Looking back at the April 20 Spring Loaded Apple event, of all the things that have been introduced, the new 24-inch colourful iMacs are what piqued my interest the most. And as usual with Apple in recent years, I got my regular dose of excitement mixed with frustration. Of course, some of the things I find annoying may be non-issues for many other people. But the event was more than just new iMacs, so let’s go over the main products.
1. AirTags
Finally, the long-rumoured accessory was unveiled. It’s an inexpensive tracking device with a user-replaceable battery, two features I didn’t expect to associate with an Apple product. I’m assuming you saw the event and know already how AirTags work. You can put them in or on the personal items you want to keep track of, and use the Find My app to track them. One cool privacy-related feature is that you can’t use an AirTag to surreptitiously track someone else. As Apple’s AirTag page explains:
AirTag is designed to discourage unwanted tracking. If someone else’s AirTag finds its way into your stuff, your iPhone will notice it’s traveling with you and send you an alert. After a while, if you still haven’t found it, the AirTag will start playing a sound to let you know it’s there.
Of course, if you happen to be with a friend who has an AirTag, or on a train with a whole bunch of people with AirTag, don’t worry. These alerts are triggered only when an AirTag is separated from its owner.
AirTags are a nifty gadget. I don’t really need one, but given its low price I wanted to buy one anyway. Sometimes it’s after you own an accessory that you stumble on a use case for it. Unfortunately, the coolest aspect of the AirTag experience — Precision Finding, that interface that points you to the exact location of your AirTag — is made possible by Ultra Wideband technology, which is currently available only on the iPhones 11 and 12.
I guess that if you own an older device or another device that doesn’t have the U1 chip, you could still be able to track an AirTag via the Find My app, just as you can track your other devices. But you’re definitely not getting the best experience.
2. Updated Apple TV 4K
If you want a short and sweet summary of what’s new, Ars Technica is your friend. Highlight №1 is that it’s powered by an A12 Bionic chip (the previous model featured an A10X chip), which offers an increased GPU and video performance, making it a better device for playing games, something Apple Arcade subscribers will be happy to hear. Highlight №2 is that it comes with a redesigned remote, and this is probably something 90% of Apple TV owners will be happy to hear, given the amount of criticism faced by the previous touchpad remote design.
I personally care very little about the Apple TV ecosystem. To make the most of an Apple TV, first I would have to buy a much better TV than the one I currently own. And given how little time my wife and I spend watching TV, both a new TV set and an Apple TV 4K (or HD) would just be a waste of money.
At $179 for the 32 GB model, and $199 for the 64 GB model, Apple TV remains one of the most expensive products in its category. Apple insists on offering a premium device with sophisticated features (High Frame Rate HDR, colour calibration using the iPhone, etc.), and that’s fine, yet I can’t help but feel that these only appeal to a niche audience. Most regular folks I know [Content warning: anecdotal evidence] simply look for inexpensive, get-the-job-done devices they can connect to their TV sets to watch something on Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu.
I didn’t particularly mind the old remote design. I held one once or twice and I remember thinking it didn’t look or feel that bad. But the new design, from what I can see on Apple’s site, seems better thought-out.
3. The new, colourful, 24-inch M1 iMacs
I’m not going to lie: when I first saw the introductory video during the Spring Loaded event, I had a big smile on my face. Finally Apple was bringing back something from their past that was worth recapturing: computers that come in a varied selection of vivid, beautiful colours. A touch of whimsical fun after years of basically silver-and-black Macs.
As the new iMacs were presented in more detail, though, that big smile progressively faded. Mind you, I’m not entirely disappointed, and part of me still wants to put one of these on my desk (at the moment I’m torn: yellow, orange, or purple?). But when you look past the bright colours and sleek design, you start to encounter a few details which — for me — are irritating compromises.
Thin or bust
Apple has created what’s possibly the thinnest all-in-one desktop computer, and I’m sure they’re still patting themselves on the back. But was it necessary to produce a computer that is so thin that its power supply has to be external? I find that rather inelegant. My 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac is less than 3 cm thicker at its thickest point, and has an internal power supply. I believe that Apple could have easily built a new iMac with this new, flat design, by making it 2.5 cm thicker and putting the power supply inside. It still would have retained a thin and elegant profile, and Apple would have spared us the external brick.
The year of MagSafe on the desktop
I find it a bit ironic that these new iMacs have what is essentially a MagSafe-like proprietary power connector, and current MacBooks (where such a magnetic connector would certainly prove more useful) do not. I suppose they chose a magnetic connector for the new iMacs because their chassis is so thin that inserting a regular power plug would exert too much force on it. (Also, a regular power plug may be simply too deep for these very thin iMacs). On the other hand, I hope those magnets are strong, because in case of an accidental pull on the power cable, iMacs are not laptop computers with a battery — they would be abruptly switched off.
I know, I know this connector was designed to be strong enough, exactly because it’s for a desktop computer and therefore wasn’t designed to behave like the MagSafe connector on Mac laptops, but still, I wouldn’t have minded a kind of security mechanism to keep the connector in place when plugged in, like in a breech-lock system for mounting camera lenses, where you have an outer ring that rotates and secures the lens to the camera mount.
Port austerity
Connections-wise, these new iMacs offer a surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) restricted selection. At best, you get two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports (USB‑C connector), and Gigabit Ethernet (on the external power supply brick, in case you were wondering). At worst, you get two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports and that’s it. No SD Card slot, not even one single USB‑A port. I suspect it’s because such connections would require a bigger motherboard or even a slightly thicker chassis. And these machines are essentially MacBooks in a desktop form factor. At this point I’m almost surprised they still have a 3.5mm headphone jack, to be honest.
From stripped-down to mmkay
The new iMacs come in three configurations, but I wouldn’t call them good — better — best.
- Rather, the cheap-and-atrocious $1,299 low-tier configuration is available in fewer colours, has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash storage, and the GPU in the M1 SoC is limited to 7 cores like the M1 MacBook Air. It only has two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports. It also comes with just a regular Magic Keyboard, not even one with Touch ID.
- The barely-good-enough middle tier $1,499 iMac has an 8‑core GPU, two more USB 3 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, but still has 8 GB and 256 GB of flash storage.
- The finally-decent top-tier $1,699 iMac has features that, in comparison, would have made it the middle-tier iMac just a few years ago. It’s exactly like the $1,499 iMac but this time you get a 512 GB SSD.
Put it another way, the $200 difference between the low-tier and the middle-tier iMacs buys you 1 GPU core, three more ports, Touch ID on the included keyboard, and more colour choices. The $200 difference between the middle-tier and top-tier iMacs buys you… 256 GB more of internal storage. As you can see, when it comes to base RAM and storage, once again we’re reunited with good old stingy Apple.
I know there is a market for the low-tier iMacs. They’re for people with restricted budget, or maybe for bulk solutions in an education environment. The monolithic nature of the M1 chip doesn’t appear to allow much room for meaningful differentiation when it comes to offering various configuration options for the same machine.
That’s why these three iMac tiers feel so contrived to me. It’s not an additive configuration model, where you start with a decent base machine (the good tier) and you add meaningful features to it to create the better tier machine, and then you add some more perks to end up offering the best tier machine. With the new iMac you have a subtractive configuration model: you start by what is essentially a reasonable configuration by 2021 standards — the most expensive $1,699 iMac — and then remove functionalities from it to offer two more lower tiers which do cost less, yes, but also leave you with a machine with the bare minimum of ports, performance, memory and storage — and neither of these latter features are upgradable down the road.
I realise that computers are de facto household appliances by now, but this trend towards devices with immutable innards once you pick a configuration at the time of purchase still feels annoying and ridiculous to me. Computers aren’t devices you replace every year. Your needs may change over time. If there’s something you constantly need more of as time goes by is storage space. Internal drives should always be upgradable. Yes, yes, You can always add external storage. And have a USB or Thunderbolt port permanently or semi-permanently occupied? That wouldn’t be so bad if Apple made computers with more ports. Memory should always be upgradable, too, but I’m afraid that this cause is lost for good today, what with the internal structure of the M1 SoC.
The bang, the buck, and the performance
If you look at the technical specifications, the new iMacs are essentially M1 Mac minis with a good-quality display attached. If you already own a good-quality display, and if you can look past the unquestionable attractiveness of the new M1 iMacs, then probably the rational choice is to get an M1 Mac mini. A base $699 Mac mini has the same 8‑core CPU, 8‑core GPU M1 chip; the same 8 GB of base RAM and 256 GB base storage; the same two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports, two USB 3 ports (but with the still-versatile USB‑A connector) and Gigabit Ethernet as the $1,499 M1 iMac, plus of course an HDMI port.
Sure, the new iMacs come in an attractive package, and perhaps you can’t find a 24-inch 4.5K display with the same quality and integrated 1080p HD webcam as the one in the iMac for $800. But if you need a machine that delivers the same performance, and you already own a display you’re comfortable with, then the base M1 Mac mini very much looks like a better deal.
Less blurred lines
It is abundantly clear by now that the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon architecture is being carried out by releasing a first wave of refreshed products all revolving around the M1 SoC, and that such products are to be considered consumer-oriented lineups. At the moment, though, I’m even more intrigued by what Apple hasn’t released yet. It doesn’t take much acuity to predict that the second wave of Mac computers will be the professional line, and will revolve around an even more powerful Apple-designed SoC.
And another thought: how much more powerful? Consider: the current performance of an M1 ‘consumer’ Mac is already an order of magnitude better than the performance of many Intel machines in the ‘pro’ market. Apple has to produce a chip that will outperform the M1 by a perceptible margin — CPU-wise, GPU-wise, or both — otherwise why bother getting a ‘pro’ machine in the first place?
So perhaps, when the Intel-to-Apple-Silicon transition is over, we may see again that clear distinction between consumer and professional Macs we first witnessed in the early 2000s, with PowerPC G3 Macs in the consumer slot, and G4/G5 CPUs powering more professional Macs. And like in the PowerPC era, we’ll be back to having a simpler, more clear-cut distinction between consumer-class Macs and pro Macs based on the chip class and denomination. These Macs have M1 CPUs, so they belong to this tier. These Macs have (M1X? M2?) CPUs, so they’re in a higher tier. People won’t really have to analyse spec sheets to assess how powerful a Mac is and what it can really do for them.
4. The new iPad Pros
Unless I’ve missed something, the main new features of the new iPad Pros are:
- They’re now powered by an M1 chip.
- The 12.9‑inch model is equipped with a much improved display with technology derived from the Pro Display XDR.
- The iPad’s main connector has been upgraded from USB‑C to support Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4.
- The cellular models offer 5G wireless data.
So fast, it’s ridiculous
For me, the iPad Pro is like that friend who is already so affluent you don’t know what to gift them for their birthday. What do you give to those who already have everything? In the case of the iPad Pros, the answer apparently is, More of what they already have.
In Faster than its own OS, the article I published after the release of the 2018 iPad Pros, I wrote:
But ever since I started hearing this argument [that these iPad Pros are so powerful they can outperform most PCs and even MacBook Pros], a question that’s been nagging me — a question I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to — is this: All this staggering performance… to do what, exactly?
And:
Many power iPad users seem to want this device to become more like a Surface. A 2‑in‑1 device. A shape-shifting tablet that can act like a real laptop when needed. They require a versatility that the iPad, in my opinion, cannot provide yet because it still has an operating system that treats it like a big iPhone, most of the time. iPad is this hybrid entity with the hardware capabilities of a traditional computer, and the mind (software) of a smartphone. That’s one part of the identity crisis. The other part is that iPad still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. And on the hardware front, it has definitely grown up now.
iOS, in its current form, is still inadequate for the iPad. To truly shine as a tablet, as a portable powerhouse, iPad needs adequate software. It needs apps that really take advantage of all these unparalleled tech specs and hardware capabilities. But it also needs an operating system that’s more thoughtfully tailored to the iPad’s format and user experience. Sure, iOS has become more iPad-friendly with the last two releases, but it just can’t keep up with the hardware. The iPad should have started to have its iOS branch or flavour years ago — I’d say around the time of the third- or fourth-generation iPad at the latest. Just as it makes sense for the AppleTV to have tvOS and for the Watch to have watchOS, it would make even more sense if the iPad had its custom iOS with controls, behaviours, user interface, that treated it like the powerful tablet that it is.
Apologies for the extended quote, but after seeing the presentation of these new M1-powered iPad Pros, these very same thoughts and observations came again to mind. After three years we now have iPad Pros with yet another astounding hardware boost, and essentially the same software capabilities of three years ago.
I feel that, with the iPad, Apple is increasingly painting themselves into a corner. There comes a moment where they feel compelled to come out with an upgrade, and since hardware is what Apple does best, here we have new iPad Pros with significant hardware improvements. But in terms of perceived performance in real-life use we’ve already reached a ceiling with the iPad. I could be wrong, but I’d love to see a use case, a set of circumstances, where a user really notices the difference between the previous A12Z Bionic chip in the 2018 iPad Pros and the current M1 chip.
What the iPad needs is a leap forward in the software department. This is where a fundamental redesign is needed, in my opinion. An iOS-based variant that starts treating the iPad more like a touch-based traditional computer and less like a big smartphone. I still stand by the conclusion I wrote in that 2018 article quoted above:
I think that a good set of apps and a more versatile, more tightly integrated OS with these new iPad Pros should be a given. Instead, we’re still ‘getting there’, while the hardware (design and tech specs) is already beyond there, waiting for the software to catch up. This combination still requires a fair amount of versatility on the user’s part to be effective. This software/hardware gap is especially frustrating when you have iPad Pro configurations that cost more than a traditional, high-end laptop.
This is why I’m really, really looking forward to WWDC this year. I want to see a preview of iPadOS 15 going in this direction, aimed at harnessing all this incredible potential afforded by truly powerful hardware specs. I’m tired of using the term potential when talking about the iPad.
The M1 chip in an iPad! This must mean…
Yes, I thought about that as soon as Apple did the reveal at the event. It was more of a reflex than a real thought. What if Apple’s next move is making iPad Pros run Mac OS!? I mean, on a technical level it’s not exactly impossible. If you’re cynical enough you could even say that this could certainly be a nice shortcut on Apple’s part to give the iPad Pro immediate access to a lot of truly professional applications… the ones made for Mac OS.
But if you stop and think, this whole picture would be a bit of a mess. Sure, Mac OS on an Apple Silicon Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps (with the debatable results and utility we’ve all seen so far), and generally speaking, when you put apps designed for Multi-touch interaction on a traditional computer with keyboard and mouse/trackpad input, the inherently more precise input system of the latter won’t give you too much trouble interacting with such apps. When you do the opposite, though, things get tricky fast.
It’s not completely unfeasible, mind you. If you take a Microsoft Surface device, you’re basically interacting with apps designed for traditional computers on a device that lets you interact with them with your fingers or a stylus. But the experience is not that great, and you tend to favour a more traditional keyboard and trackpad interaction, maybe using your fingers to scroll inside windows or tap the occasional target, and the stylus to draw more precisely in certain areas.
In other words, after the initial What if!? moment, I don’t think that the M1 chip in an iPad necessarily means that Mac OS and iOS are going to become one hybrid system, or that iPad Pros are going to become Mac OS devices. I think that,
- The time to release an iPad Pro update had come, and that at this point the only viable successor to both the A12Z Bionic and the A14 Bionic chips (you don’t release an iPad Pro that has the same processor as the ‘lesser’ iPad Air…) was the M1, so Apple put it in the new iPad Pros, and that’s that, end of story.
- The presence of an M1 could potentially mean that more Mac-like features could be more easily implemented for these iPad Pros with the next version of iPadOS. Or that iPadOS 15 on an M1-equipped iPad could run not the entire Mac OS verbatim, but single Mac apps by adapting certain UI elements to be more iPad- and touch-friendly. With the ultimate goal of having ‘universal apps’ that get optimised according to which system it’s running them. It would be sort of merging things and not merging them at the same time, if you know what I mean. Not having one hybrid operating system, but hybrid uses across different devices.
Stray observations
1.
During the event I tweeted: Apple’s current hardware design language: “Everything is an iPad.” Some asked me privately what I meant by that. Well, it’s rounded rectangles all over the place again. Look at the iPhone 12 line, look at the iPad Pro and Air, look at the new iMacs… It’s the same concept, the same primitive, in different sizes. This is not inherently a bad thing. A certain design language is much of what makes a brand recognisable. You see those lines, you see that æsthetic, and you know it’s an Apple product even if it doesn’t have an Apple logo on the front.
On the other hand, what’s next? Apple is currently exploring colour again to make their hardware design striking, appealing, recognisable; but I also see a lot of recycled & remixed design details, while the last impactful design changes and refreshes were made when Steve Jobs was still alive. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d like to see another design leader like Jonathan Ive directing Apple’s Design division. Someone who could come up with an unexpected, opinionated design like the original iMac or the clamshell iBook.
2.
I love Centre Stage for video calls, it’s a very cool feature implemented in that seamless way I still like about Apple. In case you missed what it is, Apple explains it in the iPad Pro’s page:
Center Stage. The all‑new Center Stage uses the Ultra Wide camera and machine learning to change the way you participate in video calls. As you move around, it automatically pans to keep you centered in the frame. When others join in or leave the call, the view expands or zooms in. Center Stage works with FaceTime and other video conferencing apps for an even more engaging experience.
3.
When I first saw the new 24-inch iMacs appear on screen, I admit I was puzzled by the clear bezels. When I look at my 21.5‑inch 4K retina iMac, I really love that it has a black bezel around the display. But the more I look at these new colourful iMacs, the more I think that the clear/white bezel is a better match to their general æsthetic. It reinforces their visual message of ‘lightness’ and casual fun, so to speak.
The logo-less ‘chin’ on the front of the iMac, however, still perplexes me. Oh well, if I ever purchase one of these iMacs, I’ll put one of the old ‘Rainbow Apple Computer logo’ stickers I still have around.
4.
I like that now there are Magic keyboards, mice, and trackpads that come in colours to match the iMacs. And I like that now even desktop Macs get Touch ID via the new Magic Keyboard. Too bad Apple has decided to maintain that awful arrow-key design instead of going back to the ‘inverted T’ layout like they’ve done with the MacBooks.
Stickies app icon up to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina
