Apple Announces "One More Thing" Event Scheduled for November 10, 2020

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

Summary

Today, Apple released invites to their "One More Thing" event which is rumored to host the announcement of new Macs and AirTags. These new Macs will come with Apple's in-house silicon instead of traditional Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs, and AirTags are rumored to be a small Tile-like tracker competitor fueled by Apple's Find My network. Earlier leaks pointed towards AirPods Studios coming out alongside these in November, but now all leaks are pointing towards a delay to March. No Apple TV models are rumored for release right now.

 

Quotes

Quote

"Join us from Apple Park. November 10, 2020, at 10 a.m. PST." - Apple

 

If you've been living under a rock and aren't familiar with ‌AirTags‌, they're Apple's version of the Tile. ‌AirTags‌ are small Bluetooth-equipped item trackers that you can attach to important but easily lost items, allowing the ‌AirTags‌ (and the items) to be tracked right inside the Find My app alongside your Apple devices."

 

"Apple itself has said that the first Mac with an Apple Silicon chip is coming before the end of 2020, so we can count on at least one Mac launch in November or December. There's no word yet on exactly which Mac will get an Apple Silicon chip first, but based on rumors, candidates include a new MacBook Pro, a new MacBook Air, a resurrected 12-inch MacBook, or a new 24-inch iMac." - MacRumors

 

My thoughts

Apple Glass. Need I say more? I mean it's the "breakthrough" Apple logo, similar to the one they had when they unveiled the iPhone and MacBook Air. They don't throw this image around for anything.

 

In all seriousness, if it were that we would've heard something. It will probably just be for Macs and AirTags. Excited for the Macs, couldn't care for the Tags.

 

Sources

Apple Events - Apple

November Event Coming? Everything Apple Didn't Announce at the October Event - MacRumors

[Spindel]

I’m hyped.

 

I hope ther is a AS Mac Mini or iMac (27”-30”) or other non-pro desktop announced in this event. 
 

My wallet is ready.

[Commodus]

I'm really curious to know how Apple prices and configures ARM-based Macs. I suspect you won't even have a choice of processors on laptops and lower-end iMacs, just RAM and storage. And will it use this as an opportunity to lower prices or stuff in more for the money? I'm not counting on either, but Apple is also in the rare position of not being chained to Intel or AMD processor pricing. It only has to worry about how much it costs to make the chips.

 

One possible clue is how Apple equips iPhones. Remember, the iPhone SE came out using the same A13 chip as the iPhone 11 series despite costing considerably less. Apple isn't afraid to use its fastest chips in low-end devices, so you could see some 'entry' MacBooks and iMacs that are particularly competitive.

 

[ne0tic]

This will probably be the most important Apple event in a long time. It truly has the potential to be something big, not just for Apple, but the whole industry if Apple succesfully transition to ARM and the rumored benifits of high performance low efficiency holds true. 

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

This will be interesting to see. If Apple silicon turns out to be good, it'll be a hell of a big deal. Then again, it could be a flop

[Commodus]

41 minutes ago, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

This will be interesting to see. If Apple silicon turns out to be good, it'll be a hell of a big deal. Then again, it could be a flop

I think the only real risk is that people balk at being unable to run Windows, but that argument has been fading over time. Haven't heard many people talking about it aside from the occasional misguided person who wants to buy a Mac with the intention of primarily running Windows. Most folks seem to either be happy with the selection of Mac apps or have ways of running VMs that will do the job.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

27 minutes ago, Commodus said:

I think the only real risk is that people balk at being unable to run Windows, but that argument has been fading over time. Haven't heard many people talking about it aside from the occasional misguided person who wants to buy a Mac with the intention of primarily running Windows. Most folks seem to either be happy with the selection of Mac apps or have ways of running VMs that will do the job.

The question really is the performance - and the app compatibility.

[Commodus]

1 minute ago, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

The question really is the performance - and the app compatibility.

Compatibility shouldn't be too much of an issue since even games are supposed to run reasonably well, but I do wonder about absolute performance relative to Windows PCs. Although the sad bit is that Apple will almost certainly have better GPU performance than Intel's integrated video.

[Fasterthannothing]

Really airtags? Why does apple feel the need to make their own everything? I mean I get the want to make more money but don't reinvent the wheel when there is a technology already created that does the same thing as your proprietary crap **cough USB C cough**

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

46 minutes ago, Commodus said:

I think the only real risk is that people balk at being unable to run Windows, but that argument has been fading over time. Haven't heard many people talking about it aside from the occasional misguided person who wants to buy a Mac with the intention of primarily running Windows. Most folks seem to either be happy with the selection of Mac apps or have ways of running VMs that will do the job.

I think this would mainly be a big blow to University students in the Engineering and Computer Science fields. Many students in those fields running Macbook Pros that dual boot between macOS and Windows. 

 

2 hours ago, Commodus said:

I'm really curious to know how Apple prices and configures ARM-based Macs. I suspect you won't even have a choice of processors on laptops and lower-end iMacs, just RAM and storage. And will it use this as an opportunity to lower prices or stuff in more for the money? I'm not counting on either, but Apple is also in the rare position of not being chained to Intel or AMD processor pricing. It only has to worry about how much it costs to make the chips.

 

One possible clue is how Apple equips iPhones. Remember, the iPhone SE came out using the same A13 chip as the iPhone 11 series despite costing considerably less. Apple isn't afraid to use its fastest chips in low-end devices, so you could see some 'entry' MacBooks and iMacs that are particularly competitive.

 

I would very interested in this. I've always wanted to try using a Mac for daily tasks such as media consumption and general office like work for the volunteer organizations I'm with. Then retain my Windows solely for gaming. But the steep price even for a Mac Mini was just too much to justify it. Of course you can always go used but these devices tend to retain their value a ton so you're not really saving a whole lot. 

[StDragon]

Apple should just make a 10mm socket with AirTag built-in.

[BuckGup]

I agree with the others. Apple has a huge industry influence. When apple does something you'll see the whole industry move in this direction

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

18 minutes ago, Shorty88jr said:

**cough USB C cough**

I don't mean to be that guy, but Apple was one of the main companies developing USB-C. Literally the only reason they switched to Lightning in 2012 was because USB-C wasn't ready yet. It wasn't finalized until 2014 and the first computer with one was the 2015 MacBook.

 

And do we not remember how shit and confusing USB-C was within the first few years of usage? You had USB-C, USB-C PD, USB-C w/ DisplayPort, USB-C Thunderbolt 3, still stuff we deal with to this day. There were no solid USB-C cables for use, it literally came down to a Google employee testing out cables on Amazon to see which ones were good or bad.

 

I'm not saying Apple shouldn't switch to USB-C on the iPhone, they totally should to keep compatibility with other devices, but it's a dead horse to beat at this point. I mean look at MagSafe, Apple is clearly going to get rid of the port all together. Why switch to another port then go portless? Just take the one step with an outdated port to terrible wireless charging implementation.

 

For me, I prefer the Lightning connector itself (I have never had a problem with my iPhone's charging port being loosened over time, something that some USB-C phones have issues with), but it's fucking USB 2.0. God forbid you have a large music library you want to send to your phone, you'd be there for months!

1 hour ago, Commodus said:

I think the only real risk is that people balk at being unable to run Windows, but that argument has been fading over time.

Yeah, Apple has been slowly fading out Bootcamp. It was a huge argument back in 2005 and 2006. Apple being able to market "You can buy a Mac and run both OS X and Windows, so just buy a Mac", but now since everything is done on the web, it literally does not matter what computer you have. That's why Apple Silicon is gonna be big for lower end MacBooks. ARM strides in being able to do short bursty tasks with really low power, and browsing the web is one of them. So if you're school's portal and assignments are completely online, you'd be crazy to not buy an ARM based computer in the next few years. Imagine having to charge a laptop every other day, with all the other benefits from ARM such as instant wakeup and heterogenous compute.

 

I think this will change the industry as we know it. I think it's why Nvidia wanted to buy ARM so badly now that they see what Apple's doing. They know that ARM chips are gonna be the future of personal computing, and imagine controlling who gets the license to use the instruction set. Nvidia could have a whole monopoly on the PC ARM space until the government sees fit for them to break up Nvidia and ARM. 

[ItsMeSpiny]

10 hours ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

Summary

Today, Apple released invites to their "One More Thing" event which is rumored to host the announcement of new Macs and AirTags. These new Macs will come with Apple's in-house silicon instead of traditional Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs, and AirTags are rumored to be a small Tile-like tracker competitor fueled by Apple's Find My network. Earlier leaks pointed towards AirPods Studios coming out alongside these in November, but now all leaks are pointing towards a delay to March. No Apple TV models are rumored for release right now.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

Apple Glass. Need I say more? I mean it's the "breakthrough" Apple logo, similar to the one they had when they unveiled the iPhone and MacBook Air. They don't throw this image around for anything.

 

In all seriousness, if it were that we would've heard something. It will probably just be for Macs and AirTags. Excited for the Macs, couldn't care for the Tags.

 

Sources

Apple Events - Apple

November Event Coming? Everything Apple Didn't Announce at the October Event - MacRumors

Yea its conformed 

[hishnash]

7 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

I think this would mainly be a big blow to University students in the Engineering and Computer Science fields. Many students in those fields running Macbook Pros that dual boot between macOS and Windows. 

Apple have been updating the VM experience a LOT in bigSur, VM guest operating systems get GPU acceleration now! and PCIe passthrough is supported, but also if you are an app dev and you need to use a VM you can very easily now embed a hypervisor within our app without going down the pain of writing a load of lower level kernel dirtiness. 
 

So as long as MS changes the license terms for windows 10 ARM I think that will be the solution for these users, due to how macOS bigSur runs there is no real perfomance (for CPU based tasks at all) when running a VM (on modern hardware) and we have seen already that the arm64 darwin kernel will be the same for ARM64 cpus with the Hypervisor extensions.  So you will just run Windows 10 ARM in a VM and then use MS x86-64 emulation layer, given the perfomance of these machines that will be fast enough. ...

And some software vendors might even embed VMs in the app bundle (this gives some very interesting optitunitys with PCIe passthrough) for example CUDA support could be provided by shipping with a cut down ARM64 linux VM image that loads in the hypervisor framework headless and then PCIe passthroughs the attached NVidia gpu into the Linux VM where there are CUDA drivers present. Historically you would have needed to do a lot of custom kernel extension work to be able to do this but this is now possible using just user-space apis, and is a very interesting way to provide this type of workflow.

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Shorty88jr said:

Really airtags? Why does apple feel the need to make their own everything? I mean I get the want to make more money but don't reinvent the wheel when there is a technology already created that does the same thing as your proprietary crap **cough USB C cough**

Are you really complaining about a rumoured product that doesn’t exist yet? 

 

Apple creates new products same reason for any other company - to make profit, because they can. More competition in any space is good. 

To the topic:

They usually reserve the ‘one more thing’ for something more different. I don’t think they would have an event for something as small as AirTags either.