iPhone Air
apple.com900 points by excerionsforte 4 days ago
900 points by excerionsforte 4 days ago
It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated.
If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.
That's the most exciting thing from this Apple's event in my opinion.
PS. I also like the idea of the ultra thin iPhone Air, the 2x better noise cancellation and live translation of Airpods 3, high blood pressure detection of the new Watch, and the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro. Overall, this is as good as it gets for incremental updates in Apple's ecosystem in a while.
> bold sexy orange color
Luckily they added the blood pressure check for when you get too excited about the color orange.
It is almost strange, since iPhones were only available in ugly drab colors for several generations. And the Pro models in particular were previously never available in a decent color.
99% of people uses a case for the phone so the color doesn’t change anything
If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?
Considering the price and re-sale value of iphones I would add a case even if they ruggedized it.
My current (Android) phone is from 2020 and I have bought three cases for it because the previous ones got wear and tear. The phone inside still looks brand new.
But yeah, the trend of ultra-thin phones is silly.
That open a new business for them to sell $60 cases that are worth $2 of materials and have a great panel to match people’s taste which is even more appealing to buy
I bought a blue iPhone 16 last year at this time; I've never used a case. More people are going case-less these days.
Ask workers of cell phone stores and you’ll find that figure is way off. Not everyone wants a case. Having a case significantly changes the feeling of the device in hand.
As someone who does not use a case, I almost never see anyone else without one. To the point that when I do, I usually mistake their phone for mine.
The 15s and 16s both had titanium bodies which (as I recall at least) don't take on colour as well when they're anodized, so that could be the cause of drab colour ways.
edit: It was only the Pros and up which had titanium bodies. The 17s are all aluminum.
Anodizing titanium creates an oxide layer, the thickness of which varies with the voltage used. The thickness of that oxide layer determines which wavelengths of light it refracts [0]. In practical terms, your choices for color are pretty limited[1].
I'm not a chemist, but I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors. Personally, I like the plain gray.
[0] https://wisensemachining.com/titanium-anodizing-guide/
[1] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/cups/products/ti-single...
Hey, cool! This is very interesting and explains a lot. Thanks for connecting more dots for me
> I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors
I wondered the same thing, but never hit that threshold of urgency to actually look into it!
But even the non-Pro phones had mostly ugly colors in the last couple years. Maybe to match the ugliness of the Pro models?
A realization that I came to today is the fact that I’m still on my 12 because it’s (one of the?) last PRODUCT(RED) one.
The Sage Air has my eye. Would match my AirPods Max. But that orange pro is also calling.
I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors. I loved the blue of my iPhone 12 Pro, but I can't even get that anymore... I would have upgraded a few generatiosn back if they had kept consistent colors.
The changed colors are the signal that you have the new one.
They're the signal I wont be buying it if it doesn't match the colors I've liked.
You don't have to buy a phone every generation and it's not really intended that you do.
> I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors
The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).
Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.
And i have no idea what color my phone was when i got it. It has been inside an otterbox case since the hour i first had it. For me, the color of a cellphone is about as relevent as the color of a motherboard. It will look cool for, at most, a few minutes before it is forever locked inside a case.
A19 supports MTE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186265
Which is a very powerful feature for anyone who likes security or finding bugs in their code. Or other people's code. Even if you didn't really want to find them.
MIE
MIE is a combination of enhanced MTE (EMTE) and some highly-overdue software allocator improvements.
It certainly took them a while to introduce MTE! Pixel 8 came out in 2023. I wonder how it compares against hardened_malloc with 48-bit address space and 33-bit ASLR in Graphene. Apple's security team has reported that MIE could break all "known" exploit chains, but so does hardened_malloc. Hard to tell right now which one is best (most def MIE) but everything else included in Graphene is probably making the point moot anyway.
Yes, but it is not MTE, they are technically different. That's what I was attempting to point out but thought it may have been a typo
If you compare the specs of the 10 and 11 series watches you will see they both claim high blood pressure detection.
https://www.apple.com/watch/compare/?modelList=watch-series-...
In the past few weeks the oxymeter feature was enabled by a firmware update on series 10. Measurements are done on the watch, results are only reported on a phone.
Good to know! The fine print:
As of September 9, 2025, hypertension notifications are currently under FDA review and expected to be cleared this month, with availability on Apple Watch Series 9 and later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. The feature is not intended for use by people under 22 years old, those who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension, or pregnant persons.
> [hypertension notifications] is not intended for use by people [...] who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension
Sounds a bit ironic but I guess it's for legal reasons.
legal, and also: if you already have been diagnosed, you should already be under medical professional supervision (meds, checkups,…) anyway.
my guess is this is more like the heart irregularities feature: it’s for the first diagnosis. (a relative of mine actually got diagnosed that way)
I believe this is for the fringe cases where you have been diagnosed with hypertension, but your apple Watch does not tell you that you have hypertension risk, then you may decide to not take your drugs, since your watch told you all clear. This could trigger lawsuits if complications set in when you decide not to take your drugs because of "lack of alarm"
Then you get a new fringe case: you are not yet diagnosed with hypertension, but you are aware that your apple watch has that functionality so you decide you don't need to be diagnosed.
Going to be interesting comparing the series 10 blood pressure sensing against my Hilo (formerly Aktiia) band on the other wrist. Although without calibration against a cuff, I'm not super convinced the Apple Watch will give reliable information.
> the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro
The color line up reminds me of the au MEDIA SKIN phones (Japanese carrier) circa 2007. Maybe it's because I had one back in the day, but I can't help but think they took some influence.
> MEDIA SKIN phones
Wow, thanks for sharing the name, these are really good! I don't know why I was surprised to realize that great designers have made fantastic products even in the past...
Some sites with images, for anyone curious: 1. https://www.dezeen.com/2007/01/17/tokujin-yoshioka-launches-... 2. https://spoon-tamago.com/best-of-2007-part-iv/
If you like these, check out the INFOBAR phones from a few years prior. https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... People like the multi-colored one, but I've always been partial to the green. I believe there's been a few newer homages to these over the years.
I've always been a bit confused about when to run models on the GPU vs the neural engine. The best I can tell, GPU is simpler to use as a developer especially when shipping a cross platform app. But an optimized neural engine model can run lower power.
With the addition of NPUs to the GPU, this story gets even more confusing...
In reality you don’t much of a choice. Most of the APIs Apple exposes for running neural nets don’t let you pick. Instead some Apple magic in one of their frameworks decides where it’s going to host your network. At least from what I’ve read, these frameworks will usually distribute your networks over all available matmul compute, starting on the neural net (assuming your specific network is compatible) and spilling onto the GPU as needed.
But there isn’t a trivial way to specifically target the neural engine.
You're right there is no way to specifically target the neural engine. You have to use it via CoreML which abstracts away the execution.
If you use Metal / GPU compute shaders it's going to run exclusively on GPU. Some inference libraries like TensorFlow/LiteRT with backend = .gpu use this.
Exactly. And most folks are using a framework like llama.cpp which does control where it’s run.
Hoping this budget macbook rumour based on A19/A19 Pro is real.
Isn’t the MacBook Air already pretty cheap at $999?
$998, $997, etc.
A couple more examples would have been nice; it took a while to understand your point.
Competing at high end budget PC laptop will increase market share, but more importantly it’d be an easy recommendation to make when people see a lower priced PC laptop. Rumours were $699.
Where did you see the matmul acceleration support? I couldn't find this detail online.
Apple calls it "Neural Accelerators". It's all over their A19 marketing.
What a ridiculous way to market "linear algebra transistor array".
Hey man, it helps you think different. You just never knew your neurons needed accelerating.
I accelerate them every morning with an Americano.
I have to ask out of curiosity, why is your first comment made with one account, and the reply with a similarly-named alt?
To confuse all those neural accelerators scraping this conversation.
That seems incredibly prescient for accounts created before even GPT-1. Obviously broad data scraping existed before then, but even amongst this crowd I find it hard to believe that’s the real motivator.
