Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The first wave of new Apple products this year will be a little earlier than in previous years. The brand new Mac mini, MacBook Pro and HomePod will set out ahead of schedule and launch on the official website before the Spring Festival.

Among these three new products, 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are updated routinely, with stronger M2 Pro and M2 Max chips upgraded throughout the department; HomePod is the return of an old friend who has not seen for a long time, so that there is no longer only one mini model on sale in this product line to satisfy users who pursue higher sound quality.

Mac mini seems like a routine update, but some of Apple's tweaks this time have activated the entire desktop Mac product line, which is simply: lower the threshold and raise the upper limit. Lower the entry price of the M2 model to 4499 yuan, the education discount is as low as 3699 yuan, and the price-to-performance ratio of netizens is high; while the upward introduction of M2 Pro model pulls the Mac mini performance to the professional dimension and makes up for the only gap in the Mac desktop product line.

So why did the Mac product line, which is soaring all the way to professional productivity, suddenly change the direction of the wind and put on the price-to-performance label? With these changes and problems in the Mac mini product line, we interviewed Colleen Novelli and Doug Brooks of the Apple Mac product marketing team to try to understand the purpose of Apple's layout of the desktop product line.

Mac mini is close to the people since the birth of Mac mini in 2005, it is the Mac desktop computer that users can buy with the least money, and the perfect combination of performance and superior price is also the significance of the birth of this product, so it has been loved by users.

With the introduction of Apple chip to Mac mini, this advantage continues to be expanded. Today, the performance and energy efficiency of the chip have been greatly improved, and it is entirely designed and manufactured by Apple. Colleen Novelli also said in an interview: the use of self-developed Apple chip is the direct reason why Mac mini can not only get a performance upgrade, but also continue to explore the price.

When it comes to Apple, you can't do without ecology. Mac mini's low-price strategy is like a shortcut left by Apple for users who want to try macOS. Colleen Novelli talked about many users who originally used Apple's other product lines and would like to try Mac, so Mac mini is a particularly good starting point for these users.

Even if the most entry-level model is equipped with 8GB unified memory, with the ability of the M2 chip, Mac mini can run multiple productivity applications at the same time, and there is extra computing power to do other things, such as browsing the web while processing photos and editing videos while communicating with friends.

To raise entry-level products to this level of performance, users can gain a complete and smooth Mac experience without much investment, allowing users to gain positive feedback when they enter the Mac ecosystem for the first time, rather than having many restrictions just because I buy entry-level products. Such an experience will make users willing to invest more in the entire Apple ecosystem.

In addition to showing a people-friendly posture to first-time Mac users, Apple has also shown a people-friendly posture for professional users and productivity users after introducing the M2 Pro chip into Mac mini this year. Doug Brooks said: a lot of Pro professional users also like Mac mini, they will use Mac mini to do separate rendering, development work, or let it do data center server farm, there are also a lot of professional photographers, in professional scenes, use Mac mini.

When the Mac mini of M2 Pro chip appears, professional users can judge whether to choose a stronger Mac mini or a higher layer of Mac Studio by the performance they need. In today's Apple chip system, it is also very easy for users to judge performance. Apple has given professional chips with three levels of Pro, Max and Utlra, with CPU cores ranging from 10 cores to 20 cores and GPU cores from 16 cores to 64 cores, so that you can clearly choose more appropriate products according to your own performance, and you don't have to pay for extra performance.

Speaking of Mac mini's use of M2 Pro, Doug Brooks also added: the two Mac mini are identical in appearance, but in order to adapt to the more abundant performance of M2 Pro, the internal design is different from M2 version, including a stronger heat dissipation design and more Thunder interfaces, so professional users can rest assured in terms of performance release.

Mac mini is a free box that only provides full performance and extension interfaces. It is entirely up to you to decide how to use a Mac mini. If you have your own monitor, keyboard and mouse, you can use them directly after connecting them, even if they are the rest of your old computer; or you have your own favorite monitor, keyboard, mouse, no matter e-sports 's, cute, you can connect them to meet your DIY needs, and at the same time, you don't have to pay for Apple's complete sets of equipment to further reduce the entry cost.

If you want to pursue a complete Mac experience, the official Studio Display, keyboard, mouse and other official accessories, regardless of screen, sound effects, and touch ID complement, make the Mac mini experience the same as other Apple products, of course, the price is that this display may be more expensive than the Mac mini itself.

On this issue, Doug Brooks said: first of all, Mac mini is fully compatible with other monitors, and secondly, for Studio Display, there are some users who love and need this device very much, that is, the former 27-inch iMac users. These users are more engaged in graphics, graphics, vision and other work, need an excellent display to display content, now they switch from the old Intel platform to Apple chip platform, the best option is a combination of Mac mini+Studio Display.

For this part of users, designers and editors no longer have to eliminate a top 27-inch 5K screen because of insufficient computer performance, and now he can always use this Studio Display to match different performance products, whether it's Mac mini, Mac Studio or MacBook series.

In this way, users who have high requirements for the display will no longer be limited by the display effect when choosing performance, but can make freer and more suitable choices according to the performance.

Mac's popular Mac mini friendly and free posture will make Mac more popular. Mac computers, which used to serve only professional studios, Pro productivity and creators, are now likely to become the next computer in your home, or the first computer for children or students.

With the advent of the mobile Internet era, the computer is no longer the only channel for the public to contact the Internet. On the contrary, compared with mobile phones, tablets and game consoles, it is inconvenient in terms of information browsing, entertainment, audio and video, and the positioning of computers in the home has gradually shifted from multimedia entertainment centers to simple workstations.

Then macOS's more graphical interface, boot with many applications, file management logic similar to mobile devices, compatibility and support of Apple chip platform for mobile phone App, etc., as well as the seamless interconnection of iPhone, iPad and Mac in the entire Apple ecosystem. Both make Mac computers more user-friendly to today's users, or computer beginners, and now may be the best time for Mac to become popular.

So when the new Mac mini debuted, Apple offered a rare strategy of increasing and reducing prices, in which the preferential price of education was so low that it was difficult to find rival prices in the entire desktop mainframe market. What's more, in the post-mobile Internet era, let Mac replace PC, enter thousands of households, become the first computer of the next generation, and gradually rely on the entire Apple ecology.

Overall, Apple has always been a company laid out in the future, such as Apple chips, Swift language, iCould services, and today's Mac mini.

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