Let’s talk a bit about the Macs with Apple silicon. Announced last week and releasing this week, there’s new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini equipped with Apple’s M1 chip, a derivative from its illustrious line of A series chips that’s been powering iPhones and iPads for a decade. Long story short: Apple is abandoning Intel because the chipmaker is unable to produce CPUs with the power and efficiency that Apple requires. Apple’s own in-house team has done such a fantastic job with the iPhone chips that porting it to the Mac platform is the next logical leap.
And the benchmarks show the M1 is simply amazing. Single and multi-thread scores equalling or better than Intel’s latest 11th generation chips, with only the very top-of-line still holding a slight advantage (I can cherish my Intel-powered 16-inch MacBook Pro for quite a bit longer). Keep in mind the M1 represents only the “entry level” product from Apple, and it does this amazing performance with incredible power efficiency - battery life on the new laptops is well above 10 hours. The M1 MacBook Air doesn’t even have system fan.
And because Apple now practically owns the whole stack, the seamless integration between software and hardware means the M1 Macs can get more performance out of a single unit of speed. The supreme fluidity of using a modern iPhones and iPads has come to the Mac as well, which is just fantastic.
I cannot wait for the truly “Pro” products to come out with Apple silicon, offering even more performance, and more than the 16 gigabytes of RAM and 2 terabytes of SSD that the new M1 Macs maxes out on. The only question is what should I buy: a MacBook Pro to replace my current 16-inch machine, or a new, hopefully redesigned iMac to compliment the mobile product? A confounding and fun conundrum to ponder on. I sold my 2017 iMac to consolidate down to a single laptop, so it would be interesting if I reverse the decision.
Intel and the rest of the PC world should be on high notice.
Hofmeister.