Event “Peek Performance”
Apple’s big balancing act: a small disappointment and a big surprise
Small Mac, big: The Mac Studio was the surprise of the evening.
©PR
At its first event of the year, Apple updated three of its key product lines. But the star of the evening was different than initially expected.
Under the motto “Peek Performance” – in English “Our idea of performance” – Apple held its first event of the year. As a purely virtual transmission from the headquarters in Cupertino, the group has presented a number of innovations. The topic of the evening should not be the new iPhone SE, the revised iPad Air and so on for most people: the war in Ukraine also overshadows the news situation at the Apple event.
The group only responded very subtly. After Apple stopped selling its products in Russia last week, CEO Tim Cook once again made the point clear on stage with an indirect statement: The yellow Apple Watch strap with the bright blue sweater was unusually colorful for the Apple boss – and thus an all the stronger signal of solidarity with Ukraine. However, Cook did not comment on the war itself on stage: everything there revolved around Apple.
No revolution with the iPhone
The greatest anticipation of the evening was probably the iPhone SE – which unfortunately turned out to be a small disappointment. Fans hoped that Apple would finally remove the home button from the savings model and fill the entire front with the display. However, that did not happen. Although the entry-level iPhone now also has the powerful A15 chip of the 13 models, the 4.7-inch display and the home button are retained. And the second hope of thrifty Apple fans also remained unfulfilled: rumors that Apple would keep the old iPhone SE for 200 euros in the range turned out to be wrong. The cheapest iPhone is even more expensive: At a price of 520 euros, the new iPhone SE costs 50 euros more than its predecessor.
On the other hand, there was a pleasant surprise with the new iPad Air. A performance boost was expected, with the iPad getting the fast A15 chip from the iPhone 13 models. Only optimists would have expected that Apple would use the fast M1 chip in its notebooks and iPad Pro instead.
But the iPad Air is also impressive in other respects. It offers a new front camera, which now follows through the room with the “Center Stage” function, even during video calls. And: It is the first Air model to offer 5G reception.
Even better performance
The star of the evening, however, came out of nowhere: As the motto suggested, Apple had performance in its luggage – and even more than most viewers might have expected. With the M1 Max, Apple set the bar for extremely high performance with low power consumption even higher in the fall and made the competition sweat a lot. The M1 Ultra now doubles its performance again – literally: The chip consists of two M1 Max which are connected to each other via a special interface.
This allows data to be moved between the chips at an incredible 2.5 terabits per second. According to Apple, the cores work like a single one. That means: The chips work extremely efficiently without consuming more power or requiring adjustments on the part of the software. Overall, Apple wants to achieve the performance of the best graphics cards on the market – and at the same time consume 200 watts less.
This is the Mac the fans have been waiting for
The chip is used in a completely new Mac – the Mac Studio. It looks like a slightly swollen Mac Mini, but is more like the Mac Pro in terms of performance and adaptability. This is what many fans have been hoping for for years.
The design is made possible by the new M1 chip. Despite its performance, it develops so little heat that it manages with two fairly large fans inside the compact Mac Studio, which Apple says are hardly noticeable. And all this despite the fact that the performance is said to be 3.4 times that of the current Mac Pro. Even the Mac Pro model with 28 cores should only achieve half the performance.
In addition, Apple offers plenty of connections on the Mac Studio – from Thunderbolt to HDMI to USB-A and a professional audio jack, everything is included. In extreme cases, it should be possible to control four monitors and a 4K television – simultaneously. The data on the hard drive is also impressive: the SSDs, which can be up to eight terabytes in size, shovel the data around at up to 7.4 gigabytes per second. And: In one year, the computer should consume up to 100 kilowatt hours less electricity than high-end PCs.
chips in the screen
So that the overall picture is right, Apple has also offered a suitable display for the first time in a few years. The Studio Display is optically based on the latest redesign of the iMac, combining very narrow frames with a wafer-thin housing. Strong: The display comes with its own processor – the A13 of the iPhone 11. The display can now think for itself.
This allows the display to process videos recorded with the webcam, for example, and is the first desktop Mac to even offer “Center Stage” with the help of the built-in camera. Also: The built-in speakers even support spatial audio, i.e. 3D sound. With three USB-C and one Thunderbolt socket, it is also extremely easy to connect. For notebooks, however, you only need the one Thunderbolt port. Not only does it pass on all data, it also charges the notebook.
Strong evening at Apple
With its spring event, Apple has proven that the company is always good for a surprise. And that despite the fact that the iPhone SE ended up doing less well than hoped due to the many rumors. However, the brief disappointment was more than made up for with the out of nowhere M1 Ultra and the matching Mac Studio – including the matching display.
A rather unspectacular announcement in this country should cause a stir in the USA: With Friday Nights Baseball, the group is entering the gigantic sports business for the first time and broadcasting two baseball games every week. If this proves to be a success, the world’s sports broadcasters will have to be wary of a new, alarmingly solvent competitor.