Dezine Zync

Stunning colours. I doubt we’ll meet anyone who does not like any one of these colours. Perhaps a dark grey coming in the winter? 😏

Two of my favourite features from this release were:

1. The Power Brick of the M1 iMac now comes with an integrated Ethernet port. That makes two cables coming from under the desk into a single one. This is particularly useful where a lot of schools, colleges and offices have ethernet ports under the desks on the floors. It seems like Apple’s own offices were designed this way and prompted for this design choice.

   

   You can also now get a 10G Ethernet port on the M1 Mac mini. Source

2. The M1 iMacs also come with a new keyboard with integrated TouchID. You can also separately purchase these keyboards (in all their glorious colours) for your M1 Mac mini (or even Hackintoshes 😏)

   

What irked me the most is that the iMac’s design went back by a decade for its front panel. This could have been avoided completely. The back looks absolutely stunning with the new colour options, all of them. But the front is going to be hard to work with, especially for photographers.

This comparison clearly illustrates how frustrating it will be for photographers who will buy this device for their editing work. What prompted Apple to use a white bezel completely evades common sense. Sir Jonathan Ive would have never let this happen joke.

The pricing for these devices is also bonkers in India. The baseline M1 Mac Mini ₹64,900. The decent/good baseline M1 iMac will retail for ₹1,39,900. That's ₹75,000 for a 4.5K Display, Keyboard and Mouse/Trackpad and no HDMI/USB-A Ports. Go figure.

None of us saw this coming. Yes, we all read the rumours of the XDR Display, I even suggested the possibility of Thunderbolt 3/4 before the event started to my bother. But little did we know, all of this would be made possible by the M1 Chip.

The inclusion of the M1 chip, introduction of the Thunderbolt 4 port and the gorgeous new Liquid Retina Display makes it the most capable, portable device held back solely by the now incompetent OS it runs. WWDC21, all eyes on you.

I know a lot of people are demanding, expecting a Windowing System. I do not believe this to be a good idea at all. Windowing systems work great with pointer based inputs. For touch based inputs, this would be taxing. Windowing is one more thing for th user to manage and the iPad Pro doesn't need one. Apps and workflows have evolved to be single-focused and sliding a window from the left egde (or the right in RTL locales) to bring up temporary window is another thing, which still retains the single focus system.

You can now connect the M1 iPad Pro to an Apple XDR Display and get full 6K output resolution. I honestly never thought this would be possible, but now that it is, it only makes me more excited to continue working on an iPad App that I've been prototyping over the last couple of months.