- After the Apple silicon announcement
at WWDC this year, we knew they were coming.
But it still felt weird to see Apple executives
get up on stage, and proudly announce to the world
that you can now pay real, actual money
for a computer with basically the same guts as an iPad.
That's right, three different machines
at three different price points, one spec sheet.
I mean, remember how people thought the iPad
was gonna be a portable touch screen MacBook?
Turns out it was opposite day.
But now that opposite day has arrived,
if I'm an Apple user, looking for a new Mac,
do I want the iPad with no touch screen,
the iPad with no screen,
or the iPad with a touch bar?
Hard to say.
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If you've got no idea what Apple Silicon is,
it's an ARM CPU,
kinda like you would find
in your phone or your smart toaster,
but also not.
ARM does license their core designs,
allowing customers like Samsung or Qualcomm,
to integrate their own intellectual property,
adding, let's say, a more powerful GPU,
to create a full SOC.
But, they also offer what's called an architecture license.
This allows customers,
with the engineering chops to pull it off,
to build off of ARM's technology,
using what they want,
and altering or outright discarding what they don't.
The resulting SOC, or system on a chip,
will run code compiled for ARM processors,
but may have markedly different performance,
and/or power consumption characteristics.
It's not quite the same thing,
but you can think of it kind of like
how Intel and AMD both make X86 compatible processors,
but with very different approaches,
and in some cases, even different features.
On the subject of Intel,
after Intel's post-Skylink CPUs
failed to meet their expectations,
Apple took it upon themselves
to be the change they wanted to see in the world.
Who wrote this crap?
Anthony did you pull that right out of their slides?
- [Anthony] Sounds like it, doesn't it?
- Anyway, this is a huge move for Apple.
But it also isn't unprecedented.
Apple was among the three founding members
of the AIM Alliance,
that developed the power architecture
that Mac computers used prior to switching to Intel
in the first place.
And in fact, most of Apple's history
has involved CPUs other than Intel X86.
So, they've survived
this kind of painful transition twice now.
What's one more time?
The new thing
is that they've never really gone it alone before,
and there's never really been a direct competitor
in PC hardware, since the power days.
So, everyone was hoping
for a big, splashy announcement today.
And that's what we got.
Three new Macs were announced:
The MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini,
all powered by the Apple Silicon M1 processor.
I guess they really are officially calling it
Apple Silicon.
I think I'll call it AS for short.
The AS M1 processor is Apple's first PC-grade processor,
and consists of a big.LITTLE design,
with four fast cores that light up for heavy tasks,
and four power efficient cores
for background and lighter workloads,
to extend battery life for the new Macs to almost 20 hours,
or just lower their power consumption.
Virtually everything that makes the Mac a Mac,
is baked right into one silicon die.
CPU cores, GPU cores, IO secure enclave,
and neural accelerator,
all of which can communicate directly with each other,
and access the same pool of system memory,
which, by the way, is also built in.
So, RIP after-purchase RAM upgrades.
Apple claims that this arrangement
gives the AS M1 the title of
The World's Fastest CPU core.
But, their comparisons all seemed intentionally vague.
What exactly is the most popular Windows laptop?
Is it a fast one?
I kinda doubt it.
But, an improvement over last gen Macs
of up to three-and-a-half times the CPU speed,
and up to six times in GPU speed,
all while using just 10 watts of power,
sounds pretty good,
especially because, like the iPad Pro,
the MacBook air is completely fanless,
which Apple boats, makes the system fully silent,
although what this costs in chassis surface temperatures,
or CPU throttling, we don't know.
Now because CPU and wireless connectivity
is identical for all three new Macs,
Apple has got some big claims for MacBook Air performance,
including the ability to handle multiple streams
of 4K ProRes at a time,
which as Colin over at That Does Not Compute points out,
isn't actually all that impressive,
until you remember, it's fanless.
As for the MacBook Pro, it's got a fan.
And while in many respects,
resembles a larger MacBook Air,
no, yeah, that's pretty much what it is.
But that's okay,
because for your extra $300,
you still get a touch bar.
And, with that extra internal space,
they were also able to cram
a whole lot more batter in there,
so even with thermal limitations removed,
thanks to active cooling,
the AS M1-based MacBook Pro
promises to have even better endurance than the Air.
Disappointingly, despite being called Pro,
we're stuck with a 720p webcam,
rather than the 1080 version found in the new iMacs,
although Apple claims that they're able to use
the advanced image processing
that they developed for eye devices,
to clean up the image.
With so little to differentiate the Air from the Pro now,
it will be interesting to get our hands on them
for direct comparison.
Honestly, I think this could be the end of the MacBook Pro
as we know it, assuming, of course,
that the AS M1 CPU is as efficient as Apple claims.
As for the new Mac Mini,
it looks to be essentially the same computer
as Apple's Developer's Transition Kit,
which we tried, and succeeded,
in getting our hands on.
But unfortunately, weren't able to do anything with,
because Apple's legal team smelled blood in the water.
So, rather than risk legal action against us,
or worse, our informant,
we sent it back and abandoned the project,
so we could make more shirts on lttstore.com instead.
Hey, nice.
Despite that drama, the Mac Mini
is perhaps the most disappointing of the lineup.
And given the $100 price drop over last gen,
Apple clearly knows it.
While it may be more powerful by whatever metric
Apple is using here,
there's no expandable memory or storage even,
and there's no 10 gig networking option.
Damn it Apple.
You were doing so well.
I even bought like three of these things.
I guess it could be just down to Apple's M1 processors
not having enough IO bandwidth or something.
But as it stands,
there's a lot of empty space in the Mac Mini,
when they probably could have put an SSD in there,
or just put it in something the size of an Apple TV,
or smartphone instead.
I don't know.
At least it has Thunderbolt, ish.
All of these new Macs will be running Mac Os Big Sur,
set for public release this Thursday, November the 12th,
with support for automatic pinning of tasks
to the correct cores in the new big.LITTLE CPU design,
and fun features like near instantaneous
wake from idle on Apple Silicon Macs.
Neat.
Unfortunately, it also comes with some less neat stuff.
While Apple tried to make it sound
like Universal Binary 2 had pretty good support
out of the gate, which theoretically would allow developers
to compile their apps for both ARM and X86 simply,
Photoshop, for example, won't be available until 2021,
meaning anyone who's running creative cloud
will probably wanna hold off on buying for now,
that is, unless they really wanna figure out
whether or not Rosetta 2 is any good on their work computer.
Derp.
Oh, and additional security measures
baked into the operating system
reinforce what a lot of open source
and independent developers already feared.
Apple is moving to lock down their ecosystem even further
in the name of security,
which means anyone who wants to develop for the Mac
will have to either get their software blessed by Apple,
or convince end users to bypass it.
Still, this transition is happening,
whether you're ready or not.
Apple's holding a lot of cards right now,
and compatibility with IOS apps
may make this transition easier than the previous two.
We've got ours on order already.
So make sure that you get subscribed,
so you don't miss our reviews.
Before that though, it's bold prediction time.
Number one, the AS transition works out fine in the end,
but these first generation products look pretty rough,
and Apple's gonna replace them,
and sweep them under the rug as quickly as possible,
kind of like the iPad One, and Apple Watch Series Zero.
Second, Apple will continue to fight right-to-repair
behind the scenes, and shred working devices for no reason,
while posturing as an environmentally-friendly company.
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Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our video from WWDC
where we talk a little bit more
about what this transition means, not just for Apple,
but for the computer industry as a whole.