From a press release about pre-orders opening tomorrow:
iMac configurations in green, pink, blue, and silver will be available to purchase directly at apple.com and Apple Store locations, and all seven colors will be available at apple.com.
I guess people won’t be able to just walk in off the street and buy the orange iMac, which will be the best one.
Myke explains what admiration means, then the guys talk about what’s new in iOS 14.5 before getting into what’s going on at Basecamp. Then in a radical change of gears, Federico has to name some emoji and Stephen surprises the guys with some news.
On Connected Pro, a confession is shared and words with different meanings are discussed. Then, a problem with a neighbor.
My thanks to our sponsors:
Michael Collins—a two-time astronaut who piloted the command module during the historic Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the Moon—died on Wednesday after battling cancer, his family said. He was 90 years old.
“He spent his final days peacefully, with his family by his side,” the family said in a statement. “Mike always faced the challenges of life with grace and humility, and faced this, his final challenge, in the same way. We will miss him terribly.” With Collins’ death, only 10 of the 24 humans who have flown into deep space remain alive: Collins’ colleague on the Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin, as well as Bill Anders, Frank Borman, Charlie Duke, Fred Haise, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott, and Tom Stafford.
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2021 second quarter ended March 27, 2021. The Company posted a March quarter record revenue of $89.6 billion, up 54 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.40. International sales accounted for 67 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
“This quarter reflects both the enduring ways our products have helped our users meet this moment in their own lives, as well as the optimism consumers seem to feel about better days ahead for all of us,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple is in a period of sweeping innovation across our product lineup, and we’re keeping focus on how we can help our teams and the communities where we work emerge from this pandemic into a better world. That certainly begins with products like the all-new iMac and iPad Pro, but it extends to efforts like the 8 gigawatts of new clean energy we’ll help bring onto the grid and our $430 billion investment in the United States over the next 5 years.”
David Sparks, writing about what could come after M1:
On the marketing side, I’d be surprised if they call it the M2. Presumably, they will make a successor to the M1 one at some point as the current lower performance/more battery life chip for things like the MacBook Air. Naming the higher performance chip M2 would put them in a weird place where an M3 (for MacBook Air) could be slower than an M2 (for MacBook Pro). The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the performance chip currently in production will get an entirely different name, like X1, allowing them to have two chips for Macs. (Or possibly three once the Mac Pro releases.)
X1 sounds badass.
The 10 Gigabit Ethernet (RJ-45) port is Nbase-T Ethernet technology that supports multiple data rates for speeds up to 10 Gbps over standard twisted pair copper cabling up to 100 meters (328 feet) in length. Depending on the device you’re connecting to, the cable type and technology used, and the cable length, the highest link speed is automatically negotiated. For example, if the device you’re connecting to is 10 Gbps-capable and the cable can support the speed, the two devices would negotiate the 10 Gbps speed.
Over on MacStories, Viticci has written an in-depth piece on today’s major iOS release:
Version 14.5 is the biggest – or, at the very least, most interesting – update to iOS and iPadOS we’ve seen in the 14.0 release cycle to date. That’s not to say previous iterations of iOS and iPadOS 14 were low on new features and refinements – it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps the pandemic and Apple’s work-from-home setup played a role in the company spreading new iOS functionalities across multiple releases throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021, but, regardless of the underlying reason, iOS and iPadOS 14 have evolved considerably since their public launch six months ago.
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In the wake of Apple’s spring event, David and I cover the new iMac and iPad Pro, and also discuss changes to the Apple TV and some of Apple’s services. In short, everything should be more colorful and some things more powerful.
For the longer, members-only More Power Users, we wax poetic about WWDC 2019.]
My thanks to our sponsors:
Matthew Panzarino interviewed Apple’s Greg Joswiak and John Ternus about the company’s new products, and the M1 being in the new iPad Pro came up, and Apple’s thinking about it jumped out at me:
One of the stronger answers on the ‘why the aggressive spec bump’ question comes later in our discussion but is worth mentioning in this context. The point, Joswiak says, is to offer headroom. Headroom for users and headroom for developers.
“One of the things that iPad Pro has done as John [Ternus] has talked about is push the envelope. And by pushing the envelope that has created this space for developers to come in and fill it. When we created the very first iPad Pro, there was no Photoshop,” Joswiak notes. “There was no creative apps that could immediately use it. But now there’s so many you can’t count. Because we created that capability, we created that performance — and, by the way sold a fairly massive number of them — which is a pretty good combination for developers to then come in and say, I can take advantage of that. There’s enough customers here and there’s enough performance. I know how to use that. And that’s the same thing we do with each generation. We create more headroom to performance that developers will figure out how to use.
“The customer is in a great spot because they know they’re buying something that’s got some headroom and developers love it.”
In hardware, headroom means two things: that a device can have great longevity, and that the software can become a lot more powerful. For the iPad, the former has been true for a long time, and I really hope the latter comes to pass.
This week on an action-packed Connected:
Apple’s Spring Event has come and gone, and now the picks must be graded. Will Stephen remain in power as the Keynote Chairman? Can Myke gain access to both Twitter accounts, or is Federico poised for a comeback?
My thanks to our sponsors:
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