Opera comes to M1 Mac with new tricks up its sleeve

Opera has announced an update for its Mac Browser. The new update brings Opera’s support to M1 Mac. Moreover, it is touted to deliver a 2x speed bump. Now, it also allows you to set your own keyboard shortcuts to quickly access the Flow feature. The feature is said to connect your computer browser with Opera on iOS and Android.

Opera browser now natively supports the newest line of Apple M1 processors. The company says Opera runs 2 times faster compared to the previous version of the browser – thanks to the quicker load times and transitions. The Flow feature’s connection is an end-to-end encrypted chat with all your devices for sending notes, images, links, files. You can also now create shortcuts to Opera’s built-in Crypto Wallet. Plus, you get a Player feature that acts as a gateway to all your favorites on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music.

To set custom keyboard shortcuts:

  1. Click the three-dot icon at the bottom of your sidebar
  2. Click the three-dot icon next to the feature and select Configure shortcuts
  3. Type your custom shortcut next to the feature

When you buy a shiny new Mac, one of your key priorities is speed: you want it to load and run apps as smoothly as it can, and you want to be impressed by how seamless the experience is. While marveling at your crisper than ever display, you also want to browse the web with freshness and speed inspired by your brand spanking new Mac. Apple wants you to be happy, and so does Opera, which is why we’ve made your browsing on Macs with M1 even faster,” wrote the company in its blog post.

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Apple might soon launch a new M1-powered Mac Mini with 10 Gigabit Ethernet

The new Mac Mini powered by the M1 chip is already out, and from the first wave of reviews, it appears that Apple has a winner in its hands with its latest mini PC. The main reason is the exceptionally high performance delivered by the new chip, both in terms of processing power as well as graphics brawns. However, Apple might have another variant of the Mac Mini in the pipeline that will improve upon the existing model’s connectivity suite by adding support for 10 Gigabit ethernet

To recall, the new Mac Mini only supports gigabit connectivity. But as per a report by MacRumors, Apple has listed logic boards that offer 10 Gigabit Ethernet for M1-equipped Mac Mini. However, do keep in mind that the list is aimed at Apple Authorized Service Providers only, and may also turn out to be an old specifications list that never saw the light of the day in the form of a marketable product. 

“For every Mac mini logic board with Gigabit Ethernet in the parts list, obtained by MacRumors, there is a corresponding logic board with 10 Gigabit Ethernet. While the boards are available to order (in limited quantities), it is unclear why at this point,” the report says. Do keep in mind that the regular Intel-powered variant of the Mac Mini is configurable with up to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, but the variant powered by the M1 chip is stuck with the slower 1 Gigabit Ethernet port. 

As mentioned above, it is hard to establish the veracity of the report. However, it is quite likely that Apple has a new model of the M1-powered Mac Mini that is targeted at enterprise customers and professionals who would pay top dollars for a machine that offers a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port. Ad if that turns out to be true, Apple might launch the new Mac Mini variant at a later date.

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Google offers an optimized version of Chrome for Macs with Apple’s M1 chip

Apple’s new Macs with the in-house M1 silicon has left folks impressed with their blazing fast performance. After all, when a fanless MacBook Air easily outperforms an iMac with a top-of-the-line Intel processor that costs over thrice as much, you better believe the hype. However, as pointed by many in the first wave of reviews, Chrome continues to hog system resources even on the new Macs. Well, Google has a solution – an optimized version of Chrome tailored for Macs with the M1 chip at their heart.

As per a tweet by Google Chrome designer and developer Elvin, the company released the optimized version yesterday itself. When users head to the Chrome browser download page, they were offered an option to choose between two versions depending on their machine – Mac with Intel chip or Mac with Apple chip. However, the rollout was halted when some users started experiencing random crashes after downloading this M1 chip-optimized version of Chrome. 

On the official support forum, Google suggested some workarounds such as tweaking the Bluetooth settings for the app from the System Preferences section. However, it was mentioned that the issue will only affect Mac users who installed that optimized version on day 1, suggesting that an updated version with a fix will be rolled out soon. 

Separately, Google Chrome product manager Mark Chang tweeted that the team was aware of the issue and has stopped the rollout. However, the release of Chrome browser’s new build optimized for Macs with M1 chip is expected to resume later today. To recall, the new release being talked about here is v87.0 of Chrome that started rolling out yesterday on all platforms. 

The new version promises 5x lower CPU usage, 1.25 hours of additional battery life, and up to 25% faster opening time. It also brings a host of new features such as a new tab search tool that will allow users to quickly find a tab from a universal list of tabs, and action buttons in the URL bar that will take users directly to the requisite settings page based on their search query. 

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Apple’s new Mac Mini with M1 chip leaves Intel far behind in benchmarks

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When Apple introduced its in-house M1 chip and the new Mac trio powered by it earlier this month, the company touted a performance boost that sounded almost too good to be true. After all, this was a first-gen PC chip, and optimizing it to extract the maximum performance out of it was expected to be a challenging task. But the reviews are in, and so are the benchmarking results – both of which are overwhelmingly positive. Talking about the new Mac Mini though, the M1-powered machine leaves Intel’s best far behind. 

As you can see in the image below, the single-core Geekbench tally of the new Mac Mini stands at an impressive 1689, which is even higher than Intel’s top-of-the-line 10th gen Core i9 processor fitted inside the 27-inch iMac. For comparison, the Intel chip was a distant second with a multi-core Geekbench 5.0 score of 1251. What this essentially means is Apple has rewritten the rules of price-to-performance ratio by offering a machine that starts at just $699, but performs way better than Intel-powered hardware that costs thrice as much or even higher.

Mac Mini with M1 chip
Geekbench V5.0 tally of Mac Mini with M1 chip

Another impressive feat is that not only the Mac Mini, but the new M1 chip-powered MacBook Air also scored way better with a single-core tally of 1678 compared to the 1251 ceiling touched by the Core i9-powered iMac. It is worth keeping in mind that the new MacBook Air has a fanless design, but still offers a fire-breathing octa-core chip that leaves Intel’s best silicon far behind. Earlier results have also shown that the new MacBook Air is more powerful than Apple’s latest 16-inch MacBook Pro model, while the onboard GPU beats NVIDIA and AMD’s discrete graphics too.

It goes without saying that a higher single-core benchmark score indicates that the chip can sustain demanding workloads with ease. Even an 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core i7 laptop like the Dell XPS 13, when tested by the folks over at Tom’s Hardware, could only achieve a peak single-core tally of 1521. While the numbers are in favor of Apple’s new M1 Mac lineup – which includes the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini – their performance will receive even further boost as developers optimize their apps to run natively instead of Apple’s Rosetta 2 translation layer. 

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New 13-inch MacBook Pro with new Apple Silicon is jaw dropping

Apple’s latest “One more thing” event has finally introduced new Apple Silicon powered devices. The new lineup includes a new MacBook Air, a new Mac mini, and an upgrade to one of Apple’s bestselling laptops, the 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Apple’s new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the new Apple M1 chip comes with an amazing boost in speed and power. Compared to the previous model, we get 3X faster performance, 5X faster graphics. Apple’s most advanced Neural Engine also allows 11X faster machine learning performance, and it also includes a new active cooling system to sustain the laptop’s blazing-fast performance.

TO make things even better, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro will deliver up to 20 hours on battery life, which is the longest in any Mac ever, if you only stick to watching videos. However, the hour count drops to 17 hours of wireless web browsing, which is also something to celebrate.

Other upgrades include studio-quality mics with improved signal to noise ratio, sharper video with less grain, and it will all look even better on its Retina Display, which makes images take an incredible level of detail and realism, which will also deliver 500 nits of brilliance, 25 percent more colors than sRGB and True Tone technology which will automatically adjust to your environment to give users better viewing experiences.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip also features Big Sur’s Secure Enclave, which will get users best-in-class security features like Activation Lock to protect your Mac if it’s ever lost or stolen. The new laptop will include two Thunderbolt 3 ports with USB 4 support. The best part is that it will still fit in the same portable 3-pound design.

If you’re interested in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro, you can get one starting at $1,299 and just $1,199 for education. It is now available for purchase, and they will all be available next week, with macOS BigSur arriving in only two days.

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