Month: March 2022

Enlarge / Where has the 27-inch iMac gone? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For years, Apple’s 27-inch iMac was the company’s best desktop. The device was updated frequently with new processors and GPUs, unlike either the Mac mini or the Mac Pro, and its 5K Retina display was an excellent high-resolution screen. Its design was even the basis of the iMac Pro, an even-more-powerful desktop that Apple released to prove that it was still committed to its high-end pro users.

But the future of the big-screened iMac is currently in doubt. Following the announcement of the screen-less Mac Studio desktop today, the 27-inch Intel iMac disappeared from Apple’s online store. The 24-inch iMac is currently the only iMac referenced in the navigation bar, and all existing direct links to its 27-inch counterpart now redirect to the Mac page. Even more mystifying, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that there was only “one more” Mac that had yet to make the transition to Apple Silicon—and the system he named was the Mac Pro, not the larger iMac.

The Apple Store’s navigation bar only mentions the 24-inch iMac, and links to the 27-inch model all redirect. (credit: Apple)

Don’t hold a funeral for the big iMac just yet. Persistent rumors from multiple sources have suggested for months that a new big-screened Mac all-in-one is in the works. According to those rumors, the device would combine a large Mini LED screen with the higher-end versions of Apple’s processors. The best information we currently have suggests that the all-in-one could be unveiled sometime in the summer, possibly at Apple’s yearly developer conference. The Apple Silicon Mac lineup has been full of surprises, from the company re-embracing chunky notebooks to the existence of the tiny Mac Studio workstation. Maybe the new large-screened iMac is the Mac Pro, or maybe Apple plans to announce some other kind of branding for it entirely.

The new Apple Studio Display with two adjustable stand options. (credit: Apple)

It took quite some time, but Apple has finally re-entered the consumer desktop monitor space with the Studio Display. A decade has passed since Apple last made and sold a consumer desktop monitor; the long-beloved Apple Cinema Display was discontinued in 2011. Apple instead partnered with LG to sell monitors the South Korean company made for Macs through Apple’s online store. LG’s monitors generally received decent reviews, but they weren’t much to write home about, all things considered.

The new 27-inch monitor supports 5K resolution with over 1 billion colors via 14.7 million pixels. It also has True Tone technology to attenuate color warmth in different lighting situations, reaching up to 600 nits. Overlayed on the display is an antireflective coating, but there is also a nanotexture glass option to further reduce glare.

To facilitate the video experience, the Studio Display has six speakers—four force-canceling woofers with two tweeters that support surround sound and spatial audio with Dolby Atmos. That’s paired with three studio-quality mics, the same 12 MP camera found on the latest iPads, and Apple’s Center Stage technology for homed-in video calls. An A13 Bionic chip helps to run all of this.

Enlarge / An artistic reconstruction of the newly described 328-million-year-old vampyropod, Syllipsimopodi bideni. (credit: K. Whalen/Christopher Whalen)

Paleontologists believe they have discovered a new genus and species of extinct cephalopod with ten functional arms, similar to a vampire squid. The 328-million-year-old fossil is the earliest known example of a vampyropod (ancient soft-bodied cephalopods) to date, pushing back the earliest evidence by 82 million years, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. Other paleontologists aren’t so sure, believing the specimen might represent a different known species of ancient cephalopods and calling for a full chemical analysis to confirm the species one way or the other.

The fossil was excavated from Bear Gulch Limestone in Montana. The fossils found there tend to be exceptionally well-preserved—sometimes even showing vascularization—thanks to the impact of seasonal monsoons. That heavy rainfall rapidly deposited sediments and other biological matter into the bay, in turn feeding algal blooms. Those algal blooms resulted in temporary oxygen-deprived zones, while the sudden infusion of fresh water from the rain would have lowered saline levels, according to the authors.

The fossil was donated to the Royal Ontario Museum in 1988, and there it sat, unnoticed for decades, until co-author Christopher Whalen, a postdoc in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was perusing the collection and spotted the arms. When he looked at the specimen more closely under the microscope, he noticed small suckers on those arms, making this an incredibly rare find, since suckers are typically not preserved.

Enlarge / Apple’s new Mac Studio. (credit: Apple)

For months, everyone has been speculating that Apple would soon update high-end, Intel-based Mac mini configurations with its own custom-designed silicon, and now Apple has announced just that at its spring product event. But what we got is actually a little more than what we expected.

The new desktop Mac is called the Mac Studio, and it’s like a Mac mini, but bigger—bigger in size and bigger in performance. The thicker desktop comes in multiple configurations based on Apple’s M1 Max and the new M1 Ultra processor, which doubles the CPU and GPU core counts of the M1 Max.

The more powerful chips allow the Studio to offer a dramatically upgraded array of ports, compared to the M1 Mac mini. On the back, you get four Thunderbolt 4 ports, a 10GB Ethernet port, two USB-A ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack. Those ports allow it to drive up to four of Apple’s 6K ProDisplay XDR screens at once, plus a 4K screen using the HDMI port.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple is adding “one last chip” to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses “UltraFusion” technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM.

It looks like Apple is using a chiplet-based design for the M1 Ultra, just like AMD is doing for many of its Ryzen chips. A chiplet-based approach, as we’ve written, uses multiple silicon dies to make larger chips and can result in better yields since you don’t need to throw a whole monolithic 20-core chip out if a couple of cores have defects that keep them from working.

Like the other M1 chips, the M1 Ultra is manufactured on a 5 nm TSMC manufacturing process. If you want to know the chip’s other key specs, simply double everything Apple is doing in the M1 Max—that means up to 800GB/s of memory bandwidth and a 32-core Neural Engine.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

At its Peek Performance event on Tuesday, Apple announced that it will stream live sports for the first time. “Friday Night Baseball,” a weekly baseball doubleheader, will step up to the plate once the Major League Baseball season begins. (Owners locked out the players in December and have canceled a week’s worth of games so far as a result of the work stoppage.)

Beyond Friday Night Baseball, Apple will offer a 24/7 livestream of highlights, replays, news, and talking heads for subscribers in the US and Canada. Apple TV+ subscribers can also tune into “MLB Big Inning,” which Apple describes as a “live show featuring highlights and look-ins airing every weeknight during the regular season.”

Most notably, “Friday Night Baseball” will be available in all markets—local broadcast restrictions will not apply to Apple’s new service.

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  The fifth-generation iPad Air. It looks much like the last one, but it comes with a much faster M1 system-on-a-chip. [credit:
  Apple ]

The iPad Air got 5G support, faster processor speeds, and an improved front camera in a refresh that was announced during the company’s “Peek performance” event on Tuesday.

Until today, the 10.9-inch tablet had been the oldest in Apple’s lineup, having released in October 2020. The iPad mini and base iPad were updated last fall, and the iPad Pro got the M1 chip and other improvements last spring. Now Apple’s entire iPad lineup has been updated within just the past year.

This iPad Air refresh bumps the previous model’s A14 Bionic chip up to the aforementioned M1. This is the same chip used in the iPad Pro, late 2020 MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and 2020 Mac Mini.

Enlarge / Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince speaks during the Wall Street Journal Tech Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, California on Monday, Oct. 21, 2019.

Cloudflare is resisting requests to fully shut off its services in Russia, saying that such a move would hurt Russian citizens and likely be “celebrated” by Putin’s government. “[W]e have received several calls to terminate all of Cloudflare’s services inside Russia,” CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post yesterday. “We have carefully considered these requests and discussed them with government and civil society experts. Our conclusion, in consultation with those experts, is that Russia needs more Internet access, not less.”

Prince said Cloudflare has seen “a dramatic increase” in users on Russian networks navigating to international media sites, “reflecting a desire by ordinary Russian citizens to see world news beyond that provided within Russia. We’ve also seen an increase in Russian blocking and throttling efforts, combined with Russian efforts to control the content of the media operating inside Russia with a new ‘fake news‘ law.”

Prince noted that over the past few years, Russia’s government “has threatened repeatedly to block certain Cloudflare services and customers.” His blog post argued that a Cloudflare cutoff would be welcomed by the Russian government:

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

As expected, Apple took the stage in a streaming product event today to announce a new version of the company’s cheapest iPhone, the iPhone SE.

Like its 2020 predecessor, the new SE closely resembles the iPhone 8 first released back in 2017. To keep the cost down, the new SE still has a home button and a fingerprint reader, unlike other modern iPhones. But it has some newer things on the inside—namely, Apple’s A15 system-on-a-chip, which was previously seen in 2021’s flagship iPhone 13.

The new device comes in three colors: Midnight, Starlight, and Product RED. Apple says the new SE is 1.8 times faster than the iPhone 8, it has a 12MP camera and IP67 dust and water resistance, and Apple promises “better battery life.”