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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

You're highlighting Apple's strategy very well, with one omission: the M1 Macbook Air at Wal-Mart was US only. Even next door in Canada with the same retailer, Wal-Mart didn't have that deal.

This is the M1 Macbook Air deal for the rest of the world as well as the US. This is huge, it's the cheapest Mac laptop of all time. Apple Silicon is paying dividends!

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Except sadly it is not using M.

My first Mac was a Mac - ie the first Mac. 128k of memory and $1000 (with the student discount!) in 1994. I've had every architecture of Mac since then - except for M. This one might just have inspired me to try a Mac again - if it had an M.

's/in 1994/in 1984/', perhaps?

Yes. Thanks.

The M-series is just marketing. They're just the A-series with more cores and IO. Apple has one family of CPUs, but they give them different names.

They dont need to use an M series. The chip they are using isn't far off (spec wise) a base M4. It's single threaded performance is damn good.

I didn't realize that. I thought it was a different architecture - or different enough that the two couldn't run the same binaries. Are they indeed binary compatible?

Yes! It’s simply a naming convention.

You can run iOS apps on an Apple Silicon Mac if the developer doesn't explicitly prevent you.

Additionally Apple have been sticking M-series chips in iPads for a while now. They appear to be pretty much interchangeable.

Yeah theres very little difference at this point between the A and M lines, think of the M as just being the more powerful line, but that doesnt make the A line weak, not by any stretch. Both are completely binary compatible at this point.

The A18 Pro single core performance is on-par with the M4 (a smidge lower but barely anything in it), and outperforms the M3.

A18 Pro Geekbench on an iPhone: Single: 3539 Multi-core: 8772 Macbook Air M1 Geekbench: Single: 2347 Multi-core: 8342

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