On March 4th of this year, Apple unveiled the new 2024 MacBook Air equipped with the M3 chip, drawing considerable attention from netizens. pulsestacks recently provided a review of the 15-inch Midnight Black MacBook Air 2024, but there are likely more questions and information that everyone wants to know about the new product.
Recently, pulsestacks had the opportunity to conduct an exclusive interview with two Apple executives: Kate Bergeron, Vice President of Hardware Engineering, and Evan Buyze, from the Mac Product Marketing Team. They discussed the new MacBook Air and the overall development plan for Mac products, addressing the concerns of the audience.
About MacBook Air: Evolution of Gaming Experience, 8GB RAM Suits Specific User Scenarios
At the beginning of the interview, pulsestacks raised questions regarding the highly discussed topics among netizens, namely the memory and storage configurations. It's known that the base configuration of the MacBook Air still starts at 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. However, from the perspectives of cost-effectiveness and long-term usage experience, it may not seem very friendly. Evan Buyze from the Mac product marketing team mentioned that 8GB of RAM actually suits many tasks quite well. Tasks such as web browsing, streaming media, light photo and video editing, including casual gaming and productivity-related apps, are all scenarios where 8GB of RAM is a suitable choice.
Furthermore, pulsestacks discussed a new feature of the new MacBook Air, which allows for connecting two external displays while the lid is closed. Evan Buyze mentioned that this design is particularly suitable for productivity or business applications. For instance, business users can benefit from having more external screens for multitasking or expanding data tables.
Following up, pulsestacks inquired about whether there would be any performance difference when using external displays with the lid closed compared to when it's open. This is because the cooling conditions of the MacBook Air might change when the lid is closed. Evan Buyze mentioned that the M-series chips are highly efficient in terms of power consumption, allowing for a fanless design. Users can expect good performance whether multitasking, switching between productivity apps, or in other usage scenarios.
Additionally, pulsestacks asked about the gaming experience on the MacBook Air. Recently, the popular game "Honkai Impact 3rd" was officially released on the Mac platform. pulsestacks had previously tested this game on the MacBook Air and found that even at the highest graphics settings, the gaming experience was smooth and the laptop's temperature remained within acceptable limits. pulsestacks expressed curiosity about how Apple achieves such smooth and low-power gaming performance.
Evan Buyze first acknowledged that gaming is indeed a focal point for Apple at the moment, leading to significant efforts to enhance the gaming experience on the Mac platform, especially with the introduction of Apple's M-series chips to the Mac lineup, which allows Apple to better realize their vision for gaming experiences.
Speaking of gaming experiences on the Mac platform, one cannot ignore the ecosystem. Since the inception of the M1 chip, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of games available on the Mac platform, with high-quality titles like "Resident Evil 4" and "Death Stranding" making their debut on Mac. However, many of these games are ports from other platforms. pulsestacks also inquired whether Apple would consider leading the charge in releasing some exclusive games specifically developed for the M-series chips to fully leverage their capabilities.
In response to this question, Evan Buyze mentioned that Apple had announced the Game Porting Toolkit at last year's WWDC for game developers, allowing them to better develop games on Apple's platforms. Additionally, Apple is pleased to see games from China such as "Honkai Impact 3" and "Genshin Impact" already available on Mac.
Evan Buyze teased that Apple will have more releases related to gaming in the future, so everyone should stay tuned and keep an eye out for updates.
Regarding AI: The groundwork has long been underway, and there will be more progress to share this year.
In addition to the topics related to MacBook Air mentioned above, pulsestacks also had in-depth discussions with two Apple executives about AI-related topics. Regarding how Apple plans to incorporate AI into Mac products, we know that since last year, generative AI has gained popularity worldwide. This year, the entire PC industry is striving to create PC products with AI acceleration experiences. Many products in the Windows camp can already run some large AI models with decent results on mid-range hardware. Based on this, pulsestacks specifically asked Apple about their plans for applying AI on Mac.
Firstly, Evan Buyze expressed excitement and anticipation for the development and application of AI. He also referenced information mentioned by Tim Cook in a recent earnings call, revealing that Apple will disclose more about AI later this year.
In terms of AI technology, we know that when running generative AI on the terminal side, there is a high demand for memory. Apple's M-series chips have a significant advantage in this aspect due to their unified memory architecture design. This seemingly natural advantage of M chips when facing generative AI suggests that Apple may have been preparing the M-series chips for AI computing architecture from the beginning.
Kate Bergeron, Apple's Vice President of Hardware Engineering, affirmed this speculation:
It's worth noting that Apple's first-generation Neural Engine was introduced as part of the A11 chip in 2017. It had a peak throughput of 0.6 teraflops (TFlops) under the half-precision floating-point data format (float16 or FP16), efficiently supporting ML machine learning features on devices such as Face ID and Memoji. By 2021, the fifth-generation 16-core Neural Engine's processing power had increased by 26 times to 15.8 TFlops, and the availability of the Neural Engine had expanded from just the iPhone in 2017 to the iPad starting from the A12 chip and the Mac starting from the M1 chip.
Kate Bergeron further explained: The CPU, GPU, unified memory, and Neural Engine of the M-series chips have created a platform that is perfectly suited for AI PCs. With its support, Mac will also become a platform very suitable for handling AI tasks, laying a solid foundation for the future direction of AI at Apple.
Evan Buyze also made additional comments on this topic, stating that Apple has very tight hardware-software synergy, as is evident in the macOS system. Many AI features have already been implemented, such as Siri dictation, Live Text, object extraction in video or photo editing, and background blur in video conference portrait mode. Users may not always realize that these features are powered by AI, but they represent intuitive use of AI technology.
It can be seen that Apple's investment in AI at both the chip level and the Mac product level began quite early, and there are already many applications in use. The design of unified memory architecture, the presence of Neural Engine, etc., all contribute to continuously improving the Mac user experience.
Continuing on the topic of the Neural Engine, pulsestacks further inquired about Apple's plans for the NPU in AI applications and how it will cooperate with the CPU and GPU.
In response, Kate Bergeron, as Apple's Vice President of Hardware Engineering, provided further clarification. She stated that Apple views it as a kind of subsidiary operation, a relatively specialized computing group focusing mainly on optimizing the aforementioned functions, such as performing image or video optimization operations in Adobe suites, to deliver a better user experience.
Meanwhile, Evan Buyze added that many developers are already leveraging this functionality, with Apple providing Core ML APIs. This enables third-party developers as well as native Apple applications to effectively utilize this capability. He cited the example of Final Cut Pro's intelligent transformation feature, where converting a horizontal video to vertical can now be quickly achieved using NPU capabilities. In the past, users might have had to manually adjust the frames.
Overall, after interviews and discussions with Kate Bergeron, Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Apple, and Evan Buyze from the Mac product marketing team, pulsestacks has gained a deeper understanding of the new MacBook Air product and Apple's plans for Mac product development.
Although this iteration of the MacBook Air with the M3 chip is just a routine upgrade for the Air lineup, insights from pulsestacks' previous evaluations and the conversations in this interview reveal that Apple is indeed striving to enhance the MacBook Air experience with each upgrade. Whether it's the gains brought by the M3 chip itself, the addition of external dual-display capabilities, efforts in game ray tracing and expanding the gaming ecosystem, Apple is making the MacBook Air more versatile and user-friendly.
It's worth noting that the MacBook Air is currently considered the ceiling of fanless design products in the PC industry. It exceeds expectations for users who frequently need to work on the go, commute, and engage in light to moderate internet browsing, entertainment, and task handling. The MacBook Air itself is also continuously evolving.
Moreover, in this conversation, we can see Apple's proactive layout of AI experiences for Mac products. Many features and characteristics, which may be overlooked by us, are actually supported by AI computation and related technologies. Whether it's the A-series chips or the Apple M-series chips, neural network engines have been rapidly evolving over the past few years. Coupled with forward-thinking chip designs like unified memory architecture, this lays the groundwork for the development of generative AI.
During the interview, Apple mentioned that they will share more about AI progress later this year. Recently, Apple announced the WWDC 2024 Global Developers Conference to be held from June 10th to 14th. It is believed that at this year's WWDC conference, they will bring more AI technologies and applications to the Mac platform. Let's look forward to it.
