Feed your mind. Feast your eyes.
for the new silicon, mostly by
demonstrating a gap in a little
chart where a hypothetical chip
that’s both high–performance
and low–power would sit. I mean,
that’s the processor dream, so
sure, let’s go. But while Apple
made the case for a theoretical
chip, it didn’t make the case for
any actual new silicon. We
eļectively were given a
demonstration built around
promising us that a Mac system
running an existing A12Z processor
wouldn’t leave users dramatically
worse oļ than they were before.
Here’s a bunch of apps you can use
already, running at an acceptable
current speed, now on our
processor! The status quo is dead,
long live the status quo?
We were missing a demo of what
would be better after the move to
Apple’s chips. They aim to be
faster, they aim to be lower power,
they can have neural coprocessors,
they’ll let you run iPhone apps on
your Mac... are you feeling thrilled?
When the Intel switch was
announced it came with the
promise of multicore processors
— an immediate and huge leap
forward that the Mac had been in
danger of being left behind from.
Of course, that alone is a clear
beneĽt, and told us of the exciting
future we were getting in exchangefor the bother of universal apps and
Rosetta at the time.
We needed to hear the equivalent
here. I imagine the issue is that
Apple doesn’t want to announce
speciĽc chips yet for whatever
reason; maybe the new processors
enable a whole diļerent device
type that isn’t ready to show, and
that hardware itself will be the
tangible beneĽt that brings out
real excitement. But whatever
happens next doesn’t change
the fact that the announcement
was... whelming. Not quite
underwhelming, granted. Certainly
not overwhelming. It is odd that
one of the biggest shifts in Apple’s
history leaves me with no strong
feelings at all so far, but I suppose
that leaves me enmoying my
possibility space for a little longer.A
H, THE WONDERFUL
possibility space of the
unknown. When you know
something is coming, but
you don’t know anything about
it, the number of ways it could
surprise and delight you is inĽnite.
Of course, so is the number of ways
it could disappoint you, but I don’t
tend to focus on that because it’s
boring at best and depressing at
worst — Schrödinger’s lab would
be a real bummer if it’s must people
sitting around resigned to having
to deal with a cat corpse.
Waiting for the inevitable
Apple–made processors, I imagined
12–core MacBook Pros or a 12–inch
MacBook successor as fast as an
iMac, and other fun options. I didn’t
really expect to see those things
right now of course, but that doesn’t
matter — I was always looking
forward to hearing more about what
Apple’s doing, why it’s doing it, and
what it means for users in practice.
But the WWDC announcement
didn’t tell me most of those things.
Apple made the case for the needMATT BOLTON is very excited for Macs
to move to Apple–made chips, but he isn’t
sure why... and Apple isn’t telling him
THE SHIFT
>>> Matt is the AV and smart home editor of Future’s flagship technology website T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since
his student days. He’s skeptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing.”Image rights: Apple.The first Mac hardware with an Apple chip is
a Mac mini, which is on–par for excitability
as the rest of the announcement, really.Look, every generation of Mac users needs
a big transition and universal apps. It’s just
the fabric of life.
Start
8 SEP 2020 maclife.com