Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new ARM macs outpaced by older models”.
Had Apple not knocked M1 out of the park, this was a real possibility. Is it surprising that a well executed architecture change is now selling well? Not really.
But the more interesting point is that the rest of the market agrees with us early adopters and tech nerds.
This would be a very different headline if devs were struggling to port their software, or if Rosetta 2 didn’t live up to its promise.
What you say is something that could affect the decision making process for highly technical people, but even then... we have no firm commitments from Apple on which platforms will get the longest support, so it's a gut-feeling decision, which isn't very technical.
As you hint, the M1 could be treated as a pathfinder platform and deprecated much sooner than subsequent platforms, kind of like the original iPad.
The M1 is not ARMv9 and lacks SVE2... ARMv9 is coming soon, and that may become the long-term supported standard for Apple's Mac-on-ARM platform.
At the very least I’d put money on the M1 not being deprecated before all Intel-powered Macs (present and future) are deprecated.
People held on to their 2015 15" MBPs for as long as they could because they didn't like the upgrade paths. The 16" was well received and helped fix that. The M1 laptops were incredibly well received and people are excitedly jumping on them instead of feeling forced.
My 2015 MBP is still going strong and Apple support were even pretty great at helping when I did have one issue, even though they classify it as Vintage. But you're totally right, I'm really impressed by the M1 and am just holding out for the M1X to upgrade.
I use BootCamp (daily lately, since we're in lockdown and it's snowing) for gaming on Windows with an eGPU. Neither of which are supported on the M1.
I'm considering selling my eGPU and just building a gaming PC (the M3 will likely be out by the time I pull trig though :/), but it was nice to have 1 machine do it all (work + play), especially since I didn't need the eGPU to play some couch co-op games (Cuphead, Castle Crashers, very cottage-friendly!)
How was your experience? I bet it was nice just plugging in and getting all that extra power.
Imagine that the M1 wasn't actually faster than just about everything out there. But also imagine that the new design decisions, the improved memory allocation methods, the significantly better power usage, and the materially lower price meant that it was faster, took less memory and less power for lots of things, or even for most things.
Would it be compelling for people who already have Intel to move? No. But would it be preferable to choosing Intel for a new machine? Certainly, at least for low-end models and applications.
And look at what Apple has done - the M1 is in the mini, the Air, the smaller (usually lower end) MacBook Pro, and now the 24" iMac (which is the lower end iMac). So, even though the M1 kicks Intel's ass, Apple is still playing it safe.
There'd be plenty of reason to choose ARM over Intel even if performance wasn't clearly better :)
It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends.
It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.
I've never squeezed more than 4 or 5 hours out of my two year old Macbook Pro. A 20 hour battery life in addition to the speed gains make upgrading a tempting prospect.
Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps.
I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are).
If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem.
[EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.
It's ready to work before I finish opening up the screen and, they forgot to tell the battery that it needs to deplete after some time.
It doesn't matter for ordinary people to know all the cool tech and architectural stuff running below that keyboard, because at the end of the day, your ordinary applications are running, using way less power and it responds so fast that you can't even think.
This matters way more for end users than for us, developers. Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast, and the ordinary users have unmoored expectations (and it's not a bad thing TBH).
I have a personal intel Mac and office gave me an M1 one. I reach for M1 without even knowing.
I simply can not wait.
It'll worth the wait. :)
You won't be the M1 early adopters in 2020 that had their software break in front of them this time when getting an M1X or M2 device this year.
Not only it will be a lot faster thanks to it being possibly going down to 4nm, the software ecosystem will be much improved and supported by it from day 0.
You will thank me later.
I would not lump all devs under 1 group. While the technological aspects of M1 are impressive, the compatibility issues and Apple "being Apple" for lack of a better word are significant enough for some of us to steer clear away. My work issued MBP just doesn't recognize the external display 80% of the time without me having to plug and replug it or usbc hub back in, and the fact that its an issue is simply unnacceptable when my 5 year old Dell, running Linux, has no issues.
Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis, as the speed that you talk of is something that we have had for the past 3-4 years.
Of course.
> ...the compatibility issues
Honestly, I've seen only one application crash on me due to using an M1 Mac. TBH, didn't try to port my scientific applications on M1 though (most of the time, they run on Linux servers, so no rush).
> Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis...
In fact, I'm a desktop first user. Using M1 daily, since we're WFH. Maybe you can be this responsive on a desktop, but I'm talking on the mobile space. If we take out form factor considerations, I can get the same speed and responsiveness from 6-7 year old servers we use at the office.
OK the point is, more often than not I've woken up in the morning with youtube still playing. Absolutely insane.
It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses, etc that we're used to are just gone. They've made the way the software and hardware interact a nearly perfectly smooth racetrack. They've done this to such a degree that it must have been a very overt high level goal.
They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?
- They learned to design a phone platform.
- Then, shoehorned a modified version of macOS on top of it.
- Then, they started to iterate on performance. Added iPad. They increased the performance while keeping latency criticality of iOS platform. Trying to have performing CPU/GPU and trying to keep power consumption low paved the way, year over year.
This iteration over and over resulted in M1. A descendant of iPhone and iPad, but with unbelievable performance. They kept the best parts of every platform since they can design from the processor to the latest bit of the software.
At the end of the day, M1 is greater than sum of its parts. An M1 Air behaves a lot of like an iOS device in some parts. Connect to power, screen comes on, a big battery appears with "XY% charged" message and you hear iOS charging chime. It's funny, yet hints on the heritage.
Apple fused everything together. A unified ARM platform. Variety of OSes with the same roots. One optimization for all. With a big blow, they theoretically reduced the software work they have to do dramatically, so they can build magical software again with last effort and can transfer technologies from one to another virtually with no effort.
See: iPad Pro with M1. iMac with M1, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M1. They are the same device. Same performance. A slightly different OS on iPad. That's just it.
My XPS always had tiny bits of lag here and there, enough so that I hated using it. I hated doing any intensive work with it because the fans were annoying. My Air completely stomps it in speed and is silent while doing it.
Surfing with Safari is noticeably faster than on any other computer I have, even my much more powerful Ryzen 3700. Even my Ipad Air 4 is much faster than any browser on my Ryzen machine.
Rosetta 2 just works.
Compare the M1 Air to the new ARM Surface (which is 50% more expensive), and you see how far behind MS is. Their ARM cpu is 5 years out of date, and their x86>ARM translation software is flat out broken. Keep in mind MS has been fiddling with ARM devices, so they have zero excuse for being so far behind.
I'm not a platform evangelist, but Apple is firing on all cylinders and nailing execution across the board. MS seems disinterested in software, and Intel is lost at sea.
When I first started using it there were some glaring issues that have all disappeared as software has been updated/optimized for the M1 architecture.
Notably back in February I attempted to write a .net core console app, and it would never enter Main() {}. A week later there was an update to .net, and that went away.
I still use my Intel MBA for Parallels. A client of mine is Windows only, and I have to VPN in, then RDP into the development machine, but I'm hoping that Parallels has released the new ARM version officially, it might just work (there were issues regarding connectivity while I was beta testing it).
I often see that transition dated to 2006 at MacWorld, but the reality is that it was previewed at WWDC the previous year and there was only a minor spec bump to - I think - one model before the iMacs appeared to kick things off.
On a related note, I was not surprised - but definitely disappointed - to hear them describe the iMac changes as "making the computer disappear." Such 'appliances' have always seemed cheap and purposefully limited (not in a good way), yet this is what the market seems to want.
Regular people continue to not understand how computers work and they probably never will.
The problem space is much smaller and with each big shift in hardware and software, we've missed the opportunity to do this well.
A rough timeline: Desktops, the Internet, Laptops, and - for probably the last decade - Mobile. Is "Ambient" next?, I'm not sure, that seems like it carries other baggage along with it.
It may look like an appliance, but it certainly doesn't work like one, and if users had just a bit more knowledge about it, I wouldn't feel like we're going back to square one with each step forward in technology.
Some of that could be that these computers don't represent a shift in the wind - x86 remains the primary architecture for Windows. But I think that another big part of it is that every review of a Windows ARM laptop is full of caveats. Some programs will run slower, some programs won't run at all. Knowing which is which requires technical knowledge that a lot of people don't have, such as the ability to distinguish native executables from Java or .NET apps, or the ability to distinguish 32-bit programs from 64-bit ones.
Apple, on the other hand, really outdid themselves here. The story for most consumers is just, "It will run all your old apps, no problem." The worst-case-scenario story for a certain niche is, "Docker may be flaky until later this year."
IOW, the fact that "those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway" represents an enormous accomplishment on Apple's part.
Apple is carrot and stick, where the carrot is performance and the stick is obsolescence.
With Windows, there's neither carrot or stick. ARM isn't that much more performant, the battery life isn't that much better, and they're certainly not abandoning Intel.
OTOH, Microsoft could invest a huge amount of their money on making ARM attractive, but the Wintel ties clearly run deep.
Does this really apply?
My gf and I each earn FANG salaries and could upgrade a,couple of times a year if we were so inclined but haven’t bothered until the M1 arrived. IPhone 6s & 7, watch 0 & 3, 2016 Macbook + 2017 MacBook Air (TBF she has a big 2019 Intel MBP from work though)...upgrading that old gear didn’t seem worth it. Patches and upgrades continued to arrive (except for the watch 0).
But we finally upgraded everything and now I’ll upgrade my 2014 ipad that I’m typing on now.
I doubt most people upgrade simply because something new has arrived. Apple doesn’t really drive you to it.
Whilst you can run Intel code via Rosetta indefinitely(), Apple's strategic position is no more Intel hardware.
I'm typing this on a 2013 MBP. I'm personally waiting for an M2 chip, which I expect will follow Moore's law, albeit for ARM. Which backs up your point.
() indefinitely as defined by Apple is until they change their mind.
Rosetta is the key piece here to 'fill in the gaps'. IMO, Rosetta only really works because of Apple's silicon and so how insanely fast the machine is compared to the Intel equivalent. The M1 has such a performance advantage over Intel that you can use it up in translation and your options become "x86 version of program running at roughly the speed it always used to" or "ARM version that is lightning quick".
Whereas the Windows ARM machines weren't a performance leap over Intel so even if you had translation it would be "x86 version that is very sluggish" or "ARM version that is just about OK".
We will need a new product category to put that to rest.
Personally, I'm OK with that. But I've never really stayed abreast of the latest trends, anyway. I can also see where people who enjoyed the excitement of those famous "one more thing" moments might feel like some of the magic has been lost.
Looking at the products it is hard to see where Cook has made his impression. It feels like it is about refinement and improvements year after year. That isn't a bad thing, because over time those things add up, and Apple is probably a much more well-oil and stable machine behind the facade today than 10 years ago. This is what Cook does (even before he became CEO).
I suspect Cook also knows that this is his strength, and that's where he should focus, but I would like to see something more risky and exciting come out from Apple.
You can still run executables compiled under Windows2000 today. Meanwhile, programs as old simply won't work in MacOS (at the time, Apple was shipping OS9).
I have no doubt that a Windows release with legacy components removed can run fast on ARM (it was already demonstrated with Windows 10 mobile).
But that's just the tip of the iceberg: Nobody is shipping a chip comparable to the M1. All the ARM vendors are focused on phone chips, with completely different power optimization goals.
He "likes" it, as opposed to "loves" it; because he doesn't actually care that much (he's not a tech nerd). He likes his iPad a lot more.
He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. It's just not that important to him. Computers are a "necessary evil." He's a musician, and he asked my advice, so he got a Mac.
For myself, I am waiting on the M1X/M2, later this year. I have a couple of big external monitors, and I know the M1 has issues with those. I've already weaned myself off of my BlackMagic eGPU Pro, in anticipation.
I have become addicted to the vast real estate of this big honker. I did have it set up, once, using the whole screen width (5120 X 1440), but that was too wide for me (also, Apple does not yet natively support that resolution. I had to use a third-party screen res tool).
Not sure if this was ever true for someone who used a Mac before. Going to a Dell or Lenovo feels like a huge downgrade. Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. Also the track pad and other screen on the Mac is so much better. Even if some Windows laptops come with a crazy high resolution, the OS looks shit on it and the user has to go into the Windows menu and play around with all the UX controls until the proportions of the start bar, windows and other UI elements somehow make sense on the high resolution again. Of course there is a million Windows apps still out there which don't scale at all. I cannot imagine that a user who was on Mac for more than a year could go back to Dell or Lenovo and feel excited about it. Now with the M1 the contrast is even worse. I have an M1 and Intel MBP and even going back to the Intel MBP feels really crappy because I need to charge my device when working for a full day. I got so used to the M1 not needed a single charge during the day that it's really odd to think about how other laptops still do. I treat my M1 like my iPhone. I plug it in over night, that's all it needs.
By "computers," they mean things with screens, mice and keyboards that don't have a simple, fixed user interface. I know that some of the iPad Pros are starting to look a lot like "computers."
Me? I love "computers." But I'm a nerd. We're supposed to love them.
I am really looking forward to getting my grubby little mitts on a new laptop, when they come out.
This is completely wrong. For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter than a MacBook Air at 2.8 pounds. It also offers 32GB of ram, does not have a glued-in battery, does not use glass and the keyboard is much less likely to fail. I am tempted by the M1, but from my experience Apple machines are heavier, fragile, less reliable and less user-serviceable. I also don't understand the aversion to plastics. Aluminium makes MacBooks heavy and can attenuate radio signals.
.. and yet if feels heavier, looks shittier, is less durable, full of Lenovo spyware and overall still much worse quality. I have had so many Lenovo laptops in my life that I can say for sure that there is nothing good that comes out of this company.
It's like buying a Wilkinson razor with 5 blades, plastic covering and which weights only a few grams in total. Yes, on paper it's lighter, has more blades and has super easily replaceable parts and is also much cheaper, but if you buy a thiers issard carbon steal cut-throat straight razor you will only have one blade, it will be much heavier and more expensive but you will still have the best shave in your life with zero irritation and not look like a cheap red faced pig afterwards. That's the difference between Lenovo and Apple in computer hardware.
How is that possible? It's lighter.
>is less durable
Citation needed. I've heard MacBook keyboards tend to self-destruct when encountering small specks of dust though?
>full of Lenovo spyware
This is FUD. The ThinkPad line comes with stock Windows, which you can replace with Linux.
If the same screen sized laptop has bigger bezels, the grip is bulkier, less sleek overall form factor makes it feel heaver in your hand even if it's a few grams lighter. That's why it's called "feel" and not "is".
> I've heard MacBook keyboards tend to self-destruct when encountering small specks of dust though?
Citation needed. My MBPs haven't self destructed yet despite being daily in use for years.
> >full of Lenovo spyware > This is FUD.
Google Lenovo Superfish
You can get laptops that can almost match it on price and performance but the responsiveness and battery life is going to be extremely hard (including the MacBook Pro and reviews have stated that you can get it to above 18 hours with light use. Also, the MacBook Air is totally silent with great performance and I can't find many silent laptops at all. The biggest downside to the new M1 Macs are probably that they rely on swapping from RAM to disk but we have to see when those parts will wear out.
The Tinkpad X1 Carbon which I bought multiple time over the years would run hot, make noise and the battery would deplete fast when watching youtube videos. Before M1 this was just normal laptop behavior and the X1 is a great laptop. With the M1 though, it's now been 2 hours of watching youtube and you're at 95% in a perfect silence and the laptop is cool to the touch.
Also I don't find a Macbook Air to be "cool". To me it feels mainstream just because it's an obvious choice.
Apple has a long, long history of pulling off well executed architecture changes. If you are a Apple computer shopper then you would know by now that by the time they release a new architecture, internally, that platform has long been retired for their internal users.
It would have been an even bigger headline if Apple released the M1 and it didn't live up to expectations.
I'm actually more surprised about the iPad Pro going from the A-series to the M-series. And now, the new iMac looks very iPad-like.
The original Intel Mac's ran the 32-bit Core Duo, although a mid-season refresh took them to the (64-bit) Core 2 Duo. That generation of purely-32-bit hardware being out in the wild had some real impact on moving the OS forward, later down the road.
I assume we will soon see ARMv8 -> ARMv9, but that will hardly be noticeable.
I owned the first MacBook Pro but it died before the architecture became an issue :(
Overall Apple should be good at architecture transitions by now as they've done enough of them!
We had purchased one, when 10.5 released. And it died shortly after to be replaced by the Core 2 Duo Mac Mini. The x86 era was so short I barely remembered it.
6502 -> 6502B -> 65C02 -> 65C816 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1)
> When emulating the Apple IIe, only a full-screen mode is available and all native Macintosh functions are suspended while running (a proprietary graphical control panel, running outside MacOS, is available for configuring the virtual Apple II slots and peripherals; however, both native and emulated computer function are suspended during this activity). Macintosh functions and control resume only once emulation is completely shut down and exited.
Arguably, the transition from MacOS to Mac OS X does belong in the list. Apple did a ton of work to provide the Carbon compatibility layer to make it easier for developers to port to Mac OS X. And there was also the ability to run MacOS 9 under Mac OS X using Classic.
It's almost like a reverse transition: instead of getting a new cpu and making it work with the old ecosystem and software you take an old cpu and software and and get it to work with the new hardware (I know the analogy isn't perfect!)
6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1)
First Intel Macs (MacBook Pro) had a Core Duo which was 32 bit. I think Core 2 Duo was delayed and Apple weren't particularly happy about it.
M1 is more or less a "A14X" so that doesn't really surprise me that the iPad Pro would get an -X tier chip.
No one outside of early adopters and tech nerds cares one wink about the components of their laptop. The days of normal people caring about specs are long gone.
This story would be "man bites dog", the linked story is "dog bites man", that's why people are reacting this way.
We all know “most things” is subjective to how you use your PC.
Tell me a world where that wouldn’t ever happen and I’ll consider your Intel leading model scenario.
Yeah, imagine if Surface Pro X outsold Intel-based ones.
However, when it came to buying a new engineer on our team a laptop, we had to go with the last 2020 Intel model.
We still have some uncertainty over whether or not our development tools/environment will work on M1. Many python packages will take longer to install I imagine (if there are no wheels for the M1 mac, not sure if that's an issue) and I suspect some won't build at all. I also have some concerns over our Docker environment building.
Is there anyone doing python development and using Docker who can share their experience so far?
Edit: please also share non-python development experience, it's really interesting to hear
It was bumpy until March or so, but now I really really like it for Python.
ARM-native images are 100% fine, and x86 images are surprisingly usable via emulation (albeit considerably slower). During the technical preview stage some x86 images simply didn't work at all (MySQL being a big one that springs to mind). However, I've just checked it in the stable release and it's working now. Not sure if there's still images that don't work under emulation though.
That said, I love my M1 MacBook Pro and for now I don’t mind too much keeping my old MacBook nearby.
I think the situation should continue to improve, but there is an extremely long tail of stuff to get working.
The other thing I would mention is that Rosetta is very very slow. A lot of the initial impressions made out it was basically a bit slower, but for a lot of stuff it's slow as hell. You do not want to for example run an IDE in Rosetta.
In general though, I love my M1 air, but I am sticking to my workstation (5950x, 64GB, debian) for dev work for now.
Quick fix for all of this - whatever platform you run the build on, do it in docker on the exact same base image that lambda uses at runtime.
I know, you’re going to tell me there’s an easy way around this with cross-compilation. But when you already have docker available , quite often everything looks like a nail.
Overall, developing on the M1 Macbook Pro has been great so far.
I have an M1 Air and ended up listing my iMac I use for work as the Air was just wholely faster for my tasks. For the average dev, I think there's a weird hap right now of "M1 now vs M1X/M2". It's getting later in the cycle and while M1 support has greatly gotten better, it's now closer to new models with drastic changes.
Now in my use (TS/Node), the M1 in native Node is unbelievable, it's twice as fast as Intel machines. But that's my use case.
If the next MBP16 lineup with M1 (M2?) supports 32+ GBs of RAM other vendors will have to step up their game, though.
16GiB is insufficient for mobile? iPhone SE has 3GiB and 12 has 6GiB. That is less than half your M1 RAM. How much more does the emulator consume?
So not strictly necessary, but when you're used to it going back to having to work around the limitations is burdensome. People not having lots of ram seldom complain, but they don't know how much time they're wasting on an inefficient workflow.
When I need to run VMs as well, sky's the limit.
Whereas my 2019 MBP will suffer incredibly when I start running out of memory (it literally becomes unusable and requires a hard reboot), the M1 will transparently start swapping, and I generally don't even notice.
Just the other day I noticed a python process was running slower than expected, and it was a bug in my Pandas code so I had allocated 85GB of memory. The rest of the system was operating normally - Chrome, VSCode, Music were all fine.
I regularly kick off a data pipeline process with 8x concurrency, even though each process uses between 4-6GB memory. It's probably inefficient in some way, but overall is still much faster than running at 2x concurrency (where everything would fit in memory and it wouldn't need to swap).
There is no rush into purchasing an M1 for developers since, the software ecosystem at the time (and still to this day) is somewhat immature and not ready. There is plenty of time to switch to Apple Silicon until the ecosystem is mature.
By then, you would not even consider an M1. It might be an M1X, M2, etc. On top of the already existing issues that plague the first generation, the best thing to do for now is to stay on Intel for now. I am long term Apple Silicon, not long term 'M1'.
This is what I have been saying for weeks [0][1] and weeks [2][3] and now just yesterday. [4] I even said it a day after 'launch day'. [5]
Just wait for WWDC or September.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26748321
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26159495
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26361883
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26327064
Will currently rock my 2017 MBP until it shits the bed. While there have been huge strides in getting tools compatible with apple's ARM, I am not a fan of spending huge amounts of efforts to get a tool(s) to work on something that was already working sufficiently enough on x86.
Plus, I imagine in most corporate environments M1 will break many internal tools making it nearly impossible to access protected resources.
Just use an x86-emulated terminal and you don’t have to worry about this. The only limitation is x86 docker images, which I can’t get to run on my M1. Everything else works as it did on my 2015 MBP (when executed in an x86 terminal).
Some of that speaks to Solidworks performance in general, but I don't know how to make sense of this other than the virtualization on M1 Macs being so good it feels like magic. I don't know how I could recommend any other laptop in good conscious (Price to Performance). Happy to be kindly corrected in comments :)
And yet I know tons of developers, myself included, that have made the jump. I think that's indicative of both how well they've done with the M1, and how lacking the Intel models were/are in many regards. This M1 is a good bit quicker than the 16" it replaced, but I notice the improvements to thermals, noise, and battery life way more.
But damn it's already so tempting. Really hope we'll see updates in September.
I’m holding off for this reason, and I’ve not been able to find why this is the case, particularly when they seem so much more powerful compared to previous MacBooks.
It's as if we have decades of legacy code wasting billions of dollars of power per year. I strongly believe within the next decade the vast majority of computers, new computers consumers buy anyway, will run on arm( or whatever replaces it). This will also be amazing for servers, imagine a data center that can run off 30% of the power of an Intel based data center.
I really do love my m1 Mac Mini, I only use it for music but so far I've been nothing but amazed by it.
arch -x86_64 /bin/bash
?Part of the appeal of a Macbook Air (which IMHO is the best M1 form factor thus far) is it's not a lot of money (compared to a Macbook Pro 16" anyway) and you can just walk into a store and get another one if you need it.
This applies to accessories too. I know it's easy to get a Macbook charger. But a Dell or Lenovo charger? I'd probably have to wait days for that.
Also the upgrade prices are kinda unjustifiable. Upgrading to 16GB/1TB is $1299. That's a lot for the specs ($200 for each of 16GB->32GB and 512GB->1TB). I'm really hoping the next version gets better.
I do think the M1 has been received incredibly well and Apple has done a great job here it seems.
It would've been a fine SoC for PC grade products.
From my understanding, the older Intel models of some Apple devices at least had some level of upgradability (memory, etc.), but the the memory being on the SoC, I can't buy a cheaper model and hat upgrade it later as I see fit. So if I need something new later, I have to purchase a brand new, expensive machine.
I say this as the owner of a maxed out Thinkpad X1 Yoga 1st gen. I tend to buy used top of the line and forget about upgrades. The ram is soldered in this one as well, but I can change SSDs and WiFi cards, which is very nice.
It's been running MacOS Catalina for more than a year now and rock solid stable, so basically a $300 i7, 16GBRAM /512GBSSD 1440p 14in Macbook that is lighter than the 13in Pro.
The cons are the damn speakers, if this thing had good speakers I wouldn't even consider a Macbook.
The ad they showed it with involved Tim Cook "stealing" the M1 from the Macbook and putting it in an iPad. So if you want to predict, perhaps there will be some big software news at WWDC.
But that's just speculation. There's nothing really different from what the M1 is and what people expected the "A14X" to be.
More practical designs
Thicker, more performing machines
Higher quality and durability at the cost of thickness
Colors again?!
It’s possible, perhaps even likely that this was planned before Ives departure. But we are seeing a massive sea shift in the way Apple designs their gear. The old mantra was “thin and light before all else” Now it seeks back to “make stuff people love”
However compared to MacBooks with the butterfly keyboard, Apple introduced more than one laptop that had useability issues due to the drive for shedding weight and centimeters.
Power brick is now external.
Now I'm just looking forward to the 16 inches arm macs.
I ended up buying a Mac-Mini M1 and am very happy with the overall experience. Fantastic speed and memory management.
I feel the M1 is doing to personal computing what the iPhone did to music.
Amazing how Apple pulled this off in a market that I thought was very mature for a game-changing innovation.
http://www.righto.com/2013/09/intel-x86-documentation-has-mo...
The M1 is really the same as an SoC in an iPad/iPhone --- essentially zero public documentation.
Then there will be new models from Apple, but you the cycle will repeat itself, again no linux support etc..
That's just false. AMDs newer U models have TDP and performance per watt at the same level as the M1.
Apple has other advantages with the M1 (like running iOS programs, more optimised for their software and so on), so they still benefit from having their own chips. M1 is great, but it's not magic.
Apple M1 - 10 watts TDP
If the numbers are accurate, then it is close. However, each company measures TDP in different ways. Plus AMD can boost to 30W for short periods of time. Obviously the boost is good when you need it. The big question, how does this affect battery consumption?
That said, AMD's biggest issue is supply. I don't know if it is supply issues from TSMC, or component issues with the OEMs. But it is nearly impossible to buy a 5800u.
What is the relevance of Ryzen here?
Saying the M1 "isn't just an upgrade, but a breakthrough," and supporting that with sales figures that don't really show anything is "great marketing".
Staying on x86 would be nothing more than an incremental update, and would not be noteworthy.
Successfully executing an architecture change of this magnitude and immediately hitting these sales numbers is why this is a headline.
So we can bemoan a missing cpu option but profitwise (ie price*volume-costs) it makes more sense.
It's got nothing to do with the merits of the new architecture vs Intel, it's about Apple not only transitioning, but also consolidating its market edge with yet another moat of smart technology adoption.