Opinion
MATT BOLTON…
SAYS THAT THE M1 CEMENTS THAT APPLE’S DEFINITION OF ‘PRO’ FOR THE FUTURE IS MORE ABOUT FEATURES THAN POWER
For the last few years, the word ‘pro’ has sat rather uneasily as a label across a range of Apple’s products. In times past, the simplest explanation of what ‘pro’ meant for Apple’s laptops or desktops was: more power. Faster processors or more cores, and then usually some extra expandability. But more recently, it’s been fuzzier, and 2020’s releases have only made it more so. The iPhone 12 Pro is no more powerful than the iPhone 12, the iPad Pro is on roughly the same level as the iPad Air, and both the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air now share one extremely powerful chip. Making such incredible processor advancements means that Apple has effectively commodified ‘pro’ performance – it’s just a normal thing now to be able to edit 100-megapixel, multi-layer images on a MacBook Air. So what does it really mean to create a ‘pro’ machine?