The Macs are back

Nov 7, 2018

Last week in Brooklin Apple showed some love for the Macs! It was a strange event, the only well known face on the stage was Tim Cook's, the venue unusual, the crowd extremely cheerful. Three the products unveiled, allow me to spend more time where my heart beats.

MacBook Air

I had advised friends for years about not buying the Air for two main reasons: it had lacked significant upgrades in a long time and it didn't look as if it had any future ahead as a model. Before Tuesday, it had been updated on July 2017 with a speedbump and similarly in the years before. Last big revision was from 2010 and for all I knew, the Air was on its deathbed.
Come Tuesday, the Air is well and fighting with us! I agree with Jason Snell at Sixcolors that this adds confusion to the Macbook lineup, especially giving the similarities between the Air and the MacBooks, but I guess time will tell how things will go.
In an interesting move, the Air comes equipped with no Touch Bar, but a Touch ID sensor at the top-right corner of the keyboard. I don't see this as a sign for the Touch Bar dismissal, since it might rather just stick to the hig end MacBook Pros where every possible way to control an app could resolve in a gain of productivity.
All in all, it's a great update for the Air, an update that doesn't betray its original soul and keeps it for the masses. I only hope the price doesn't set back potential buyers.

Mac mini

I have owned a Mac mini for 4 years now, using it as a desktop computer and an always on home server: it has never lost a beat. Even with just 4GB of RAM, is still kicking fine and a shining SSD installed alongside the spinning HD gave my Mini new life.
Months ago, at work, we ordered a PC to drive an instrument. What arrived had plenty of ports, more than we probably need - I thought just before finding out that one of them could allow me to plug an old balance and using it just fine.
These characteristics, I think, are what need to find place in a Pro machine, one that needn't to be necessarily pretty, but work: expansibility, ports, power.
The new Mini luckily delivers. On the expansibility side, SO-DIMM RAM modules allow it to be expanded later on in case of need, or even just trashed in case one has gone bad. I'm looking forward to iFixit teardown to see if anything else on the inside can be swapped out.
On the ports side, it has 4 USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, Gigabit Ethernet configurable up to 10Gb, two USB-A ports (!), HDMI 2.0 and a headphone jack (!), I guess as a tribute for media player use.
On the power side, it starts with a 4-core Intel i3 and can go up to a 6-core i7; as of storage: 128GB up to 2TB of PCIe-based SSD. The power has increased so much, the new thermal architecture has a 2x increased airflow to allow sustained workloads (70% more MSP).

A12X

What's an A-series processor doing in a Mac article? Nothing... yet?
Much of the iPad Pro presentation was centered about it's computational power, they even said out loud it is faster than 92% of computers sold last year. Read it as saying the iPad Pro is powerful, but alse read it as saying Intel is losing in the processor's race and the Apple's silicon team is getting closer and closer. Especially because if a processor designed fot an iPad can be as powerful as the one currently housed in computers, guess what will happen once an Apple designed processor comes out being designed for a Mac since its inception. I say it again: Apple designed processors in the Mac are closer than ever. Maybe Intel will still be a partner for iPhones' modems, but the strategic advantage of departing from a third party manufacturer, once your internally designed parts are this much better, is becoming striking.

Final thoughts

Interestingly, the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini were introduced by comparing them to their previous generation, not to some currently available alternatives like, say, a MacBook for the Air. I think the reasons are twofold: first, these machine weren't updated in a long time, and comparing them to what's available wouldn't have sounded well; secondly, there aren't many alternatives altogether! The Air fills a portion of market with very loyal customers, some don't even consider a MacBook to be an alternative since it's pricey and not a portable for the masses. The Mini has not any alternative in the Mac lineup! The only other Mac without a screen is the aging Mac Pro, a machine in a totally different price and performance range than the Mini.

I think we can assume two things going forward: Pro machines will be expansible, with plenty of ports; laptops might have lost the urge to get thinner at any cost. Even better, both models are the greenest Macs ever, with the enclosure made of internally recycled aluminium. The Air is even improving on its battery replacement, making it not so insanely impacting as it is on MacBooks and MacBooks Pro, and I surely hope these models will follow.

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