In this article, I am going to discuss the new products announced at Apple’s March event called ‘Peek Performance’. I will also include the numbers given by Apple but I would personally wait for reviewers to get their hands on the new products before buying.
Firstly, two more different finishes of the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro were announced. The two new variants are called green and Alpine Green.
Secondly, the new iPhone SE was announced.
The new iPhone will have the new A15 Bionic bringing the performance of their flagship, iPhone 13, to a more budget-friendly option for everyone looking to move to Apple products or even to upgrade from earlier devices. This new iPhone also has the tough glass present on the iPhone 13 lineup and the IP67 water and dust resistance present as well. It also includes the new 5G technology and 12MP rear camera with DeepFusion alongside the Touch ID which was present since the first iPhone SE. The new iPhone SE was announced to start at $429.
Secondly, there was a new iPad Air will come with the M1 chip which is an SoC with an 8-core CPU resulting in 60% faster performance than the A14. The new iPad was also compared to a Windows laptop in the same price range and apparently, it was 2x faster.
It will also get an upgrade when it comes to the front-facing camera which is now the 12MP Ultra-Wide camera allowing people to use the new Center Stage feature. Features such as 5G will also be present on the new iPad.
With the new iPad Air, there is also a new iMovie getting released on iPadOS next month. Lastly, it will still be compatible with the keyboards and the 2nd gen Pencil.
The starting price of the new iPad Air is $599.
And as the star of the event so far, the new Mac announcements. A new Apple Silicon called M1 Ultra got announced. The new M1 Ultra improves the performance by bridging two M1 Max together and acting as a single chip. This bridging, also called UltraFusion, which is a die-to-die connection includes benefits such as 2.5TB/s interprocessor bandwidth, 800GB/s memory bandwidth, and up to 128GB of unified memory.
The new processor contains 20-CPU in the configuration of 16 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, 32 cores for the Neural Engine, and up to 64 cores for the GPU. Lastly, this new processor will also have two video decode engines, four video encode engines, and four ProRes video encode and decode engines.
The new M1 Ultra will be present in the new Mac Studio.
The Mac Studio has the same box-shaped with round edges design as the Mac Mini. The new Mac Studio was also announced next to the newest Mac display. The I/O of the new device is made of two USB-C for the M1 Max version or two Thunderbolt 4 ports for the M1 Ultra version and an SDXC card slot on the front, but also four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, Ten-Gigabit Ethernet, and a headphones jack on the back. It also has Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6 inside.
This system which Apple told is up to 80% faster than the top-of-the-line Mac Pro can get up to 8TB of SSD and can run up to 18 streams of 8K ProRes 442 video.
The starting price of the Mac Studio is $1999 with M1 Max and for the newest M1 Ultra for $3999.
The new 27-inch Studio Display with an anti-reflective coating is a 5K Retina Display with 218 Pixels Per Inch with 600nits of brightness comes with an A13 Bionic inside for the 12MP front-facing camera as the iPhone, three-mic array, six speakers in the formation of four woofers, and two tweeters with Spatial Audio.
On the back of the display, there are three USB-C ports and one Thunderbolt which can deliver up to 96W of power therefore can be used for different things such as accessories or even fast-charge a Macbook Pro. The display also has the nano-texture glass option.
When it comes to mounting, there are three options available including a VESA mount.
The price of the Studio Display is $1599.