WWDC

On the switch to Apple Processors during WWDC2020

by

I bought my first Mac in 2004.

It is a 12” iBook, the last model to be assembled in Taiwan, just before production is moved to Mainland China. As most will know eventually, the PowerPC Mac laptops were somewhat slow, stuck at G4 processors because IBM can’t make power efficient G5 processors that won’t burn the skin off anyone’s legs if a G5 processor was ever used in a Mac laptop. 

The Intel switch was announced in 2005, with the first MacBook Pro released around Jan 2006, and the first MacBooks around April 2006 if I remembered correctly. I was quite involved in the educational sales of Macs in some of the major tertiary institutions in Singapore, and to an extent, the aftersales support in one of these institutions for a few years.

A major thing during the first year was the old Mac people commenting on how stupid the term “MacBook” sounded, after years of PowerBooks and iBooks. Seriously today MacBooks are how the common non-Mac users define a Mac laptop, and in hindsight it was a great name, just like many of Steve Jobs’ other ideas. “We are done with Power”, he said during the MacBook Pro reveal.

Today I doubt we will see a change of product names though, when the Macs with the Apple processors are eventually unveiled next year.

One big issue the early MacBooks had were that the first Core Duo/Solo CPUs ran really hot, and with Apple’s legendary cheapskate-ness of putting enough ram in their laptops a lot of these early MacBooks were slower, hot, and did not seemed to be that much faster than the G4s they replaced. More RAM (we did a institution-wide program for upgrading RAM) and the Core 2 Duos eventually solved the problems.

Will next year’s A14 MacBooks be as problematic as the first MacBooks? I wonder. Apple has a track record of having problematic first generation machines (first intel logic boarded unibody MacBooks, first Retina MBP, first TB3 MacBook Pros, amongst others) though the first 2nd-gen MacBook Air, and the first Retina iMacs were absolutely perfect. 

A huge factor in the problematic first MacBooks were that the Core processors from Intel were relatively new, coming from the Pentium M design that a small team in Israel made, and Apple probably had at most a year of work with the Core processors before implementing them in the MacBooks, like every other Intel customer.

Apple has more than 10 years of experience working with the Apple A-series processors, and more than 10 years of experience putting them in machines that are way way way smaller than even the smallest Mac — the 12” MacBook. Heat, stability and performance won’t be an issue in the upcoming early Macs for sure – and with the rumored first machine being my favuorite 12” MacBook design, I will sure be saving up for one.

Monday can’t come soon enough.

Major changes coming to MacOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS during WWDC 2016

by

Right from the mouth of Mark Gurman (during the Jay and Fared Show Podcast), first reported by O’Grady’s Powerpage;

  1. No hardware announcements (that we already know)

  2. Siri in MacOS, to be featured in top right corner alongside Spotlight

  3. iOS Design Refresh with more colors – this is big. There are still many who insists that iOS 7 to 9 have been pretty bland and boring design-wise, coming from design powerhouse Apple, and refreshing the UI will definitely help in the looks department.

  4. Notifications will change (among other iOS system tweaks). Probably for the sake of watchOS 3, since the current less-than-perfect notification system is weighing watchOS 2 down.

  5. Big enhancement to Photos both on iOS and MacOS (to fend off Google Photos, as well as address the demise of Aperture somewhat. After all, Google Photo’s editing features are worked on by the former team at Nik.

  6. Redesigned Apple Music. (Whatever, just bring back the old Music app please)

  7. New encryption abilities (Wow).

  8. Send money to others through iMessage

WWDC 2013 predictions?

by

Sometimes I wonder why people even crave for such posts when everything is out there in the open, but I guess there are some who would not bother with the research.

I am just going to rehash everything that is already all over the web, adding some of my opinions if necessary.

1. Completely new UI (User Interface) for iOS 7

Honestly, I do not know what to expect. Jony Ive has designed the majority of the Apple hardware we know and love today, but his take on UI is still uncharted territory. As far as we know, he was, to quite an extent, involved in the original iPhone’s UI design back in 2006/2007 but everything after that was under Forstall. The whole “flat look” rumour thing that has been reported widely sends chills down my spine – I absolutely will hate iOS losing most of the fun elements it is known for.

However, if looking the gradients and gloss means a much slicker and professional looking UI (think Tweetbot, think Reeder), I am all for it. It is highly unlikely the hordes of software engineers will let Jony Ive change iOS into something as tasteless as Windows Phone 8, after all. Besides, the Brit has impeccable taste. A clean look, less gloss, less gradient, but with lots of colours and fun elements will be the hallmark of a modern iOS. Besides, change just for change’s sake, for once, is something that iOS needs to keep a majority of their bored customer base from “looking for a change”.

2. Mac OS X 10.9

As with iOS 7, OS X 10.9 must be the most well kept secrets in Cupertino right now. Rarely in the past two years has information about the two new operating systems been so tight-lipped that even now, less than a week from WWDC 2013, there has been no leaks, no screenshots of new features or the new UI (in the case of iOS 7). Rumour-mill has it that engineers have been taken from 10.9 development to help speed up iOS 7’s development pace, and that has resulted lesser changes to 10.9.

Like many of the traditionalists I am more interested in OS X than iOS, and a much improved OS X will perk me up way more than a completely revamped iOS. That said, though, OS X is extremely mature and with much of the underlying changes needed for a modern desktop OS already done in Snow Leopard and Lion, all that is left to do for the next few years is tweaking OS X to perform better, and address the outstanding issues still present today.

An improved Finder (as rumoured) will be welcomed, and hopefully the UI for Calendar and Contacts will be changed to something slicker. Mail.app is in crazy need of a refresh after many years of bloat, though most peeps these days run Sparrow, or more recently, Airmail, as a replacement for Mail.app. I really doubt a new file system will debut anytime soon to replace HFS+, definitely not in 10.9. There is also some speculation that widgets and Dashboard might be discontinued, but I hope that they do keep Dashboard as I still use it everyday for currency conversion.

What other changes do OS X need? You tell me. I am really happy with how everything works so far.

3. New iPhones and iPads?

NO. NO NEW IPHONES AND IPADS. PLEASE. THESE ARE COMING IN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER.

I am going to slap anyone who tells me that he or she is disappointed because there is no new iPhone/iPad at WWDC.

4. New Macs?

Haswell is just released. So new Retina MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs are definitely coming. There are rumours that the 13″ Retina MacBook Pro will go on a diet and get slimmer (thanks to crazy power efficiency in the new Haswell platform), and that will be definitely welcomed. The current rMBP 13″ is not that much lighter from the old 13″ MBP (non-retina) right now, and is not tempting enough for anyone to switch.

Oh ah, and a price drop across the whole line of Retina MacBook Pros is much needed (will and probably come).

You can follow MacRyu at @ryuworks on Twitter and @ryu on App.net.

What I want for WWDC 2012 is a new iMac and the curious case of the 15″ MacBook Pro

by

The past few days had seen a crazy mix of rumors about the exact new Macs that will be announced during the keynote tonight, and much of the rumors are about the big possibility that the new 15-inch Mac notebook will not be a MacBook Pro, but instead a new “MacBook”, and that the MacBook Pro line will live on a bit longer with only updates to the internals.

This mean that the Macs codenamed J30 and J31 in my previous post could instead be updated MacBook Pros as opposed to actually being new and redesigned iMacs.

Having absolutely no rumors/news about redesigned iMacs besides extremely vaguer mentions in the major rumor sites isn’t helping either. In the days leading up to WWDC 2012, we have heard a great deal about the new Mac Pros, the new 15-inch Mac notebook, and lesser about the updated MacBook Airs, but almost absolutely nothing about the iMacs, rather than some unverified news that redesigned iMacs will not make it in time for WWDC 2012.

However, something about the whole MacBook Pro line being retained despite having a new 15-inch Mac notebook stinks though.

Apple is not a company afraid to cut old products when they introduce new ones.

Apple is also not a company to keep complex product lines.

A 11/13 MacBook Air line, with a 13/15/17 MacBook Pro line, with a new 15 MacBook line, all for Apple’s notebook lineup, is absolutely nonsensical and not in Apple’s fashion to do.

What Apple will be in favor of, is a product lineup which they have implemented since day 1 of their big switch to intel more than 6 years ago.

6 years ago, there was a 13-inch MacBook, and a 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Yes, this means that the notebooks are separated into two lines based on the size of the notebooks, which made sense since Apple could really only put in Pro-level graphics cards in the bigger Mac notebooks.

If you recall, Apple was all ready to follow that lineup when they introduced the unibody MacBooks (13-inch) and the unibody MacBook Pros (15-inch and 17-inch) in late 2008. But then they realized they had to have a Mac notebook under 1000USD, and thus the MacBook White was revived, and the 13-inch unibody MacBook became the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which in itself isn’t very “Pro”, being the only MacBook Pro without a dedicated graphics card (yes there was an oddball 15-inch without a dedicated card for a while, but nobody except Elsie Law wanted one).

If the Apple today is still the Apple of Steve Jobs, I believe we will be seeing this new MacBook line-up tonight;

11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air (with Retina Displays)

and

the all-new 15-inch MacBook Pro (redesigned, with Retina Display)

And then I’ll have my redesigned iMacs too. Yay~

Macs to be released at WWDC 2012

by

Appleinsider just put out an article with regards to new part numbers (Australian) for what are supposed to be the new Macs to be unveiled next week at WWDC.

While Tim Cook did say during D10 that Apple will be doubling down on secrecy, when the products are actually in the final process of being shipped worldwide to Apple Stores and resellers, it’s pretty hard not to leak any info.

Judging from the part numbers above, the models to be introduced at WWDC next Monday night are as follows (it’s pretty obvious if you look at the models and the Australian prices);

1. J30 – iMac 21.5″
2. J31 – iMac 27″
3. J11 – MacBook Air 11″
4. J13 – MacBook Air 13″
5. K5BPLUS – Mac Pro (We know this from a previous 9to5mac leak)

Which will bring us to the last 2 machine part numbers, D2 and K31.

All these while we have been hearing rumors about a redesigned MacBook Pro, but every single rumor is about a redesigned MacBook Pro 15-inch model, and there is absolutely nothing on a redesigned 13-inch or a redesigned 17-inch.

Which brings us to the very, very obvious fact that next Monday night, there will only be one redesigned MacBook Pro, the MacBook Pro 15″. And from yet another leak reported by 9to5mac, we know that at least one of the MacBook Pro 15″ models will really be professional based, with very high specs listed, as well as the leak that this higher spec-ed model will cost around $3000 (that’s USD, mind you, which is almost on par with Australian Dollar right now). And the D2 BEST model do fit in with this pricing at $3000+. Therefore D2 = redesigned MacBook Pro 15″.

Which brings us to K31. And if the 15″ leak is accurate, so must the 13″ leak be. And therefore K31, the updated MacBook Pro 13″ with no retina display, is the new White MacBook, the cheapest model one can buy from Apple, and is still in the inventory because it was the most popular Mac before the redesign (just like the White MacBook), and some people can’t bear to give up the old.

The rest of the part numbers are likely to be new accessories, although with that large a number of accessory part numbers, whatever is going to be introduced looks really fun, especially B67, with so many versions of it being introduced.

P.S. A few minutes before I clicked published, 9to5mac just posted the entire price list with model names for the very same image Appleinsider put up, making this very post redundant. And K31 isn’t the MacBook Pro 13″ surprisingly (obviously based off the price), but the Airport Express…..A new Airport Express???

9to5mac’s full Apple inventory image below.