The world changed by the MacBook Pro --Apple News Flash Holiday Guide 2022 --CNET Japan
As a holiday guide for reading Apple News at once, each product / service category is summarized. Following the first iPhone 13 series and the second iPad, the third is the Mac.
The author renewed the main machine in 2021 for the first time in a long time. The work environment, which used to be a desktop and a notebook, will be integrated into a single MacBook Pro 14-inch, and the desk at home or work will be prepared to dock with a MacBook Pro such as an external display. I steered to.
Personally, it was a MacBook Pro that had a big impact, but let's first look back on the conversion of the desktop to Apple Silicon.
The iMac's tremendous charm
It was the iMac that bloomed in the spring of 2021. In addition to the usual colors of blue, green, pink, and silver, the lineup of all seven colors, including yellow, orange, and purple, which are exclusive to the Apple Store, had a big impact.
7-color iMacWith the Korona-ka, the message was put in that he wanted to be a person who would brighten the inside of the house as much as possible, with a view to establishing a long-term computer-oriented life at home. Multicolor development is difficult for those who make it, but it may be difficult for those who sell it.
Along with that message, I also noted that Apple has made a completely new design as an all-in-one desktop with Apple Silicon.
First is the weight. I don't carry a desktop, so it doesn't matter if it's around 10kg, but the iMac weighs just under 4.5kg. It is light enough to be used anywhere in the house where there is a power source.
Of course, lightness does not assume mobility in the home. Depending on the material, being light means that less material can be used. The 4.5 kg product can be made with less resources than the 10 kg product, so I felt that it was an Apple-like design concept aiming for resource recycling (closed cycle).
Although it is a desktop, it has a small logic board similar to the MacBook Air and is 11.5 mm thin. Even with the beautifully enlarged 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, it's power-saving enough to require a 145W power supply.
This display is attractive enough to introduce an iMac for this purpose. Even if you try to find it with a 24-inch resolution of 4.5K, 500 nits, and specifications compatible with P3, it is difficult to find a competitor on an external display. When you use it, it's not as huge as 27 inches, but its high resolution makes it an exquisite workspace that can handle complicated tasks.
Also, I was particularly surprised by the speakers. The 6-speaker system has good bass to treble, and also supports spatial audio, making it a sound with a strong presence that sets it apart from the built-in audio built into the display.
The M1 that appeared in 2020 is sufficiently competitive even if it is installed on a desktop in the middle of the 100,000 yen range, and it can be said that it is a significant performance improvement from the entry model iMac.
The biggest benefit of M1 conversion that I personally felt is that the image quality of FaceTime HD video has improved tremendously. While improving the performance of the sensor from 720p to 1080p, the image quality has improved significantly even more than that, as the video conference continues, people are asked "Did you move?" "What are you using the webcam?" The room is also beautifully projected.
The iMac is on an evolutionary path that is different from conventional PCs in terms of color, sound, and camera. Looking at the result of thinking about how computers will be used in the home, we can recall that it was a very suggestive product.
Presence of the 14-inch MacBook Pro
The most notable news about the Mac in 2021 was the renewal of the MacBook Pro. Apple is planning to shift the heart of the Mac from Intel to Apple Silicon with a transition period of two years from June 2020. Already half of that period has passed, and Apple has distributed a chip called M1 that dramatically improves the performance of entry model products.
From here on, it was a concern for many. Is it possible to achieve satisfactory performance with professional products? That is the point.
New MacBook Pro with new chips "M1 Pro" and "M1 Max". A lineup of 14-inch and 16-inch models. 13 inches will be M1 as beforeThe M1 Pro and M1 Max were fully released in October 2021. The CPU part is shared by 10 cores (efficiency core 2, performance core 8), and the two chips are differentiated by the amount of GPU and memory installed.
The M1 Pro has 14 or 16 cores, and the M1 Max has 24 or 32 cores. It continues to have an overwhelming advantage in the balance of power and performance, and the performance that can be demonstrated with power exceeding 100 W by combining Intel and external graphics is realized with power of 30 W, and it has higher performance for a longer time even with battery drive. It was a value to be able to demonstrate.
It's worth noting that video editing is fast anyway. There was no catching during editing, and the writing time was greatly shortened, and the merit of being able to carry the data and the work during editing on a notebook PC was greater. With the same performance, you can edit and export videos even on battery power, and it's fast anyway. It was an experience that completely changed the way I work.
The reason I chose the 14-inch this time is that I can now choose the M1 Max, which is as fast as the 16-inch.
On the contrary, until then, the Intel chips that can be selected with the easy-to-carry 13-inch model were limited, and there was no model with external graphics, so in the end it was a style to secure performance on the desktop and gain mobility with the notebook. I didn't get it.
In that sense, the 14-inch MacBook Pro has been evaluated as a game changer.
The MacBook Pro is equipped with Liquid Retina XDR, a mini LED backlight that was first used in the iPad Pro, and it was able to have a contrast ratio of 1 million to 1 and a maximum brightness of 1600 nits as a Mac. There is also a problem that the performance of this display is too good.
When it comes to external displays of the same level, ASUS Pro Art for less than 450,000 yen and Apple Pro Display XDR for less than 600,000 yen are the lowest prices, and the hurdles are quite high. Therefore, at home, I close the lid so that I don't look at the display of the Mac itself, and I only work with a normal external monitor.
This feels a little wasteful, but it's a little hard to see that the performance is so different on two screens. Liquid Retina XDR, which has too good performance for a personal computer screen, has a mode that limits the maximum brightness to 600 nits, so it is confirmed on the screen display that many people see when creating content. It is necessary to proceed with the adjustment while doing.
The MacBook Pro, which can be said to be the "ideal" set by Apple, shows some advanced efforts in the computer industry in various aspects. Over the next few years, I hope that other manufacturers and third parties will catch up and create a mechanism that can be combined at a slightly more affordable price.
However……. Keeping up with the quality of the display is a high hurdle, but webcams and speakers are also quite demanding. Like the iMac, the 1080p-upgraded webcam looks great on the M1 Pro / Max's ISP, and it doesn't look like a mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera without more light.
In addition, the 6-speaker system allows you to experience heavy bass and a relaxed sound spread that completely exceeds the performance of laptop speakers, and the HomePod mini is no longer useful at my desk, so I can move to other spaces in my house. I left for the trip.
In the fourth installment, I will talk about Apple Watch and home accessories.
