Hardware

2021 might have been the calm before the storm.

Except for the introduction of a few new Apple Silicon Macs, 2021 has been a quiet year for Apple. The new iPhones offered improved cameras and battery life but were otherwise nearly identical to 2020's models. And apart from a slight bump in screen size, the new Apple Watch is barely distinguishable from its predecessors.

As 2021 draws to a close and we look ahead to 2022, it's a safe bet that next year is going to be a lot more interesting. So we have some predictions to share.

JD Howard just wanted to watch cloud security tutorials. Howard, a construction industry worker on sabbatical, spent $4,000 on a NordicTrack X32i treadmill, lured in by its 32-inch HD screen and the opportunity to exercise body and mind. His plan was to spend his time away from work exercising while watching technical videos from learning platforms such as Pluralsight and Udemy. But his treadmill had other ideas.

Google did it. The company finally made a phone that feels like a full-effort flagship device. It took six long, frustrating years, but with the Pixel 6 it finally feels as though Google isn't holding back out of concern for its Android licensees or some other commitment issue. The Pixel 6 has a custom Google SoC, tons of AI software features that really work, and a new and exciting version of Android. These combine into the best Android smartphone out there—the One True Flagship of the Android ecosystem. With a great price, the Pixel 6 is an easy "buy" recommendation.

The newly announced 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have HDMI ports, but they have a limitation that could be frustrating for many users over the long term, according to Apple's specs page for both machines and as noted by Paul Haddad on Twitter.

The seventh beta of macOS Monterey contains what appear to be references to new screen resolutions suitable for the MacBook Pro line, as discovered by MacRumors.

In a list of supported graphics resolutions within macOS, there are two new resolutions: 3,456 x 2,234 and 3,024 x 1,964. Each carries a "Retina" marker, which Apple typically only applies to its own devices' screens.

The new iPad mini—whether you want to call it the 2021 iPad mini, iPad mini 6, or iPad mini (6th generation)—is easily the best one Apple has ever made. That’s true whether you’re comparing this iPad mini to the last one, or if you’re comparing it to the other iPads Apple sells.

Google is building the Pixel 6, and with it, the company is dumping Qualcomm and introducing its first in-house main SoC (with help from Samsung): the "Google Tensor SoC," aka "Whitechapel." Other than some talk about Google's special AI sauce, there's hasn't been much info about the core parts of Tensor like, say, the CPU. A reasonable expectation for a company building its first SoC is that it won't be too ambitious—we would expect Google to play within the guardrails set up by ARM, and after shipping a modest, cookie-cutter SoC, the company would learn from its first design and iterate.

We already know that Windows 11 will officially require a TPM 2.0 module and Secure Boot support for installation when the operating system is released on October 5, but it looks like Riot Games' Vanguard anti-cheat software will be getting in on the fun, too. Users running Vanguard on Windows 11 systems have seen pop-ups notifying them that a TPM 2.0 module and Secure Boot support will both need to be present and enabled before Vanguard-protected games like Valorant will run on a Windows 11 PC.

On September 14 at 10 am PDT (1 pm EDT), Apple will host its first product-launch event in several months. Once again, it will be an online-only event. But as with other recent online events from Apple, we expect it to be as jam-packed with announcements as ever.

When it comes to the neural networks that power today’s artificial intelligence, sometimes the bigger they are, the smarter they are too. Recent leaps in machine understanding of language, for example, have hinged on building some of the most enormous AI models ever and stuffing them with huge gobs of text. A new cluster of computer chips could now help these networks grow to almost unimaginable size—and show whether going ever larger may unlock further AI advances, not only in language understanding, but perhaps also in areas like robotics and computer vision.