“We look very much at Mac studio for what it is, a completely new Mac product line. Which is rare. We don’t add product lines to the Mac very often,” says Tom Boger, Vice President of Mac & iPad Product Marketing at Apple. “Our philosophy was not at all to take a Mac Mini and scale it up, it was ‘we know we’re working on this M1 chip and we want to bring it to those users who want performance and conductivity and a modular system. And let’s allow it to live right on people’s desks so it’s within easy reach. And that’s what we delivered.”
I’ve reviewed a whole bunch of computers in my career that are aimed at this exact market. I often get a workstation that seems like it can keep up with various creative workflows. I’ve never reviewed one that seemed like it could change the sorts of things creators can make. And that’s what I heard across the board. Not only did this device allow them to try more powerful, more advanced tools, but the speed it delivered also freed up huge chunks of their time to focus on other projects.
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UltraFusion is not a kooky new idea that Apple is wasting our time with. It’s real. Companies have been trying to mush two GPUs into one for over a decade, and Apple finally did it. This computer is a historic achievement. And using it feels like a privilege.
It’s sort of like arguing that because your electric car can use dramatically less fuel when driving at 80 miles per hour than a Lamborghini, it has a better engine — without mentioning the fact that a Lambo can still go twice as fast.
And yes, it is very impressive that Apple is accomplishing so much with (comparatively) so little power. I’m sure Apple’s chart is accurate in showing that at the relative power and performance levels, the M1 Ultra does do slightly better than the RTX 3090 in that specific comparison. But it’s effectively missing the rest of the chart where the 3090’s line shoots way past the M1 Ultra (albeit while using far more power, too).
I shared frames with a group of colleagues, without saying which came from which. The group was unanimous, ranking the Apple Studio Display’s webcam dead last. Naturally, the iPhone came in first.
After contacting Apple about my results, another spokeswoman wrote, “We discovered an issue where the system isn’t behaving as expected. We’ll be making improvements in a future software update.” I plan to monitor the situation.
Really the only reason to chase after this display for the screen itself is if you desperately care about having a 5K display that can display MacOS at pixel-perfect resolution with no scaling. I don’t want to discount this: a lot of people care about that a lot, and for those folks $1,599 sounds totally reasonable considering that the only other 5K option on the market is that buggy LG UltraFine.
For those of you that don’t care about pixel-perfect macOS with no scaling, $1,599 will sound frankly ridiculous, and there are lots of other fascinating displays to think about, including a number of OLEDs, some neat ultrawides, and plenty of displays that support higher refresh rates.
Critics accuse Apple of hurting competition by forcing app developers to use its store and payment tools, from which it extracts a commission of up to 30% for in-app purchases. Apple has countered that it is giving consumers a choice of a digital platform that has proven popular with customers and that proposed changes would open users up to threats to security and privacy, and weaken the overall iPhone experience.
Rivals and critics of Apple’s power hope the EU law will serve as a catalyst for other jurisdictions, such as in the U.S., where similar legislation is pending before Congress.
A push in Congress to regulate digital app stores has pitted Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. against Microsoft Corp. and others in a showdown of some of the nation’s biggest technology companies.
The Open App Markets Act focuses on a narrow slice of the sprawling internet economy: the billions in fees collected by app-store operators. The legislation has emerged as a flash point because it has the best chance of becoming law among a handful of bills aimed at reining in Big Tech.
The latest macOS Monterey update, released to the public this week, is bricking Macs that have had their logic boards replaced, causing panic among customers who are unable to get their Mac back to a working state, according to a cluster of user reports posted on social media and Apple’s support forums.
Enough people have been locked out of a dead parents’ device that Apple and Google have now made it possible for you to grant posthumous access.
Apple calls the program Digital Legacy. Your selected Legacy Contacts can present the access key you give them along with your death certificate to gain access to any data you have stored on iCloud.
Google takes a slightly less morbid approach. You can configure Inactive Account Manager so that if you ever don’t log in for three, six, 12, or 18 months, your chosen contacts will be emailed with a link to download all your data.
Yoink provides an intermediate place to deal with dragging items from the Finder, from the Clipboard, and from other places until you’re ready to put them to use.
The Brydge 12.9 Max Plus keyboard is designed to improve the productivity of your iPad experience in laptop configuration. It also has a new hinge SnapFit Case design that lets you quickly and easily remove the iPad for tablet use and then return it to keyboard use in seconds. The Bluetooth performance has been flawless, and if I hadn't been the one that made the initial connection with my iPad, I would have thought that Brydge was using the Apple Smart Connector technology.
With Posture Pal, you just have to start a session, and it will keep track of your neck tilt and will alert you when a bad posture is detected, even if the app is in the background.
The delay is needed to finalize the software development kit (SDK) device manufacturers will use to incorporate their products into the Matter ecosystem. According to Mindala-Freeman, because of a larger than expected number of platforms adopting Matter, the code for the SDK needs more work to ensure everything will operate together smoothly – which is the overall promise of the Matter standard.
Just like the iMac Pro, maybe Apple should also look into retiring the iPad Pro, and come up with a new line of studio-level tablets that run macOS (which already run iPad apps)? I will buy that.
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Thanks for reading.