Apple's march event.
Apple's march event has just finished and it is genuinely one of the most insane launch events ever happen. Its going to have a significant impact on the entire future of tech so here's everything they announced from the lame to the tame to changing the game.
Two New iPhone colours launched.
The first thing that they kicked things off with was two new iPhone colours we've got a bold green for the iPhone 13 and an alpine green for the iPhone 13 pro.
Colour Features.
Apple's falling into a bit of a rhythm with this releasing a whole bunch of safe colours at launch but then as soon as that new iPhone stops feeling like a new iPhone dropping a much bolder colour to reinvigorate interest they kind of need to do this like the whole way that apple operates the way they never put their products on sale the way they release their next generation of phones at almost the same price as the previous gen means that the closer you get to the next iPhone the more that the current generation plummets in sales because people are waiting for it the more.
People who are just unsure whether to pay full price for what is essentially half a generation old tech or to wait for the latest and these new colours are basically apple's way of saying look here's your reward for waiting now's a great time to still buy an iPhone 13.
Fundamentally it just it increases their profits because you've got to remember that the production of a smartphone gets cheaper over the course of that smartphone's lifetime as the cost of components fall and the economies of scale rise and so apple.
iPhone 13, iPhone 14, iPhone SE, Apple's a13, Apple's a13
Would rather you buy an iPhone 13 for full price now than an iPhone 14 in September but it's not just new colours there is also a new iPhone the iPhone SE and it's kind of weird see apple already released an iPhone SE in 2020 it was this 399 entry level.
iPhone that was built to be a really powerful net to to reel in the more budget conscious consumers into apple's ecosystem and so this time around they've basically taken that same phone bumped the price up to 429 and refreshed. It they swapped out the chip set from apple's a13 to apple's a15 which alone should give it about 40 to 50 more performance they've upgraded the glass construction they've added in 5g they've also apparently improved battery efficiency.
How much this needed to happen in a world of smartphones that last six to eight hours of screen on time the fact that their last iPhone SE barely hit four was a major cause for concern and so if you are considering this phone you just hang on and wait to see how much they've actually improved that battery life by also though this is not a great screen.
Poco x4 pro, Samsung's 1100 galaxy tab s8 ultra.
You might remember this poco x4 pro that tested recently that phone is around 280 and for that this display is huge it has a high refresh rate and it has deep blacks and great contrast the 430 iPhone SE screen is a tiny lcd panel with enormous borders and probably not great viewing angles either for a product. That's so geared towards the mass market. It does feel weirdly imbalanced like with the a15 chip you're getting the kind of performance that beats out Samsung's brand new 1100 galaxy tab s8 ultra but other aspects of the phone are right out of 2017.
iPhone SE Colour Features:
That's not even the weirdest part of it see apple's made a significant improvement to this phone right but they've done it in such a way that unless you specifically watch this event you probably wouldn't know the new iPhone SE has the same body as the last one the same design the same colours which would have been really easy to change it even has the same name we know apple we know that apple likes to change things up to make it clear which one's the latest model or at the very least add a new colour.
Nothing externally new why would they bother silently making the phone more expensive to produce my theory is this apple wants you to buy their iPhone 13s not my most groundbreaking bit of detective work obviously the higher end the iPhone you buy the more profit apple makes for that purchase.
The last thing that apple would want is to make a cheaper phone that pulled you away from that hence why they've made this as unglamorous as possible but at the same time the reason that they're still making sure that it's up to date in terms of tech is that if you're not going to stretch to a full priced iPhone 13 apple would still rather have you in the apple ecosystem and buying apple services than letting you go buy a shell. They still need to have a budget competitive 5g offering.
Apple iPad.
Apple is usually pretty good at keeping their products simple but their iPad lineup is very intimidating to navigate it's not like the iPhone where you have the mini the normal size one and then right at the top the pros with Pads you have the normal sized iPad at the bottom then above that is the mini which is a premium iPad that's small the iPad air which is a premium iPad that's normal size but focused on being thin and then.
The iPad pro which is the premium iPad with extra power user features and on top of that some of these iPad support the apple pencil others don't some of them support apple's magic keyboard some don't I was browsing their site earlier and every single one of their current iPad is actually a different generation there's thought to be a better labelling system like couldn't you just label them by the year they were last updated in anyways the new iPad.
iPad pro.
That we just got is an update to the iPad air and it's somehow managed to be both a simple safe refresh but at the same time kind of unbelievable see the way that apple tends to update their iPad is that they start with the ipad pro because obviously pros want the latest features early and then over the course of the next year they update the rest of their lineup to keep parity with it.
Features:
In 2021 apple upgraded their iPad pros to come with their own custom built laptop class m1 chip-set which is about 50 more powerful than the a15 that sits in their iPhone 13s and now almost a year later they've just brought that same m1 chip-set to the iPad air alongside a few new software features and a faster USB c board so on one hand m1 is like one and a half years old now this is in no way revolutionary but on the other hand this upgrade has brought the price of an m1 power tablet way down from 800 to 599.
The only potential catch is that while there is a 64 gigabyte base model and a 256 gig top end model there is no middle option presumably to push you towards the 729 256 gigabyte one but now it's time to talk about the truly shocking stuff because while they were on the subject of their m1 chips apple also just announced m1 ultra.
When seeing the specs of this things came this close to spitting out my drink so in November 2020 apple announced that they were going to start to pivot away from using Intel chips to power their machines to using apple's own chips starting with the m1 and there are some obvious reasons for this it gives apple control over.
How much improvement they want to make each year it massively increases their profit margins by removing Intel as the middle man but the biggest improvement that you notice as a consumer is the ridiculous level of efficiency.
Mac-book.
This mac-book right here is the first mac-book owned that's powered by an apple chip and it is the best tech the machine is completely silent. It has literally zero hiccups five times the battery life of my Intel based mac-book thanks to the m1s being based off super efficient mobile phone processors and it edits multiple layers of 4k video with less lag than my five times more expensive full fat Intel based mac pro.
That said apple has just released the most souped up version of this m1 chip in 2020 we had the original m1 in 2021 we saw the m1 pro with two times the performance of that and the m1 max with 3.5 times the performance of that.
Features:
In 2022 we have m1 ultra what apple has effectively done here is built a system such that you can attach two of these m1 max chips together in such a way that they're saying there are no efficiency reductions and you get a straight up doubling of the CPU performance and the GPU performance so compared to the original m1 they are saying that this is eight times faster.
Because it's originated from a mobile chip 65 more power efficient than an equivalent desktop class chip and the first machine to show the whole thing off mac studio basically a mac mini but like well thick this thing is going to have up to 128 gigabytes of ram and 8 terabytes ssd this will be the most powerful.
Apple silicon powered machine ever and based on my experience of apple's first party optimised apps it is going to absolutely fly and before.
How impressive this machine is we're talking something the size of a salad bowl it fits underneath your display it's almost completely silent and yet it is cranking out enough performance to power four of apple's highest m 6k displays and a 4k tv on top of that this thing can run 18 streams of 8k pores video at the same time they're saying that the graphics on this thing are as powerful as the most powerful GPU that you can get on the market while using a third of the power and probably.
How much of a leap forward this is is the fact that the fully spec version of this tiny little micro PC at eight thousand dollars is eighty percent faster than the highest end fifty thousand dollar twenty eight core Intel xeon mac pro.
There are two things you should bear in mind though. One is that apple didn't specify where these performance numbers came from. They are usually pretty bang on with their estimates i would imagine that they've done most of their testing using apple's own first party apps which are properly optimised to make the most of their m1 chips like final cut pro.
For example these first party apps do perform staggeringly well with apple's own chips it's the third-party apps like the entire adobe editing suite and the whole load of games that don't perform so optimally and the second thing is it's not really a caveat but it's more of a reminder that this new lineup apple's creating the studio set of products is not their top tier lineup like even though they are comparing themselves to big fat desktops.
Apple's mac studio.
The way to think about apple's mac studio is really as the mid-range part of their future lineup because the fact that they've managed to build this ability to be able to just chain apple chips together like their pieces of Lego makes me pretty sure that when we do see the pro versions of this lineup.
Later this year that they will completely dwarf even this one so if you're not in any hurry and you do want the best of the best i would still hang on and to go with this to fit this mid-range studio lineup there is also a new screen in the same way that this mac studio will fit below their mac pro this studio display fits below their current top tier pro display xdr.
It's a really well thought out product instead of being five thousand dollars.It's 15.99 the stand is built in this time instead of costing an extra thousand plus it has a built-in webcam unlike the pro display and apparently.
Apple's best set of speakers ever to comb the screen the only caveats being that it's smaller it's not as bright and it's 5k resolution instead of 6k but it's still a high-end spec and i could totally see this thing becoming the easy to recommend compromise screen.
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