Apple just recently held a virtual Apple Event for the second time in 1 month, and it was phenomenal!!! Despite all of the products released during this event already rumoured months ago to be released, it was still so great to watch Apple cinematography in action!
I would say Apple started off weak here, introducing the Voice Plan for Apple Music. I see really no use with this plan, since not many people would completely depend on Siri on music streaming, unless one has a HomePod lying around at home and uses other streaming services(there is no way anyone is gonna start shouting at Siri in public!)
However from there on and out, the whole event was definitely extremely fulfilling and great, and I would say it was comparable or possible even better than when they released the groundbreaking M1 chip last year in November.
Airpods
The most popular Apple headphones finally has a new generation after 2 years of having the 2nd generation, which was not much of an upgrade, in terms of speaker quality from the 1st generation. This time however, they focused much more on making audio sound better, which is why the 3rd generation AirPods contain almost every flagship feature like Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking, Adaptive EQ etc., with the only exception being the Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency modes. Other than that, this was a great refresh, making the AirPods more AirPods Pro like, yet maintaining the traditional AirPods look.
M1 Pro and M1 Max
It has been almost a year since Apple introduced to the world to the M1 chip, the first System on a Chip designed for the Mac, and in the third so-called ‘Apple-Silicon’ event, Apple delivered, yet again. 2 new chips were debuted in this event, with both having 10-core CPUs, up from 8 cores in the M1. Graphics got even better upgrades, with the M1 Pro having 16 GPU cores and the M1 Max having twice that. This makes these chips have the irrefutably best in class graphics performance for integrated graphics, and likely to be the same even when competing with other PC laptops which have discrete GPUs.
MacBook Pro 14-inch and 16-inch
The MacBook Pro finally got its redesign, sporting two new displays, a 16.2 inch and a 14.2 inch display which are Liquid Retina XDR displays, meaning that, just like the M1 iPad Pro, they have mini-LED. For the first time in years, the MacBook Pros actually have ports, with the bringing back of MagSafe, coupled with 3 thunderbolt 4 ports, a HDMI port, a SD card slot and a 3.5mm headphone jack which now supports high impedance headphones, meaning that for most headphones, even certain audiophile ones, there is now no need for an external DAC to be connected to the Mac. Apple finally ditched the touchbar, replacing it with full-size row of function keys, much akin to the Magic Keyboard that comes bundled with Apple’s desktop computers. A humorous thing to note is that, since Apple decided to make the displays larger while maintaining a similar footprint, there is now a notch just like the iPhones have had for the past 4 years, though the camera is largely improved, with almost double the resolution at 1080p, up from 720p which was just subpar in this age of video conferencing. Both MacBook Pro models also have an improved six-speaker sound system which supports Spatial Audio. Battery life is also great on these machines, with 2–4 times longer battery even while using intensive, resource heavy applications like Premiere Pro, Xcode etc. This laptop truly has it all. The MacBooks come in at 1999 and 2499 respectively, though to fully utilise M1 pro or M1 max’s power, one would have to have some upgrades which would cost almost half the price of the original laptop.
