- ‘Starlink review: broadband dreams fall to Earth’ by Nilay Patel for The Verge
- ‘How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS’ by Howard Oakley for his blog
- ’24-inch M1 iMac review: She’s a rainbow’ by Jason Snell for Six Colors
- ‘iPad Pro 2021 Review: Future on Standby’ by Federico Viticci for MacStories
Nilay Patel writes a review of Starlink. It looks like the hopes and dreams of many have crashing down to Earth. It turns out that even some of the best satellite internet technology is still not a good enough replacement for fibre in the ground and in homes. The American ISP market is so stagnant that people see the saviour in Starlink so this review is a little dose of reality: fibre is the future.
Howard Oakley writes a very well written post on just why M1 Macs feel faster than the Intel models. It is all about smart QoS:
As far as the processor goes, an M1 Mac is divided into two: the four Efficiency cores are there largely to run macOS and its many background tasks, freeing the four Performance cores for the apps which you run.
Jason Snell writes a review of the 24-inch M1 iMac. I actually love the orange colour more than I thought I would. I still like the blue more than all the others but the orange isn’t half bad. The conclusion to the review here is unsurprising to me:
The M1 is powerful enough to handle a wide range of uses—including uses that we’d consider very high end, like editing multiple streams of 4K video. And yet if you are someone who needs more RAM or is currently using one of the highest-end Intel-based Macs, these computers are not for you. As someone with an iMac Pro, the 24-inch iMac is appealing—but it’s the wrong computer for me, and wouldn’t offer enough of an improvement for me to switch.
Federico Viticci writes the definitive review of the 2021 iPad Pro, if you have to read one review for this device, make it this one.
The perception since the iPad Pro’s introduction is that its hardware has consistently leapfrogged its software, leaving many to wonder about the untapped potential of iPadOS and a third-party app ecosystem that could have been vastly richer and more powerful if only iPadOS allowed developers to write more complex apps. Effectively, “too good for its software” has long been the iPad Pro’s hardware mantra.
The 2021 iPad Pro, launching publicly this Friday, doesn’t alter that public perception at all. If anything, this new iPad Pro, which I’ve been testing in the high-end 12.9” flavor with 2 TB of storage for the past week, only widens the chasm between its hardware and software: it’s an absolute marvel of engineering featuring the Apple-designed M1 chip, a brand new Liquid Retina XDR display, and 16 GB of RAM that hints at a powerful, exciting future for its software that just isn’t here yet.
The rest of the review looks at the hardware which is just stellar, especially that screen. Those blacks look incredible, just take a look at the shots showing the difference. I also really like the Center Stage feature, it seems to work quite well and is actually a fairly clever software trick. Speaking of software, the theme of all the 2021 iPad Pro reviews is that the software is still not matching the hardware capabilities. Here’s hoping WWDC 2021 is one that brings some more life to the iPadOS side of things.
That’s all from me this week, see y’all next week!