How To Watch Apple's One More Thing Livestream Event And What To Expect
Following a couple of launch events over the past two months, Apple still has one more thing to share before calling it a wrap for 2020. Whatever that might be, it will go down today during Apple's appropriately titled "One More Thing" event. And golly gee, whatever could that one additional thing be? We are completely and utterly stumped! (Quick, someone cue Borat's "Not!" sound byte)
Let us go ahead and work things out by process of elimination, shall we? Over the past couple of months, Apple introduced the iPhone 12 family, including an iPhone 12 mini, along with an all-new iPad Air powered by an A14 Bionic processor. It also unveiled a HomePod mini speaker, the Apple Watch Series 6, its Apple One subscription service, and rolled out iOS 14.
What's left? New Mac systems based on Apple Silicon, of course. This will undoubtedly be the focus of the One More Thing event, which Apple will livestream beginning at 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST) today. You can watch it right here...
We plan to have post-event coverage of whatever gets announced, so whether you watch the livestream here or head over to Apple's YouTube channel, or even skip it altogether, be sure to check back in with us at HotHardware for a summary and some analysis of what went down.
This is a bit of a big moment for Apple, more so than its usual product announcements. For about the past 15 years, Apple has been using Intel's x86 CPUs inside its desktops and laptops, after making the switch from IBM PowerPC hardware. Now it is embarking on a two-year transition to custom "Apple Silicon" based on Arm.
Apple announced the transition plan in June, saying at the time that it will "establish a common architecture across all Apple products, making it far easier for developers to write and optimize their apps for the entire ecosystem."
Using its own silicon inside its iPhone and iPad products has worked out well, but questions loom over the decision to make this kind of shift in its laptops and even its professional desktops (Mac Pro). From Apple's vantage point, its upcoming family of SoCs "will give the Mac industry-leading performance per watt and higher performance GPUs—enabling app developers to write even more powerful pro apps and high-end games."
Needless to say, Apple is confident in its decision. And rumor has it today's event will see the unveiling of an entry-level 12-inch MacBook or a revised 13-inch MacBook Pro powered by a variant of Apple's A14X Bionic chip. This is said to be an 8-core processor, followed by a desktop variant next year—A14T Bionic—with possibly 12 cores, including 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores.
Adding another layer of intrigue here is NVIDIA's deal to acquire Arm for $40 billion. Apple and NVIDIA are not exactly best buddies, and it's not clear of Apple had any idea this was a possibility before it decided to show Intel the door.
In any event, for better or worse, the journey officially begins today.
