On 1/24/2024 the Mac Turns 40

Nice article from WIRED on the Mac turning 40. They spoke to Apple executives:

 

Molly Anderson, leader industrial design

Alan Dye, Vice President of Human Interface Design

Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering

Greg Joswiak, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing

John Ternus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering

Jony Ive 50th Birthday Apple Watch Band

Very nice images from a special Apple Watch band made to celebrate Jony Ive’s 50th birthday. The color is cloud white and has a “J50” personalized monogram. It was paired with a white ceramic 42mm edition model. Thanks to X user Stella – Fudge for uncovering this and sharing it.

USB-C AirPods Pro 2 & Vision Pro

Besides the AirPods Pro 2 update having just a USB-C charging case the H2 chip has been tweaked to provide lossless audio for the upcoming Vision Pro. Brian Tong’s YouTube channel has a great interview with Apple VP of Sensing and Connectivity Ron Huang explaining why(hint, turns out the Vision Pro may have an H2 as well, Mr.Tong scooped the heck out of that one).

An observation I was not expecting

Ok first off this is in no way related to my bias for WHITE apple products. If available I will always default to silver/white. Nothing to do with my love for the iPhone’s 4S and 7 Plus in sliver/white , iMac G4 and G5 etc. In my not that small group of friends who either update their iPhones every year or every 2-3 years, there is a disappointment that the iPhone 15 does not come in white. Yes even with the extremely muted pastel colors they are bemoaning lack of white. Some will get the iPhone 15’s Pro in white titanium but the majority will not. They will not upgrade this year. I’ve already gotten multiple calls asking if the spring update for the iPhone 15 color will be white. 😳🧐.

Great Takeaway from Daring Fireball

As usual Gruber is not first out of the gate with his Apple Event reactions but as he lets the event simmer and percolate he always has one of the best retorts bar none, the below being one of my favorite parts of his post on Daring Fireball.

“On the surface, camera features and GPU specs don’t seem related, but they share one thematic similarity: they’re two areas where Apple is behind the industry state-of-the-art. iPhone cameras aren’t behind the state-of-the-art for phone photography, of course — they’re probably the best, and undeniably among the best. But they’re not the best cameras, period, full stop, in the world. Apple wants them to be, and is pursuing this relentlessly year after year. And while Apple Silicon GPUs are also undeniably market-leading for phones, they’re just as undeniably not market-leading in PCs, where Nvidia reigns supreme. I firmly believe Apple wants to do to Nvidia with GPUs what they did to Intel with CPUs — match or surpass them in pure performance, and utterly blow them away in performance-per-watt.”

“But my god, what a GPU the A17 Pro seems to have. Hardware accelerated ray tracing is a huge deal, and a major differentiating factor between Apple’s M-series chips (which don’t have it) and high-end PC GPUs from Nvidia and AMD (which do). Clearly, this new GPU is not just the biggest aspect of the A17 Pro, it’s going to be the biggest aspect of the M3-series chips for Macs and iPads (and, eventually, Vision headsets) too. The A-series chips have always had world-class GPUs for phones, but Apple is attempting to narrow the high-end GPU gap on the PC side as well.”

WOW!

Apple Vision Pro is here running visionOS. The dawn of Spatial Computing is upon us. I’m still speechless.

Apple WWCD23 Vision Pro multitasking 230605