Oct 19, 2021
Highlights from the Apple event — 18th October 2021
Amongst all Tech. enthusiasts, the month of October is known as Tech-tober because all the tech giants from all across the globe schedule their annual launch events around this time.
Apple is no stranger to this tech fiesta and they too conduct a launch event this time around, every year during which they unravel all the technological breakthroughs that Apple achieved during the past year and all the new gadgets they are about to launch. This year, once again, the ‘ Apple event 2021 ’ was held on 18th October 2021. Of course, since last year all such events have been hosted virtually due to the pandemic we’re going through. The Apple event 2021 went live on Youtube and the presentation was kicked off by no other than Apple’s own CEO, Tim Cook.
Below are the 3 main highlights from the event that you wouldn’t want to miss (Saving the best for last😉).
AirPods 3
The 3rd generation of the Apple AirPods is here this time with a slight design change on the outside and packing a punch on the inside.
Some of the key highlights for the AirPods 3rd generation are:
- A low distortion driver for better sound quality.
- Sweat and water resistance.
- A whopping 6 hours of listening time.
- MagSafe / Wireless charging capability.
But perhaps the best feature is the support for ‘Spatial Audio’, something that was previously available only on the AirPods Pro and the AirPods Max. Spatial Audio is a step up from the conventional stereo audio which gives you only bi-directional (left and right) audio, spatial audio is a complete 3-dimensional immersive experience and is now present on the AirPods 3.
The AirPods 3 will retail for 179 USD.
New Processors
Last year Apple unveiled their in-house designed M1 chips which became a game-changer for them in the laptop market, giving a higher performance with significantly lower power consumption as compared to its competitors.
This year apple brings in the big guns with the reveal of the M1 Pro chip and the M1 Max. These chips follow the same naming convention as the iPhone with the ‘Pro’ version being better than the standard one and the ‘Max’ version being the best of the lot.
A lot can be said about the 2 chips but we’ll keep it to only the technical specifications for this blog.
The above chart says it all, Apple has beefed up their already high-performing chip. If the numbers above don’t satisfy you, there all lots of cool charts waiting for you below that would blow your mind 🤯.
We know the CPU on these chips is powerful, but how powerful are we talking you ask?
Apple claims that the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips reach about ~30–35% higher performance than a high-end 8-core PC laptop chip all the while only consuming a max of 30 Watts.
The 32-core GPU on the M1 Max is claimed to have a performance that is parallel to a High-end pc Laptop discrete graphics card while consuming about 100 Watts lesser.
It is also important to note that this performance stays the same whether the laptop is plugged in or on battery whereas the performance of the discrete graphics cards on other high-end laptops drops to about 20% when on battery.
M1 Pro takes the amazing performance of Apple silicon to a whole new level
-Jhonny Srouji, SVP, Hardware Technologies
New MacBook Pro
Apple unveiled two new MacBook Pros; A 16-inch model and a 14-inch model. These new notebooks will be housing Apple's new advanced M1 chips that we talked about above it's not just the processor that has had an upgrade.
It seems like the Macbook Pro has had quite a heavy design overhaul.
For starters, the touch bar is gone and the physical function keys have made a return, I guess they realized how useless that bar was after all.
On the topic of things that have made a return, we now see the HDMI port as well as the MagSafe charging port apart from 3 thunderbolt USB type-c ports and a headphone jack. There's also an SD-card slot for quick media transfer.
And now for perhaps the most shocking reveal of them all. The display of the Mac now… *drumrolls* … now has a notch on the top which houses the front camera.
The screen has a display resolution of 3256 x 2334 on the 16-inch model and 3024 x 1964 on the 14–inch model. Both the models are capable of refresh rates of up to 120 Hz.
The macs also feature a new mini-led display which also for 1600 nits of peak brightness and 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
There’s so much to talk about.
The 2 laptops are priced at 1999 USD for the 14-inch model and 2499 USD for the 16-inch model.
That's a wrap
So there it is, everything you need to know from this year's Apple event. If you too are a tech enthusiast do consider following.
