One more thing, live: Apple will present new Macs with iPhone chips | Technology

Macs will be on sale “today”, apparently, they will ship next week.

Apple prides itself on its environmental skills, and there doesn’t seem to be anything quite as bittersweet as dropping chargers out of the box:

And now the flagship: the new 13 ”MacBook Pro. “Our most popular and affordable MacBook Pro,” apparently.

Shruti Haldea comes up to introduce the machine, which, again, looks almost the same as before.

It’s 2.8 times faster than before, apparently, with a GPU 5 times faster, and when compared to “the best-selling Windows laptop in its class,” it’s apparently “up to 3 times faster.”

“And even with all this incredible computing power, it offers up to 20 hours of video playback,” the longest battery life ever seen on a Mac. “Software developers can compile 4 times more code on one charge,” and improved microphones with a better signal-to-noise ratio will mean cleaner sound. (But again, there is no new camera, just a new camera processor.)

The “same incredibly portable design”, with the same … controversial Touch Bar, starting at $ 1299.

Here is the spec sheet:

Next up: the new Mac Mini.

Again, it looks almost identical to the previous generation, we are not here for hardware redesigns, but it has a 3x faster CPU and a 6x increase in graphics performance.

“If you compare the Mac Mini to the best-selling desktop in its price range, it is one-tenth the size and up to 5 times faster,” they tell us. You can even run the Apple screen in 6K resolution. Did you know 6K was a thing?

It starts at $ 699 and here is the spec sheet:

Here’s the spec sheet for the new MacBook Air. The quiet design is still the impressive feature of the title, I think:

The first is a MacBook Air! “It will completely redefine what a thin and light laptop can do,” says Ternus, handing us Laura Metz, Mac Product Line Manager.

It looks almost identical to the last generation MacBook Air, but is “almost 3.5 times faster,” says Metz. “With the world’s fastest integrated graphics, Air delivers nearly 5 times faster graphics and, for the first time, you can edit multiple 4K video streams without missing a frame.”

It’s “up to three times faster than the fastest laptop in its class” apparently, which is a mouthful. But also faster than “98% of laptops sold last year,” which is … also a bit of a confusing statement.

However, there is something really new: the laptop has no fan at all. Its battery can last up to 18 hours for video. And it has a new front-facing video camera… chip. However, the camera itself is the same if I read between the lines, but the image is processed differently.

It starts, says Metz, at “just $ 999.”

Now the big question: we know what will be inside the new computers. But what will the new computers be?

Next, Craig Federighi, the head of Apple’s software teams who pranks parents. You’re here to introduce macOS Big Sur, the latest version of the operating system, and talk about how well it works with the M1 chip.

A lot of this has already been announced, but it says that Safari will be up to 1.9 times faster, the Mac will be able to better manage battery life, and it will do fancy things with the new RAM to stop having to copy data to different parts of the computer. .

Federighi also assures users that their applications will continue to work. Some applications will be “universal”, made for the M1 chip from scratch; some will run through “Rosetta”, which allows older applications to run on new hardware, “sometimes even faster” than before. Besides that, the system can run iPhone and iPad apps natively, between us and HBO Max listed.

This is followed by a sweet video from a group of independent Mac developers, all raving about how much they enjoyed working on their dev units. “It’s amazing to see developers take advantage of the incredible performance and features of the M1 and Big Sur,” says Federighi, returning to Ternus.

Here is the overview of the M1:

The M1 also has the GPU, or graphics processor, built in. With eight more cores, it offers twice the performance of the “latest notebook GPU,” he says, leading to “the world’s fastest integrated graphics.”

There is more! A 16-core “neural engine” and a “secure enclave,” two technologies introduced in iPhones, for dedicated AI processing and high security.

Ternus gives the floor to Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, to discuss the details. It’s going to get technical, but I’ll do my best to translate.

The M1 is a “system on a chip,” or SOC, like its ancestors at Apple. That means a ton of features that were spread across a laptop motherboard are now bundled together on a single chip, saving money and space, and increasing efficient communications between all features.

Srouji says that the M1 core is the “world’s fastest CPU core”, with four of them and four other “high-efficiency cores.” That “world’s fastest” claim is going to come under great scrutiny, but Apple’s chips have withstood such claims before.

It also, he says, offers the best “performance per watt” in the world, backed by a beautiful, totally unlabeled graphic.

A short montage of celebrities, activists, musicians, and filmmakers (and Lisa Simpson) all working on their Macs leads us to John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering.

“Now is the time for Mac to take a giant leap,” says Ternus. “At the center of this effort is Apple Silicon. It’s at the heart of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and now we want to bring it to the Mac. “

The first Apple Silicon chip is called the M1, Ternus reveals. “It’s an amazingly capable chip and ushers in an entirely new era for the Mac.”

And off we go, cheery pop ringing over shots of a still-empty Apple Park leading to Tim Cook, standing in the cavernous Apple staff cafeteria. “It’s amazing to think that this is our third big event in the last two months,” says Cook. “We are at an incredible rate of new product launches, delivering more products this fall than ever.”

Cook runs some of those launches: new iPads, iPhones, operating systems, and more. “But there’s just … ‘one more thing,'” he says. “Time to talk about Mac.”

The latest events have unfolded at a breakneck pace, so we don’t expect to be here for much longer than an hour. But that pace can make it difficult to keep up with everything that is being said, so please forgive us if we don’t get all the details!

Hello and welcome to The Guardian Live Blog of Apple’s third and final Fall 2020 press event. We will start at 10 a.m. M., Pacific Time, which is 6 p.m. M., UK time, and at 5 a.m. M. In New South Wales, if you get up early for the latest news.

We hope to see an update on all Apple laptops today as the company finally pulls the trigger on its long-planned divorce with Intel. Expect a lot of discussion about “blazing fast” computers and the peace of mind that your software will continue to work.

However, that’s unlikely that’s all we get, so keep an eye out for a goodie bag of other products, including, potentially, the launch of Apple’s “AirTag” object tracking hardware.

If you’d like to watch it live, Apple is streaming the event on YouTube, which I’ve also incorporated above. Otherwise, stay here for the next hour. Be honest: it’s not like you have a better place to be.