just 10 days ago I bought myself a MacBook Air and could I have possibly
picked a worse time because today Apple
bombarded me with reasons that this just ain't that great anymore because the new
Macbook Air is faster prettier and somehow also cheaper that's right my
friends the Apple Air event is over we've got a new laptop a new desktop a
new iPad and even a new processor to talk about and these announcements range
from H quite compelling to Industry
changing but uh how much Apple tax are you willing to pay for these shiny new
toys no really I'm genuinely wondering so I know how much I should be charging
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before we even get started let's do a quick refresher on Apple's branding in
case you missed our video on Dell's rebranding which featured a uh one toone
ripoff currently there are four generations of Apple silicon with the
manufacturing process node efficiency and single threaded performance
increasing as we go from M1 to M4 within
each generation there are Bas Pro Max
and Ultra tiers with the number of processing cores GPU performance and the
maximum amount of unified memory increasing as you go up or sometimes
increasing within a tier or decreasing I
don't know it's complicated what isn't complicated is the most exciting feature
of the brand new Macbook Air it's blue
okay seriously the sky blue color it's pretty nice looking but for us the
bigger deal here is the upgrade to the M4 Bas processor it still passively
cooled which is likely to result in thermal throttling during heavy
workloads but under lighter conditions this thing should absolutely fly it's
got 10 of Apple's latest arm CPU cores
and anywhere from 8 to 10 GPU cores depending on the configuration as for
unified system memory apple is continuing their recent purging of 8 gig
systems from their lineup so we get 16 gigs in the base config but
like the rest of their lineup if you want any more than that you need to be
ready to pay for it and I'm talking more by weight than literal gold with an
additional 16 gigs of memory costing an obscene $400 upcharge In fairness I
guess part of that goes towards a small GPU upgrade but still the webcam also
gets an upgrade to the 12 megapix Center Stage camera that we saw in last year's
MacBook Pro refresh it supports automatic reframing to keep you from
accidentally lean leaning out of the shot and it supports desk view a trick
where you can duct tape your iPhone to the top of your laptop and turn it into
an alternate second feed NVIDIA conference software like FaceTime and
zoom the M4 processor on these new machines supports up to two displays
that is on top of the built-in one and the new machine keeps intact all of the
things that already made the MacBook Air great including its aluminum unibody
Touch ID 500 nit liquid Retina Display and Wi-Fi 6E and as a bonus Apple
actually dropped the starting price to $1,000 okay it's a little on the
iterative side but if you were shopping for a Mac it's still pretty exciting
though not nearly as exciting as the new Mac Studio where we get upgraded M3 and
M4 chips now one of these is faster than
the other and I'm going to give you a second to guess did you say M3 well if
you did you're right wait what how does
that work well simple apple took two of
their M3 Max chips and glued them together using what they call Ultra
Fusion this technology is similar to AMD's Infinity fabric where they use a
silicon interposer between the two CPU dieses and join them together to make
them appear in software as a single discreete chip this trickery allows the
top M3 Ultra skew to have a whopping 32
CPU cores and 80 GPU cores along with a
32 core neural engine so yeah a single
M4 core might be a little faster than a single M3 core but when you've got that
many of them is it ever fast it won't
come cheap though if you want an M3 Ultra the minimum memory config is 96
gigs though if we're being realistic most of the buyers of this machine are
going to take more because while Apple talks about improvements to Dynamic
caching and Hardware accelerated mesh shading and Ray tracing the Mac Studio
is is clearly designed from the ground up to be an AI monster of a machine
where being able to load your entire model into memory can be hugely
beneficial especially in systems where that memory can be allocated between the
CPU or more likely the GPU depending on
your needs and you'll be running some seriously big models on this machine
thanks to Apple offering configurations with up to half a terabyte of RAM on the
Mac Studio that is as long as you're okay paying an extra $4,800 us for the
privilege speaking of expensive upgrades you can also equip the Mac Studio with
up to a 16 tbte SSD for also
$4,800 bringing the top config up to an eyeing $1
14,99 it kind of feels like apple took the criticism that the Mac Pro was
overpriced compared to the studio and thought H well we could discount the Mac
Pro or or or hear me out we could jack
up the studio ah ah
anybody now In fairness the base version of the new Max studio isn't that
outrageously priced starting at $2,000 for an M4 Max chip with 14 CPU cores and
32 GPU cores and 36 gigs of unified
memory it's about the same as what you'd find in the current gen MacBook Pros but
as seems to be typical for Apple these days that starting price quickly
balloons as you start to option out your machine you want more RAM oh well you'll
need to Shell out for eight extra GPU cores just to unlock the privilege of
spending $200 for just 12 GB of RAM ouch
there is some more good news though every Mac Studio now comes with four
Thunderbolt 5 ports for blazing fast 80ish GB connectivity a 10 gig Ethernet
port and on the M3 Ultra you can connect up to eight displays simultaneously to
build the ultimate Mac granddaddy of a
battle station for those of you looking for something a bit more touching though
we also got new iPad Airs the key upgrade here is an M3 processor with 8
CPU cores N9 GPU cores and 8 gigs of RAM
Apple claims that compared to an older M1 iPad Air you can expect 35% faster
CPU performance in multi-core loads and 40% faster GPU performance Apple also
has a new magic keyboard for the iPad which connects magnetically and has a
larger built-in trackpad now I'm told that the price actually went down on
these accessories but good Lord are they ever not cheap at $269 and
$319 for the 11 and 13in keyboard
respectively like does Apple not know how incredible of a keyboard you can get
for $320 any who this means that as usual if
you just want a tablet the iPad Air is actually a pretty darn decent value
especially given that Apple has hasn't increased the price over last gen it's
just that once you add in a keyboard and a stylus you are getting dangerously
close to a base MacBook Air which gets double the RAM double the storage more
cores not to mention a real operating system I think you can all guess which
one I would choose our biggest surprise from this event though was that Apple
was able to deliver price cuts to the MacBook Air and the magic keyboard
despite the tariffs that the current US Administration is imposing which will
impact the price of electronics more broadly this has led to some speculation
that the new Macbook Air might be made in Malaysia or in Vietnam to avoid
tariffs on Chinese made Goods but we won't know for sure until we have them
in hand for our shortcircuit unboxing video so maybe uh act fast if you're
looking for a new laptop or if you're looking for a new segue to our sponsor
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description if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out our
announcement video for the iPhone 16e I had some controversial takes but I
stand by them