August tends to be right in the middle of the summer doldrums, the time when everyone goes on vacation and so news – including tech announcements – are not much and far away. Then again, 2020 is not your average year, so maybe it’s not a shock that this week saw a departure from the norm with Apple announcing a surprisingly substantial update for the iMac.
My colleague Jason Snell has already explained what the upgrade to Apple’s popular desktop means for the future of that product, but I think it’s worth taking a moment to see what we can extrapolate from this update and learn. about Apple’s future other devices. Apple is no stranger to introducing updates in one device that eventually migrates to the rest of its lineup, even from the Mac to the iPhone and iPad and vice versa, and this iMac update is certainly no exception.
Your face remains in the picture
We have all become more familiar with the webcams in our devices, seeing the current world environment where many of us spend endless hours at video conferencing. Apple was recently taken on board for the poor quality of the front-facing cameras on its Macs, and the company seems to have taken the particular criticism to heart with the iMac update. It no longer has a lean 720p webcam, but now has the same 1080p FaceTime HD camera as the iMac Pro. This means that desktop webcams should have significantly higher quality than those on the company’s laptops, as it does not quite measure up to the cameras on their mobile devices.
CallThe 27-inch iMac has an enhanced Facetime camera, so your video calls will actually be clear.
But the webcam is only half the story. The company makes use of the T2 chip it contains in most modern Macs to enhance the image processing of that camera, and adds a little extra intelligence that will hopefully make the quality even better.
I have a hard time imagining that we’ll see another Mac with a 720p webcam below (at least for the Macs that include it – the Mac mini and Mac Pro are on their own). Given that the 27-inch iMac is almost the latest Mac model to take up the T2 and that the transition to Apple Silicon is about to begin, any Mac that goes ahead will be some sort of Apple -designed chip, so it seems a given that this enhanced image processing will be standard.
Judgment Day
Speaking of the T2 chip, its importance should not be underestimated. Apple has been developing its own custom coprocessors in Intel-based Macs for years, and it seems clear that it is taking on an increasing amount of interest in the system architecture. Not only does it handle the image processing for the said webcam, but it also handles security, encrypted storage, audio processing and video conversion.
iFixit Apple’s T2 chip is used to process images from the FaceTime camera.
Somehow, the T2 is the predecessor of the Apple silicon transition, and handles just about anything not covered by the CPU or the GPU. And that tells us all we need to know about Apple’s plans for Macs based on its own silicon: systems that are specifically tuned to enable features we’ve not seen before, because general purpose chips can not satisfy what Apple wanted to do.
Machine learning in particular has become an important part of Apple’s technology strategy, and being able to use all the tasks it uses through a chip specifically designed for that purpose will have a major impact on the bottom line. for all of Apple’s products – as we’ve seen on both the iPad and iPhone.
Nano nano
Among the biggest improvements in this latest iMac is the ability to opt for a nano-texture display that delivers significant gloss reduction without compromising quality of origin. It’s not cheap: adding the 27-inch display costs $ 500. That said, it was previously only available on Apple’s very high 32-inch ProDisplay XDR for an extra $ 1000.
CallThe nano-textured glass made its debut with Apple’s Pro Display XDR. It is now an option on the 27-inch iMac. Could we see it coming on MacBooks, iPads and iPhones?
As with any technology, the nano-texture option is likely to become cheaper over time as Apple raises the scale of production and improves its processes. That it is not difficult to imagine that this will eventually make its way into the rest of the company’s lineup. And probably not just MacBooks, but even mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. While it is certainly easier to adapt these devices to avoid glare, one of the major challenges with their use is in direct sunlight; the nano-texture may prevent this.
Is this technology good enough to become standard in Apple’s device lineup? Probably not in the short term, but as it becomes available to more and more users, the company will surely be able to get an idea of how well it performs in all kinds of conditions. So it is very conceivable that we may once again enjoy this feature on all our Apple devices and chuckling on the days when we suffer from terrible glare.
