By Jason Snell

December 14, 2020 9:00 AM PT

20 Macs for 2020: #3 – Macintosh 128K

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

My friend John Siracusa is disappointed in me because I didn’t put the Macintosh 128K—the original Macintosh—at number one in this list of the 20 most notable Macs of all time.

I certainly considered it. The original Macintosh changed the computer world forever. Without its presence, this series couldn’t exist. It is a seminal product in the history of technology.

Putting it at number one felt a bit obvious, though. And there’s this: While it came first, it had a lot of drawbacks—so many, in fact, that it was revised within a year. It was a remarkable first attempt, but for my money the Mac didn’t really settle down as a platform until the Mac SE arrived in 1987.

But still, it was first. And that counts for a lot.

Continue reading “20 Macs for 2020: #3 – Macintosh 128K”…

By Jason Snell

December 11, 2020 2:47 PM PT

SwiftBar steps up to provide ambient data in the menu bar

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

One of my favorite features of iOS 14 is its support for home-screen widgets. They’re supported on macOS Big Sur, too, but I don’t bother with widgets there. That’s because there’s already a great place to display information, and it’s visible at all times: the menu bar.

In the past, I’ve used Mat Ryer’s BitBar to put all sorts of information in my menu bar, including the current temperature, air quality, and even live listeners to podcast streams. Unfortunately, it came to my attention a few months ago that Ryer had largely moved on from BitBar development, just as Big Sur arrived and caused a bunch of cosmetic issues. (A BitBar user contributed a quick fix.)

It’s a drag to see a utility you rely on fade away, but I’m happy to report that there’s a spiritual successor to BitBar, SwiftBar, in active development led by Alex Mazanov.

SwiftBar is written in Swift—it’s in the name!—and aims to compatible with any BitBar plugins. (It worked with all the plug-ins for BitBar that I’d built.) And there are some nice additional features under development, including support for Apple’s SFSymbols icon library. SwiftBar also lets you activate and deactivate plugins from within its preferences window, rather than using the filesystem, which I appreciate.

There are lots of BitBar plugins out there, and if you know any scripting language (literally anything that can execute on macOS — mine use AppleScript, JavaScript, and PHP) you can write plugins yourself in no time.

I have come to rely on having little blobs of information available to me whenever I glance up to my Mac’s menu bar. Thanks to SwiftBar, I don’t need to even consider the prospect that I might have to give that up.

By Dan Moren

December 8, 2020 5:44 AM PT

Apple introduces $549 AirPods Max over-the-ear headphones

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

December surprise! As rumored, Apple had one more trick up its sleeve for the “year” that has been 2020. This morning the company announced its new AirPods Max headphones, a long-expected over-the-ear model that bring many of the features of its AirPods line.

Apple says that the new AirPods Max—which come in five colors¹, including space gray, silver, sky blue, green, and pink—have a custom acoustic design and use the same H1 chips found in other AirPods models; each ear cup has one chip, and they both have 10 audio cores to power audio processing. Like the AirPods Pro, the Max have both Active Noise Cancelation and Transparency modes, as well as the new spatial audio introduced in iOS 14.

The ear cups are designed with memory foam to help seal in sound, and feature a mechanism to distribute ear cup pressure to fit one’s head. Inside each ear cup is a 40mm dynamic driver, with a “unique dual neodymium ring magnet” that Apple says helps maintain a distortion-free listening experience, even at high volumes. (Though no doubt audiophiles will make their own judgments when they arrive.)

Ah, but how will you control such a device? Well, look no further than the Apple Watch. The AirPods Max feature, yes, a Digital Crown, which you can use to control volume, as well as play/pause audio, skip tracks, answer and end phone calls, or, of course, activate Siri. There’s also a noise control button that can toggle between the ANC and Transparency modes.

Like the AirPods Pro, the setup of AirPods Max is done on your Apple device, and automatically pairs with all devices associated with your Apple ID. Optical and position sensors mean that playback automatically pauses if you lift one ear cup.

Apple also says that battery time is no slouch: the AirPods Max will provide 20 hours of audio playback, talk time, or movie playback with both ANC and spatial audio turned on.

The headphones also include a fascinating “soft” Smart Case, which puts AirPods Max into a low-power state when not in use. For charging, Apple uses a Lightning port (sorry USB-C fans) includes a Lightning-to-USB-C cable in the box, though, of course, no power brick.

All of this comes at a premium price, though. AirPods Max will cost $549, and are available to order today in the U.S. and more than 25 other countries and regions. They’ll start shipping on December 15.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

December 7, 2020 9:00 AM PT

20 Macs for 2020: #4 – MacBook Air (2nd generation)

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

Apple’s first attempt at the thin, light laptop of the future happened a couple of years too soon.

In early 2008, Apple introduced the original MacBook Air, a deeply compromised product. It was expensive (the base price was $1799), yet also the slowest Mac, sporting a pokey iPod-class hard drive. (A 64GB solid-state drive, a first on a Mac, was offered as an option—but at $999, it was eye-meltingly expensive.) The Air didn’t have an optical drive or FireWire port or Ethernet jack, just a single USB port hidden behind an awkward drop-down door. Its cooling system was so inadequate that the Air’s dual-core processor would stop working effectively in a warm room.¹

Its advantages were clear, though. The MacBook Air weighed only three pounds. That made it a full two pounds (40 percent!) lighter than the next-lightest Mac laptop sold at the time, and more than a pound lighter than any previous Mac laptop. And it was impossibly thin, a 0.16 inch wedge at the front widening out to 0.76 inches in the rear. In other words, the original Air’s heart was in the right place—but the technology just wasn’t good enough yet.

Two years later, Apple took another swing, and this time they got it right. The new MacBook Air resided at the bottom of Apple’s laptop price list rather than the top—thereby ensuring it would be the laptop of choice for most people. The new model kept the thinness and lightness of its predecessor, but offered a full array of ports and a perfectly capable Intel processor.

And perhaps best of all, it came in two different versions—a 13-inch model that was roughly the size of the original model, and a tiny 11-inch model for people who wanted the absolute smallest Mac laptop in existence.

The future of notebooks?

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever created before,”² Apple CEO Steve Jobs said when introducing the new MacBook Air models. “We think it’s the future of notebooks.” Apple often proclaims that it’s creating the future. Rarely has it been as right.

Just before the advent of the MacBook Air, many PC makers were creating Netbooks, a category of ultra-cheap ($200-$300!), ultra-small laptops that ran Windows and were powered by new, low-end Intel processors. Apple execs were constantly asked why the company wasn’t making a Netbook.

Sometimes I suspect that people lobby for Apple to enter a product category because the rest of the technology industry knows it hasn’t cracked the problem, and it’s hoping Apple will. As someone who tried out a couple of Netbooks during this period, I can attest to how lousy they were. They were impressive in a sort of novel, “can-you-believe-this-runs-Windows” kind of way, but they were cheap plastic garbage with shrunken-down keyboards that were impossible to type on.

In designing the 11-inch MacBook Air, Apple discovered a bright line that it would not cross: the size of the keyboard. The 11-inch Air was built around its full-sized keyboard, every key the same size as you’d find on other Apple laptops, desktop Macs, and pretty much any keyboard in existence. Apple would get this small, but no smaller. And of course, the MacBook Airs didn’t feel cheap, thanks to their anodized aluminum shells, machined out of individual pieces of metal.

The PC industry thanked Apple for its answer, and Intel promptly introduced the concept of Ultrabooks. An Ultrabook is best defined as a PC laptop that looks like a MacBook Air. (As for Apple, its other answer to Netbooks was the iPad, released a few months before the MacBook Air in 2010. Between the iPad and the MacBook Air, Apple had two very different responses to the same desire for a smaller, cheaper mobile computing device.)

As the decade wore on, every other laptop (including Apple’s other offerings) seemed to become more and more like the MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro shed its optical drive, switched to SSDs for storage, and got thinner and lighter. Today’s 13-inch MacBook Pro is itself a thin, light three-pound laptop.

Too popular to be killed

As the decade went on, the MacBook Air kept getting better. Even with its thin profile and limited cooling system, it managed to add more robust processors as configurable options. An 11-inch MacBook Air with an Intel i7 processor could handle almost anything you could throw at it.

The biggest crisis in the MacBook Air’s lifespan came mid-decade, and the threat came from Apple itself. In 2015, Apple introduced the 12-inch MacBook, which was thinner and lighter than the Air, with a Retina display—but also $300 more expensive. A 13-inch MacBook Pro followed in 2016, clearly following in the MacBook Air’s footsteps—but its initial price was $500 more than the Air’s!

Still, the non-Retina MacBook Air just kept selling. It turns out that Apple’s customers felt it was a better value even without that shiny Retina display. In 2018, Apple relented and released a Retina Air. When Apple recently released the first MacBook Air based on its own processors, the company confirmed what we all suspected—that the MacBook Air is the company’s best-selling Mac³. (In all likelihood, that’s been true for most of the last decade.)

I think what made the Air so popular was that it offered the general public a computer that had exactly enough to do what was needed, and nothing more. Early in its life, computer nerds could complain about its scant storage, RAM limitations, lower-powered processors, lack of ports (Thunderbolt was added in an update), and requirement for an external optical drive if you wanted to use CDs or DVDs. But if you just wanted a thin, light, low-cost laptop to do email and look at the web and maybe work in Microsoft Office, you didn’t need any of that.

As the decade wore on, all those distinctions faded away, but I think the core appeal of the Air remained: It was Apple’s cheapest laptop, and compared to the thicker MacBook Pros, the thin wedge shape of the Air just seemed smaller and lighter and… less. With the Air, less is more.⁴

MacBook Air forever?

At this point, it’s hard to see the MacBook Air exiting the Apple product line any time soon. Apple presumably has learned a lesson from all its attempts to kill it, realizing that the Air’s design and price is what most of its customers want from a laptop.

I certainly agree. I’ve been using a MacBook Air as my laptop (and in many cases, my primary computer) since that original model came out in 2008. The 11-inch Air was my primary Mac from the day it shipped until my last day at Macworld, and I only replaced that final one last month, when I bought a new M1 MacBook Air.⁵

In the meantime, the rest of Apple’s laptops have caught up with the Air. Sure, there are differences—the Touch Bar, larger screen options, and (presumably) more powerful models yet to come. But major differences, like big hard drives and optical storage and the like, have all melted away. One look at the recently-announced M1 MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Air make the challenge clear. The differences between these computers are subtle ones.

Now the big question. What’s next? The MacBook Air, released in 2010, really did define laptops for the rest of the decade. But it’s 2020 now. What will be the definitive mobile Mac of the 2020s? The MacBook Air may keep kicking around for a while, but what will replace it in the hearts and minds of users?

Apple’s approach to laptops has changed very little in the last decade, if not the past two—since the the Titanium PowerBook G4 hit the scene. While its competitors in the PC laptop world have experimented with touchscreens, keyboards that detach or fold away, and folding screens, Apple has resolutely stuck with the aluminum shell and two perpendicular planes—one for input, one for display.

If Apple is to redefine the laptop for the next decade, we’d all do well to remember the lesson of the MacBook Air. Sometimes, you don’t get it right on the first try—and that’s okay. Given a couple of years to learn those lessons, Apple ended up creating the greatest laptop design of all time. I look forward to seeing its next attempt to unveil the future of notebooks.

I’ll be back next week with number three.

By Jason Snell

December 4, 2020 4:19 PM PT

Fun with Charts: Imagining the M2 processor

Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.

The pace of Apple’s processor development can be measured in all sorts of ways. The chart I built today is using only a single measurement, that of multi-core performance as measured by the speed-testing tool Geekbench. It doesn’t take into account all sorts of other ways that Apple boosts performance in its chips between generations. Since Apple introduced the iPad-focused X variant processor with the A8X in 2014, it has boosted clock speed, subtracted and added processor cores, split its processor cores into separate performance- and efficiency-focused cores, built a multi-core GPU, added a multi-core Neural Engine, and a whole lot more.

However, at least when it comes to raw multi-core CPU performance, the X-series chip generations Apple has released since the A9X arrived with the first iPad Pro in November of 2015 have progressed at a remarkably consistent rate. (For the purposes of this chart, I’m considering the M1 a proxy for an “A14X” processor, since it seems to be an evolution of the X-series chips.)

Apple skipped the A11 and A13 generations when it came to a higher-powered, iPad-class processor, but by taking avantage of a two-years-improved architecture, the growth in performance proceeds apace. If you want to think of it this way, Apple’s X-series chips are gaining about 1200 points in Geekbench multi-core scores every year.

For the sake of this exercise, then, let’s assume that next fall Apple releases an M2 processor that follows this same trend. It would score about 8500, roughly 16 percent faster than the M1 Macs currently being sold.¹

Assuming that an M2 processor would be used in low-end Macs like the M1, it would mean that an M2 MacBook or Mac mini would be faster than all but one Intel Core-based Mac, the current high-end i9 5K iMac. Only the Xeon-based Mac Pro and iMac Pro models, with 10 or more cores, would best that score.

There are so many questions yet to be answered, including:

• Is there a variation of the M1 processor waiting in the wings for sometime in 2021, or will all the Macs that ship in the next 10 months be using the same M1 processor in the three current Apple silicon Macs?

• Will Apple really release an M2 processor next year, or will the company approach Mac chip design similarly to how it approaches iPhone and iPad design? I could see a scenario where 2021’s Mac release is a chip with more processor cores and capabilities that’s rolled into higher-end laptops and desktops, while the M1 continues motoring along until 2022.

• Would that theoretical 2021 chip be an “M1X” or an M2? Does the M-series numbering move in lockstep with Apple’s A-series chips, or do they move on a different cycle?

So many questions, so few answers. But the most boring, conservative M2 update in 2021—one that takes advantage of the A15 chip development cycle to create a new chip for lower-end Macs—would be at least 16 percent faster. Anything else Apple does—boosting the number of CPU cores seems like a real possibility—would just boost the number from there.

I can’t wait to see what 2021 brings for the Mac and for Apple silicon. It’s shaping up to the most interesting year in the Mac in ages.