Vratislav Holub Only a week ago, we saw the third autumn conference, which was dedicated to apple computers and the previously presented project called Apple Silicon. We could officially hear about this for the first time during the WWDC 2020 developer conference this June, when the Californian giant told us that we will see the first Macs with their own chip before the end of this year. And as Apple promised, it did. But in today's article we will shed light on a new one 13″ MacBook Pro. It has already reached the hands of foreign reviewers, who praised the product in general - but we still find some bugs.
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Design
In terms of design, the new "Pročko" has of course not changed in any way, and at first glance we would not be able to distinguish it from its predecessor. So we would have to look for the actual change in the insides themselves, where of course the Apple M1 chip itself is key.
In terms of performance, it is flawless
Already at the very presentation of the new 13″ MacBook Pro, Apple certainly did not skimp on self-praise. During the Keynote, we were able to hear several times that the laptop is equipped with the most powerful chip for laptops ever, which compared to its predecessor up to 2,8x in the field of processor performance and up to 5x in the field of graphics performance. These numbers are undoubtedly very beautiful and took the breath away of more than one apple lover. But what was worse was waiting for reality. The mentioned numbers and praise seemed so unrealistic that one simply did not want to believe it. Fortunately, the opposite is true. The "pro" with the M1 chip from the Apple Silicon family literally has power to spare.
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TechCrunch magazine summed it up pretty well. According to them, for example, the applications themselves turn on so quickly that once you click on it in the Dock, you don't even have time to move the cursor to another place. Thanks to this, the new apple laptop is more reminiscent of products with the iOS operating system, where you only need one tap and you are practically done. With this, Apple demonstrates perfectly where it is able to push the performance of its products. In short, everything works quickly, smoothly and without a single problem.
Of course, launching apps quickly isn't everything. But how does the new Apple laptop cope with more demanding tasks, such as rendering 4K video? This was quite well commented by The Verge magazine, according to which the performance is recognizable at first glance. The work itself with the mentioned 4K video is fast and you will hardly ever encounter a jam. Even the subsequent render/export of the resulting video took relatively little time.
Opening apps on the new MacBook Air:
Fan volume
What differentiates the new "Pročko" from the MacBook Air presented next to it is the presence of active cooling, i.e. a classic fan. Thanks to this, the laptop can allow its user to offer significantly more performance, as the Mac can subsequently cool it down without any problem. In this direction, however, it is a little more complicated. The new Apple M1 chip, which is built on the ARM architecture, is indeed significantly less energy-demanding, while still offering brutal performance. The Verge describes the quality of the cooling and the fan in general in the way that during normal work, the fan did not turn on even once, and the Mac ran completely silently. The heat dissipation design itself literally works great. The fan then did not turn on even during the aforementioned work with 4K video, when it involved editing and subsequent export. It is worth highlighting the fact that the 16″ MacBook Pro is completely silent in activities where last year's 13″ MacBook Pro starts to “heat” at full speed.
In this regard, it is not clear whether the performance is really that different compared to the MacBook Air. Both machines can deal with launching applications practically immediately and are not intimidated even by such operations, which frighten Apple computers with an Intel processor and practically immediately "spin" their fan almost to maximum. It is clear that the Californian giant has moved forward by leaps and bounds by switching to Apple Silicon, and only time will bring us more detailed information.
Battery life
A lot of people asked about battery life after the show. As we mentioned above, ARM processors should generally be energy-efficient, while their performance is often several times higher. This is exactly the case with the new 13″ MacBook Pro, whose battery life will please many an Apple fan who often moves between several places with his Mac and thus must not be limited by a weak battery. During testing by The Verge magazine itself, the Mac was able to cope with ten hours of endurance without any problems. But when they tried to work with more demanding applications and generally deliberately "squeezed" the battery, the endurance dropped to "only" eight hours.
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Pavel Jelic FaceTime camera or progress in one place
Apple users have been calling (in vain) for a better camera in Apple laptops for several years. The Californian giant still uses the once iconic FaceTime camera with a resolution of 720p, which is simply not enough by today's standards. This year, Apple promised us that it can move the quality of the video itself a step further thanks to the Neural Engine, which is hidden directly in the aforementioned M1 chip. But as the reviews have now shown, the truth is not so clear and the video quality from the FaceTime camera is simply a few steps behind.
Summarizing all the information written above, we must definitely admit that Apple has decided on the right step and the transition to the Apple Silicon platform will probably bring it the well-deserved fruits. The performance of Apple's new products has moved forward by a notch, and the competition will have to really step up in order to catch up with Apple's lead, or at least come close to it. But it's quite sad that the new laptop has improved in all respects, but the video quality from its FaceTime camera lags behind.
- Newly introduced Apple products can be purchased in addition to Apple.com, for example at Alge, Mobile Emergency or u iStores
Already at the presentation itself, Apple did not shy away from kind words about the performance of their new 13″ MacBook Pro chip. What? Dude, it's impossible to read.. please start working on that Czech a little bit, make those sentences make sense and have a head and a heel :/
God, you really can't read it...