to me the update puts it in parity, finally.
The ability to support your favorite creator is nice too since there are more people than ever doing content creation and for a good portion of them it’s their full time job.
AIRTAGS:
I’ve long contemplated getting a Tile since I have a tendency to misplace my keys and a small bag I use for the gym but I’ve always held off because I really don’t want or need yet another app that’s tied to just one specific thing. Plus they’ve always seemed a little big and bulky. Too bulky for my keys. Airtags take those pain points away.
Find My has always sort of been this weird part anti theft for your Apple stuff and part friend locator but never really useful. Its one of those things that everyone uses but never really talks about. I’m glad to see it finally be more useful aside from locating your Apple stuff as it’s something that’s been very underrated about iPhones and Apple stuff in general for a really long time.
Apple’s approach to privacy is also key here. Nothing is identifiable to either the user (unless it’s your thing) nor Apple. The Unwanted Tag detection along with the audible alert ensures another user is not unwillingly tracked but the big thing is the rotating identifier. It’s a great feature that allows other users to find and notify the owner that a lost item is found, along with its location, so it can be retrieved. Of course the finder could notify the owner so long as the owner left a way to be contacted in the tag. This is one of those things that, in 2021, sets Apple apart from everyone else and makes me willing to pay the Apple tax vs something like the Tile, even if it is cheaper.
APPLE TV:
I admittedly haven’t watched a lot of things on Apple TV+. The Morning Show and For All Mankind are basically it. But that crack at the Jets in the Ted Lasso trailer? Priceless.
That said the price for the Apple TV box is starting to border on the absurd, at least for the HD version. This thing should start to be in the $99 price range at most but certainly not $150. Trust me, I have two of them in my house. I love them and would probably replace them but only because I’ve owned them in the past.
Perhaps, given the feature set for the 4k box, a $200 price tag is justifiable. The most notable new feature, that as far as I can tell for now is only on the 4k box, is the color balance. Setting the proper color according to industry standards allows us, the viewer, to see tv and film as the artist intended. Most TV panels are not color accurate and most people don’t bother to calibrate them properly if at all. It’s probably the best thing Apple has done tot he Apple TV box in a while and I’m hoping this makes its way down to the HD box as well.
The remote update is a godsend. Glad to see they replaced the menu button with a back button since it was misleading in the current way tvOS works. That power button will be useful too, assuming it works with literally every TV, as I no longer use my cable box for anything, and my TV remote is basically a glorified power button at this point. It’s also interesting they brought back the circle from the original Apple TV remote. Functionally it looks like it should be better but lets see what happens in the real world.
MACS:
The colors are nice and really harken back to the iMacs of yesteryear. The old, original, colorful G3 ones from 1998 when the Mac was meant to be more fun and user friendly. I love the new square/rectangle design too. If the colors look back to the fun colors of 98, the screen looks back to the initial redesign of 2002. Between that and the fact the screen is once again a regular 24 inch screen and 4k on top of it. The 24 inch screen is still small but at least its a standard size making paring it with a second display much more palatable in a multimonitor setup.
The magnetic power cable is interesting and I can only imagine removing the brick from inside had something to so with the thinness of the new iMac, which seems not too far off from the current MacBook Pro. The ethernet port on the power brick is definitely a neat thing and I’m glad they didn’t just force wifi on those of use that still prefer or need a cable. Even though this is something that’s been possible since the launch of the M1 MacBook Pro and Air, it’s nice to see Apple (sort of) bring gaming to the desktop if only in the casual sense now that the M1 is on the desktop as well. It’s also nice to see they finally updated the magic keyboards for TouchID. It’s one of those #Finally moments but I can’t help but wonder if this was one of those Intel limitations they either didn’t want to work around or couldn’t for security reasons. Speaking of M1 and Intel…
Tell me your competition sucks without telling me your competition sucks. That’s exactly what Apple did by mentioning the previous iMac design. While they mentioned thermals at the November 10th Event, they never make a big deal of it. With the Air, it was silent and fanless. For the Mini they mention thermals but only in the “it stays cool so it can run at max power longer” kind of way. For the MacBook Pro it was about battery life. All of it was typical marketing speak and never, really, do they directly mention thermals or power draw. This time though they made sure to make their point and went right for the thermals right out of the gate, essentially saying “Our previous chips wouldn’t let us do this because their design is archaic and power hungry, and as a result they couldn’t get their thermals under control.” Oof. Not only did Apple just do a great job in revealing a new product design, but they also gave a masterclass in throwing shade.
IPAD PRO:
There’s no denying that the new display is awesome the new front camera tracking system is incredible to have on something like an iPad and I there’s no doubt I’d love to have that on my phone. USB-C now including Thunderbolt is a welcome addition as well and helps give it that feature parity with macs and PCs for transferring large amounts of data from one device to another should the need arise.
The real story here though is the M1 now in the iPad Pro as well as Macs. Having an M1 in an iPad people are going to immediately want to compare it to a Surface or start to request that Apple put macOS on there. And let’s not forget about the conspiracy theories that this is happening even though Apple says it isn’t. Apple says they’ll never bring macOS to the iPad. I still believe that. Why? Because performance on a Surface outside of the same basic tasks you’d do on an iPad sucks. Anything more and the thing starts to sound like a jet engine and slows down. Which brings us right back to thermals. Just because the hardware can do something doesn’t mean it should. What the iPad Pro will leverage on the M1 is it’s GPU. It’ll continue to be great for artists and content creators that need small and light devices that are capable of things a laptop can do without the overhead and bulk of a laptop. It’ll eat up all those CPU cycles, don’t worry. The screen resolution will help with that. And man is that display going to be gorgeous.
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