Some Quick, Random Thoughts Following the Apple WWDC Keynote

Here I am at Apple Park, having spent the morning watching the keynote event on campus. It was a lot of fun and, of course, I have thoughts:

The Software

The software updates were more robust than I expected. I’d originally heard this year was going to be primarily bug fixes with everyone at Apple focused on Vision Pro, but that wasn’t the case. Even if they hadn’t introduced the Vision Pro, it was a good year in general.
Live widgets on the Mac? Yes please.
I like the changes to watchOS. The widgets feel like they are taking another run at the now-abandoned Siri face. I thought it was a good idea then. Hopefully they nail it this time.
They spoke about using a new voice recognition engine on all platforms. I’ll be testing that … soon.
We didn’t hear much about Apple’s productivity apps during the presentation. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out there are improvements that they didn’t discuss.
Messages has to be the most commonly used iPhone app (in the US at least). It makes sense that they are continuing to improve it.
Again we heard about gaming. I think that ultimately Apple is going to have to doing a better job of courting AAA game developers but it’s nice to see they are now actively working on it. For years it felt like they’d just given up on gaming.

The New Macs

The new 15-inch MacBook Air was expected, but still nice to see. It’s basically a 13-inch MacBook Air, but bigger. I spent some time with one after the event. The lack of pin-holes for speakers on either side of the keyboard makes it look strange to me because I’ve never seen a large Apple laptop look like that. On the plus side, that’s one less place for water to get in.

The M2 Mac Studio looks exactly like the M1 model. However, I’m pleased that it got an annual update to the M2. There were rumors that they would skip years with the Mac Studio and I’m glad that’s not the case. Now that Apple makes its own chips, I’d hope that everything gets updated with each new M-chip iteration. (I’m looking at you, iMac.)
The Mac Pro feels a bit of a compromise. I spoke to an Apple rep that confirmed the Mac Pro will not run external video cards. It does, however, have a lot of slots if you need more storage and I/O. I’m not sure what else it will run but I’m guessing we’ll hear about it soon.
The new Mac Pro has the nicest looking logic board I’ve ever seen.
They had some of the units on display in the Steve Jobs Theater. The crowd around them had the same vibe as the Macworld when they announced the iPhone.

Apple Vision Pro

When it comes to introducing a new product category, Apple remains the best company in the world to do so.
Speaking of messaging, Apple really was leaning into the Vision Pro as an augmented reality device, not virtual reality. I don’t recall them using the term “virtual reality” once.
The battery-in-the-pocket thing makes total sense given the early-days nature of this product.
Many times Apple explained how the Vision Pro is only a first step. There is no question that they have a whiteboard somewhere that says “Tony Stark Glasses” on it somewhere.
The real trick to this device will be the screen resolution and brightness. If it is going to try and trick the user into thinking they are looking through the glasses at the actual world, it needs to be convincing. This has been the downfall of VR devices I’ve tried in the past. If they can stick this, it will be game changing.
I think the whole way the device is aware of your surroundings and lets you phase in and back out as necessary is clever. I can’t see myself keeping the Visual Pro headset on while talking to someone for more than a few seconds, but I think they are on the right track.
Turning it into a 3D camera is cool, but the idea of watching my daughter blow out birthday candles with that thing strapped to my head repulses me.
$3,499. I was fooled. I thought they’d come in well below $3,000. With that price, this is very much an “early adopter” product.

The Event Vibe

Apple has the “Keynote at Apple Park” thing nailed down at this point. This year they added shade. This shade is not just a tarp, but a metal structure with footings. They’ll be doing this again next year.
As always, it is nice reconnecting with friends from both the media and Apple. This part makes me miss the old days of Macworld, where it was a true gathering of the tribe.
It is amazing at how densely Apple packs information into their presentations these days.

And now I have an appointment to light this computer on fire with a beta. I’ll see you on the other side. Below are some pictures from the event.

Apple Park, Cupertino, California.

Keynote watching area before the event’s start.

In the Steve Jobs Theater after the event.

The new M2-powered Mac Pro.

Mac Pro: A view of the inside.

Some Speculation on the Future Mac Pro

As we lead up to WWDC and look at the current state of the Apple silicon Macs, I can’t help but wonder what’s left for the Mac Pro. The thing that has me scratching my head is the extraordinary power of the Mac Studio. If you get a fully loaded Mac Studio, you’re getting one hell of a computer. The M1 Ultra, with all the bells and whistles, can keep up with the most expensive currently selling Mac Pro at a quarter of the price. So what is Apple going to do with the Mac Pro?

I think the new Mac pro will definitely be more expandable and more powerful than any existing Apple silicon Mac. I also think it will have a corresponding price tag. Let me explain further.

Expandability

There are a group of people inside Apple known as the Pro User Group. They all make their living doing creative work with Macs, but they also work for Apple as very knowledgeable lab rats. They provide feedback for future hardware and software. I believe this group of insiders explains why the new MacBook Pro is so much more suited to pro users than its predecessor. I also think this group explains why the currently shipping Mac Pro does such an excellent job of supporting external cards and other bits of bolt-on technology that professionals need at the highest end.

I was lucky enough to get invited to Apple’s big unveiling of the currently shipping Mac Pro at WWDC a few years ago. At one point, they brought us into a series of rooms populated by some of these pro users. They were doing things like 3-D rendering, 8K movie editing, high-end sound work and video scoring, and many other creative endeavors that often lead people to buy Mac Pros. All of them were using specialized equipment inside their Mac Pros to get their work done.

One conversation that stands out to me was with one of the pro users that spends time writing music for motion pictures. When writing music for a movie, you need an extensive library of musical instrument samples. The current technology for that involves large and processor intensive sound samples for each note of each instrument sample, some of which have multiple versions, like pizzicato vs. bowing and using a mute on a violin, for example. Now multiply that times every instrument you could need when creating a music score for a motion picture.

The creative professional explained that historically he would pull this off by having multiple computers chained together. As he explained it, his needs were a very powerful central computer supported by specialized expansion cards. Where historically, he was doing this with a collection of lesser computers, he was able to do the whole project with one Mac Pro.

This was a common theme among the creative professionals. They all had some specialized card or peripheral they needed to get their work done. Thus far, with Apple silicon, we’ve got a series of increasingly powerful Macs, but none of them have the external peripheral support that these pros require.

Apple’s Pro User Group is still inside Apple and presumably still explaining how important it is to have this kind of expandability in a professional workstation. While the Mac Studio may be crazy powerful, it will not hold all of your violin samples or support these specialized cards.

So getting back to the new Mac Pro, I think this sort of expandability will be table stakes. Moreover, I think Apple understands that. I don’t know if the new Mac Pro will be as expandable as a currently shipping Mac Pro, but I expect it to accommodate Pros’ specialized hardware.

Compute Power

Compute power seems a little murkier. I could see an expandable Mac driven by something in the neighborhood of an M1 Ultra chip making the new Mac Pro, essentially, a Mac Studio Ultra + Expandability. But if I had to bet a nickel, I’d say that’s not the case. I think Apple will find some way to get a lot more compute power (Double the M1 Ultra?) from the new Mac Pro. So that new Mac would be something an order of magnitude more powerful than the Mac Studio, and expandable.

Price

I think the Mac Pro will be a computer with all the stops pulled out. And by all the stops I don’t just mean the hardware, I also mean the price. The existence of the Mac Studio gives Apple the ability to make a Mac Pro with a shocking amount of power and a shocking price to go with it. This will not be a computer you buy just because you like to have the latest and greatest. The people who want a computer like that will buy a Mac Studio. I expect the Mac Pro is going to be for serious professionals that will have no problem dropping tens of thousands of dollars on a computer for them to do their work better and faster.

Adding the Mac Studio to the line gives Apple a lot more room at the highest end. The new Mac Pro will not be a computer that most people need or can afford (myself included). But I do expect it to be a rocket ship, and the people who need that kind of rocket ship power and are willing to pay rocket ship prices will get a genuinely remarkable Mac. This is all speculation, but it seems to me like the stars have aligned for just this type of Mac.

When will we see it? Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple shares some details about the new Mac Pro at WWDC in a month.

Stephen Hackett’s Mac Pro

Stephen Hackett wrote a goodbye letter to his Mac Pro. I’ve been teasing him about that computer for years on the Mac Power Users, but I completely understand why he bought it … and why he is now selling it. When that Mac Pro was announced, it was the first time Apple ever invited the Mac Power Users to an Apple Keynote event. For that reason alone, I will always have a special place in my heart for that computer.

One odd thing that strikes me is that the currently shipping Mac Pro never ended up getting a common nickname. We had the “Cheese Grater” and the “Trash Can”. This new one never got there.

Now that Apple has announced WWDC will start on June 6, I’m hopeful that they’ll announce whatever they are going to be doing with the Mac Pro and Apple silicon. Will it be in the same case? I don’t think so. Hopefully, it’s not long before we find out.

Mac Pro Updates

Yesterday Apple released some new gear for the Intel Mac Pro. I’ve been telling anyone that will listen to only buy Apple Silicon Macs going forward, but the Mac Pro does remain the easiest exception to the rule. There are folks making motion pictures that need massively powerful computers and use custom software that won’t immediately get updated for Apple Silicon. For those people, there is the Intel Mac Pro.

If the folks who study Apple rumors are to be believed, we’re probably a year (or more) from an Apple Silicon Mac Pro. So Apple updating the Intel Mac Pro at this point makes sense.

Hello, New Mac Pro

The New Mac Pro is now available for sale, and it’s a beast. I think it’s prettier on the inside than the outside. Granted, this computer is for a tiny population of power users (I am not one of them), but I’m thrilled that Apple once again has something at the very top end. Marques Brownlee has had one for a few weeks and has some initial thoughts below.

For fun, you can now go to the Apple online store and price one out. They even have a rack mount version coming soon. Again, remember this computer is probably not for you. It’s made for folks that push it to the limit. For those folks, the benchmarks on this new Mac are amazing. When I was at WWDC, I spoke with an Apple rep that is a former Pixar employee. He had the entire set for Toy Story 4 loaded in a single Mac Pro. I remember my question to him, “Isn’t that something that you’d need a fleet of computers for?” His answer, “Until now.”

My congratulations to Apple for making the necessary course corrections to make this happen.

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