At least, not yet.
On November 10, 2020, Apple held an online event. At the event, Apple unveiled new Macs that are powered by the new M1 chip. The new Macs are:
- MacBook Air (13-inch)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch)
- Mac Mini
Hardware-wise, these Macs are identical to the ones released in 2019 except for the replacement of the Intel CPUs with Apple’s M1 chip. Interestingly, Apple is using the same chip for all 3 Macs except for the 256GB version of the MacBook Air which has 7 GPU cores instead of 8.
To differentiate the MacBook Pro from the MacBook Air, Apple removed the cooling fan from the MacBook Air. As a result, the MacBook Pro should have better sustained performance. This means that the MacBook Pro will be more suitable for heavy workloads such as video editing and gaming. Without a cooling fan, I predict that the MacBook Air will throttle itself quite a bit but we won’t know by how much until we get our hands on the machine. There is however a silver lining for the MacBook Air. The absence of a cooling fan allows the MacBook Air to operate silently. This may not be important to you but I always found the humming sound made by cooling fans to be quite annoying. The hum degrades the computing experience especially when you don’t use headphones. …
MagSafe is coming to iPhone 12; how did we get here?
The original idea for MagSafe came from an unusual place. The humble deep fryer. At the time, people were afraid that tripping on the wire may cause injury due to hot oil being spilled. To solve this problem, the Underwriters Laboratories developed a new standard that allows the wire to break away from the deep fryer if anyone ever trips on the cable. The new standard achieves this effect by using a magnet that connects the cable to the electrical appliance. The magnets allow the cable to break away gracefully when someone trips on it. …
Apple is the only company that sells a phone without an included charger.
On October 13, 2020, Apple announced the iPhone 12. At the same keynote, Apple announced that the iPhone 12 will no longer come with a charger. As expected, this move was not well received by the tech community.
Environment.
As of the iPhone 12, Apple will only include a lightning to USB-C cable in the box. Apple is doing that to reduce waste. According to Apple users already have 700 million lightning headphones and over 2 billion power adapters, that’s not even counting 3rd party power adapters. That’s a lot of waste.
By removing the lightning headphones and power adapters from the box, Apple claims that they can reduce carbon emissions and the mining of precious materials. The removal of these items makes the iPhone boxes smaller. Allowing Apple to fit 70% more iPhone in a shipping pallet. Thus, reducing carbon emission in its global logistic chain. …
But why?
On 23rd June 2020, in its WWDC 2020 keynote Apple announced that it will be moving its entire Mac lineup to Apple Silicon within 2 years. When Apple transitioned its Mac lineup from PowerPC to Intel that process took only 210 days.
What is Apple Silicon?
Apple Silicon is Apple’s implementation of the ARM ISA. Apple Silicon will be designed by Apple and manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Contrast this with Intel CPU’s that implement the x86 ISA.
Today, ARM chips are most commonly found in smartphones. This includes most Android phones and all iPhones. …
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