Rene Ritchie

Moving the Mac to Apple Silicon is exciting but, honestly, Apple Silicon isn’t even the most exciting thing about it. It’s the features that Apple Silicon will enable.

I’ll get to the specific Macs and features in a minute but, for years, Apple’s been able to deliver experiences on iOS devices, on the iPhone and iPad, that simply haven’t been practical or or even possible on the Mac.

Why? Because on the iPhone and the iPad, Apple’s owned everything from the hardware to the software to the interface, including the silicon.

And, on the Mac, they’ve been dependent on Intel.

And.. working around Intel.

For example, when Intel failed to support the 5K displays Apple wanted for the Retina iMac, Apple built their own custom timing controller. We all lost target display mode, but they fused the bandwidth together to support pushing that many pixels, if only internally.

When Intel failed to deliver HEVC — H.265 — support, and shunting it off to the GPU just wasn’t good enough, Apple used custom encode/decode blocks on their own T2 chips, essentially a variant of the A10 in the iPhone 7, to handle it instead.

Same with the Secure Enclave for Touch ID and Apple Pay, the always-on processor for voice activated Siri, the storage controller and real-time data encryption, and the list goes on and on.

But, building that much scaffolding is just… inefficient and, I imagine, exhausting. Especially when you’re still with Intel’s increasingly hot, increasingly power hungry CPUs continuously trying to just burst out of the bead-blasted unibody enclosures you’re trying to fit them into.

And every YouTuber is just face-palm thumbnail fire emoji fire emoji fire emoji.

And… just none of that happens with the iPad.

So, the Mac is moving to Apple Silicon, and we should start to see features more in line with, and more on pace, with the iPad.

We’re even seeing some of them already.

Apple’s shown the new restore system, which will let you recover your Mac using a hidden container, and the new full and reduced security modes for casual and hobbies users respectively, things that weren’t possible before Apple Silicon.

Likewise, hypervisor acceleration for virtual machines built into the Silicon, and all of it just showing that, now fully in control of their destiny, Apple pretty much can and will design the chips specifically to support and accelerate the features they’re putting into the operating systems.

So, when you take the features Apple’s already been able to deliver on the iPhone and iPad, the workaround they’ve already provided for the Mac, and the new stuff they’ve hinted at for the new silicon, it sets up just a huge amount of potential for the next generation systems.

Of course, Apple hasn’t said what’s coming or when. And it’s fair to assume things will start off more conservatively, more slowly, just to keep the transition as rock-solid as possible, but over the next few years, I have a really strong feeling the sky really is the limit.

For example…

MacBook Air

Apple announced the 12-inch MacBook the same year they the announced the iPad Pro.

Both were ultra-thin, ultra-light, and ultra-silent with not a fan in sight, but while the iPad Pro was also ultra-powerful, the 12-inch MacBook was… most decidedly not.

And that came down to the differences between Intel’s anemic CoreM Y-Series and imbedded graphics and Apple’s increasingly performant A-series system-on-a-chip.

So, now, imagine something in between that 12-inch MacBook and the MacBook Air today, but instead of CoreM, it’s got one of Apple’s new family of Mac SoC’s.

You’d have something every bit as powerful as a current iPad Pro — more, even, if the SoC is on the new ARMv9 instruction set and 5 nanometer process like the A14 series might just be this fall, and its not as constrained by the size and power envelope of the iPad.

10 hours of battery life maybe? More if Apple decides to prioritize it over weight?

And, like the iPad Pro, maybe a smaller one at 12-inches, edge-to-edge, and a bigger one at 14-inches.

With more than the iPad Pro’s current limit of 6GB of RAM, and the traditional clamshell form factor traditional laptop users know and love…

It wouldn’t be a workstation, wouldn’t be meant to be anything even in the same universe as a workstation, but if you have a workstation at home or in the studio and want to travel with an ultra-light, Apple could build in acceleration for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and Xcode, and for 3rd party pro apps, beyond anything Intel has been capable of to date.

Remember, that 12-inch MacBook on Intel choked on a single stream of 4K while the iPad Pro could handle multiple streams like a boss. And that was 3 to 5 years ago.

Another option the iPad Pro’s had… forever… that the MacBook’s just never gotten at all is cellular networking.

It’s 4G LTE right now but expected to go to 5G Sub-6, maybe Sub-9 at the low end and mmWave at the high end this fall, when Apple’s… renewed partnership with Qualcomm kicks back in… after they take care of the much higher priority iPhone of course.

Apple could have added a cellular modem to the MacBook at any time. They’d have to figure out the antennas and give macOS the far more data-efficient features iOS has enjoyed for basically ever. But it costs a freaking fortune to license the modems and IP.

In other words, Qualcomm is famous for demanding a hefty share of the profits. The iPad option is already $120 and based on MacBook prices, it could go even higher.

Now, other companies are doing it, of course. Sure, it means paying for an additional cellular plan, with some 5G versions being just painfully expensive and other being truly excruciating. And 5G service still being largely mythical in most parts, but they’re doing it.

And that’s where Apple Silicon comes in. See, Apple didn’t just agree to buy Qualcomm chips, they agreed to license the technology. And then they bought Intel’s modem business, basically what they used to make iPhone modems before this new agreement with Qualcomm.

So, it’s also possible Apple could just wait a couple or few years until they’re ready to ship their own, custom, modems integrated right into the Apple Silicon.

Both for iOS devices and, who knows, maybe the Mac as well.

Would you want a cellular Mac? Let me know in the comments below.

MacBook Pro

Now, of course, with a MacBook or MacBook Air, you’re looking at an ultra-light device very much like the iPad. For a MacBook Pro, you’re looking at something quite a bit more…

Well, something… with a fan.

Given the bigger chassis, the better cooling, and the higher power draw that allows… Well, we’ll just have to wait and see what that kind of Apple Silicon SoC can really deliver.

Especially in terms of graphics where they’ll be trading in the dedicated AMD chips for integrated Apple chips… and even more dedicated accelerators and controllers.

Not just for hypervisors either, but for absolutely any feature Apple wants to make as absolutely high performance as possible. Whatever it takes to make the pro tools and pro workflows teams happy. And, yeah, us.

The goal should be every ounce of power Intel’s delivered to date, and more, with nothing like the power draw or thermal constraints.

Apple Silicon also houses Apple’s own, custom display controllers.

When it comes to displays, everyone pretty much has access to all the same panels from all the same same processes, whatever they’re willing and able to pay for.

But Apple has been demanding not just their own panel specs for years already on the iPhone and iPad, but building their own display controllers as well. Things that enable the 120hz adaptive refresh rates of ProMotion on the iPad Pro, and handles all the performance and mitigations of OLED on the iPhone.

Apple’s display team has already brought their DCI-P3 wide gamut pipeline to the Mac, their TrueTone dynamic color temperature adjustments, even adjustable refresh between 48 and 60 on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

But there’s still more they can do. Maybe not with OLED, because of its quirkiness, but with miniLED that tries to better balance out some of those good characteristics, like deeper blacks and higher contrast, with less of the bad ones, like color shifting and sometimes less than consistent brightness levels across larger panels.

And, of course, if Apple ever decides to un-nope multitouch or Apple Pencil support for the Mac, all of that is already built to just work with all of this as well.

Drop a like below if those are things you want to see on the Mac.

Mac mini

With all of these next-generation systems, Apple’s going to be able to decide if they want to use the far greater efficiency of custom silicon to keep the same performance at even smaller weights and sizes, or boost performance at the same weights and sizes.

For something like the MacBook Air, portability is going to beat out absolute performance. For something like the MacBook Pro, the reverse is hopefully true.

But what about the desktops?

Apple could take the current Mac mini design and just power it up to perfect home server levels. Basically the all-in-the-box for anyone who doesn’t want a built-in display or a big old cheesegrator tower.

Though I’m sure I’m by far not the only Mac nerd still just begging for an expandable mini tower as well.

But, my fanfic budget for today goes only so far…

Now, Apple could also go the other way — maintain current performance levels, and just carve away so much casing the mini becomes more of an Apple TV-sized Mac… nano.

I mean, with an SoC, as long as you have the ports, you don’t really need much in the way of a box.

Especially considering, after Intel released the Thunderbolt 4 news last week, Apple sent me a statement, I shared on twitter, re-affirming their commitment to the technology, and that they’ll continue to support it with their custom silicon.

That’s something beyond what Apple does now with the iPad Pro, where there’s USB-C out, but no extra PCIe lanes, so no Thunderbolt out.

With USB 4 on the way, which keeps the the USB-C connector and basically supersets Thunderbolt, it could end up finally, finally delivering on the promise of one interconnect to integrate them all. Across the whole Mac lineup.

iMac

With the iMac, I think what’s exciting people the most is the rumors of a redesign. I did a whole video on that already, so, seriously, make sure you hit that subscribe button and bell so you don’t miss out.

Beyond having a more iPad Pro-like design and a potentially a mini-LED display, Apple Silicon also opens up the potential for technologies like Face ID.

The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro both have Touch ID. The first generation was essentially an Apple Watch system-in-package and display controller buried next to the Touch Bar. The current one is like an A10 chip buried under it.

But Apple has just never pushed the technology to the desktop Macs. Not even the keyboards included with the iMac Pro or Mac Pro.

It’s not a security issue. Apple figured out how to transit Touch ID authentication on the iPhone to the Mac years ago. Same with Apple Watch unlock. They even use time of flight to prevent relay attacks. It’s super cool tech.

But it’s expensive. They’d have to put a system-in-package or system-on-a-chip inside the keyboard, and that would bump up costs considerably.

Modern Apple Silicon, though, has the ANE, the Apple Neural Engine built in, and that’s what powers Face ID.

Sure, putting a True Depth camera system in an iMac would be expensive as well, but like Touch ID on the MacBook Pro, the expense would be in the computer, not a standalone keyboard.

Now, maybe no Face ID in the Pro Display XDR means its just not a technology Apple’s interested in shipping with the Mac, but I think that would be a huge missed opportunity.

Not just because having Face ID on the iMac, and all the MacBooks, frankly, would be incredibly convenient, not just because having a True Depth camera would finally bring the Mac at least partially into the world of Apple’s next big thing — augmented reality, but because it would also high-key help solve the ongoing embarrassment that is the potato cam problem on almost all current Macs.

Even if all some of you want to hear from me right now is Apple Pencil support and drawing board mode for an iMac Studio.

But that’s less about silicon and more about philosophy. Still, let me know your preference in the comments.

Mac Pro

It seems… odd that Apple would release a Mac Pro last year and then a Mac to Apple transition plan this year.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Intel Macs won’t just remain useful for years to come, for pros specifically, who struggle to get the software they need supported even on Macs with Intel, they’ll likely remain table-stakes for years to come.

But, in a system-on-a-chip world, where does the ultimate system-spread-out-across-a-tower Mac even fit in?

And this is where my speculation really goes full-on fanfic.

But, Apple knew about the Intel transition when they were building this new Mac Pro. When they were spending those two or three long years in the desert with the Pro Workflows team figuring out what a modern, modular Mac really meant, really needed to be, and it’s hard to imagine the Intel to Apple Silicon transition wasn’t something they considered a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

Sure, it’s possible this was a last hurrah, the end of big iron, and the Mac Pro will be sent off to sit in a rocking chair next to the Xserve, Elvis, and Bruce Lee, and Bubba Hotep.

But it’s also possible the Mac Pro will just transition to Apple Silicon along with the rest of the lineup. Just, in its heart, instead of Xeon cores, it’ll have the monster of all SoC.

And maybe Metal and the various performance and machine learning controllers, which Apple designed to abstract away the hodgepodge of silicon that’s always lurked below the surface, the different CPUs, custom chips, and GPUs in any given Mac, any given year, will still enable a variety of options.

See, the dirty little secret about why there’s no Nvidia in modern Macs, I mean beyond the feuds of the past, is that they’re at absolute cross-purposes with Apple.

Nvidia wants to be the most important part of any machine, and totally commoditize the PC around it. Doesn’t matter what you buy or build, it just has to have Nvidia and CUDA cores and you’re set.

Apple, on the other hand, wants the most important part to be the machine, and totally commoditize the components inside. Doesn’t matter if one year it’s Nvidia, the next AMD, and the future, Apple Graphics. Just buy the Mac and you’re set.

And they’re both powerful and successful enough they neither sees any need to budge. AMD, though, seems happy to do whatever Apple needs.

So, maybe AMD can still exist in a post Apple Silicon world, abstracted away behind Metal as just another compute resource.

Or maybe Apple, with a bank even bigger than Nvidia, decides to spend the few years it takes to spin graphics chips every bit as good, maybe even better.

I mean, who would have thought 5 years ago we’d be seeing what’s happened to Intel?

Or, maybe it’s something entirely new and Apple sticks to the SoC but has a bunch of accelerator and expander cards available, re-programmable ASICs like Afterburner, but not just for ProRes, but for a wide variety of different needs, and like the storage expander, but not just for storage, for memory as well.

Maybe that’s what the next generation of massively modular Mac really means, and was really designed to be?

Siri Shortcuts. One of the biggest, nerdiest, and most awesome updates to iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 this year, and… they barely got any attention at the WWDC 2020 keynote.

But… I can fix that! Joining me for this video is Matthew Cassinelli, who, long story short, was one of the original members of the Workflow team, brought into Apple, but who left just before they became Shortcuts, so he could share his expertise with all of the rest of us on the outside

Matthew on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattcassinelli
Matthew on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/matthewcassinelli
Matthew on the Web: http://matthewcassinelli.com

iPadOS 14 has just gone into Public Beta. So, if you’re even thinking about giving it a test-drive before it goes into general release this fall, then this video for you.

I’ve also already done a complete iOS 14 preview, and have macOS, watchOS, and all the AirPods, HomePods, and Home stuff coming your way, so hit that subscribe button and bell right now, and you won’t miss anything.

iPadOS 14 Public Beta

You can get on any or all of Apple’s software testing programs, via beta.apple.com .

Just remember that beta means beta, so don’t put it on your primary iPad if that’s something you need to rely on day to day. Because there will be bugs, apps that don’t work, and all sorts of other stuff along the way.

And always make sure you backup before you beta, just in case you decide you really want to go back.

iPadOS 14 Compatibility

If you’re running iPadOS 13 on your iPad, you’ll be able to run iPadOS 14 on that very same iPad.

That includes every iPad from the 2014 iPad Air 2, the 2015 iPad mini 2, the 2017 iPad, and all the iPads Pro.

As always, Apple’s commitment to software updates is just, really, unmatched.

iPadOS 14 Cursor — Redux

Now, at first blush, it may seem that the iPad didn’t get as much attention or as big an update as the iPhone this year. That Apple is continuing their more like every other year cadence for the iPad.

And that’s… kinda sorta true. But only kinda sorta.

Obviously, the iPad didn’t get the new Home screen experience the iPhone did. Which is… More on that in a hot take minute.

And it also didn’t get anything in the way of a fix to the still fussy, fiddly multi-window mechanics from last year.

But, the iPad is getting not just everything coming in iPadOS 14, but most of what’s coming in iOS 14 as well.

That includes all the new features in Messages, Memoji, Maps, Privacy, Accessibility, App Clips — though without NFC options, obviously — Camera, Photos, and more.

No Translate app, though, which is just Kevin Sorbo levels of disappointing.

But, the iPad also just got a monstrous update back in March, which the iPhone did not get.

An update with trackpad, mouse, and cursor support. An update that, if Apple had waited and kept it for WWDC, would have made the 2020 iPad Pro release way less impactful but, hot damn, would it have spiced up iPadOS 14.

Sure, that was then and this is now and what have you done for my iPad lately, right?

Well, Apple did use iPadOS 14 as away to provide way more insight into how, exactly, this now cursor system works.

Specifically, how the initial, round cursor is meant to better fit touch screen devices than the traditional, more precise, but also far more finicky arrow pointer.

How it doesn’t just morph into button shapes to give you visual confirmation you’re on target, but also magnetically snaps to them and between them, to help you more confidently differentiate and actually hit your target.

Also, if the system thinks you’re trying to reach something further away than a small trackpad swipe will allow, it’ll throw and snap the cursor to what it thinks is your most likely target.

Similarly, instead of making you guess if your arrow pointer is at the bottom of the top line or top of the bottom line, and only letting you know if you got it right or wrong after you go to the trouble of dragging it out, it’ll remove the ambiguity before you even start by snapping between lines as well.

All this to say, cursor support on the iPad is way, way smarter and more sophisticated than it might have appeared at first glance… or swipe.

And, while, sure, some of that might be to work around the lack of affordance in modern iOS and precision in touch-first computing devices, it’s also kinda low-key brilliant and I’d love to see some of the considerations here get taken all the way back to the Mac.

iPadOS 14 Widgets

One of the biggest flagship, tentpole… whatever features in iOS 14 is the new home screen experience nearly two years in the making.

And iPadOS 14 gets… none of it. Well, a little. But not really.

It’s complicated.

iPadOS 14 is getting the new widget design. Derived from the SwiftUI Apple Watch complications, they look great, the information density is terrific, they’re super easy to take in even at a glance, and you can stack and smart stack them so you can fit a bunch into the same-sized space and the right one will usually just pop up for you at the right time.

They don’t have the in-widget interactivity of the previous versions, though. See my iOS 14 preview for details and diatribes.

But, the iPadOS implementation also has an extra strike in its widget box: Unlike on the iPhone, where you can drag and drop these shiny new toys right onto the Home screen, on the iPad they’re still locked and key-thrown-away into what’s basically Schrödinger’s sidebar. The Today view.

Which means you have to swipe them over from the Home screen or Notification Center, or pin them on the Home screen but only in landscape mode… and it’s… just a whole thing. Or an un-whole thing, more like it.

There’s also no App Library. Which is the new end-of-Home screen screen on the iPhone that auto-magically Marie Kondo’s all your apps into intelligent folders for you. It’s delightful and it’s just totally MIA on the iPad.

Now, it’s been suggested that the iPad screen is big enough and the icon grid can be made dense enough that you don’t really need arbitrary widget placement or the App Library.

And, hey, we’re the ones who kept asking for the iPad to get its own OS and be treated differently anyway. So… whoops.

But, my guess is that the iPad is different enough now for things like how the small, medium, and large widgets would fit on the wider grid, handle both the more dense and bigger icon versions, and how they’d react to the grid reorganize on rotation, that Apple just hasn’t had the time to implement it all yet.

Hard deadlines and work from home being hard deadlines and work from home and all.

But, hopefully, after piloting it on the iPhone this year, and seeing all the demand for it, we’ll get it on the iPad next year.

And if that’s what you want, drop a like below so that demand can really be seen.

iPadOS 14 App Interfaces

Like the iPhone, the iPad is shedding its full-screen takeovers, the ones for phone and FaceTime calls, Siri and search, for what Apple’s calling compact interfaces.

So, now, instead of a call… well… screen-spreading across your display, you’ll get banner notifications. Or, in Siri’s case, a swirling, pulsating powerball at relative bottom right as opposed to absolute bottom center. I covered the good and bad of both in my iOS 14 Preview, so make sure you check that out.

Where the iPad scores a decisive presentational victory, though, is Search. New. Universal. Search.

Swipe down on the screen or hit command space on the physical keyboard and now you have the glory that has basically been macOS don’t-call-it-spotlight-search-anymore for years.

Results start to appear from the first character you type, you can launch apps from the moment they pop up, you can do knowledge-based searches — which is basically type-to-Siri. And you can search not just the web but inside apps as well, which is terrific.

It’s only Apple apps right now, of course, but come general release this fall, hopefully a ton more text and data-centric apps will open wide to the feature as well.

And I love this, because there have been many years where new iPad ideas and conventions have been taken back to the Mac. So, it’s great to see the iPad pulling more of the new and better Mac ones over as well.

Including Sidebars, which are among just the Mac-iest of Mac interface conventions.

You can find them, freshly minted, in Mail, Notes, Files, Calendar, Photos, and a bunch of other built-in apps.

Like so many of the more complicated, more traditional computer trappings Apple’s been adding to iOS over the years, they’re not all up jammed in your face by default. You have to tap one of the new, crisp, clean toolbar buttons to reveal them. Which, I think is great.

It shows that even as Apple is increasingly evolving the iPhone an iPad to better fit the needs of the tiny but incredibly vocal, legit adorable minority of us nerds, they’re not abandoning the vast majority of mainstream users. The one’s that find traditional computer complexity not just off-putting but alienating. You know, the ones the iPad was literally designed for.

Because we nerds already have a ton of computing options and everyone else shouldn’t lose their best one just so we can hoard up another.

Anyway… sidebars. Yes.

For those of us nerds used to the Mac, they’re great. Along with the new pull-down menus, not only do they provide for far better consistency between the iPad and newly redesigned macOS platforms, come later this year when Apple Silicon Macs start to ship, and they can run iPad apps natively, right alongside Mac apps, it’ll provide far better consistency on that platform specifically as well.

Don’t you just love it when a serendipitous plan comes together?

iPadOS 14 Notes

I went over a bunch of built-in app updates in my iOS 14 preview. Things like @ mentions and reply threads in Messages, and cycling directions and skyline scanning in Maps. Link to all that in the description. But there’s also a lot more in this update.

Notes has a new drop-down that tries to make the most relevant actions pretty much instantly available to you for any given note.

The pinned notes section is now collapsible so if you, like me, have just a ton of stuff pinned, you can tap it away now so you can get to everything else without having to grunt scroll all the way past it every single time you want something else.

Document scanning is sharper and with better cropping, and search is smarter, with top hits, and what Apple calls elevated results for attachments, including images, PDFs, and web pages.

Still no plain text mode that I can find, though, which is the one thing that keeps it from being just perfect for me.

iPadOS 14 Reminders

You can now assign Reminders to anyone you share a list with, which is both great and how dare you.

I mean, we’ll see how many relationships can withstand “you were clearly the DRI on canceling Quibi!”

There’s a new details menu so you can more easily and quickly send out assignments as well, and also add flags, dates, times, and locations.

Reminders will also now offer you smart suggestions for those locations and dates, and lists you may want to move tasks to, as well as pulling potential reminders for you based on your email.

I’m always wary of to do feature creep, because I never want a task manager to just become one more task to manage, but so far, Apple is maintaining a decent balance.

And some fun. There are also almost a dozen new symbols and full emoji support so you can really personalize your reminders, and take your reminder assignments game to the next level. Emoji impatient Judge Judy tapping furiously on watch… 👩‍⚖️⌚️

iPadOS 14 Safari

Yeah, there’s no iPad version of the Translate app, which is depressing given how much emphasis Apple places on the universality of their apps.

Except for, you know, Calculator and Weather. And I’d still love to know who’s holding the Kompromat over the PM for those omissions.

But, Safari will now translate web pages directly, which is great for anyone who doesn’t want to just shovel yet more free behavioral data at Google.

It currently supports English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese — which means I can finally figure out what all my Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches were yelling at me for all those years…

Safari will now show you more and better tabs, with favicons on by default so you can more easily find the one you’re looking for at a glance.

Using cryptographic derivation, which I think basically means getting something usable from a secret while still maintaining that secret, Safari will also check to see if any accounts you’re storing in Apple’s keychain system may have been hacked or otherwise compromised, and prompt you to change your password or switch to Sign in with Apple, if available.

You can also tap the options button and then Privacy Report to see everything all the cross-site trackers on all the websites you go to have been up to. It’s… a lot.

And yeah, we totally did find out if anyone can hear data harvesters scream in their hearts.

iPadOS 14 Game Center

Game Center is getting is biggest update since Apple shaved off the green felt and… pretty much everything else along with it a few years ago.

There’s a new in-game dashboard that gives you all your and all your friends’s progress in one easy-to-see, easy-to gloat over place. And you can tap in to get to your profile, achievements, leaderboard, even get friend recommendations.

Game Center is also integrated right into the App Store now, both into the Games and Arcade tabs and the actual game app pages.

That means you can see which games your friends are playing, so you can join them… or totally dodge them. Like Ally…

iPadOS 14 Augmented Reality

You can tell how seriously Apple takes ARKit by how relentlessly they’ve been improving it year after year. And ARKit may just be the biggest, most audacious update yet.

Reality Kit is getting video textures, so you can map a movie screen to your wall, facial expressions to head model, ripples to a river, pretty much anything you want to animate.

If you have the latest iPad Pro with LiDAR, the new depthy API will let virtual objects behave far more naturally with the real world. That includes things like virtual clothing try-ons, video and photo editing, and effects.

Location Anchors let you drop AR experiences not just into the real world but into precise real-world places in the real world.

Basically, you pick a famous area or landmark, or just, you know, your house, and then Apple pulls the all the rich, detailed data from the new Maps they’ve just launched in the U.S. and are continuing to roll out in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K., and the AR experience can just lock right in.

Sort of like… the opposite of the Matrix?

And then you can move around the virtual objects and see them in a way that’s just far, far closer to how real objects would look in the same situation.

It’s mind blowing to think of Gundam or a Valkerie landing in your driveway, but it’ll be even more mind blowing when we no longer have to hold up an iPad or iPhone to see it.

iPadOS 14 Pencil

As big as the trackpad and cursor update was last march, as much as it helped make the iPad work more like a traditional computer for everyone who wants to use the iPad as a traditional computer, I am exponentially more excited about the Pencil updates coming this fall.

You can draw a shape and if you pause at the end and keep the Pencil-tip down, the iPad will convert it into the perfect, geometric Platonic Ideal of that shape.

And that works for straight lines with and without arrows, curves with and without arrows, outline arrows, continuous lines with 90-degree angles, squares, rectangles, circles, ovals, hearts, triangles, stars, clouds, thought bubbles, and hexagons.

No octagons or sexy shapes. Sorry. So sorry.

For hand writing, it’s just a quantum leap forward. Like from Sam to Archer to Pride-sized leap.

First and most importantly, the iPad will just treat hand writing like typed writing.

Using machine learning models they’ve been building and training for years, they can just identify writing — you know, as opposed to abstract doodling — down to the individual strings and characters that compose it.

It doesn’t learn or get better at understanding your personal handwriting, it’s just been trained on an incredibly wide rang of hand writing samples. And, as someone who’s typed for so long I can barely fill out a cheque any more, it’s been identifying my writing amazingly well so far.

For things humans don’t typically write, but may write on an iPad, things like URLs, Apple even created machine learning models to produce writing samples for the other machine learning models to learn from.

It’s just machine learning all the way down in the most brilliant, terrifying way imaginable.

Because the iPad can identify your hand writing, you can now select it the same way you’ve always been selecting typing text. Just double tap and then you can move them change the color, even copy them and paste them as hand writing or as typed text.

And, if what you write triggers a data detector, like a phone number, email address, physical address, or web address it’ll even be turned into links so you can tap on them to go to FaceTime, Mail, Maps, and Safari. It’s great.

There’s a new shortcuts palette so, when you’re writing and drawing, you don’t have to put your Pencil down just to do brief, other actions on the iPad.

Just tap the pallets, then tap an action, and the actions vary by app so you almost always find exactly what you need.

Then there’s scribble.

Instead of just understanding hand-writing as if it was typed text, Scribble turns hand-writing into typed text.

It’s designed for text fields that expect you to type, but lets you subvert those expectations, not in a Last Jedi way, but in a way that gives everyone what they want. Go ahead, at me. I got The Mandalorian.

But, basically, you get to write with the Pencil and the text field gets the typed out result. As long as you start in the field, your text will go into the field.

In addition to generating typed text, you can also use scribble to edit it.

You can circle a word to select it and, if a word offends you, you can take up your pencil and scratch it out to delete and end it.

iPadOS 14 To Be Continued...

iPadOS 14 will continue in developer and public beta until this fall when it should go into general release for everyone.

There are rumors going around, because their are always rumors going around, that Apple is going to kill the Lightning port on the iPhone. Not to replace it with USB-C, no, but just to watch all the wires die.

Now, it probably won’t be with any of the iPhone 12 models released this year. And the entire industry is moving that way, not just Apple. But why?

Find out in my weekly column at iMore:

https://www.imore.com/why-iphone-might-lose-its-lightning-port

The iOS 14 public beta is just going live now so if you’re interested in test-driving Apple’s next-generation software for the iPhone, strap yourself in.

Because I've got a complete preview for you up on iMore...

https://www.imore.com/ios-14-preview

Intel, earlier today:

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/introducing-thunderbolt-4-universal-cable-connectivity-everyone/

Today, Intel revealed new details about Thunderbolt™ 4, the next generation of its universal cable connectivity solution, delivering increased minimum performance requirements, expanded capabilities and USB4 specification compliance. For the first time, Thunderbolt 4 will offer docks with up to four Thunderbolt ports and universal cables up to 2 meters in length. Intel’s upcoming mobile PC processors, code-named “Tiger Lake,” will be the first to integrate Thunderbolt 4. Intel also announced the Thunderbolt 4 controller 8000 series, compatible with the hundreds of millions of Thunderbolt 3 PCs and accessories already available. Thunderbolt 4 developer kits and certification testing are now available.

From an Apple spokesperson, just now:

Over a decade ago, Apple partnered with Intel to design and develop Thunderbolt, and today our customers enjoy the speed and flexibility it brings to every Mac. We remain committed to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple silicon.

The future is going to be fast.

Should you get an iPhone 11 now or wait and get an iPhone 12 later this year?

I’m Rene Ritchie and that’s the question you all started asking me pretty much immediately after I posted the video last week on Intel Mac now vs. Apple Silicon Mac later.

And it makes sense, because it’s the same type of problem. Want vs. need. Immediate vs. delayed gratification. A phone in the hand vs. a potentially better one in the future.

So, let’s break it down.

Design

Now, Apple hasn’t released the iPhone 12 yet. They haven’t even announced it. It’s basically a non-existent product. But, Apple has been releasing new iPhones every year since the first one in 2007, so releasing another one in 2020 is just about the safest bet in consumer tech.

Sure, what with the shut downs and all, they could be later than usual, which has typically been September to October for the last few years, but still, we can assume they’re coming.

And based on trends and rumors, at least a partially new design could be coming with them.

The current, rounded iPhone design began with the iPad mini, iPod touch, and iPhone 6 over half a decade ago.

Two years ago, though, the iPad Pro brought back the more squared off sides of the previous iPhone 5 and original iPhone SE design and, rumor has it, the iPhone 12 will follow its lead. The iPhone 12 Pro, maybe even the stainless steel version of the beloved iPhone 4 design.

You know, all retro-future chic, techno-nostalgia, everything old is new and oh so very hot again.

Now, some people loved those squared off sides because they found the way they dug into their hands made for a better, tighter grip.

Others hated them because of the way they dug in and find the more recent curves very much more comfortable.

So, if you like the current curvy design, the iPhone 11 has it ready and right now available for you.

If you prefer the flatter, more retro look, the iPhone 12 may be worth waiting for.

Displays

The iPhone 11 has a 6.1-inch LCD display and the iPhones 11 Pro have 5.7- and 6.5-inch OLED display.

Apple is so good at color management, from a complete wide-gamut pipeline to individual calibration at the factory, that both look as identical as the very different technologies allow.

The more expensive OLED displays, though, do have deeper blacks, more detailed highlights, and much wider contrast ratio.

But, some people don’t like the way OLED color-shifts off-axis or uses pulse width modulation at lower brightness levels.

Now, rumor has it, the iPhone 12 lineup will be all in on OLED.

Also, that there’ll be a smaller 5.4-inch model and a bigger 6.7-inch model.

So, if PWM bothers you or you just prefer LCD, and you’re fine with the current iPhone 11 size, you may want to stick with that iPhone 11.

If you prefer OLED, and especially if you want a smaller or larger iPhone than what’s currently offered, you’re going to want to wait on the iPhone 12.

5G

Current iPhone 11 models all have Intel modems that, despite AT&T’s so-shady-they-should-be-illegal 5Ge labels, absolutely all cap out at 4G LTE.

Speed is decent. Coverage is decent. But there are still a lot of people, especially outside big cities, that don’t get a lot of signal in a lot of places.

The iPhone 12 is supposed to be getting Qualcomm modems back and ones that can run on the new fangled 5G networks.

The iPhone 12 Pro models are expected to support the fastest standard, mmWave. But it has such trouble penetrating things like walls and, you know, leaves and rain, that I still think it may never become a real consumer facing technology.

All of them, though, are expected to support Sub 6/7/8/9 or whatever the low-to-mid-band standard ends up settling on.

While nowhere nearly as fast, it’s far more robust, and as the networks roll out, should finally give everyone outside big cities all the bars they’ve been promised for all these years.

So, if you’re fine with LTE speeds and connection quality, you’ll be fine with an iPhone 11.

But, if you’ve been waiting for something not just faster but way more reliable, waiting on 5G should have you covered. Like literally.

Performance

The iPhone 11 already has beyond industry leading performance and efficiency with the A13 Bionic chipset as well as really good battery life, and will likely get software updates for another 4 years at least.

I mean, the 2015 iPhone 6s is getting iOS 14 this year, in 2020, and that tends to be the rule more than the exception.

But, the iPhone 11 is expected to get an even higher performance, higher efficiency, even more silicon-feature packed A14. What that means for battery life we just don’t know yet, but it should mean updates for another 5 years at least.

If you don’t really care about an extra year of chipsets or updates, then the iPhone 11 will still be better than any other phone you can get for 12-24 months still.

If you want the most advanced silicon you can get and updates for as long as you can get them, the iPhone 12 will give you that.

Camera

If there’s one thing you can count on, year after year, iPhone after iPhone, is that the camera is going to get better and better.

The iPhone 11 added better sensors, a new ultra-wide angle camera to the system, and Night Mode and deep fusion to the computational models.

It doesn’t have the big glass of Samsung or Huawei, or the big algorithms of Google, but it has better algorithms than the first two and way better glass than the last one, making it capture photos as good as anything else on the market and video arguably best of all.

The iPhone 12 should be more of the same and then some.

Rumors focus on LiDAR, the same depth-sensing scanner the iPad Pro got this spring, going onto the Pro-level iPhone 12s this fall. That’ll be big for augmented reality. Basically like getting a TrueDepth camera on the back.

But we should also see improvements across the board for all the cameras, the image signal processor in the A14, processes like Smart HDR and Night Mode, just… everything.

So, if you’re perfectly fine with the iPhone 11’s state-of-the-2019-art camera system, then you’re perfectly fine with the iPhone 11. Especially the Pro with its telephoto.

If you want the absolute latest and greatest, though, especially if photos and videos are the most important part of your phone to you, then you’ll want to wait on the iPhone 12.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Apple’s strategy may be to try and maintain average selling price and margins over time, but they’ve also proven kind of canny at how they go about it.

Most recently, they’ve been pushing premium prices up with redesigns and more expensive technologies, like OLED and TrueDepth cameras. But, they’ve also been pushing technology down to offer more compelling, less expensive entry levels.

The iPhone XR was more expensive but the iPhone 11, less expensive and the new iPhone SE less expensive again.

Now, normally, OLED displays and 5G are more expensive technologies and both of those are supposed to be making their way to the base model iPhone 12.

But, rumor has it, the new 5.4-inch will be slightly less expensive again, with the 6.1-inch gets slightly more expensive, while the Pro models stay the same. Dropping the cost of entry but balancing everything out overall.

So, unless you want the next, smaller iPhone, you won’t lose any money getting an iPhone 11 now.

If you do want that smaller iPhone, and OLED on it, you can save a few bucks waiting for the iPhone 12.

Also, Apple may keep the base model iPhone 11 around for $100 less once the iPhone 12 is announced, if that’s meaningful for you.

Advice

I’m going to repeat my always advice here, because it’s still my best advice:

Wait as long as you possibly can to buy, then buy when you absolutely need to buy, buy the best you can afford at the time, and then enjoy the hell out of it, because there will always be something new and something next.

In other words, if you really need an iPhone now, get an iPhone 11 or even iPhone SE now. If you don’t, wait and see what the iPhone 12 models have to offer and, when you need to buy, buy the one that best suits your needs.

Then enjoy the hell out of it, because there will always be something new and something next.

Almost two years ago I did a video about how Apple could add multitouch to the Mac — the benefits, the costs, the challenges, all of it.

Because, in the age of the iPad, for a lot of people, a screen without multitouch not just feels but effectively is… broken.

And, while I think I got a lot of it right… I also think I got a few things wrong.

So, with Apple Silicon on its way — and just hit the subscribe button and bell right now so you don’t miss any of my coverage on that — with Apple silicon on the way, I want to revisit it, especially the wrong part.

And you can read all about it in my weekly column at iMore:

https://www.imore.com/making-apple-silicon-mac-multitouch

iOS 14 borrows a page from Apple Watch complications to totally reboot widgets on the iPhone, the iPad, even the Mac.

James Thomson, the developer behind PCalc, who once shoved an entire calculator into an iOS 8 widget, joins me to discuss how the new version, announced at WWDC 2020, works — and doesn’t.

At WWDC 2020, Tim Cook announced that the Mac was leaving Intel and transitioning to Apple Silicon — made by the same team responsible for the A-Series chipsets that have been powering iPhones and iPads for a decade.

Now, Cook said the transition would take roughly two years but that the very first Apple Silicon Macs would be release later this very year.

So, if you’re in the market for a new Mac, do you buy now and get the Intel you know, or do you wait and get the Apple Silicon that’s next?

Design

We know all the current Intel Mac designs. Most of them haven’t really changed in years. The MacBook Air is still a wedge. The MacBook Pro is still squared off. The Mac mini is still a little rounded box. The iMac is still a giant display on a stand and the iMac Pro very much the same. Only the Mac Pro is new and, even then, a bit of a throwback to cheesegrators past.

They’re known quantities. Sleek, elegant, if a little too long on the shelves now to truly still be considered inspired.

Apple Silicon Mac design, though, is an unknown quantity. Mostly.

Based only on what we know about Apple Silicon and how it’s been reflected in iOS device design over the years, we can make some educated guesses.

First, that it could well be thinner and lighter. Unlike Intel, which has been struggling for years to get down from a 14 nanometer process to a 10 nanometer process for its chips, Apple’s already shipped a very similar die-shrunk design on TSMC’s 7 nanometer process and is rumored to be Ant-Man’ing their way down 5 nanometer already. That means less power consumption and less heat.

To compensate, Intel’s reverted to throwing cores at their problems, which means more power consumption and more heat. In enclosures that were designed expecting the exact opposite.

Which is pretty much why you see so many thumbnails with fire emoji complaining about Mac thermals. But not about iPad Pro thermals, which can be just as fast and in an enclosure not even half as thick.

There’s a lot of apple’s to Apple’s… other apples in what I just said, but the bottom line is if you’re fine with Apple’s current Intel Mac designs, if they fit your desk or your bag, and you like the classic, sleek look, you absolutely know what you’ll be getting.

But, if you’re itching for something that’s likely to be even sleeker, and you’re not concerned about it potentially being even thinner, then new Apple Silicon Mac designs are probably right around the corner.

And, if you can’t wait for an iMac as retro future cool as the iPad Pro, go ahead and drop a like below.

Hardware

The displays on the current Intel Macs range from good on the MacBook Air to great on the MacBooks Pro and iMacs to… obscene on the Pro Display XDR.

With the Apple Silicon Macs they may get even better. Partially, because Apple won’t have to work around Intel’s limitations anymore with custom timing controllers and the like, and do what they’ve been doing with iOS devices for years now, and that’s build chipset features to directly support and optimize display features.

Partially because technologies like mini LED are also rumored to be on the way that’ll give some of the higher contrast ratios of OLED without the uniform brightness and other problems that come with OLED on Mac-sized screens.

It’s possible Apple will sneak mini LED into one of Intel Macs they’ll still ship before the transition is over, but it’s not in any Intel Mac they’re shipping now.

Ports remain part of the great unknown when it comes to Apple Silicon Macs as well. Current Intel MacBooks have USB C with Thunderbolt 3 ports and headphone jacks, while desktop Macs retain some mix of USB-A, HDMI, SD-Card, and ethernet.

Apple Silicon devices currently max out at USB-C, with no PCIe lanes for Thunderbolt 3.

Apple Silicon Macs could license Thunderbolt from Intel or could go with USB 4.0 which can also support Thunderbolt, but will they support the same older ports as current Intel Macs?

Aside from the iMac Pro, cameras on current Intel Macs are… a disgrace. Nowhere near the amazing cameras Apple ships on iPhones and iPads.

Could Apple Silicon Macs see an improvement there? Current Intel Macs have the equivalent of an A10 image signal processor and Apple Silicon Macs should have something closer to what Apple ships with the A14 later this year, but the bottom line is silicon alone can’t fix this. Apple needs better camera hardware in the casings and all we can do is wait and see if and how they deliver it.

So, if you have specific, especially legacy desktop port needs, like the current displays, and the cameras aren’t deal-breakers, the Intel Macs are again a known quantity for you.

If you’re waiting on a better display, praying for better cameras, and don’t care so much if the Mac deletes or changes even more ports, you can wait on Apple Silicon.

Either way, let me know your specific port and camera needs in the comments below.

Performance

We’ve already seen some benchmarks leak out about Apple Silicon performance, probably because people don’t realize benchmark apps suck up whatever they run and post it online without even asking permission first. But they’ve been based on a chipset that will never ship for the Mac, run on emulation, with an app not all designed to work with that chip.

So, they’re far more noise than signal.

What we do know is that iPad Pro silicon is already competitive with Intel silicon, without consuming anywhere nearly the power or generating anywhere nearly the heat.

In other words, for MacBooks, they should stay cooler and get way better battery life at the same size, or the same battery life at an even smaller, lighter size.

My guess is that’s what we’ll see with the first few Apple Silicon Macs — slightly better, much more Mac-specific variants of the current A-series versions for iPad, that impressively out perform at their size, power, and temperature, and it’s just going to go up from there.

How Apple scales silicon is also an open question. Some think they’ll start small and stay iPad-like with a new 12-inch. Other rumors suggest they dive right in with a new MacBook Pro and iMac.

Last time, it took until the end to get to the Mac Pro.

If you need what you need now, and you’re ok with the amount of cores, the power, and the heat, then you’ll be ok with Intel.

If you’re hoping for something better, cooler, and longer lasting than what Intel currently provides, you probably want to wait on Apple Silicon Macs.

I’ll be covering all the new Macs, Intel and Apple Silicon, as they come out, so seriously, make sure you hit that subscribe button and bell.

Software

Not everything is going to be optimized for Apple Silicon at first.

Apple’s stuff will be, of course, as well as indy developers who always seem to code rings around the giant internet and software houses.

But, there’s already software on Intel Macs that’s barely supported and takes forever to update, and that probably won’t change.

So, if you work in production and depend on mission-critical workflows, you probably want to stick with an Intel Mac for as long as you possibly can and see just how much of the software you depend on gets updated to work with Apple Silicon and how fast… or if not at all.

That includes Windows, since Bootcamp won’t exist on Apple Silicon Macs and neither Apple nor Microsoft have announced anything in terms of Windows for ARM, much less good old-fashioned Windows for Intel being available for emulation.

We’ll hear something, it just might take a while.

If you’re a hobbyiest, you also know what you can and can’t do on an Intel Mac, including home brew and booting into alternate operating systems.

Apple has said you’ll be able to go into reduced security mode on Apple Silicon Macs and do things like run versions of macOS that are no longer signed, and the open source community will work on updating tools and the like, but we still don’t know how all of that is going to play out.

So, if you depend on software the way it currently works for you, get a Mac that can run it for as long as possible and wait and see how everything else sorts itself out.

If you mostly use Apple apps and web apps and are fine with computers just being the boxes you do that stuff with, you should be fine with an Apple silicon Mac. And if you’re an early-adopter, you should be thrilled.

Let me know which way you’re leaning in the comments below.

Pricing

We have no idea what Apple Silicon Macs are going to cost. If we draw examples from iOS, the cost savings when Apple makes their own silicon compared to when they have to buy it from Intel has been considerable.

Intel chips alone can cost what a base level iOS device cots. How much of that gets passed along to customers we’ll have to wait and see.

My guess is, on high end Macs, Apple will spend that budget on adding extra and batter features, so the costs stay about the same.

My hope is, on entry level Macs, Apple does what they did with the iPad, iPhone SE, and Apple Watch 3, and that is introduce versions that cost considerably less than what the standard products have traditionally cost.

Additional memory, storage, IO — things like that will raise the prices somewhat, but we could get to a point where Macs don’t cost that much more than iPads for similar performance.

And that would be incredibly disruptive.

Advice

So... All this to say, wait as long as you possibly can to buy, then buy when you absolutely need to buy, buy the best you can afford at the time, and then enjoy the hell out of it, because there will always be something new and something next.

In other words, if you really need a Mac now, get an Intel Mac now. If you don’t, wait and see how the Apple Silicon Macs compare and, when you need to buy, buy the one that best suits your needs.