Thoughts on the Apple’s Upcoming “One More Thing” Event and Apple Silicon Macs

To everyone’s surprise on Monday, Apple announced the event fo rate Apple Silicon Macs, titled “ One More Thing”. According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg Business week, there will be 3x laptops announces. 1x 13” MacBook Air, a 13” MacBook Pro, and a 16” MacBook Pro. Apple listening to the Talk Show with John Gruber and Jason Snell this weekend, I’m pretty excited about the potential performance gains on these new laptops. I’ve been using the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard at work and it makes the iPad into a great Hybrid device, but its still no substitute for MacOS. The Mac is just a more complicated and capable operating system. I’m use MacOS as my primary operating at work and am looking forward to the design changes in Big Sur to make it feel more like iOS and iPadOS. I see the iPhone, iPad, and Mac as a computing continuum now. It’s going to be exciting to have the Mac on the same hardware as my iPhone and iPad, which always feel like they’re way more capable hardware than the operating system can take advantage of. I think the easier thing to do would be for Apple to milk Intel until they couldn’t anymore because Mac Sales are at an all-time high, so this move to push forward into their own silicon is either hubris or confidence in their ability to execute. I think that it’s the latter. Here are a few things I’ll be looking for next week

1. Power: What are the power advantages over an Intel Mac? Will they be able to Mac Intel’s single and multi-core performance? Apple talked up the chipsets power a lot during WWDC over its energy efficiency and the iPad’s A13X and the iPhone 12’s A14 are notoriously powerful. It will be interesting to see those chipset designs scaled up to a machine with a bigger battery.
2. Battery Life: Will there be any battery life improvements? Personally, I don’t care too much if the MacBook Pro gets really any more battery efficient right now. Its a pro-machine, I’m more concerned about carrying around a more powerful machine. The MacBook Air getting more powerful would always be welcome as well.
3. Graphics: Intel’s graphics have…never been great. I do wonder particularly on the 16” MacBook Pro what they do with graphics performance. The iPhone and iPad A14 and A13X both have great graphics performance for mobile processors. I’m reasonably confident that they can match and exceed Intel’s integrated graphics, but what about AMD and on the Windows side…Nvidia? I’m hoping that the 13” and 16” end up with the same graphics chipsets. It would be really awesome to only have to pick a screen size this time.
4. iPad and iPhone apps: Apple showed off being able to run iPhone and iPad apps natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Supposedly there are no code modifications, but I’m sure most developers are going to want to run their Macs through Catalyst to make them more Mac-native. I wonder how many apps will be native when the machines presumably come out later this month or next month.
5. Rosetta 2: What is going to be the performance hit running non-native apps in Rosetta? Is it going to be like running a Virtual Machine layer? I can’t imagine you’ll want to run a resource-intensive application in Rosetta…no matter how good it is, like Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD, Premiere Pro, etc.
6. Windows Support: *Gasp* Yeah, this one is boring, but important to a lot of people. Apple demo’d running Windows 10 in virtualization in Parallels Desktop in Big Sur. I vaguely remember that them mentioning that Parallels was using Apple’s built-in virtualization technology instead of building their own? I have to imagine if that’s the case there could be some hardware support for that in Apple’s silicon chipset. Maybe that could make virtualization less of a performance hit than years past? I dunno. I’m wildly speculating at this point because I’m tired at this point in the evening, but regardless, Windows support is going to make or break Apple silicon Macs for a lot of people.
7. Touchscreens : Will the Apple Silicon Macs have Touchscreens? I think that makes a bit of sense, especially with the larger touch targets in Big Sur. Windows has at them for years and it hasn’t been the end of the world. I bet if you asked Windows users, most of them would say they like having them on their clamshell laptops even if its not a primary input for them.
8. Touch Bar: Will the Touch Bar continue going forward with the MacBook Pro machines? Some people like myself like it, but I could live without it. Given the choice between a Touch Bar and a Touch screen, I would honestly rather have a touchscreen Mac.
9. FaceID: Will we finally get FaceID on Macs this year? I could see the MacBook Air sticking with TouchID to save money, but maybe its time for FaceID to come to the Mac? Surface has had Windows Hello for years now. It really is bizarre that the Mac doesn’t have FaceID right now. Its borderline magical when you open a Surface device and it just automatically unlocks the device for you.
10. One more thing: What could this be? My hope: MagSafe coming back to Macs even if it means having *gasp* more than 5x ports on the computer.

So, those are some thoughts I have about the event next week. I’m really looking forward to seeing what Apple announces next Tuesday. I think this has been a rather exciting year for Apple software and hardware. Hopefully this will cap it off on a high note

-Hobie 🦖