The 7 Biggest Surprises at Apple’s ‘Unleashed’ Event

Apple Music Voice Plan

With its shift into virtual events last year, Apple has shown an increased willingness to toss in a couple of curveballs as a sort of opening act. The HomePod mini headlined the iPhone 12 unveiling last October, so it seems appropriate that Apple also opened this year’s event with something completely unrelated: music.

Apple Music’s Zane Lowe took the virtual stage for quite possibly the first time ever to talk about a new way of calling up theme and mood-based Apple Music playlists using Siri, and while that was a nice and moderately interesting expansion of both Apple Music and Siri, it’s what came next that threw us for a loop.

It appears that Apple has decided that one way to draw in more Apple Music subscribers is to offer a lower-cost plan that’s based entirely around Siri. The new Apple Music Voice Plan will cost only $4.99/month, and it will offer access to the widely expanded array of curated playlists available on Apple Music.

It’s going to be available only on Apple devices, not third-party speakers, smart TVs, or game consoles, and there will be other limitations, but it’s still an interesting new development that we did not see coming.

The MacBook Pro Notch

An eleventh-hour rumour appeared seemingly out of nowhere last week claiming that the MacBook Pro would be getting an iPhone-style screen notch. The rumour came from an unknown source on Reddit, which led to much doubt and speculation, but it turns out the source was correct on just about every count.

Had that leak not appeared, Apple would have completely blindsided us with the debut of a notch on the MacBook Pro. It’s something that seemed really odd at first glance, but the more we thought about it, the more sense it made, and Apple confirmed that on stage today.

In short, the notch doesn’t take away screen space, but rather adds to it. It allows the menu bar to move up above the main 16:10 display area, into space that was previously wasted by the bezel.

We’ll have to wait and see how full-screen apps will handle it, but we suspect they’ll just ignore it, since developers still have the same size canvas to play with as they did before, and thanks to the high contrast ratio of the new mini-LED displays, that area will just blend in and look like the bezel on the current MacBooks when it’s not in use.

Colourful HomePods

In what may be the most pedestrian announcement at any Apple event in recent history, the company also took the opportunity to announce that HomePod mini would be coming in three new colours: Blue, Yellow, and Orange.

While this also gave Apple an opportunity to talk about the HomePod mini, it’s likely something that wouldn’t have gotten any stage time were it not for the other music-related announcements. There was nothing else to say about the HomePod mini, other than to recap everything that the speaker can already do.

AirPods on Stage

While the coming of Apple’s third-generation AirPods was not a surprise, the fact that they got stage time this year most definitely was.

Granted, the debut of Spatial Audio gives Apple a bit more to talk about, as it’s been putting a lot of effort into that technology, and this makes it more accessible. Still, it’s fair to say the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max were both considerably more significant products, and both of those were slipped out much more quietly via press release. We’ll chalk this one up to timing, along with the fact that Apple clearly felt like running a general music preamble before it got into the main event.

The other surprise to come out of this was the fact that Apple isn’t fully discontinuing the 2019 second-generation AirPods either.

Instead, the wired charging model is dropping to $129 and will be sold along with the new $179 third-generation AirPods, which not only include wired charging, but also work with MagSafe.

Since we doubt the AirPods will handle faster charging, this likely just means that they magnetically attach to a MagSafe charging disc.

The Death of the Touch Bar

The death of the Touch Bar has been predicted for a while, so it didn’t come as big news by itself, although its replacement with full-sized function keys was a welcome surprise.

What’s interesting about this, however, is whether the Touch Bar is truly dead for good.

In announcing the new design, Apple’s Mac Product Manager, Shruti Haldea, highlighted how the function keys were brought back because they were something that pro users loved. While some of that is just marketing, there’s a possible implication here that the new layout could be exclusive to Apple’s higher-end MacBooks.

Mind you, this may only refer to full-sized function keys, and it’s easy to see Apple retaining the slimmer row on the MacBook Air, even when it introduces the redesigned version of that entry-level model early next year. Apple may even decide to bring the Touch Bar to the MacBook Air, or at least retain it on the base 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro, but we’ll have to wait and see what happens next year on that front.

While the Touch Bar has been pilloried by many serious Mac enthusiasts, it is a useful feature that more casual Mac users enjoy, which seems to line up with Haldea’s comments about pro users.

If it did happen, though, it would be an ironic twist, as the Touch Bar began as a higher-end feature, available only on the 15/16-inch MacBook Pro and premium 13-inch models. It didn’t even come to the base MacBook Pro until mid-2019, and yet today the entry-level M1 MacBook Pro is the only model that still includes it.

Two New M1 Chips

Rumours of a more powerful M1 chip have been circulating since minutes after Apple showed off its original M1 Macs last year. We all knew that something more had to be coming, since Apple had left the higher-end machines in its lineup running older Intel silicon.

While we began to hear about Apple’s plans for a multicore CPU/GPU combo as far back as last December, we weren’t expecting Apple to actually come out with two distinct chips. Some reports had suggested 16-core and 32-core GPU variants, but there was every reason to believe that these would just be different configurations of a new “M1X.”

Instead, Apple decided to go with two distinct new chips: the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Both offer the same standard 10-core CPU, but they differ in GPU and memory configuration. The M1 Pro offers a 16-core CPU and up to 32GB of unified memory, while the M1 Max doubles both of those, topping out with a 32-core GPU and a 64GB capacity. The M1 Max also doubles the memory bandwidth and offers extra video encoding and decoding engines.

Five Different M1 Configurations

Despite Apple breaking the higher-end M1 chips into Pro and Max versions, it turns out there are actually a total of five different configurations that you can put into your MacBook Pro, and this means that the base $1,999 price of the 14-inch MacBook Pro should come with a pretty big asterisk beside it.

Thanks to something called chip binning, there are two lower-end versions of the M1 Pro chip, along with a lower-end M1 Max. With Apple’s M1 chip-making process at the bleeding edge of technology, it’s understandable that there will be some chips that don’t quite make the cut. In this case, instead of throwing them away, Apple simply disables the cores that don’t work, and sells them as lower-end versions.

We saw this last year with the entry-level MacBook Air, which had an M1 with a 7-core GPU instead of the standard eight cores. This was the only distinction in the M1 Mac lineup, but sadly things are considerably more complicated with the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Specifically, here are the configurations that Apple is offering:

1. M1 Pro with 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
2. M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
3. M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
4. M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
5. M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

All five of these are available on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and the $1,999 model naturally starts with an 8-core CPU and 14-core GPU version. You’ll pay an extra $400 to move up to the “real” M1 Pro, or $700 more to go with the full M1 Max.

The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with the standard M1 Pro, but still offers the two variants of the M1 Max, for $200 and $400 more, respectively.

To be fair, it’s still less confusing than the days of Intel CPUs, when most non-technical users were left scratching their heads about the differences between an i3, i5, and i7 and the various clock speeds. In this case, qualifying the chips by the number of CPU and GPU cores seems pretty clear, although we’ll have to wait for the real-world benchmarks before we know what the means in practical terms.