The MacBook Pro with M2 will be landing with buyers from this Friday, but that most likely means the reviewers have had them for a little while and chances are their review embargo will lift tomorrow. That’s when we’ll start getting some of the other benchmarks appearing – We’ve had GeekBench which we talked about last week, but suffice to say, Apple wasn’t exaggerating the performance gains, but we’ll also start to see Cinebench, Blender tests, real world video rendering and more. We’ll be rounding the reviews up over on iCaveDave.com if you don’t fancy searching for them all over YouTube.
When pre-orders opened it seemed that only the base configurations were available to order with 8GB Unified Memory, while other configs were listed as “Currently Unavailable”, but taking a look at Apple.com today, you can configure all the way up to a 24Gb Unified Memory version with 2TB of storage if you so desire and have $2500 burning a hole in your pocket. And honestly that’s not a terrible price, if well into MacBook Pro with M1 Pro territory. You could even pick up a 16” version for that money, if with less storage and memory.
AirTags Sales Increase Year on Year
Next up, AirTags. Ming Chi Kuo has reported that demand for the AirTag has been strong and improved year over year. Starting with 20m units in the first year, 2021 and on track for 35 million in 2022, that’s some excellent growth.
AirTags haven’t been without their controversy of course and have been used to track people without their consent which, especially for a privacy focused company like Apple is… problematic. Apple has released over 20 updates to AirTag and its accompanying software, fine tuning how long you can be moving with an unknown AirTag before being alerted and other tweaks.
It’s clear that Apple sees AirTag as for finding misplaced items and not stolen items, which of course could add its own safety implications for the owner, so it will be interesting to see what the next version that Kuo expects to be released will bring. Patent filings have shown that the precision of AirTags positional awareness could allow them to be used for motion tracking, so could they become a part of Apple’s AR VR strategy too? Possibly.
Channel Update
I just wanted to let you know I’m not at the theatre bar any more, I completed my contract this week so there’s more time to spend on the channel right now. There will likely be another real world job coming as the channel isn’t sustainable on its own right now and I’m looking at various options, and I’m very grateful to the patrons we already have. If you’d like to be one too, iCaveDave.com/Patreon, and I’m reviewing what the perks should be as Ad free videos don’t seem to be that compelling. Let me know what you think I should add.
Production wise though I’ve set up a permanent overhead rig here in the studio as I have a LOT of review products stacked up to get through, expect a bunch of these to drop this week. I’m also going to try to make these reviews more interactive though too like the rest of the channel (iCaveAnswers is up next) so in many cases we’ll unbox in one video and I’ll take suggestions on the tests you want to see me perform. Then you can have a role in these videos too. Sound good? Let’s use iCaveTested as the hashtag for that in the comments. Anyway, lets talk MacBook Air M2.
#icaveanswers Do you think the supply for the new M2 MacBook Air will be constrained the way it was for M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros. Cause I desperately need to buy one and I want it. And do you know the exact date for when orders open?
#iCaveAnswers: Crop images under macOS Ventura: I’ve only seen the demos so far, and I think the feature is awesome. It works not only on iOS but also on Mac, which would be a cool feature for graphic designers, as cropping image content is an often recurring step. Any experience on how reliably the feature works?
Does the Starlight MacBook Air color looks like the Ace of Spades ♠️ Champagne bottle? #icaveanswers
#icavedave Will Apples new MetalFX be able upscale low resolutions videos or has it only been made for upscaling games?