This is a straightforward product announcement article about Apple's M1 chip, published by 9to5Mac tech journalism outlet. The content has minimal engagement with human rights frameworks—no discussion of labor rights in manufacturing, privacy safeguards in device design, or accessibility features. Minor privacy concern flagged for passive analytics tracking without visible disclosure, offsetting an otherwise neutral editorial posture.
An 8 core processor on a Macbook Air that is also energy efficient? That is truly impressive. I never thought I would consider using Macbook Airs after all the years of using Macbook Pros, but Apple surprises me once again.
Apple mentions TensorFlow explicitly in the ongoing presentation due to the new 16-core "Neural Engine" embedded in the M1 chip. Now that's an angle I did not expect on this release. Sounds exciting!
Edit: just to clarify, the Neural Engine itself is not really "new":
> The A11 also includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a "Neural Engine". This neural network hardware can perform up to 600 billion operations per second and is used for Face ID, Animoji and other machine learning tasks.[9] The neural engine allows Apple to implement neural network and machine learning in a more energy-efficient manner than using either the main CPU or the GPU.[14][15] However, third party apps cannot use the Neural Engine, leading to similar neural network performance to older iPhones.
I honestly expected more. While compute performance and power efficiency seems to be really good, the M1 chip is apparently limited to 16GB RAM, 2TB storage and 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 controllers.
Comparing the new 13" MacBook Pro with the previous one that's a regression in every aspect as the Intel-based ones allow up to 32GB RAM and 4TB storage and offer 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports.
I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...
No 32GB options on any of the models announced today is a shame. Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today
M1 looks impressive, hopefully it scales as well to higher TDPs.
Pretty much what I expected today with all the low power models getting updated.
With no fan I expect the Air will throttle the CPU quickly when using the high performance cores. Calling it an "8-core CPU" is a little cheeky IMHO but I guess everyone does it.
Looking at the config options it seems the CPU/SoC is literally the "M1" and that's it. No different speeds like before so apparently the same CPU/SoC in the Pro and the Air? I guess the fans in the Pro will allow the high performance more headroom but still kinda odd. I wonder if that will carry over to the 16" MBP next year?
I am disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have. I was hoping we would see a little refinement with thinner screen bezels, perhaps a slightly thicker lid to fit in a better web cam (rather than just better "image processing") and FaceID.
Overall I am disappointed due to 16GB max RAM and the same old design. I guess we will see the bigger machines get updates sometimes between March and July 2021.
There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac.
The M1 is basically what would Apple would call A14X / A14Z if it was on iPad Pro.
So they decided to reuse the A14X / M1 across all three products. And the only differentiation are their TDP cooling. The MacBook Air is 10W TDP, and both Mac Mini and MacBook Pro are likely ~35W range.
The did mention MacBook Air's SSD performances is now twice as fast, so this isn't exactly an iPad Pro with Keyboard. That is great except I suddenly remember the 2019 MacBook Air actually had a slower SSD than the 2018 MacBook Air. Where the 2018 do Read at 2GB/s, 2019 could only do 1.3GB/s. So even at 2x / 2.6GB/s it is still only slightly better than 2018. And considering modern day NVME SSD, this is barely good enough.
Pricing kept at $999, and same old ridiculous upgrade pricing of RAM and Storage. Although they did lower the Education Pricing to $899, a little bit better than previous ~$829. But for MacBook Pro, You are essentially paying $300 more for a Fan and Touch Bar. And Pro still limited to 16GB Memory ( because it is now using the LPDDR RAM as used on iPad ).
I guess may be this is exciting for many, but extremely underwhelming to me.
A Quote from Steve Jobs:
“When you have a monopoly market share, the people who can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies, the product people get driven out of the decision making forums.
Companies forget what it takes to make great products. The product sensibility, the product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position is rotted out... The people running these companies have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They've got no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. They really have no feeling in their heart about wanting to really help the customers”
And my small rant and wishes, Dear Tim Cook / Apple, Please Stop Saying you LOVE something. There is no need for you to tell me that, because if you did love something; We will know. Steve never said anything along those lines, but we all know he cares way more than any of us could even imagine.
Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you?
Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processing?
I can't shake the feeling that they try to pull a fast one. For example, Mac mini: 3x faster CPU than the old one, and 6x faster in graphics. At the same time 5x faster than the "top selling PC desktop". What is the top selling PC desktop that it's essentially at the level of a 2018 mac mini, or below? Is that desktop at the same price level?
Also: People who use graphs without numbers on the axis should be shot on sight.
So I guess Windows won't run on M1, so none of my Windows software/Steam games will work either. Will software developers start dropping support for Mac now that they'd need to maintain an ARM version as well? It's not clear how long Apple will support emulation with Rosetta before cutting it off. What's the Linux landscape look like for this chip? It's great that there's performance and battery life improvements, but Microsoft said the same things about WindowsRT and their move to ARM in 2012, and we know how well that turned out.
The most important feature of an M1-based Mac will likely be OS support into the distant future. I'm still using a 2012 rMBP, which was the first-gen retina version, and it's held up much better than any other computer I've ever bought, partly due to OS support into 2020. I imagine Apple will stand behind this new generation for a long time as well.
The new M1 SOCs max out at 16GB RAM, which seems like a major limitation, but the timing and latency of this integrated RAM is probably much better than what you could otherwise achieve. Meanwhile, improved SSD performance will probably have a larger impact on the whole system. I remember when I bought a 15k RPM hard drive ca. 2005 - it was like a new computer. Upgrading the slowest part of the storage hierarchy made the largest difference.
One slight disappointment in the Mac mini is the removal of two USB C / Thunderbolt ports and no option for 10G ethernet vs. the Intel model. An odd set of limitations in 2020.
Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge.
Do I need to worry now that a walled-garden company - with all its advantages - pulls ahead of open ecosystems?
I only use Linux at home. Will I be doomed to inferior H/W going forward?
This is not a rhetorical question or a flame... It's an honest question... Is Apple pulling ahead of everybody else and soon going to be our only option?
"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 55-second clip with 4K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 4096x2160 resolution and 59.94 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 422. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Air."
This is relevant. This means that the performance increase vs Intel is using the extremely throttled 1.2 GHz i7 as the baseline.
I think Apple has done an amazing job of pulling off their own silicon. At Sun I got to be involved peripherally in the effort that created SPARC and it was way more work than I had suspected. So kudos to Apple's design, engineering, and QA teams!
I am also noting that they have killed the "ARM SoC's will never match what Intel can do" story line. That always reminded me of the "Microcomputers will never be able to do what minicomputers can do" story line that everyone except DEC and HP seemed to realize wouldn't hold up over time. "Never say never" is a good motto in the computer business.
That said, as the integration continues apace re-usability and repairablilty reach all time lows. When you consider that you could take a 1970's minicomputer, disassemble it to the component level, and create an entirely different (and functional) computer out of those components, you get a sense of how quaint that notion seems these days. I doubt anyone will ever desolder an M1 chip and put it onto a new board of their own design. And that reminds me more of the IBM "die on substrate" modules that they started using in mainframes which made them basically nothing more than low grade gold ore if they no longer worked as a mainframe.
So there is an interesting trend here in the comments because HN is very developer focused. Everyone seems to say "well this does not work for my XXX because of RAM, etc." I would say yes, no surprises there! With this line up Apple is fine with that, because the Air and 13" are not targeted at you. This is the laptop for my wife or kids that use it for school, web, some music and video, nothing at a professional level. That battery life will make both of them very happy.
The reality of this is that it is very likely they focused on yield for the chip vs market segment for what they can ship today. For the professional user I would very much to expect to see follow on products with more RAM and cores in 1Q21 (MacBook Pro 16" and iMacs).
The responses here seem to not really acknowledge what a rabbit apple has been pulling out of the hat. 2-3x the performance both from a CPU and GPU perspective, whilst being far more energy and thermally efficient. Of course this was kind of known and rumoured, but now we know.
Finally real competition for intel. If only these chips were available to others. they are literally running laps around the competition.
Curious where Apple's pro offerings will go, and whether these will be available as servers...
I can't see how something that tiny can compete in any meaningful way with a giant nVidia type card for training. I'd imagine it's more for running models that have been trained already, like all the stuff they mentioned with Final Cut.
SSD performance with their integrated IO controller might close the gap here, the same way that pretty fast storage on their iPhones makes the lack of RAM there not so debilitating.
But yeah, agreed that not having a 32GB option is somewhat disappointing.
Wow, that's actually a pretty big limitation. I guess it's tough to do 64 GB with their on-package unified memory.
I wonder if they're working on a version with discrete memory and GPU for the high end? They'll need it if they ever want to get Intel out of the Mac Pro.
While compute performance and power efficiency seems to be really good, the M1 chip is apparently limited to 16GB RAM, 2TB storage and 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 controllers.
In other words, M1 is for the majority of consumers.
That looks like a really good feature set for ordinary consumers. My guess is that there's going to be 2 "Pro" variants for a high powered laptop and a professional workstation.
For reference, I have a maxed 2018 mini I've upgraded twice -> 32GB then to 64GB.
Amazon price for 2x32gb modules is lower than it ever has been as of today ($218.58) [1] and I have had no problem making full use of that memory in MacOS. [2]
I guess the cooling let’s them tweak the CPU clocks accordingly? Wonder if we can hack the Mac mini with water blocks and squeeze higher clocks. The memory limitation makes it a dud though.
Read the fine print at the bottom, the claims they are making seem very..... not backed up by their testing. They chip they say they beat that makes them the best in the world is the last gen mackbook with an i7
If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro.
I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
I have to agree. While I'm sure the processors themselves are great, the anemic RAM and storage provided on base models (8GB in 2020, seriously?) is outrageous. Especially considering that the M1 chips should be much cheaper for them than the pricy intel processors.
On my 2015 MBP with 16gb I currently have 20-ish tabs in Chrome, Scrivener, GitKraken, Capture One, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Books and Xcode open. The only things that's really bogged down is Capture One.
> I am very disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have
Yeah one possible explanation I can think of is that they're not 100% confident in how rollout will go, and they want to avoid the situation where people in the wild are showing off their "brand new macs" which are still going through teething issues. There's less chance of souring the brand impression of M1 if they blend into the product line better.
Alternatively, maybe they want to sell twice to early adopters: once for the new chip, and again in 12-18 months when they release a refreshed design.
At Apple's volume and level of system integration, it doesn't make sense to do assembly sharing at that level between different models. Presumably the SoC package is the same between the different products, but binned differently for the Air, Pro, and Mini. The actual logic boards would be custom to the form factor.
Most likely this is why the CPUs are all limited to 16GB. It's likely when they unwrap the 16 inch MacBook Pro, it will open up more configurations (more RAM in particular!) for the 13" MacBook Pro and hopefully the mini.
> Overall, at the price they're offering the Mac mini (haven't really considered the other models for myself), I think it's ok to take the plunge.
I thought the same. I actually wonder whether the low prices aren't due to the App support being extremely limited at this point (basically only first party stuff)
Adobe Premiere Pro barely works on 32GB, let alone 16GB. Perhaps not "normal people", but it is a Pro device. And bear in mind, due to the UMA, that 16GB is shared between GPU and CPU.
I have 74GB on my system (10GB of which is GPU) so I can run my dev env (Kubernetes, PGSQL, Visual Studio), data science, machine learning and do 6K video editing. But then, there's also zero chance that I would consider doing this on a laptop.
Now that the processors are different, there will be cases where we will need to run multiple VMs to use Linux or to use Windows etc. Then having more RAM will be very helpful.
I doubt it. When they talk about performance - they always said it in terms of compute/watt. In absolute numbers these CPUs and GPUs will still be less performant - just my guess.
On top of it for a foreseeable future I think a lot of professional software will stay on x86 architecture simply because most of it must be also available on Windows.
People running electron apps are likely constrained. Maybe with the ability to run iOS/iPadOS versions we can ditch things like the desktop version of Slack.
