Month: June 2022

Enlarge / MetalFX Upscaling, as visually described by Apple at WWDC 2022. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling.

The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD (FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming "XeSS" system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since M1 and M2 silicon do not include dedicated AI processing cores like Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards.

By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction—even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—As expected, Apple has used the stage at its WWDC 2022 keynote to reveal the features and changes coming to macOS in the next major software update for the platform, macOS 13 Ventura.

Ventura's headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It's being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop—enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column.

The Stage Manager feature in macOS Ventura. (credit: Apple)

Spotlight also gets some handy quality-of-life updates, adding the ability to Quick Look search results directly from the Spotlight window, and the ability to run Shortcuts from within Spotlight. Safari picks up the ability to share groups of tabs with other users, letting all users add and remove tabs. The browser is also adding a FIDO-compliant security technology called PassKeys, which aim to replace passwords with cryptographically generated keys that sync between devices using iCloud Keychain. Sites that support PassKeys can be opened using TouchID or FaceID.

Enlarge / The "new" 13-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Apple)

The new MacBook Air is the most interesting laptop that Apple announced at WWDC today, but the 13-inch entry-level MacBook Pro got a less-noticeable refresh. The new laptop features better performance than the old model thanks to the presence of the M2 chip, but its design is staying exactly the same as the previous model.

That means we're looking at the same basic MacBook Pro design we've had since 2016, with a pair of Thunderbolt ports, a Touch Bar, and a 13-inch screen. There's no MagSafe, and no redesigned keyboard or chassis.

Apple claims that the new M2-powered MacBook Pro will deliver "39 percent faster" boosts to "processing" and "gaming" performance, though it has not yet clarified what its testing parameters are for those claims—or whether those tests leverage a new MacBook Pro maximum of 24GB unified memory.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—The MacBook Air will be soon get a total design overhaul, Apple announced today. Taking the virtual stage at the company's summer developer conference, Apple representatives unveiled the new laptop, which includes the faster and more efficient M2 chip and design cues from both the 24-inch iMac and the recently redesigned 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro computers.

Before announcing the new 13.6-inch MacBook Air, Apple revealed the 5 nm M2 processor with four high-performance cores, four low-power efficiency cores, and a claimed 18% performance boost over the M1. The processor has up to a 10-core GPU, and Apple claimed up to 35% better graphics performance than the M1.

Performance aside, the 2022 MacBook Air looks notably different than its predecessor. It's thinner and lighter at under 0.5 inch (11.3 mm thin) and 2.7 lbs (1.22 kg). And like the 24-inch iMac, it comes in several colors, albeit more boring shades called silver, space gray, starlight, and midnight. The display is also supposed to have thinner bezels. Further, it abandons the wedge-shaped design that has characterized the MacBook Air for years.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Exactly two years after Apple first announced the M1, its direct successor has finally been revealed. Apple executives and product managers presented details about the new chip—predictably dubbed the M2—during its annual developer conference.

The M2 is an improvement in many ways on the M1, but it's not meant to one-up the higher-end M1 Pro, M1 Max, or M1 Ultra seen in the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio. M2 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants have higher CPU and GPU core counts that will still outspeed the M2's performance improvements.

Like its predecessor, the M2 has eight CPU cores—four high-performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores. Apple says it will perform about 18 percent faster than the M1's CPU  It also bumps the GPU cores from eight to 10, providing a 35 percent performance boost, though as with M1 we may see multiple versions of the M2 chip that ship with different numbers of GPU cores.

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CUPERTINO, Calif.—During the keynote presentation kickoff of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple revealed the first details about the next major software update for the Apple Watch: watchOS 9.

Four new watch faces will better utilize the Apple Watch Series 7's more expansive screen. That means more room for rich complications.

Additionally, Apple is bringing new health and fitness features to the Watch as it usually does with these annual updates. The Running activity mode will calculate vertical oscillation, stride length, and ground contact time. All activity modes will be able to show your heart rate zones, as well. If you set an HR zone you'll also receive alerts regarding your effect.