Philip Houska During March, Apple should most likely introduce at least two new products. The iPhone portfolio will grow with the 5SE model and the third-generation iPad Air will also arrive. In the last few days, relatively unobtrusively important information regarding which processors these devices will come with has surfaced.
The iPhone 5SE should have the same A9 chip found in the latest iPhone 6S, and the iPad Air 3 will get an improved A9X chip, which is only in the iPad Pro so far. In large profile new senior vice president of hardware Johny Srouji's Apple was indirectly confirmed by the magazine Bloomberg.
For the iPhone 5SE, it was not yet completely certain whether Apple would bet on the latest and most powerful processors, or would insert an older A8 chip into the four-inch iPhone. Now it seems that in the end, the choice will really fall on the newer A9, and thus the smallest iPhones in terms of performance will be as powerful as the current series.
Deploying an even faster A9X chip in the iPad Air 3 seems like a logical step, as Apple seems to want to bring its mid-range iPad significantly closer to the largest. They are talking about Pencil support, Smart Connector for connecting a keyboard, four speakers and probably higher operating memory and a finer display.
The mentioned devices should appear during the March keynote, which is to be held on March 15. The new iPhones and iPads could go on sale the same week, on Friday, March 18. At the same time, Apple should show new bands for the Watch.
I'm already looking forward to the news with iOS10 and the iPad... Such a brutal increase in performance must have some justification... Shouldn't there be more apps than just 2?
The A9 and A9X would be very nice. I'm looking forward to the news.
I digress a bit. I would be quite interested in whether a small MacBook would switch to the A9X or the future A10X, or whether a 13-14″ model is in preparation.
I generally see MacBook/Pro and iMac as needing to be updated, and I find them rather backward compared to iPhone and iPad – the camera should be replaced by at least 5 MPx from the iPhone instead of VGA, and it would be nice to use Touch ID.
Macbook/Pro have had 720p cameras for several years now, which is quite usable and a reasonable step would be to go to Full HD, going with a higher resolution is a bit unnecessary for a webcam, maybe in the next few years when displays with a higher resolution become more common, but today it would just be "chasing cores and megapixels"
ARM in laptops has been a topic of discussion for several years, the question of whether Apple would be able to handle it in terms of compatibility, would have to emulate, which eats up a lot of power (and Macbook doesn't have it to give away) or would "adult" applications not work on a small Macbook. Apple has already changed the platform once, but it was switched from one to the other, maintaining two at the same time would probably be more difficult. Both for Apple and for developers, but let's be surprised
So the 720 camera resolution is quite behind for a laptop with Retina - and today you have iMacs with 4K and 5K and lots of 4K monitors. But another thing is photos - sometimes it's convenient for someone to take a picture and send it to someone. A small MacBook has only 480. The quality of these cameras is appalling - on a netbook for 6000 you could get by, but on a laptop for 40 or more it is desperate.
It would be very convenient to integrate Touch ID.
Yes, the ARM probably wouldn't be that easy and it would be difficult to develop, a small Macbook would be ideal and the processor is more economical and powerful than the used Core M. Who knows, maybe one day they will even design an x86 CPU.
I admit that I expected a higher resolution for a small macbook, I didn't know about VGA (my mistake, but I expect that they did it on purpose so that they would have something to improve in the next generation, otherwise there is a logical reason to put iSight there, when Facetime has probably been used everywhere for a year or so HD, I just can't see), I have the last MBP model without retina and it already had 720p. Although the new iMacs are retina-ready, so are the MBPs, but the native resolution is still not used. I would compare it to a 4K TV, whoever has it is a fool, but the actual use is a bit slow, today it would just be a number on paper, in 2-3 years webcams with this resolution will probably be common on computers.
The question is the quality, because of the optics and size, you won't fit an iPhone camera into the lid, and I can't imagine the amount of noise in a 4k camera if it has to be this small and have such a small chip. Even the Facetime HD resolution is more than enough, but the image quality is poor for such a small chip. They would probably make a few people happy, but I don't think that anyone would primarily watch the resolution of the camera (if it was the FullHD ones), it would rather be a side bonus. In addition, you have to realize that the camera is mainly for video calls, and in order to use such a resolution, you need a retina display on both sides (and we still need the two or three years to expand it). For home photography and filming (perhaps) no one uses a camera in a laptop or iMac, that would be a bit of a tragedy. So yes, it would be nice, but many people today probably wouldn't appreciate it.
I wouldn't be sure about ARM, the performance of x86 is completely different from ARM, it wasn't so long ago that a manufacturer made two versions of one model, the first with Intel Atom and the second with ARM, Atom was far ahead in terms of performance and it only had one single core while ARM had several. As a result, ARM is more economical but less powerful, which is due to the technology itself (RISC for Arm compared to CISC for x86), if you add compatibility problems, I am not sure if it would not be a step back in the end.
Well, according to the tests, the A9X iPad Pro is more powerful than the Core M in the MacBook 12″ 2015.
Those cameras, yes, everyone has a 4K display, on the other hand, nowadays everyone has at least FullHD and if you put a call on the full screen – the dice from the VGA camera look terrible.
From two different tests on different operating systems, OS X has completely different requirements than iOS, the very fact that iOS has a very limited multitasking must add a lot of points to it in the percentage of tests
So if they gave a 2-year-old chip from the iPhone 6, which is only slightly better than the iPhone 5S in terms of performance, no one would buy it for the new price. Especially if it is aimed at current 5/5S owners.