I am often wrong and many of you like to point that out.
For example, I initially poo-pooed the iPhone X’s abandonment of the home button in favor
of gesture-based navigation—and while most of my complaints in that video were actually
solved by Apple in firmware updates—I admit to being mostly wrong.
I initially disputed the idea that a haptic touchpad could be any good.
I was wrong.
But guess what?
When I’m right, I’m really right.
I’ve been prophesying the development of in-house silicon Macs since 2016—I even
got the window of the eventual chip’s release correct.
When questioned what benefits would come from such a transition, I mentioned security, battery,
and efficiency.
Today, more than 4 years later, Apple stated these exact benefits from moving to their
new M1 processor—the first Apple Silicon system-on-chip for the Mac.
You’re welcome.
Setapp is like Netflix, but for Mac apps.
With hundreds of apps to choose from, Setapp helps make you your most productive self—on
both the Mac and on iOS.
Sign up today with the link below or stay tuned until later in the video to find out
more.
In all seriousness, I don’t claim to be a bastion of knowledge and my guess that ARM
Macs would become a thing wasn’t prophetic even though very few people agreed Apple would
be capable of that back in 2016.
It doesn’t modify how massively important this transition is.
Not just for Apple but for computing in general.
Save for smartphones and integrated Linux systems, the rest of the computing world runs
on x86 chips made by Intel and AMD.
For Apple to abandon ship is bold, but its uniquely within their capabilities as they’re
now designing the chips for their machines running their OS.
They have complete vertical control of the entire experience which literally no other
computer maker can do.
This will either prove to be a breakthrough or a disappointment, but based on what we
saw today, I tend to believe it’ll be the former.
So, before we get to the three Mac models, let’s start with the chip because there’s
only one that’ll be in all three of the new computers.
It’s called the M1 and while Apple didn’t explicitly state it in the keynote, it’s
based on the A14 found in this year’s iPhones and iPad Air but it is not the same chip as
many rumors indicated.
Apple mentioned a 16B transistor count which is about 35% more than the A14.
This also means that like the A14, its built on a 5nm process and manufactured by Taiwan
Semiconductor—the same company that makes AMD’s Ryzen chips.
The most unusual thing about this move is that it uses what’s called a POP or package-on-package
method.
This isn’t unusual for a smartphone but it is for a computer.
You see, on the average laptop, you’ve got your CPU/iGPU, your system memory, an I/O
chip, and in the case of Macs, you’ve got the T2 security chip and Thunderbolt controller
separate.
The M1 chip absorbs all of those chips and their functions into one packages by stacking
the smaller packages on top of and beside each other to make one super package system
on a chip.
Why do this?
Well, there are several advantages.
Cost and size are all part of it, but the thing that matters the most to us as consumers
is speed and efficiency.
When all of these pieces are separate, signals that go back and forth between these chips
need to be routed through a substrate like a PCB.
The signals will travel faster and more efficiently through a contained microchip.
Of course, this makes manufacturing such a chip significantly more difficult, though
Apple seems confident they can pull it off.
Another unique and interesting design decision is a unified memory pool.
Unlike more traditional setups that have individual memory stores per component, this new unified
memory architecture will allow the components of the SoC to share memory on the fly without
having to copy data between separate pools and has the side benefit of being easier to
program for.
In short, Apple says this should make things should feel faster.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what type or clockspeed of memory Apple is using and frankly,
we may never know.
This chip has an 8-core CPU with 4-high power cores and 4-low power cores.
While Apple didn’t provide any useful graphs—like what the hell is this—not only does it have
no chart markers to determine scale, but “Latest PC laptop chip?”
What does that even mean?!
This graph (and all others) are worthless marketing fodder but let’s just pretend
for a minute that it is even remotely to scale.
That’d put the “Latest PC laptop chip” at about 35-40W which would be characteristic
of a multi-threaded AMD Renoir or Intel Tiger Lake SKU under full-chip load.
Anandtech sang praises of the A14 found in iPad Air and its best-in-class memory management,
8-wide decode block, and crazy number of execution units.
They state: “The fact that the A14 currently competes with the very best top-performance
designs that the x86 vendors have on the market today is just an astonishing feat and the
fact that Apple is able to achieve this in a total device power consumption of 5W including
the SoC, DRAM, and regulators against AMD’s 21W and Intel’s 49W package power figures
without DRAM or regulation is ‘absolutely mind-blowing’.”
Okay, so operating on the assumption that this is a 35-40W high-end X86 chip which seems
very reasonable, the M1 is getting about a 40% performance improvement over this X86
chip all while drawing just 40% of the power—10W.
That’s bananas, and Apple’s claim that the M1 has the “fastest CPU core in the
world” may actually be plausible.
Especially after Apple showed off the eye-brow raising “faster than 98% of PC laptops”
slide.
Of course, there are also dissenters like ex-Intel VP Francois Piednoel who told me
Anandtech was off its rocker.
The long and short of it is, we don’t really have any idea how the M1 will perform and
we won’t until the machines start shipping next week.
And get subscribed so you don’t miss our coverage on that.
What we are certain of, however, is that in most instances, the M1 seems to outperform
the Intel chips Apple was using in prior models while drawing significantly less power.
This may may not make it the most powerful laptop chip in the world, but will likely
make it amongst the best option for most people’s use cases.
macOS Big Sur is a huge catalyst—hah, get it?—in this transition.
The synergy of hardware and software that Apple is known for is only getting more tightly
woven and the APIs and codecs that Apple releases, if adopted, will be ever more important.
With Metal, macOS will be able to provide more graphics memory than ever allowing FCPX
to be “up to 6x faster” they said in the keynote.
Compared to what?!
Well, if we look at the fine print, baby, we can see they were talking about a pre-production
Mac mini compared to the 3.6GHz quad-core i3 Mac mini—both with 16GB of RAM and 2GB
SSD.
That two-year-old i3 is hardly a heavyweight in performance, but 6x improvement is significant.
Especially considering the performance difference between the old i3 Mac mini and the old i7
Mac mini were not even double.
6x is a lot; even with a low-end baseline.
Advanced power management in macOS will allow the CPU to use the efficient low-power cores
when needed for maximum battery life, and only ramp up when performance is requested.
Rosetta—the X86 to ARM translation layer that will allow us to run our old apps until
they’re updated seamlessly.
In some edge cases, Apple says that the performance under Rosetta is even better than on previous
Macs running the code natively.
Impressive.
Oh, and last, you can now run any iPhone or iPad app on your Mac without any translation
layer—natively—for free.
That’s amazing.
The Mac’s software catalog just catapulted in both quality and quantity.
As I mentioned earlier, Setapp is a subscription service for the Mac and I had been a paying
customer long before they offered to use the channel.
Even though Setapp has more than 200 of the best Mac apps available for one cheap monthly
price, the service goes beyond a simple list of apps.
It makes you more productive.
The app is very cleverly designed making it easy to find apps you didn’t even know existed
and with personalized recommendations, you’ll find yourself improving your workflow subconsciously
without having to figure out how to complete every small task.
Not only is Setapp an exceptional value (one of the best Setapp apps I use literally costs
more by itself than it does as part of the 200+ apps Setapp suite), but with fixed pricing
you don’t have to worry about license keys, wasting time researching if an app is worth
its high cost, and more.
With iOS apps as part of the Setapp suite now, everyone can get in on the fun.
Try Setapp today with my link below—I know you’ll love it ‘cause I do!
So, let’s finally talk about the new machines, shall we?
First up is the MacBook Air.
The form factor is unchanged except for the keyboard has interestingly ditched Launchpad
and Keyboard Backlight hotkeys in favor of Spotlight, Dictation, and Do Not Disturb.
In addition to the M1, the laptop gains USB 4 support (which is based off of Thunderbolt
3), WiFi 6, and ditches the fan in the process that by the way, was never actually connected
to any heat pipes so who knows how useful it actually was (go back and watch my hilarious
discovery of that a couple years ago.
Starting at the same $999 price, Apple stated that it could edit multiple streams of 4K
ProRes video in Final Cut without dropping frames.
Pretty handy.
And a hat tip to the unified memory pool.
Next up, we have the 13” MacBook Pro.
Keeping its same $1,299 price point, it ditches Intel in favor of the M1, retains the same
battery capacity and Touch Bar but unlike MacBook Air, has an active fan and heat pipe
system.
The implication here, obviously, is that (a) the CPU is higher-binned, (b) will be able
to have a higher base clock thanks to active cooling, and/or (c) will be able to maintain
sustained loads for a longer period of time without temperature concerns.
As a consequence, it’d be nice if Apple had provided actual performance metrics from
the Pro to the Air, but they didn’t.
All we know is that they have the M1.
The same M1?
I dunno?
The same performance?
Probably not, but by how much?
I dunno.
Benchmarks performed by people like yours truly will finally settle things, but it may
be time for Apple to come up with a new scale for system performance.
I actually agree with Jonathan Morrison in that clock-speed is and has always been a
poor metric of performance and with this new system leveraging macOS Big Sur’s software
optimization and non-standard hardware like the on-board neural engine, traditional “specs”
don’t matter.
This is a weird SoC that can’t be measured spec-by-spec with anything else, but at least
us give us SOMETHING so that I can know this Mac is better than this Mac and by this much.
The only thing we do know?
Apple said it can edit 8K ProRes footage in DaVinci resolve without dropping a single
frame which lemme tell you, is insanely impressive.
We had a bit of trouble getting solid playback in Resolve editing an 8K file in DNxHR (a
video codec with similar compression to ProRes) on a desktop computer
with a Ryzen 9 3950X 16-core CPU and GTX 1080 Ti GPU.
Last, we have the Mac mini that not only adopted the M1 chip, but lost $100 in price at the
same time and Apple claims it to be 1/10th the size and 5x faster than the best selling
PC in its price range—a massively bold claim.
Disappointingly, none of these devices have 4 USB-4/TB3 ports.
The previous Mac mini did.
As did the previous MacBook Pro.
My guess is that the M1 only has a single Thunderbolt controller because of space and
cost limitations where the previous machines had two.
Disappointing to be sure; however, this is still more than enough throughput for most
people.
Oh, also, no 10Gig on the Mac mini—not even as an option—which is really frustrating.
For a couple hundred bucks you can get a 10Gig NIC that attaches via TB3 but that’ll cut
into your throughput that’s already halved from the prior Mac mini.
All in all, these machines are still a big mystery.
I think we’ll find things are disappointing, but I also think the majority of us will be
blown away at these systems and capabilities.
If Apple is to believed, all of these machines are increasing in performance anywhere from
2.5-5x.
That’s insane considering most generation-over-generation improvements are about
0.2x.
All while increasing battery life, decreasing heat output, and maintaining (or in the case
of Mac mini), lowering price.
Considering these are the weakest Apple Silicon Macs Apple will ever make, it’s super exciting
to think what the future holds over this upcoming 2-year transition—especially for high-TDP,
high-performance Pro Macs.
Did you order an Apple Silicon Mac today?
If so, let me know which one below.
If not, why?
Would love to hear your thoughts and would love a like if you liked this video.
If you disliked it, share it with someone you dislike.
Thanks so much for watching and as always, stay snazzy.