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 going to be a portable touchscreen 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 touchcreen, the
iPad with no screen, or the iPad with a Touch Bar? Hard to
say. If you've got no idea what Apple
silicon is, it's an ARM CPU, kind of like you'd 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 ARMs
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 marketkedly 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 case even different features. On
the subject of Intel, after Intel's post Skylake 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? Sounds like it does. 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
ASM1 processor is Apple's first PCgrade
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 of 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 AM1 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 kind of doubt it. But
an improvement over last gen Max of up to three and a half times in 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 boasts 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 This Does 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 it resembles a larger MacBook Air, um,
nope. 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
battery in there. So even with thermal limitations removed thanks to active
cooling, the SM1based 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 1080p version found in the new iMacs. Although
Apple claims that they're able to use the advanced image processing that
they've developed for eye devices to clean up the image, with so little to
differentiate the Air from the Pro now, it'll 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 SM1 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
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 ltstore.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, you know, put an SSD in there or
just put it in something the size of an Apple TV or a smartphone instead. I
don't know. At least it has
Thunderboltish. All of these new Macs will be running macOS Big Su 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 Max. 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 want to hold off on buying for now. That is,
unless they really want to 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 going to
replace them and sweep them under the rug as quickly as possible. kind of like
the iPad 1 and Apple Watch Series 0. 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. And third, this video
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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