The Idea of Shortcuts on the Mac

This week Jason Snell wrote an excellent article about the need for Apple to bring Shortcuts to the Mac. I’ve been thinking about that article a lot. My position on Apple bringing Shortcuts to the Mac has always been, “wait”. The reason being that automation is alive and well on the Mac. With a much more open platform and the existence of Apple events, AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, TextExpander, and the ability to run virtually any scripting language via the terminal, there is very little that I can not automate on my Mac.

The iPhone and iPad, however, are a much different story. Apple had no automation tools on its mobile platforms until Shortcuts came along. Shortcuts is, practically, the only way to automate on mobile and for years now there has been lots of low-hanging fruit on mobile that Shortcuts has yet to pick.

I wanted Apple to keep the Shortcuts team working exclusively on mobile so it could get better rather than spend its time moving Shortcuts over the Mac. However, Jason’s article has moved me on this. While my argument about waiting made sense a few years ago, nowadays we’ve got Apple Silicon Macs and Shortcuts on mobile is a lot more powerful than it used to be. Moreover, even with all the above-mentioned Mac automation tools, there is room under the tent for one more. If done right, we’d be able to pull Shortcuts actions into scripts and Keyboard Maestro and make those tools even more powerful.

So put me on team Mac Shortcuts. Let’s hope WWDC 2021 brings us Automators some new toys.

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.

ARM-Based Macs Appear Inevitable

This week, Mark Gurman posted that Apple will announce a transition to ARM-based Macs at WWDC later this month. It is interesting how those of us on the outside have slowly arrived at the term “inevitable” concerning Apple putting a variant of the chip it makes for its phones and tablets in its computers. I think it will be an easy case to make to Apple customers.

By making their own chips, Apple cuts out a middle man, giving them more flexibility on price and raising their profit per unit. Moreover, no longer does Apple (or its customers) have to wait for Intel manufacturing delays to get sorted out before Apple can ship new Macs.

The most significant benefit, however, will be battery life. With a decent-sized battery and a power-efficient A-series chip, Apple could easily double (or triple) laptop battery life. I hope Apple looks at this as an opportunity to dramatically increase battery life and not dramatically decrease weight (by keeping existing battery life and just removing more of the battery).

It is interesting that while the existing Apple A-series chips are powerful, they’ve got nothing in a class that could power the iMac Pro or Mac Pro. Will Apple scale up the A-series for their more power-hungry Macs or stick with Intel for those. My money’s on former and not the later.

If you run Windows on your Mac, this probably isn’t good news. In your shoes, I’d buy one of the last Intel-based Macs and spec it up, so you’ve got several years of use in the tank.

Either way, I sure hope the rumors are true, and we get some news in a few weeks at WWDC. An ARM transition for the Mac is the kind of thing that pushes all my nerd buttons. If you’d like to learn more about this, former Apple engineer David Shayer wrote up a detailed breakdown of the hypothetical ARM transition over at TidBITS.