Tag: hardware

Apple’s Ground Floor

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Macbook Neo

Apple had a busy week: new displays, a new iPad, 3 new MacBooks, and a new iPhone. The individual products range from incremental to genuinely interesting, but the more you look at the whole picture, the headline to me is that Apple has figured out how to lower the entry point to their ecosystem without making anything that appears to be junk. That’s harder than it sounds.

The Neo and the 17e

This week’s headliner, the MacBook Neo starts at $599. It has an A18 Pro chip, 8GB of memory, a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, solid battery life, and the build quality folks have come to expect from Airs and Pros. Getting to that price point obviously requires some creativity on Apple’s part. What it doesn’t have: MagSafe, Thunderbolt ports, a haptic trackpad, or a backlit keyboard. The $699 model adds Touch ID and 512GB of storage, and that’s the one worth getting for most folks.

For that money, you’re not getting a compromised Mac. Frills are stripped away, sure, but I think that Apple has threaded that needle pretty well here. Schools and families are going to buy a lot of these, and for good reason.

The iPhone 17e tells a similar story. It gets the A19 chip from the standard iPhone 17, starts at 256GB (double what the 16e launched with) at the same $599 price, and finally adds MagSafe, which was a strange omission last year. The camera situation is still the main thing separating it from the “regular” or Pro line, but for most people that’s an acceptable trade. The Pro phones have become genuinely hard to recommend to anyone who doesn’t have a specific reason to want one. Personally, I have a 17 Pro and feel like it might be my last Pro phone.

Taken together, these two products represent something worth paying attention to. Previously, handing down an older device to a kid felt like the sensible move. Now there’s a real argument for buying them something new and selling your own device when you’re ready to upgrade. That shift reflects both how long people are holding onto their hardware and how good Apple’s entry-level products have gotten. It’s also an additional sales opportunity for our friends in Cupertino.

MacBook Air and Pro

The M5 MacBook Air is now $1,099, which stings a little, though the base storage doubling to 512GB softens it. This seems like a trend we’re seeing more of this year with higher RAM prices, so I’m not surprised. I think we’ll see more companies push bigger entry level spec bumps with accompanying higher prices to keep their margins healthy. If you’re on an M2 or earlier, the jump in numbers is legitimately impressive. The Air remains the default answer when someone asks what laptop to buy.

The MacBook Pro line got M5 chips with meaningful gains, particularly around AI workloads. If you need a Pro, you’ll know. If you’re asking whether you need one, see above. Get the Air.

iPad Air

The M4 iPad Air is mostly an under-the-hood story: faster chip, 12GB of RAM (up from 8GB), 120GB/s memory bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7 via Apple’s N1 chip. It’s a good iPad made better. Cool.

The Displays

Apple updated the Studio Display and introduced the new Studio Display XDR. The standard display gets a 12MP camera, which is a welcome improvement. The XDR is genuinely impressive on paper: 5K with mini-LED, 2000 nits peak HDR brightness, 120hz with Adaptive Sync, and Thunderbolt 5. It’s a legitimately great display for people doing serious color work.

Apple’s monitors have always been the one area of the lineup where even fans do a double-take at the price. That hasn’t changed. I bought my Studio Display when it came out mainly because I was building out a home office and I’d think a lot harder about it today given the alternatives. But they’re still here, still beautiful, still priced accordingly.

The Bigger Picture

The “Apple tax” isn’t gone. The XDR display exists, after all. But the ground floor has moved considerably, and Apple has managed to do it without reaching for cheap materials or cutting corners on what actually matters to everyday use. The Neo appears to have great build quality and keep the things that make a Mac a Mac. The 17e is a real iPhone. While not announced today, even the Watch

Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t taken their foot off the gas for pro users. The MacBook Pro, the XDR display, the continued push into pro app subscriptions – there’s no sense that they’re trading one end of the market for the other. They’re doing both, which is the interesting part. It’s too early to say if they can walk and chew gum here, but lately their limitations have been on the software side, not the hardware one.

On the education side, the Neo is an obvious Chromebook challenger at $599 ($499 with education pricing). Apple has a decent story to tell there: real software, real Mac apps, Apple Intelligence built in, free OS updates, solid build quality. The MDM management story is still more complex than Chromebook’s cloud-first simplicity, though it also opens doors that ChromeOS can’t – including more fine-grained device control for admins (the kind of thing a scrappy company like Kolide by 1Password does well). There are also a lot of professional and creative apps that simply don’t exist on ChromeOS, and an Android port rarely, if ever, fills the gap. If Apple gets serious about the cloud-first management story for schools, they have a real shot at making inroads.

It was a good week to be in the business of selling computers. The hardware is ready. Guess we’ll see what they do with it this summer.

How Apple could turn HomePod mini into a delightful and adorable smart display

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From Parker Ortolani at 9to5Mac:

Apple’s home strategy has been all over the place, but the company appears to finally have a hit with the HomePod mini. Rumors have been floated about Apple making a HomePod with a display, but word on the street is that the product being tested looks a lot like an iPad mounted to a speaker. Instead of making a Frankenstein product very similar to Google and Amazon’s products, Apple should take the blueprint it’s laid out with HomePod mini and use it as a basis for a unique ambient smart display.

Overall, an interesting take on what a HomePod Mini with a display could look like. From my perspective, I don’t know if it would really move the needle as I’d prefer something to replace what we have in our kitchen right now – a Nest Hub that can display family photos and still do the basic timer / music functions. I briefly touched on this a while back, mentioning something like a “HomePod Video” would be a game-changer for me.

Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC

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From Mark Gurman at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this month at its annual developer conference, according to people familiar with the plans.

The new processors will be based on the same technology used in Apple-designed iPhone and iPad chips. However, future Macs will still run the macOS operating system rather than the iOS software on mobile devices from the company. Bloomberg News reported on Apple’s effort to move away from Intel earlier this year, and in 2018.

Apple’s chip-development group, led by Johny Srouji, decided to make the switch after Intel’s annual chip performance gains slowed. Apple engineers worried that sticking to Intel’s road map would delay or derail some future Macs, according to people familiar with the effort.

This has been rumored for what seems like years now, but it appears to be finally happening. This will be a huge shift, and I’m excited to see what the transition plan looks like. I’d imagine we’ll see it first hit the “consumer” lines and work out from there. A couple of questions that come to mind for me are:

  • How will this affect things like virtualization software?
  • What about cross-platform software and games? My Steam library was already decimated by the 32bit to 64bit transition. I’d imagine an ARM transition will finish it off.
  • Will iPad Pros be a test device during the transition?
  • What are the tradeoffs going to be? What are the gains going to look like?

Really excited to see what we learn in a few short weeks!

Seven years later, I bought a new Macbook. For the first time, I don’t love it

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From Carlos Fenollosa:

This computer is bittersweet.

I’m happy that I can finally perform tasks which were severely limited on my previous laptop. But this has nothing to do with the design of the product, it is just due to the fact that the internals are more modern.

Maybe loving your work tools is a privilege that only computer nerds have. Do taxi drivers love their cars? Do baristas love their coffee machines? Do gardeners love their leaf blowers? Do surgeons love their scalpels?

A comprehensive review with lots to love about the new machine, but the lows are low. While the performance, speakers, screen and build quality are exceptional as always, he points out a lot of issues with the ports, software, and the webcam quality’s complete lack of progress in the past 7 years. I’ve also heard a number of different versions of this quote over the years:

I would have paid extra money to not have a touchbar on my macbook.

I think that on balance, people are just more negative about technology these days but it’s also worth pointing out that our expectations are higher now as we depend on these devices for our livelihoods more than we did a decade ago. I appreciate experimentation and pushing the boundaries of tech but most Apple customers would prefer “it just works” to “thin, light, experimentation”.