The 24 inch iMac

Apple's iMac has seen some of the most visually striking updates of any Apple product over the course of its history. From its introduction in 1998, where it defined Apple's vision of computers going forwards, the iMac has in many ways been the Company's flagship Mac - certainly until the Macbook Air's 2nd coming in 2010. Doing some quick maths, I believe it's Apple's longest serving product that they currently offer. The iMac is older than the iPad, iPhone, iPod - its seen 3 processor architectures (PowerPC, Intel, and recently Apple Silicon) - and its therefore had to adapt over the years to change with the times. The original iMacs boasted a 233MHz G3 chip, 32MB of RAM, a 4GB HDD, a CD drive, and the ability to connect to the internet via ethernet. It sounds bad because it is bad. The iMac evolved over the years as technology evolved, although as we got into the 2010's, updates became less frequent as Apple focused more on its "Post-PC" devices and portable Macs. The stagnation of Intel chips and the lack of affordable advances in display technology probably didn't help either.

The last generation of Intel iMacs

In 2012, Apple introduced a new design of iMac, featuring dramatically thinner sides, the removal of the optical drive for space saving, and laminated displays. While the sides were pretty thin (5mm) the design curved outwards to create a kind of humped-back. This hump allowed HDDs to remain in lower configs, and higher end discrete graphics to be viable, in an otherwise very thin enclosure.

At the time this iMac was pretty radical, with the only disapointment from the 2012 reveal being that the resolution of the panels didn't get a bump from 1080p/1440p to higher, "retina" resolutions. The Macbook Pro had transitioned to a retina display in the summer of 2012, 4 months before the introduction of the new iMac - and it was clear that the iMac's PPI was now lagging behind most of Apple's other products. It wasn't immediately clear why there was this limitation, but the most likely factor was the prohibitive cost of such a large, high DPI display. For reference, in 2012 many TVs and computer monitors topped out at 1080p, infact, 1080p was really the gold standard of displays at that time. The Apple TV that launched in March 2012 features full 1080p content for the first time, and it was a big deal. 1440p monitors were expensive, in the region of £1000+ (and often that would get you a pretty crummy quality display, much worse than the 27 inch iMacs excellent 1440p display introduced in 2009). 4K displays barely existed, and the ones that did were multiple £1000s, and often with huge trade offs. Anything above 4K literally didn't exist. The challenge of moving to a retina display was therefore pretty big. To quadruple the pixels of the 27 inch iMac, Apple would need a resolution of 2880x5120, roughly 14.7 million pixels. Even in 2014, a few years later, such resolutions were unheard of - however in 2014 Apple introduced the iMac with a retina display.

This was a giant leap forward for the iMac. The I/O available at the time didn't even support such high resolutions, so Apple actually built a custom T-con to enable the insane resolution (effectively using 2 display ports to power the 1 screen). Even at this point, a good 4K monitor would set you back multiple £000s, so an iMac with a really great quality 5K display, which included a strong base configuration of computer inside, somehow started at just $2,499. I could not believe this price at the time, and I still don't know how they weren't selling them at a massive loss to begin with. If you were in the market for a high end iMac with a great display, this was the deal of the century. Despite having just bought a specced out MBP (in the belief that no high-res iMac was coming) - I ordered one of these bad boys on day 1, with every spec maxxed out (apart from the RAM which I would DIY for obvious reasons). This machine was a monster. I remember just downloading 5K/6K wallpapers and starring into the screen. It was like looking through a window. It was amazing.

A rocky few years

The iMac then went missing in action for a few years. We got some minor spec bumps in 2015 with slightly faster CPUs and GPU options and P3 colour for the display. In 2017 there were even more graphics options at the high end as more efficient GPUs were introduced to the market, and the screen got a bump to 500 nits in line with the recently updated MBP line. The lack of substantial updates continued into the late 2010s, as Apple continued to neglect Mac hardware - mainly due to the lack of innovation of Intel's chipsets, and the ever increasing demand of discrete GPUs which meant that die shrinks didn't gain much in the way of efficiency. It wasn't until Apple silicon was introduced in 2020 when it became clear that the next iMac could be radically different. It had been a long 8 years since the humped 2012 design had debued, and with the advent of the M1/A14X chip in November 2020, it felt like it was make or break for the iMac line.

She comes in colours everywhere

The M1/A14X was a huge hit with Macbook Air, base Macbook Pro, and Mac Mini customers when it debued at the end of 2020. The power efficiency shouldn't really have been a surprise, given that the A14X was always destined for the iPad Pro, a device with just an 11 inch screen, and coming in at just 5.9mm thin. It was widely assumed that as the iMac was absent from the initial batch of M1 Macs, it would be receiving the higher end M1 chips (ultimately the M1 Pro/Max which debued in the MBPs later in 2021). However, in April 2021 Apple surprised us with an M1-based 24 inch iMac. Most importantly, it came in orange...

Some believe in love at first sight, I certainly did after 21 April 2021. The iMacs were absolutely stunning looking. They were radically thinner than the previous design, coming in at 11.5mm across the whole product (no hump in sight). This made it a hair thinner than the original iPhone. Pretty neat. It also came in an array of colours (picture a rainbow) with a nice two-tone design, with lighter shades on the front and a more saturated look on the back. They also added white bezels instead of the usual black bezels. This iMac really felt like it came from a different part of Apple than previous versions.

Maybe the most interesting part of the design was the use of the area below the display, lovingly known as the "chin". It had long been assumed that the next generation of iMac design would remove the chin entirely, going for an all-screen design (similar to the look of the 2019 Pro Display XDR). However, not only was the chin still present in the 24 inch iMac, it became an essential part of the computer. Apple decided to house all of the components for the iMac, the whole logic board, ports, fans, speakers, everything, inside the chin of the iMac. You can see this in the neat x-ray below.

It's not immediately clear why they chose to put the guts of the machine in the chin, when there was so much space behind the display itself. After 2 years of thinking I have an idea...

What's a healthy BMI?

When thinking about how to fit components into a tight space, I find it helpful to think about the iPad, specifically the 2018 iPad Pro models. These are 11/13 inch devices, coming in at 5.9mm thin. In that space, they have to house:

• The display
• The logic board/computer guts
• Speakers
• Batteries
• Ports
• Cameras/LIDAR

It's pretty staggering when you think about all the stuff that's in there. It's also staggering when you think about how thick the 24 inch iMac is in comparison. Doing some very rough maths, you could fit roughly 8 iPad Pro's into the iMac's enclosure (2x in every dimension, roughly speaking). It's also worth considering that the iPad has to house its batteries, which take up a significant part of the internals, whereas the iMac has an external power supply - the iPad also has more, and larger cameras.

If you think this post is wildly off-track by now, you'd be right, but I've finally got to the question I wanted to ask when I started writing this post 3 months ago... Why isn't the iMac 8x thinner?

You may think, "who wants a 1.5mm thick desktop computer?". Well, I do. To be honest, I'd be willing to take a desktop that is as thick as the iPad Pros at 5.9mm, but my point remains, why is it not possible? The 24 inch iMac was hailed as a breakthrough when it released, with reviewers in disbelief at how impossibly thin an all-in-one desktop computer could be. I had the same thought for the first few days before I got thinking about what's in this machine, and the fact that it really is just an iPad Pro on a stand. Hell, think about how nice a 5.9mm iMac would look, literally just a 24 inch iPad on a tidy aluminium stand. It's the stuff of dreams.

If you'll indulge me for another few minutes, I've got a few ideas as to why the iMac is so thicc and what prevented Apple from making it even thinner.

Ports

USB-C ports are roughly 7mm deep, meaning that the device has to be at least 7mm thick if you're implementing them on the back side of the iMac (and possibly more than 7mm if you take into account the enclosure needed around the port). The iPad gets around this by having the port on the side of the device, meaning that the minimum thickness is just 2.6mm (plus some margin to house the port so, maybe 3/4mm minimum in total). While I'd be fine with Apple putting the USB-C ports on the side of the iMac, allowing them to go all the way down to a 3/4mm thickness, I think aesthetically they'd hate doing this. Having ports run away behind the screen is long-established in computer land, but having stuff hanging off the sides is pretty ungainly. I'd be fine with it as I basically never use the ports, but others might not...

Power connector

The power cable and connector are custom-made by Apple, allowing them to make something tailored to the iMac's thinness. While the current connector is reasonably thick, filling most of the 11.5mm of depth, I'd imagine it could easily have been thinner if the design required it to be so. I therefore don't think this is a limiting factor to the design.

Fans

Unlike the iPad Pro, the iMac has a few small fans in order to help cool the M1 under sustained workloads. This helps avoid throttling - although as we've seen in the MacBook Air, it takes a lot for the M1 to throttle anyway. When gaming I've found that the fans do become audible, so they're clearly serving a purpose, but I'd argue that on the consumer-focused rebranding of the iMac, a fanless design would have had some appeal. Ultimately I don't think the fans are an essential part of this machine, and it could absolutely work fine for 99% of its user-base without them. The other consideration for thinness is how thick the fans are, but it's really hard to find that out on the internet...

Speakers

While this factor has only just occurred to me, I think it's a pretty viable reason why the iMac isn't even thinner. If the iMac was as thin as the iPad Pro, I'd broadly speaking expect it to have similar speakers to the iPad as well (albeit there's plenty more volume inside the iMac). Given the consumer focus of the 24-inch iMac, Apple isn't expecting people to plug in a pair of speakers into this product, they want it to have good, loud, high quality speakers built-in so that people don't have to worry about audio. I'm sure there's a prototype somewhere in Apple of a much thinner iMac, but I wouldn't be surprised if they decided that the speaker quality was just too poor to ship.

Structural considerations

In this section, I have basically no idea what I'm talking about. Having said that, I do think there's some aspect of structural integrity that comes into play here. Think about an iMac that really is just 5.9mm thick, or maybe 4mm if you believe my made-up numbers above. That's an insanely thin body for something that's 24 inches diagonal. Issues like bending/warping could easily come into play here, and the iPhone 6 taught us that the internet loves a bending problem (no matter how small the problem actually is). I'm mainly thinking about when the iMac is in transit here, but I'm sure people smarter than me would tell me all sorts of problems with making big, thin objects. In fact, as you can see from the x-ray above, the iMac already has large metal plates behind the display, presumably for structural support.

The possibility of Pro chips

While I think this one is probably the worst argument, I think there's a slim chance that Apple wanted to buy themselves some room in the chassis incase they wanted to use the "Pro" variant of Apple Silicon in future editions of the iMac. For example, the M3, running on a 3nm process, will likely have significant efficiency gains over the M1 and M2. This means that the TDP of an M3 Pro may be lower than the previous generation of chips, and this could allow it to be used in the iMac's enclosure one day. In reality I think that the efficiency gains of 3nm will actually be used solely for performance gains rather than reductions in wattage, given that the "Pro" chips are used in devices with much thicker designs than the iMac (Mac mini, MBP). 

Final thoughts

Taking all of the above into consideration, I can see why Apple ended up at 11.5mm, even if deep down I wish it could be a true "iPad-on-a-stick". The use of backside USB-C ports likely means that 8-9mm is the minimum thickness, and then I'd guess the remaining few mm was a combination of thermal considerations, speakers, and structural aspects that they wanted to play safe. 

Interestingly, Apple still hasn't updated the 24 inch iMac since its launch in April 2021, and it's the only Mac that still uses the first generation of Apple silicon. I'm hoping this means that the iMac will be in the first group of Macs to get the M3 silicon later in 2023. It's a great computer, even if my main attraction is the colours...

The Journey to Apple silicon Macs

One of the main things that I missed rambling about during my 11 year blogging absence was the progress of the A-series chips used in iPhones and iPads. These chips are really the unsung heroes of Apple's success over the last decade - they've allowed the iPhones and iPads to remain best in class throughout, enabled the Apple Watch to get through a day while offering more and more features, and more recently have allowed the Mac to take huge leaps in performance and efficiency. I want this post to capture how the journey from the A4, all the way to the A14X (more commonly known as the M1). I'll talk about the M series chips and their own journey in another post sometime.

Humble beginnings
While the A4 chip was the first silicon designed by Apple, it's worth mentioning why there's no A1-A3. When Apple was creating the iPhone, they needed an incredibly small, powerful, and efficient chip to realise the vision of a mini, touch based computer in your pocket. Apple initially went to Intel in search for such a chip, given they'd recently started working with them on the Mac with similar goals of low TDP, high performance processors. Ultimately a deal with Intel to supply iPhone chips fell through. I don't normally quote others in these rambling posts, but there's an interesting quote from the late Paul Otellini, Intel’s CEO at the time, on the reasons for this:

“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it. The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

With the door closed at Intel, Apple decided to look elsewhere, eventually making a deal with Samsung to use their ARM-based chips. It's a badly kept secret that iOS is actually a lightweight, leaner, meaner version of MacOS, without all of the bulk and clutter of the desktop version. In this sense, Apple has always had a version of the MacOS operating system running on ARM chips - its just been in the iPhone/iPads this whole time. Apple continued to use Samsung designed chips in the next few releases, the 3G and the 3GS, but during the development for the iPhone 4, Apple had more ambitious plans for chip design.

In 2008, when planning the chip design for the iPhone 4, Apple knew that they wanted to dramatically increase the resolution of the iPhone, going from 480x320 to a mind-boggling 960x640. In 2023 this might not seem too impressive, but on a tiny 3.5" screen this resulted in a pixel density of 326PPI, and the birth of "Retina" displays. For context as to how high resolution this was back in 2010, many of the Macbooks Apple sold at the time were 1280x800 displays, and their display area was 14x larger than the iPhone's display (yikes). In order to pull off the increase in resolution while maintaining the performance and battery life of the 3GS, they were going to need a very efficient and powerful chip. Following some acquisitions made in the mid-late 2000's, Apple started their own fully fledged, in-house chip design team, with the goal of creating a System on a Chip (SoC). This design would offer significant performance and power-saving advantages over the previous iPhone chip designs, which used discrete CPU, GPU, RAM and storage modules that all had to interface with each other (as you'd find in any normal PC). This development coincided with Apple's development of a tablet computer, which had a similar resolution to the iPhone 4 and required the same demanding mix of performance and efficiency. After several years of development, Apple announced the A4 chip in January 2010, powering the 1st generation iPad.

A fast start
The A4 chip was the key behind the iPad's incredible early success. Developers were able to write sophisticated apps for the iPad from day 1, while being efficient enough to achieve the famous 10 hour battery life that the iPad has long enjoyed. As expected, the A4 made it to the iPhone 4 in June 2010, before being used in the 4th generation iPod Touch and 2nd generation Apple TV later that same year.

Apple had no intention of resting on their laurels - in March 2011, less than a year after the iPad had been released, Apple announced the iPad 2, featuring a 2nd generation of Apple designed SoC, the A5. The A5 offered a dual core CPU (compared to the single core A4), doubled the RAM offered on the iPad, and crucially offered 9x faster graphics performance than the A4. Yes, you read that correctly, 9x faster. It was clear at this point that Apple's chip team were performing miracles, and that the future of iOS devices looked bright.

After the success of the iPhone's retina display, it felt inevitable that the iPad would one day receive the same, high resolution treatment. The iPad 2 focused on slimming down the product, removing all of the slack within the original iPad's curvy design. There was much debate ahead of the 3rd generation iPad as to whether Apple would manage to fit in such a high resolution panel, and the chips to power such a panel, while maintaining the battery life and sleak design that the iPad 2 offered. In March 2012, Apple released the 3rd generation iPad, with a retina display, and an A5X chip. The X stood for graphics. This was basically an A5 on steroids, essentially doubling the graphics power of the A5 and allowing the iPad 3 to drive its insanely high resolution display. This marked an important change in the Apple silicon strategy, where silicon would be tailored to devices depending on their thermal constraints, and power demands.

I'm keen not to make this post unnecessarily long for the sake of it, so lets skip straight to 2014, and the A8X.

Slow and steady loses the race
By 2014, Apple had expanded the iPad range to now include a mini version. For the 2013 refresh, Apple opted to use the bog-standard A7 chip from the iPhone 5S, rather than using a graphics powerhouse "X" version as they'd done in the previous couple of years with the A5X and A6X. While there might be technical reasons for this, the obvious explanation is that the A7 was just so good that the iPads didn't need a more powerful chip than the iPhone, and sticking with the vanilla A7 managed to drag even greater battery life out of the designs which had shrunk in 2013 with the introduction of the iPad Air.

Going into 2014, it was assumed that Apple would continue the trend when the inevitable iPad Air 2 came along in October 2014. However, Apple surprised everyone when they unveiled an A8X chip, offering a new triple core CPU design and a sizeable graphics improvement. It was the first indication that Apple wanted to push forward the performance of the A series chips, even further beyond what the iPad software really needed at the time - it hinted that Apple had bigger plans for the iPad, or maybe had long-term plans to move the Mac product line to Apple silicon chips. It was around this time that the first real rumours of Apple silicon Macs gained traction, in part due to the stunning performance of the A8X which had already begun to rival Intels lower TDP chips. The single core performance of the A8X still lagged behind the soon to be announced 2015 Macbook and Macbook Air, but the graphics performance was truly impressive, with benchmarks starting to rival the Macbook Air and the lower end Macbook Pro models. The real question was, could Apple sustain the (frankly absurd) year over year improvements? If they could, the writing was on the wall for Intel.

The following year marked another big milestone for Apple silicon, with the debut of the A9, and A9X chipsets. Both of these were screamers - roughly doubling the CPU and GPU performance of the A8 and A8X chips that they replaced. With the A9X came a new product, the iPad Pro. It became obvious at this point that the iPad Air 2 had been an exception, and that going forward the "X" chips would be reserved for the latest and greatest "Pro" iPads. The A9X was now closing in on the CPU performance of the Macbook Air and 13 inch Macbook Pro lines, while the graphics could now match the best integrated graphics chips that Intel offered. It still came up short compared to the discrete GPUs in the higher end Macbook Pros, but that gap was also closing.

The A10X followed in 2017 with more modest 30%-40% improvements - but crucially still outpaced the gains that Intel were making. Additionally, a die shrink from 16nm to 10nm allowed the A10X to consume considerably less power than the A9X, allowing enough battery wiggle-room to enable the Promotion features on the 2017 iPad Pros. It's worth considering just how bad Intel's execution had become by this point. In the mid 2010s there were numerous promises for when chips would be available, and when die shrinks would occur, but time after time Intel missed their own deadlines and chips were frequently delayed. This caused issues for Apple - they were unable to release new Macs as and when they wanted to coincide with hardware changes, and when they did release, the chip performance was behind expectations (both power and efficiency) which threw more spanners in the works for Apple's hardware team. It was becomming obvious that the relationship between Apple and Intel was strained. Apple's ability to control their own silicon releases, and coincide them with hardware announcements, clearly had huge benefits.

The transition was starting to look more like "when", rather than "if". With the A10X, Apple was able to match, or best, all of the chipsets in the 13 inch Macbook lines while consuming a fraction of the power. Even the higher specced 15 inch models were starting to come under threat. The only stumbling block was how that architecture would scale up to the desktop chips. It was clear that a partial transition would create more problems than it would solve, and so Apple would have to wait until they were confident that they had a chip that could do it all - even rivalling high end discrete desktop GPUs.

The A12X was Apple's next pro iPad chip, released in October 2018. This was perhaps the biggest and boldest leap that we'd seen to date. There were questions in 2017 and 2018 as to whether Apple could sustain the huge year on year improvements that had been achieved throughout the 2010s. Reaching 10nm with the A10 and A11 was a huge milestone, and with Intel also moving to 10nm in 2017 with the Ice Lake chips, all eyes were on Apple to see if they could shrink the A-series chips even further. The A12X utilised a 7nm process, offering a 35% increase in single core performance, and an almost 2x increase in multicore performance thanks to the increased core count (8 cores vs the previous 6 core design of the A10X). The graphics performance also saw a 2x increase - ridiculous. The CPU performance was now on-par with, and often slightly ahead of the highest end 15 inch Macbook Pro. The graphics were now comfortably ahead of all Apple laptops, except for the highest end 15 inch BTO options with Vega graphics, which maintained a healthy margin over the A12X. However, the Vega GPUs in the Macbook Pros were notorious for their heavy throttling and high power consumption. They could provide huge amounts of performance but only for short bursts, and at the cost of tons of battery life. The A12X however could run silently, in a 5.9mm thin iPad, with no fans, and basically no throttling. Apple also touted that the GPU performance of the A12X was similar to that of the 8th generation of consoles (Xbox One and PS4). While these were released 5 years prior to the A12X, it's pretty staggering to think about the size of a PS4, and the size of the iPad Pros (and lack of fans in the latter).

By the time of the A12X's release in October 2018, speculation had been rife around Apple's transition of the Mac to Apple silicon. Many had thought that 2018 would be the year, given the advantages that the A10X already offered over many Intel Macbooks in 2017. Even the architecure of the A12X was very similar to what we'd eventually get in the M1 a few years later. It features an 8 core CPU (4 high performance and 4 high efficiency cores) and an 8 core GPU (with 1 binned core). If you're thinking "hang on, isn't that just an M1?" - you'd be right. I tend to think of the A12X as the M0 with the benefit of hindsight. Even at the time in 2018, the A12X felt ludicrously overpowered for the iPad Pros. This is evidenced today where in 2023, I'm still using the 2018 iPad Pro, and while I'm sure the M2 version is slightly snappier, I really haven't noticed any slowdown in the nearly 5 years since it debued. I'll put some pictures of the performance race between Intel and Apple silicon below, which should (hopefully) stack up with the words above.

Showtime
2020 arrived, and ahead of WWDC there was wide speculation that now was finally the time for Apple to announce the processor transition. This was a cool moment as an Apple fan - the run into an Apple silicon Mac transition was one of the longest rumours in Apple's history, spanning all the way back to 2014/2015. Apple finally took the covers off at the end of their WWDC presentation, which had striking similarities to the keynote in 2005 which announced the transition from PowerPC to Intel. Just as in 2005, performance per watt was the phrase of the day, with Apple stating that there would be a family of chips for the Mac, with the transition starting later in 2020 and lasting around 2 years. The A12Z (non-binned A12X) was used as a developer kit for developers to get their apps ready ahead of the late 2020 release of the first Apple silicon Macs. Even using the A12Z (which was now almost 2 years) old, developers were finding that their apps were flying compared to the Intel equivelants.

In November 2020, the first chip for the Mac was finally revealed. This had been largely foreshadowed by the introduction of the A14 in the iPhone 12 series. The A14 was based on a 5nm process, a further shrink from the 7nm A12/A13 chips. The performance gains were significant, largely thanks to this die shrink. It became clear that an A14X would be a substantial leap over the A12X, with an expected 50% increase in CPU and an almost 2x increase in GPU power. This was widely expected to be the first Mac chip, and these expectations became reality. Apple ultimately decided to rebrand the A14X, becomming the M1 for use in Macs. The rest, is history.

What's lighter than Air?

Macbook Air introduction
Back in January 2008, Apple introduced the Macbook Air. There were rumours about Apple developing a smaller Macbook for years prior to the announcement. In many ways the transition from PowerPC to Intel processors that Apple started in 2005 was the catalyst for this product. Apple had long been struggling to fit the fastest PowerPC chips in their laptops, and it became clear in the mid 2000's that the performance per watt advantages of Intel were too good to resist. This was especially true given Apple's increasing focus on the portable Mac market as Macbooks were already outselling desktops by this point - with a trend that looked likely to accelerate.

There was a lot of fanfare when the Macbook Air was released. Apple had finally delivered what became known as an "ultra-portable". The thin profile of the Macbook Air was largely down to 3 things:

1. Removing the optical disk drive
2. Moving to a smaller HDD to save space
3. Using the latest and greatest, low TDP chips from Intel

The innovation in the Macbook Air came at a cost though, it was positioned as a luxury, more niche portable, for those who absolutely needed (or wanted) the lightweight, thin design that it offered. This wasn't the Macbook for most people, in order to get the extreme design you had to trade off a chunk of performance, the disk drive, some battery life, and some dollars. That meant that the Macbook Air was really suited to those who wanted the laptop either as a second Mac (to accompany a more powerful desktop) or those who had more basic computing needs, such as word processing, light coding, reading/consuming content. More hardcore applications could still be done on it, but performance wasn't its north star.

Reinventing the wheel
In late 2010, almost 3 years after the original Macbook Air was unveiled, Apple launched a completely redesigned Macbook Air. Not only did the physical aspects of the product change, but the positioning of the product changed significantly. Whereas the original Air was positioned as a luxury option, the new Air was very much positioned as the Macbook for everyone.

There was a significant price drop, helped in part due to a smaller 11.6" variant at the bottom of the line, which meant that the Macbook and Macbook Air were much closer together in terms of affordability. The redesign brought higher resolutions displays (remember when 900x1440 was considered high resolution?) and SSDs on all models, thanks to the sharp drop in SSD prices since the original Air debuted. This change allowed for even greater thinness due to the complete removal of HDDs. Intel's low TDP chips had also matured a lot since 2008, meaning that there was less of a performance sacrifice needed when choosing the Air over the other Mac laptops. Newer battery tech also made its way from the Pro models into these newer Macbook Airs. All of these factors combined to make the Macbook Air an irresistible combination of performance, portability, battery life, style, and price. Steve Jobs said that "we see these as the future of notebooks" - he was right.

The Macbook Air quickly became Apple's best selling laptop - due to its universal appeal to consumers, education, business, and everything in between. While models started off with just 64GB SSD and 2GB of RAM, they were configurable up to 256GB and 4GB respectively - meaning they scaled well and still appealed to prosumers who might have previously been tempted by the lower end Macbook Pros. The 2010 Air started at $999, but over the next few years the entry price came down further as manufacturing costs came down and economies of scale ramped up. I'm sure at some point in this period I saw an 11" Macbook Air as low as £660 after education discount. It became well and truly, affordable.

Over the period from 2010-2014 the Macbook Air continued to improve. The changes were always in the processor/SSD/RAM department, bringing even more performance thanks to maturing Intel chipsets and the viability of integrated graphics rather than small, dedicated GPUs. This lead to tremendous battery life improvements, going from 7 hours to 12/13 hours in just a few years. Faster SSDs made sure everything felt snappy in new Mac OS releases, and at this point the Macbook Air was untouchable. They were completely ubiquitous, every single coffee shop, school, university, meeting, lounge, all had a Macbook Air in them. Even I had one.

The difficult 3rd album?
Around 2013, a few years after the 2010 redesign, rumours began to circulate about a possible "Retina Macbook Air" *drools*. The Macbook Pro went retina in 2012, along with the 3rd gen iPad, following the introduction of "retina" displays on the iPhone 4 in 2010. Macbook Air owners lusted after the amazing display on the Macbook Pros - many had seen how good retina looked on their phone for years, and would have given an arm and a leg for Apple to release a portable laptop with such a display- I know because I was one of them.

On paper this sounded straightforward. We had retina screens in everything else, why not the Macbook Air? Sadly, retina displays came at a cost:

1. Greater power consumption, meaning worse battery life
2. Greater cost, almost certainly pushing the price of the Macbook Air up by several hundred dollars
3. Greater thickness/weight - not something in the Macbook Air's philosophy
4. Slower performance - Would the integrated GPUs from Intel be enough to push around 3 or 4 million pixels? And even if they could, what kind of thermal issues would you run into?

In technology, you have 3 competing factions: Battery life, performance, design. You can only ever pick 1, or maybe 2 of this trio (unless you lived beyond October 2020 and the advent of Apple silicon). The Macbook Air was all about design, it was about being lightweight and thin. The battery life and the performance of the Macbook Air were secondary, it just happened that they still managed to be really good thanks to the advances mentioned above in the early 2010s. Adding a retina display into the Macbook Air though would clearly compromise the battery life and performance of these machines, and it also meant that the starting price would have to go up. Apple had a choice to make - do we introduce a Macbook Air with a retina display as a higher tier option, and let consumers pick it if they want to trade off performance and battery life, or do we wait until the time when it can be introduced without any big downsides and without having to put up the price? Turns out, they did neither.

Apple was even more ambitious than the fanbase of the Macbook Air, Apple had been working for years on a completely redesigned, even thinner, even lighter version of the Macbook Air, which ALSO had a retina display. 2013 passed without any announcement, then 2014 came and went, and finally in March 2015, rumours built ahead of a spring keynote, and we were finally going to get to see this new generation of Macbook Air.

Sucking the Air out of the room
Apple delivered. Everything that Macbook Air customers had been dreaming of, and more, was shown off in the March 2015 keynote. We got:

1. A complete redesign, it was WAY thinner and lighter than the previous Macbook Air, coming in with a 12" screen and weighing just 2 pounds (eliminating the need for both the 11" and 13" models and finding a middle ground)
2. A retina display, coming in at 2304x1440, with the same PPI as the retina Macbook Pros
3. Still great battery life, of 9 hours
4. A new chip from Intel, the core-M, with an extremely low TDP (just 5 watts). Despite the low power consumption, it was still more than capable of the basic, everyday tasks that the Macbook Air was designed for, and could drive the retina display just fine
5. UBC-C charging, making it future proof (although notably omitting USB-A ports entirely to allow for the new slimmer design)
6. Fanless, all metal design, with larger speakers. The fanless nature meant it ran completely silently

There were also some extra goodies that I don't think anyone saw coming. Apple completely reinvented the keyboard, changing the underlying mechanism for sturdier keys and a shallower profile. The trackpad was perhaps the most revolutionary part of the whole product. Rather than the previous "diving board" mechanism which meant that the trackpad hinged at the top (meaning it was harder to click the further up you were) - the new trackpad was solid state, relying on force sensors and haptic feedback to provide a clicking sensation (how f*cking cool is that?) It also allowed for new UI elements, allowing you to "force click" on things to quickly reveal other options or perform quick actions, and haptics provided feedback as you pinched/zoomed/navigated round apps to allow for easier and more precise cursor work. It was, and is, amazing.

By the time Apple had gone through all of this, I truly thought we were looking at a return to the old days - positioning this product as a luxury, ultra portable that pushes forward the laptop for a premium price. This was reinforced when they announced the starting configuration would include 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. The Macbook Air had previously started at 4GB/128GB respectively, making this a significant leap. I was ready for an astronomical starting price for such a device. To my amazement, it started at $1,299.

Then for an even bigger bombshell - they called it the "Macbook". Everything about this product was a redesigned, even better, Macbook Air, but Apple marketing lost their bottle. The Macbook Air had become such a juggernaut, that even the name needed protecting. The Macbook Air name had become the 2010 design, it had become its own brand. Apple clearly wanted to continue selling the 2010 edition Macbook Air given the huge success it had enjoyed, but how would they do this if this newer, lighter edition took the same name? Would they rebrand it as the "Macbook"? (I personally would have loved it to be called the "Macbook Classic", but hey ho). Apple decided that rebranding the 2010 edition Macbook Air was too much of a risk, so they just... didn't do it. Instead they kept the Macbook Air as it was, and launched the newer, thinner, lighter, retina edition as the "Macbook".

On gas and Air
The decision to start the Macbook with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD was clearly to try and differentiate the two lines. The Macbook started at $1,299 as a result of the higher starting config, $300 above the Macbook Air's base config. However if you priced up the Macbook Air to the same spec, they were essentially the same price. This clearly compromised the success of the Macbook hugely. As mentioned above, the Macbook Air name had become so strong that customers walking into an apple store already trusted the product. Even faced with a thinner, lighter model, with a retina display and way more advanced tech, for the same price, they would go for the Macbook Air because its safe. When you're spending $1,299 you don't want to take risks if you don't have to. Your friend told you they love their Macbook Air, why would you suddenly buy this other thing you've never heard of?

The Macbook also came under fire from reviewers and journalists due to the lack of ports. There was just 1 USB-C port and a headphone jack on the Macbook, compared to the 2010 Macbook Air having 2 USB-A ports, headphones jack, mini displayport, SD card slot, and magsafe for charging. The lack of magsafe meant that when charging, users would effectively have no ports, compared to the 2 free USB-A ports on the Macbook Air. I understand the frustration around this by reviewers, but I can't help but think it was low hanging fruit when looking for cons. Sure, the lack of ports might put off some users, but Apple wasn't making this product for people who needed USB-A ports, just like the original Macbook Air wasn't made for people who needed optical drives. The Macbook Air had always been about compromise. If you wanted something with a ton of ports and expandability, the Macbook Pro was there for you. They didn't seem to get this...

Apple made it clear in the keynote that they were pushing for a wireless future with the new Macbook. As cringey as that sounds - I think the compromise they reached was a good one. Airdrop had recently been brought out, enabling apple devices to easily transfer files between each other without the need for USB sticks. Mail Drop meant that you could send large attachments over email, using iCloud as the host for your attachments up to 5GB. iCloud Drive meant that you could store all of your data on the cloud, accessing and sharing it from any device. The solutions were there, I guess people just didn't know about them or weren't ready to rely on them. You could also get a dongle to use USB-A, HDMI, SD cards, etc, if you really wanted - but maybe the inconvenience of this was too much for some. I get it, the fear of being in a position where you need these additional ports is there, but for most I thought the new design would outweigh those fears.

Another nail in the coffin of the Macbook was the keyboard. It was radically different to previous Apple keyboards. It was much more shallow, and took some getting used to, acting as a middle ground between traditional keyboards and the iPad's virtual keyboard. With enough use though, I personally found it to be a great keyboard. I wrote my entire final year project on the thing (which ended up being an 88 page novel) and it never missed a beat. Some people found that keyboards were failing, with keys stopping working after continuous, heavy use. While this was clearly an issue, I think the general dislike among journalists of the more shallow keyboard crept into the reporting of the keyboard failures, and the Macbook became notorious for having unreliable/faulty keyboards. I don't know what % of owners had these issues, I can just say that after years of heavy use, I've not had a single issue, and I know many others who haven't. It was clearly a problem, but it felt like a scapegoat for an overall backlash against the new design.

The Macbook line trundled on for a few years, getting its final update in 2017 with faster core-M chips and a more reliable, 2nd gen butterfly keyboard. Despite the 2017 model improving the performance of the laptop significantly, and the 2nd gen keyboard helping reduce failure rates, the Macbook continued to be outsold compared to the cheaper Macbook Air, despite the Air's ageing design and crappy display. The final nail in the coffin was in October 2018, when apple triumphantly announced a Retina Macbook Air, saying that customers had been asking for it and would finally get what they wanted after 8 years of the same design. The announcement celebrated the fact that the new Macbook Air had a retina display, a force touch trackpad, a fanless design, and a butterfly keyboard, and was also slightly thinner and lighter than before (2.75 pounds vs 3 pounds previously). As a big Macbook fan (pun intended) - this was painful. What this update essentially did was bring it in line with the features of the Macbook, while still being thicker and heavier than the 2 pound wonder, in exchange for a slightly larger screen, higher TDP intel chips, and Touch ID. The two lines were now so similar that it was clear the Macbook couldn't survive in its current form for much longer. Even the prices of the two products were now basically identical. In July 2019, the Macbook was officially discontinued.

At this point I probably sound like a Macbook apoligest, and I probably am. I love this laptop.

Apple silicon and the future
With the advent of apple silicon, announced at WWDC 2020, I had fresh hope that the Macbook form factor could make a comeback at some point in the future. The transition to apple silcon was in many ways, very similar to the Intel transition in the mid 2000s, the main reason being performance per watt. The M1 chip (A14X) came out with incredible CPU and GPU performance compared to the intel chips they replaced, while also being much less power hungry. The main advantage of these gains were clearly going to be in the notebook lines, where they could completely change the battery life/power/design equation for the better, enabling thinner/lighter designs while also cramming in more performance.

The M1 absolutely destroys the chipset inside the 2017 Macbook (the final iteration before being discontinued), while also offering a TDP low enough to fit inside ultra-light, ultra-thin chassis. Indeed, the M1 fits comfortably inside the 2018 Macbook Air chassis, which itself is a bigger brother to the Macbook, and even with heavy sustained use - it's difficult to get that laptop to throttle and slow down, if not impossible.

Fitting an M1/2/3 inside the 12" Macbook design, albeit at a lower clock speed perhaps, should easily be possible. Even if this wasn't possible, putting in the latest A series chip as an alternative would work perfectly. The A16 is in a different world to the 2017 Macbook guts, even without the extra CPU/GPU cores that the M series offers. To summarise, there is absolutely no reason why apple couldn't build a 12" Macbook using apple silicon that blows the old intel models out of the water, both in terms of performance and battery life.

Given that Apple recently redeisgned the Macbook Air with a new flat design at WWDC 2022, we're clearly not getting a new Macbook Air anytime soon. Therefore, I'd personally like to see this 12" design in the form of a "Macbook nano" (Macbook Mini/Macbook [insert gas lighter than air] would also work). It could be positioned once again as a more expensive, luxury product that focuses primarily on portability, compromising on having less battery life and less performance than the thicker and heavier Macbook Air. There were some rumours in 2022 of a possible return to the 12" form factor with a 12" Macbook Pro - and I believe there's no smoke without fire there. But I think the fire I want, and miss, was clearly extinguished in Apple's product strategy long ago.

I'll keep dreaming, Apple.

It has been a while...

Sorry for the 11 year absence, I've been busy: - Getting some A levels - Getting a degree - Doing even more exams to be an Actuary - Getting a bit ill Given the number of fans I have on here, I thought I'd get back into the blogging "sphere". At some point I might make some waffley posts about the last 11 years of apple products, what I've enjoyed, what I haven't enjoyed, and everything inbetween. Right now though lets talk about something close to my heart - the lack of a prosumer iMac. The Mac Studio is a great product. So is the new Studio Display. As a long time 5k imac user (2014, fully specced), I should be overjoyed with the prospect of a Mac Studio/Studio Display combo. The computer itself is a huge upgrade in pretty much every way you could imagine. The CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD are blow my imac out of the water, pretty significantly. The display is also pretty good, its 600 nits vs my imacs 350 nits, and the colour gamut is a step up. However, this is where the problems begin... My 2014 iMac started at $2,499. This was an uNbElIeVaBlE deal, and it was in line with apple's startegy for the iMac. They'd done the same thing in 2009 with 1440p screens - people were only just starting to talk about 1080p, and "full HD" monitors cost silly money. Apple brought out a (then huge) 27 inch screen with 1440p resolution, and managed to keep the price pretty sensible (I believe they started around £1,500. That was a great deal. Similarly in 2014, people were only just starting to talk about 4k monitors, and the cheapest, worst 4k monitor you could get was well over £1k. Making a 5k resolution panel, which had great colours/contrast, and bundling it with a really tidy computer, great accessories, and a metal all in one design for $2,499, was again, ridiculously good value. It's now 2022, almost 8 years since I bought my iMac. If you're being generous, you'd have to say that the apple pricetag on that 5k monitor was around $1,499, with the other thousand making up the computer, enclosure, accessories. The studio display, in many ways, is a spec bump of my iMac screen from 8 years ago, for the reasons above. In fact, the screens in the iMac since the 2017 WWDC refresh have been almost on par with the Studio Display's specs, and those iMac's have consistly started at around £1,699. As a reminder, that included a fast computer, and £200 worth of accessories. The Studio Display starts at £1,500. Once you add a keyboard and mouse, it's £1,700. Hopefully you can now see where I got the energy (and anger) to write this post, while ill with COVID again. £1,700 is an absolute kick in the face to 27 inch iMac users that were looking to upgrade. Not only have they discontinued the 27 inch iMac, they've removed the computer, the accessories, and offered it us for the same price. The "cheapest" way to get a 27 inch apple computer is now to buy a mac mini (£700), keyboard and mouse (£200) and Studio Display (£1500), which sums to £2400. For this you're getting an A14X (yeah i'm cool I understand apple silicon), 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of SSD. This also loses the All in One (AIO) design, which I think is a big downgrade. In terms of snappiness and quiteness, I have no doubt that an M1/A14X will stack up okay compared to the old base 27 inch iMac. I can't remember exact numbers, but they were in the same sort of ballpark once you averaged CPU/GPU performance. So my question is, where is the upgrade for 27 inch imac users? Every other apple silicon Mac has maintained its price (give or take £100 either way) and has got a HUGE leap in performance from the old intel models. I think the best way for apple to profit from the new silicon is by going aggressive with the price (thanks to not having to buy intel chips) and really trying to push up the market share of the Mac. It seems more and more like apple are abandoning the middleground/prsoumer and pushing back into clearly defined consumer (bright colours, M1 chips) and pro (boring colours, crazy fast chips, expensive). As someone in that middleground, I find this frustrating. My only real choice for an upgrade to my 2014 imac is a Studio Display (not a huge upgrade over my screen, £1,500), a Mac Studio (£2,200 with the 1TB SSD) and accesories (keyboard and trackpad, £250). This means I have to spend £3,950 to upgrade my iMac to something that is fundamentally better than my 2014 spec, and the main thing I actually want to upgrade is the screen, which is barely any different. My second big gripe with the current lineup is the lack of a mini-LED external monitor (that doesn't cost $6,000). But maybe that's a post for another day... but it links back to all of the above. The old apple strategy on Macs would have had a 27 inch, mini LED iMac, with M1 Pro/Max/(Ultra?) - which would have been a fantastic upgrade over my 2014 model. Even if the mini-LED drove the cost up to a $2,999 starting price ($500 more than the 16 inch MBP with identical specs, so not unreasonable at all) I think this would be a really appealing machine prior 27 inch iMac users. I'll keep dreaming...

thunder and lightning. really thin lightning.

hello there folks!
we may be into march already, but i'd like to wish you all a happy 2011. i've been very busy over the last few months, so apologies for the delayed entry. luckily, the first bit of apple news for this year came at the end of feb; so i'm reporting on recent goodies!
the macbook pro got an update last week, and it was a pretty good one... if you don't already know, here's a quick breakdown of what its packing.
we've gone completely sandy bridge, so in terms of processing power, we're on the moon. even the standard 2.3ghz i5 dual core is getting 6500 on geekbench. that destroys my 3.06ghz core 2 duo imac, at over 50% faster. people will die.
the next thing to note is quad cores in the 15 inch and above, which serve up an insane amount of power, around 9-10 thousand on geekbench infact, putting them with touching distance of the current top of the line imac. incredible on apple's part i have to say, and intel ofcourse. these chips are beauty's.
the graphics are also on par with the 320m, so you'll be running games at a decent level even on the 13 inch. if you're at all serious about video programs though, you'll see sense and get a 15 inch with that 6490 in, its pretty impressive.
THUNDERBOLT! you probably looked at the title and got all worried about my mental health, but don't worry.
thunderbolt ports bring lightning fast data transfers to the pro, and you're looking at 20x usb 2 speeds. thats fast right?

enough with the macbooks though, the ipad 2 was announced just 2 days ago, and its a pretty tempting beast.
to sum it up... thinner, lighter, dual core, 9x the graphics power, garageband, imovie, facetime, 720p recording.
a nice list there i think you'll admit, and it even comes in white!
the screen res is sadly the same, so no retina right now folks. i've got plenty of things to say about the ipad2, but its rather late, and i'm sick of typing. i'll put up some thoughts about the second ipad within a few days.

in other news, jobs is alive and well.
i can sleep again now.

the lion, the jobs, and the air

first of all, a very happy chrirstmas to anyone reading this, and secondly, apologies for my 3 month absence on the site, its been a busy time with piano school and girls, but i promise to get back to my roots for 2011 << new years resolution right there.
well where to start, firstly there was an apple event back on the 20th of october which saw the introduction of ilife 11, which i'll go into a bit of detail for. the three apps updated are garageband, iphoto, and imovie, and i'll start with garageband. you've now got flexi time, which SHOULD allow you to sync up all your tracks if any are out of time, but this feature also wrecks some of your compositions, so its not for the faint hearted. theres also a clean up of the UI, but theres no star studded feature here, just minors.
the update to iphoto was welcome for many, but its been slated as some of the worst software apple have ever brought out on OSX. it was tooted to feature new card making options and the ability to run everything in full screen, and the promise of facebook integration. and while they've changed the feel of iphoto abit you'd expect minor changes like this to be free, its not worth your money. luckily, imovie also got an update, and i'm glad to say it got quite a few improvements. theres now the option to make movie trailers (which is pretty amazing) and audio adjustments are much easier, as are transitions and effects on video.
apple also showed of OSX 10.7, 'lion'. they only managed to show off a couple of features, which seemed general UI improvements and a new kind of expose, where your applications folder looks much more like your scrolling through an ipad (theres even folders). i was reminded by a friend of mine that bringing 'folders' to a computer is nothing too special. i'm clearly addicted to my apple pie. anyway, lion will be around next summer, so if your thinking of buying a mac, please wait till then, you'll even get a free ipod touch on your travels.
the macbook air was the 'one more thing', and it showed the inclusion of an 11.6" model aswell as the 13.3", so apple are dipping there fingers into netbook territory, but personally, if the ipads not a netbook, i don't know what is. clock speeds range from 1.4ghz-2.13ghz, and all come with that disappointing 2gb of ram. the nvidia 320m should help with on the go gaming and the inclusion of SSD'S throughout the new airs mean 13 second boot ups... its just silly, considering all this is in a 1cm casing, and it'll outperform my imac which is about 2 inches thick and 21 inches diagonally. yes, that annoys me.
so finally, i'll mention mr.jobs, who won the 'person of the year' award from the financial times. welldone.
i'm off for a quick session on resident evil 4 now, before some christmas lunch. one again, have a good christmas, and i'll see you in january for a facetime, USB packing, Retina iPad. minus the usb and retina ofcourse ;)

ipods, tv's, and a bag of updates

if i said my apple sense wans't tingling with excitement then i'd be lying... its been a fantastic couple of weeks for all of us apple fans, and i though i might aswell do a round up of whats been going on, so lets start with the ipods. the shuffle was the first to be updated, and for all you fans of actual buttons instead of voice control, you're in luck, because the new generation features both, thats right, both.apart from this, the only difference is that its a much more square design than before, and has a very handy clip to attach it to waits, wrists, and shirt pockets alike. the next ipod to be updated was the nano, and we finally got to see what apple's shipments of 1.5 inch touch screens are actually used for. they've basically sliced the click wheel off, and made the screen multi touch enabled. if you're like me, and you're wondering why a 1.5 inch screen has multi touch, i have no idea whatsoever. so its kind of a smaller ipod touch without a home button, so returning home is achieved by swiping from left to right. they've stayed with 8gb and 16gb storage, which i was a bit disappointed about, a 32gb nano would be a real media tool. its hard to describe the nano's looks, so head over to apple for some better descriptions. just a note, the nano doesn't have an app store...yet.
next up is the touch, which is easily describable, because its virtually the same as the third gen, but with an A4 chip, 2 camera's, (the back has 720p recording), and the precious retina display. this may seem great, but the camera lense isn't the same quality as the iphone 4, and the retina has no IPS, so holding it at absurd angles for no reason is out of the question. its also even thinner than the last model, so i think its a great time to buy the touch. storage is the same as the old model...
the final product shown on the 1st was the new apple tv, and i'm going to be blunt, apple has missed the mark with this one. there's no internal storage, so everything is streamed from your mac, or iOS device. this is great for someone in north korea who's on 50 billion mb internet, but for someone who has a megabyte, this is almost unusable, as films would take hours to buffer. i realise i might be jumping the gin on this one, so i'm going to buy one on monday and make another blog after i've tried it out. another problem is to stream from a mac it has to be on.... so your only choice is leaving it on all day, which has put me off even further. in terms of what the apple TV does, its the same as before.
in other news, iOS4.1 is out, with game centre (yes apple fan, you were meant to get that several months ago in 4.0) and something called HDR photo's. HDR photo's creates the effect of multi focusing, so you can get everything in your picture to be sharp, and as colourful as real life, and in some circumstances this helps. for example, standing against a wall and focusing on yourself would normally mean you'd lose the colour of the wall, but HDR stops this, which is cool.
apart from 4.1, jobs announced 4.2 for ipad, which will be available in november, and it brings folders, multi tasking, game centre, print management (YAY!), and all the other OS4 stuff which never made it to your pad. i'll have more on this nearer november.
P.S. my free case arrived, and its been doing a great job, thankyou apple for giving me a solution to a problem i never had :D