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Apple said its new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 chips offers the longest battery life on a Mac.
Apple Inc.
One of the highlights of Apple Inc.’s third launch event on Tuesday in the last several months came at the end of the presentation, with the return of the old “PC vs. Mac” ads, and this time the nerdy-looking actor – John Hodgman – was alone.
“Stop. Hold on, hold on. One more thing. Hi. I’m a PC,” he said in a video. “Is there time for questions? Because I have one. Why, why make all these advances, what is the point?
This could be a question that some of Apple’s AAPLs,
Business customers are asking questions about the new Mac lineup launched on Tuesday, the first with the company’s new custom M1 chips. Intel Corp. INTC,
and its x86 chips still power Apple’s high-end line of computers, and Apple promises to continue supporting those machines once it fully embraces its own silicone design.
As third-party software developers catch up and optimize their offerings for the new setup, early adopters will need to run much of their software, including games, through Apple’s Rosetta 2 software, which will act as a translator for Intel applications that are not yet optimized for its new family of chips. New Macs will cleanly run Apple’s new operating system, Big Sur, and all native Apple apps, as well as Apple’s closest friends like Adobe Inc. ADBE,
will be ready sooner than most. Photoshop, used by designers and photographers, will be available early next year, and Lightroom is coming next month.
“These creative guys tend to use Macs,” said Maribel Lopez, senior analyst at Lopez Research. “However, that said, it would have been a real loss for Apple to wait until every application was ready to launch.”
The most important consideration was the upcoming holiday season, Lopez said.
“They have the chip, they have the machine, a lot of applications will work for a majority of consumers. … If they don’t launch this year, they’re missing Christmas.
Beyond consumers, Apple hopes to catch all professional and educational buyers who need to make purchases before the end of the calendar year.
“The next wave of buying won’t happen for months, so timing is critical,” she said.
For consumers, however, a vacation purchase should lead to real thinking. The choice with the new Mac line is between unproven technology or one that its maker may feel compelled to obsolete as soon as possible.
Apple’s untested technology is generally a pretty safe thing, and early advances in battery life are appealing. Apple has touted a fanless system, and the new MacBook Air offers up to 15 hours of battery life, with wireless web browsing and up to 18 hours of video playback. In the advertisement the company ran, actor Hodgman was proud of the noise the PC fan was making, but in the end he comes out of the camera shouting that he needs to find a power outlet.
However, Apple has really not confirmed many of its claims. Apple said the new MacBook Pro will run 2.8 times faster than its previous generation, but it showed no performance comparison with Intel machines.
“We’ll have to see third-party testing to confirm whether the newer Macs perform as well as the Intel Macs,” Tirias Research analyst Kevin Krewell said in an email. “Apple has a history of performance benchmarking. ”
Even so, Krewell said he believed this transition would go much more smoothly than when Apple switched from PowerPC architecture to Intel chips in 2006. “Apple has better software tools and a long history of iOS development on which to build. lean on, ”he said.
No technology transition is easy, but investors seem confident that Apple’s will go smoothly. After falling slightly early in the morning, Apple’s stock returned, and after hours of trading it rose very slightly. But consumers who buy the new Macs and use a lot of non-Apple software should anticipate the possibility of some slowness, at least in these early stages.
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