Today Apple unveiled the first Macs using its own designed chips, based on the A-series ARM SoC found in iPhones and iPads. It was a major paradigm shift moment, potentially signalling the beginning of the end of the x86 era in desktop computing. So naturally, as soon as Apple announced the upcoming transition to its own silicon in Macs at WWDC earlier this year, today’s eventual unveiling had been my most anticipated tech event of the year. Yet I felt quite disappointed by what was shown.

With the switch to its own, industry-leading chips found in iOS/iPadOS devices, which coincided with the release of a major revamp of macOS (they went from OS X’s 10.x versioning to 11.0 after all), Big Sur, Apple had the rare and unique opportunity to truly re-define the post-PC “PC”. And they squandered it in my opinion. The first Apple silicon Macs announced today felt like low-effort rush-jobs to get something to market, to hit the promised “before the end of the year” timeline. The new Mac Mini is basically the Developer Transition Kit machine from WWDC, with a slight CPU upgrade. The two new laptops, the MacBook Air and 13" MacBook Pro, seem to be just logic board swaps of the previous Intel-based equivalents.

Now, I am perfectly aware of the amount of engineering, both in hardware and software, that must have gone into making these machines, so they are not really “low effort” in any literal sense. And these machines are incredibly fast as well as power efficient, for their class at least. But we already know about the dominating performance of Apple’s ARM silicon, from their A-series chips in mobile devices. The more interesting thing I expected to see today was what we didn’t already know: what bringing the advantage on raw performance to full-fledged computers would mean to desktop computing. Yet apart from the major battery life improvements (20 hours of movie playback on the new MacBook Pro is impressive) and sizeable speed increases (which at 2-4x are nothing to scoff at), the new machines are not much different from the ones they replaced.

Far from being revolutionary, the first Apple silicon Macs felt unimaginative, lazy, and same-old. I’m far from an expert, but here are just a few of the things that I wish we had seen in the new machines:

• Face ID unlock
• 4k webcams, especially in 2020 (or at least 1080p, anything better than the current 720p webcams)
• Integrated 5G modem and eSIM for an always-online experience
• Full suite of sensors matching that of other Apple silicon devices (e.g. GPS, barometer, gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer), and matching software to make use of them, appropriate for desktops
• Always-on Siri, to be able to do things with voice control, even in sleep mode (using the high efficiency cores)
• More transformative on-device machine learning to take advantage of the powerful Neural Engine, such as a completely revamped Spotlight search

To be fair, some of these things (and lots more) are probably planned and coming soon in future Apple silicon Macs. At the same time, a lot of the benefits of the Apple silicon transition have been gradually seeping into Macs over the past few years, T2 (which handles security, I/O, audio/video processing and more on all recent Macs) being the most prominent example. So it is somewhat understandable that the initial launch of the first ARM-based Macs feels underwhelming as it did today. Still, I can’t help but wonder what a true reimagining of the desktop computing experience would look like, with the total vertical integration (from the software to the actual silicon) that Apple has achieved today. Perhaps Apple intended for the launch to be this way, to play it safe, to get the new technology out there first, then over time capitalize on the possibilities unlocked. So as disappointed as I was today, I remain hopeful that there is plenty more for Apple to show in the coming months.