An international group of more than 100 television and movie production professionals has petitioned Apple CEO Tim Cook with an open letter requesting improvements to make the company’s Final Cut Pro video editing software more commercially viable. Although generally capable of professional execution and apparently fun to use — qualities that have made it popular among individual creators, amateur and pro alike — Final Cut lacks collaborative features and general awareness among industry decision-makers, signatories say. Posted Tuesday on the eve of the NAB Show using GoPetition, Apple has not yet responded to the communique. Continue reading Film and TV Professionals Request an Improved Final Cut Pro

Apple says its new M1 Ultra chip will give Nvidia’s RTX 3090 — currently the fastest processor on the market — a run for its money. Introduced last week as the power inside the new Mac Studio desktop, the M1 Ultra has a unique architecture, dubbed UltraFusion, which connects two M1 Max chips for an SoC with 114 billion transistors, the most ever in a personal computer chip, according to the company. “M1 Ultra is another game-changer for Apple silicon that once again will shock the PC industry,” said Apple senior vice president of hardware technologies Johny Srouji. Continue reading Apple’s M1 Ultra Is Power and Performance ‘Game Changer’

Wearing a blue sweater and yellow Apple Watch in solidarity with Ukraine, Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled the budget 5G iPhone SE during a “Peek Performance” virtual event streamed live Tuesday morning. In addition, Apple revealed an M1-powered iPad Air, the sizzling Mac Studio for professionals and a 27-inch studio monitor to go with it. The event concluded with a teaser for the new Mac Pro. Cook also announced “Friday Night Baseball” is coming to Apple TV+ (“a weekly doubleheader with live pre- and post-game shows”) and said the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro will come in green and alpine green, respectively. The new gear hits the market March 18. Continue reading Apple Rolls Out 5G iPhone SE, iPad Air, Mac Studio Desktop

Apple unveiled the long-awaited upgrade to its MacBook Pro, which comes in 14- and 16-inch display configurations with mini-LED screens (what the company calls Liquid Retina XDR). The new laptops are powered by Apple’s homegrown M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, which the company calls “the first pro chips designed for the Mac.” Improvements such as stronger battery life, ports galore and eradication of the dreaded Touch Bar have been largely well-received by Mac bloggers. Apple says the 32 GPU cores on the M1 Max provide power that rivals the Nvidia RTX 3080 high-end gaming class laptop chip. The 14-inch model starts at $1,999 and the 16-inch at $2,499. Continue reading Apple Turbo-Charges MacBook Pro with M1 Pro, Max Chips