Thoughts on the One More Thing Event

So today, Apple announced its first Apple Silicon Macs. I have a few thoughts:

Wow! I had high expectations, but overall, Apple delivered with the new M1.
The M1 performance looks like a crazy leap forward. Generally, we’ll get 3X performance increases and 5X graphics improvements. That is completely nuts.
On all of these devices, Apple suddenly had all of this additional low watt/hour power. In each case, they chose to use it by giving the devices both more power and more battery. That isn’t a surprise. What is a surprise, to me at least, is how much power and additional battery life they were able to get.
Battery improvements are nuts. They gave many numbers, but it sounds like at least 6 hours of additional battery on both laptops.
There are two chip options available: 7 core and 8 core. I suspect that is simply a result of chip binning. When they didn’t get a full yield on a chip, they make that one of the less expensive ones.
My initial impression is that the scales just got tipped even more toward the MacBook Air in the Air vs. Pro question. The MacBook Air is so much more powerful and now fanless. You’ll need to justify going up to the Pro.
The M1 Mac mini was not in any of the rumors I read but makes sense. The Mac mini is now a mighty little computer.
There were no demos of running iPhone and iPad apps on the M1 Macs. Didn’t that seem weird?
Speaking of iOS, we didn’t get several of the iOS features I’d liked to have seen, like FaceID, cellular radios, and Touchscreen. But it is still early. I expect that may change with future hardware.
Did anybody else catch the bit with Ken Case playing the harp at 20:59?
You can order the new Macs today. Big Sur ships in two days. Buckle up, gang.

Overall, this change just gave the Mac a jolt of electricity. I fully expect the Mac hardware to also evolve in unexpected directions. I cannot wait to see how this all plays out over the next few years.

One More Thing

Apple has now announced next week’s One More Thing event for next Tuesday. This will be the third event in three months and the one I’ve been looking forward to most. There are a lot of contrary rumors about exactly how Apple will start rolling out Apple Silicon Macs. I can tell you that I am personally very excited to see how this goes down. Using Apple Silicon, I expect Apple will have the ability to turn up the dial quite a bit on battery life or performance (or perhaps a little bit on both). It will be interesting to see how they decide to go. Also, I’ve been looking at all the white space in Big Sur for months and imagining some cool new Macs with touch screens and iPad apps running alongside traditional Mac apps and all the possibilities that come with that.

Mark Gurman’s sources say that we’ll initially get new models of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air with Apple Silicon. I have no idea if those will include a touch screen or instead just be the same design as the existing models with a different processor. Regardless, we are going to learn a lot more next Tuesday.

BBEdit 13.5

Yesterday Bare Bones released BBEdit, version 13.5. There is plenty to like in this new version:

Ready for Apple Silicon — If you get it from their website, it will be a universal build. If you are getting it from the Mac App Store, it is still Intel-only until Apple allows developers to start distributing Apple silicon builds through the Mac App Store.
Markdown Cheat Sheet — Just as they recently did with regular expressions, BBEdit also now has built-in tools to help you learn and implement Markdown.
Server Document Snapshots — If you are accessing documents on a server, now when you quit BBEdit, it will save a snapshot of server-based documents, so when you re-open it, things will go much faster. I spoke to Rich Siegel about this, and he does a cool trick where it checks the server file date to make sure there are no conflicts.
“Rescued Documents” — Have you ever brain farted and quit a document without saving? BBEdit can now save a list of documents closed without saving.

There are several more new features, but the thing that stands out for me is Apple silicon support. There was some justifiable concern in the community that power-tool apps like BBEdit may have a hard time making the Apple silicon transition as quickly as we’d like. BBEdit, which admittedly has plenty of experience with Apple silicon transitions, seems to have had no problem making the move with a version ready before there is an Apple silicon Mac on the market.

Face ID Macs Likely with Apple Silicon

9to5 Mac did some sleuthing in the latest Big Sur beta and found references to the TrueDepth camera system currently found on some iPhones and iPads. Specifically, there are references to “PearlCamera”, which was Apple’s internal code name for the TrueDepth camera.

It makes perfect sense that they would add Face ID to Apple silicon Macs. They have already built it into very similar chips currently shipping on iPad and iPhone, and people would love to have Face ID on their Macs, just like everything else Apple makes. Indeed, you could argue it will be more useful on a Mac since I rarely am sitting at my Mac wearing a face mask. All that said, I would be shocked if Face ID shows up any time before Apple starts shipping Apple silicon Macs.