Apple’s march event has just finished and it is genuinely one of the most insane launch events i’ve ever watched and i think it’s gonna have a significant impact on the entire future of tech so here’s everything they announced from the lame to the tame to changing the game so the very first thing that they kicked things off with was two new Iphone colors we’ve got a bold green for the Iphone 13 and an alpine green for the Iphone 13 pro apple’s falling into a bit of a rhythm with this releasing a whole bunch of safe colors at launch but then as soon as that new Iphone stops feeling like a new Iphone dropping a much bolder color to reinvigorate interest they kind of need to do this like the whole way that apple operates the way they never put their products on sale the way they release their next generation of phones at almost the same price as the previous gen means that the closer you get to the next Iphone the more that the current generation plummets in sales because people are waiting for it the more you get people who are just unsure whether to pay full price for what is essentially half a generation old tech or to wait for the latest and these new colors are basically apple’s way of saying look here’s your reward for waiting now’s a great time to still buy an Iphone 13.
Fundamentally it just it increases their profits because you’ve got to remember that the production of a smartphone gets cheaper over the course of that smartphone’s lifetime as the cost of components fall and the economies of scale rise and so apple would rather you buy an Iphone 13 for full price now than an Iphone 14 in September but it’s not just new colors there is also a new Iphone the Iphone se and it’s kind of weird see apple already released an Iphone se in 2020 it was this 399 entry level Iphone that was built to be a really powerful net to to reel in the more budget conscious consumers into apple’s ecosystem and so this time around they’ve basically taken that same phone bumped the price up to 429 and refreshed it they swapped out the chipset from apple’s a13 to apple’s a15 which alone should give it about 40 to 50 more performance they’ve upgraded the glass construction they’ve added in 5g they’ve also apparently improved battery efficiency and i can’t state how much this needed to happen in a world of smartphones that last six to eight hours of screen on time the fact that their last Iphone SE barely hit four was a major cause for concern and so if you are considering this phone i would strongly recommend you just hang on and wait to see how much they’ve actually improved that battery life by also though this is not a great screen you might remember this poco x4 pro that i tested recently that phone is around 280 and for that this display is huge it has a high refresh rate and it has deep blacks and great contrast the 430 Iphone se screen is a tiny lcd panel with enormous borders and probably not great viewing angles either for a product that’s so geared towards the mass market it it does feel weirdly imbalanced like with the a15 chip you’re getting the kind of performance that beats out samsung’s brand new 1100 galaxy tab s8 ultra but other aspects of the phone are right out of 2017 but that’s not even the weirdest part of it see apple’s made a significant improvement to this phone right but they’ve done it in such a way that unless you specifically watch this event you probably wouldn’t know the new Iphone se has the same body as the last one the same design the same colors which would have been really easy to change it even has the same name we know apple we know that apple likes to change things up to make it clear which one’s the latest model or at the very least add a new color but nope nothing externally new why would they bother silently making the phone more expensive to produce my theory is this apple wants you to buy their Iphone 13s not my most groundbreaking bit of detective work obviously the higher end the Iphone you buy the more profit apple makes for that purchase and so the last thing that apple would want is to make a cheaper phone that pulled you away from that hence why they’ve made this as unglamorous as possible but at the same time the reason that they’re still making sure that it’s up to date in terms of tech is that if you’re not going to stretch to a full priced Iphone 13 apple would still rather have you in the apple ecosystem and buying apple services than letting you go buy a shell me and so they still need to have a budget competitive 5g offering and if you are enjoying this video then a sub to the channel would be idyllic and would also enter you into the largest tech giveaway in history rules below but now is where things start getting serious ipad now i’m going to be honest with you apple is usually pretty good at keeping their products simple but their ipad lineup is very intimidating to navigate it’s not like the Iphones where you have the mini the normal size one and then right at the top the pros with ipads you have the normal sized ipad at the bottom then above that is the mini which is a premium ipad that’s small the ipad air which is a premium ipad that’s normal size but focused on being thin and then the ipad pro which is the premium ipad with extra power user features and on top of that some of these ipads support the apple pencil others don’t some of them support apple’s magic keyboard some don’t i was browsing their site earlier and every single one of their current ipads is actually a different generation there’s thought to be a better labeling system like couldn’t you just label them by the year they were last updated in anyways the new ipad that we just got is an update to the ipad air and it’s somehow managed to be both a simple safe refresh but at the same time kind of unbelievable see the way that apple tends to update their ipads is that they start with the ipad pro because obviously pros want the latest features early and then over the course of the next year they update the rest of their lineup to keep parity with it so in 2021 apple upgraded their ipad pros to come with their own custom built laptop class m1 chipset which is about 50 more powerful than the a15 that sits in their Iphone 13s and now almost a year later they’ve just brought that same m1 chipset to the ipad air alongside a few new software features and a faster usb c board so on one hand m1 is like one and a half years old now this is in no way revolutionary but on the other hand this upgrade has brought the price of an m1 power tablet way down from 800 to 599 and that’s pretty nuts ow the only potential catch is that while there is a 64 gigabyte base model and a 256 gig top end model there is no middle option presumably to push you towards the 729 256 gigabyte one but now it’s time to talk about the truly shocking stuff because while they were on the subject of their m1 chips apple also just announced m1 ultra and when i saw the specs of this thing i came this close to spitting out my drink so in november 2020 apple announced that they were going to start to pivot away from using intel chips to power their machines to using apple’s own chips starting with the m1 and there are some obvious reasons for this it gives apple control over how much improvement they want to make each year it massively increases their profit margins by removing intel as the middle man but the biggest improvement that you notice as a consumer is the ridiculous level of efficiency this macbook right here is the first macbook i’ve owned that’s powered by an apple chip and it is the best tech purchase i’ve made in the last three years.
The machine is completely silent it has literally zero hiccups five times the battery life of my intel based macbook thanks to the m1s being based off super efficient mobile phone processors and it edits multiple layers of 4k video with less lag than my five times more expensive full fat intel based mac pro so with all that said apple has just released the most souped up version of this m1 chip in 2020 we had the original m1 in 2021 we saw the m1 pro with two times the performance of that and the m1 max with 3.5 times the performance of that but now in 2022 we have m1 ultra what apple has effectively done here is built a system such that you can attach two of these m1 max chips together in such a way that they’re saying there are no efficiency reductions and you get a straight up doubling of the cpu performance and the gpu performance so compared to the original m1 they are saying that this is eight times faster and at the same time because it’s originated from a mobile chip 65 more power efficient than an equivalent desktop class chip and the first machine to show the whole thing off mac studio basically a mac mini but like well thick this thing is going to have up to 128 gigabytes of ram and 8 terabytes ssd this will be the most powerful apple silicon powered machine ever and based on my experience of apple silicon i think that for apple’s first party optimized apps it is going to absolutely fly and before i caveat it i do need to stress just like how impressive this machine is we’re talking something the size of a salad bowl it fits underneath your display it’s almost completely silent and yet it is cranking out enough performance to power four of apple’s highest m 6k displays and a 4k tv on top of that this thing can run 18 streams of 8k prores video at the same time they’re saying that the graphics on this thing are as powerful as the most powerful gpu that you can get on the market while using a third of the power and probably v-stat that best summarizes how much of a leap forward this is is the fact that the fully spec version of this tiny little micro pc at eight thousand dollars is eighty percent faster than the highest end fifty thousand dollar twenty eight core intel xeon mac pro okay deep breath there are two things that i think you should bear in mind though one is that apple didn’t specify where these performance numbers came from so whilst they are usually pretty bang on with their estimates i would imagine that they’ve done most of their testing using apple’s own first party apps which are properly optimized to make the most of their m1 chips like final cut pro for example but in my experience while these first party apps do perform staggeringly well with apple’s own chips it’s the third-party apps like the entire adobe editing suite and the whole load of games that don’t perform so optimally and the second thing is it’s not really a caveat but it’s more of a reminder that this new lineup apple’s creating the studio set of products is not their top tier lineup like even though they are comparing themselves to big fat desktops.
The way to think about apple’s mac studio is really as the mid-range part of their future lineup because the fact that they’ve managed to build this ability to be able to just chain apple chips together like their pieces of lego makes me pretty sure that when we do see the pro versions of this lineup later this year that they will completely dwarf even this one so if you’re not in any hurry and you do want the best of the best i would still hang on and to go with this to fit this mid-range studio lineup there is also a new screen in the same way that this mac studio will fit below their mac pro this studio display fits below their current top tier pro display xdr but it’s a really well thought out product instead of being five thousand dollars it’s 15.99 the stand is built in this time instead of costing an extra thousand plus it has a built-in webcam unlike the pro display and apparently apple’s best set of speakers ever to comb the screen the only caveats being that it’s smaller it’s not as bright and it’s 5k resolution instead of 6k but it’s still a high-end spec and i could totally see this thing becoming the easy to recommend compromise screen that i would recommend to people who love to use everything apple to enter this ridiculously big giveaway.
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