Apple M1 Chip Macs: A New Wine In An Old Bottle

The wait is finally over. In spite of being the third huge announcement in the past few months, Apple’s recently concluded “One More Thing” event got a great reception.

Named after Steve Job’s iconic phrase, the event was highly anticipated by the whole Apple community. And why wouldn’t it be? Apple has finally bid adieu to x86 based Intel processor by launching a brand new Mac lineup powered by M1 Chip — Apple’s first-ever ARM-based Silicon processor.

While the future Macs would clearly be ARM-based, make no mistake, support for Intel devices won’t be dead anytime soon. As Apple had earlier stated, the transition to Silicon should take roughly two years. So, one shouldn’t sweat too much when picking between an Intel and a Silicon-based Mac at the moment.

What’s The Hype Behind Apple’s M1 Chip?

Apple unveiling a new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini with their own M1 chip wasn’t really surprising since the tech giant had already laid out its plans during WWDC 2020. Yet, it's a really big deal.

After the continuous advancements in the A-series chips for iPhone and iPad followed by Apple’s S-based processor for their Watch Series, the new M1 chip on Mac unifies the ecosystem by ensuring processor chips across all Apple devices are now built in-house.

This means Apple would no longer have to depend upon Intel’s supply cycle for the next-gen chipsets when rolling out their next Mac lineup. Also, the new ARM-based chips offer a 5x faster graphics performance than the previous Intel Mac.

Besides, an ARM-based processor is long known to power low-powered devices. This, coupled with the fact that the M1 Chip centralizes CPU, GPU, and the neural engine is a strong indication that the future Macs will be more power-efficient and a lot thinner.

The M1 chip boasts of common memory architecture and opens up the opportunities to run native iOS apps on Silicon Macs. By using 5-nanometer process technology that is packed with 16 billion transistors, the M1 chip is here to revolutionalize machine learning inference and make intensive tasks such as image processing and video editing faster than ever.

But Hold Your Horses. There Are A Few Oddities.

All that glitters isn’t gold. Much like that, beyond the glossy keynote slides and glass wall animations that depicted Apple Park, there were some oddities in the event that one cannot help but notice.

Despite the launch being entirely about the M1 Chip, Apple didn’t really dig into the specifics. They conveniently marketed their chips with fancy yet incredibly vague phrases such as “better than 98% PCs in 2020”, “fastest ever”, and “never seen before”. Without any real references to compare with, it’s hard to completely believe Apple’s bold claims— which could be perceived as a marketing gimmick. One would have to wait out until some real numbers and benchmark results are out.

Another odd thing about the new lineup is that the new MacBook Pro model tops out at 16GB RAM only. Worse, you cannot upgrade memory with the M1 chip as it's a single system-on-chip(SoC) processor — which implies the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and other components all reside together. The memory limits might put off some users from upgrading immediately.

Lastly, with regards to design, the new lineup looks almost the same as the previous one. Apple M1 Macs are more like a new processor put inside the older Mac. Perhaps, the biggest change in MacBook Air is that unlike the Pro model, it’s devoid of a cooling fan. Now it remains to be seen whether the fanless design would cause any throttling issues on the new M1 Chip.

Conclusion

It’s been a while since we’ve seen any revolutionary computing changes in laptops. Apple with this huge transition towards its own silicon chip might just be altering the status quo. If Apple’s claims are anything to by, the current PCs lineup would find it tough to compete with the amazing performance and battery life of M1 Macs.

At the end of the event, Apple hilariously trolled the decade-old “I’m a PC” advertisement with a throwback video. Perhaps, the ad was meant as a sign for Windows computers. Times are changing. They need to evolve.

That’s it for this one. Thanks for reading.

-------

Disclaimer

This article was originally published on another platform.

-------