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The M1 & the Future of Mac Nov 23, 2020

suhantm , Nov 23, 2020 :

Hey Community! @yashonagori and I have collaborated and tasked ourselves with summarizing and sharing our opinions on Apple’s most recent announcement about their first ARM-based SoC, the M1. This was originally going to be posted last week but we both agreed it was best to wait to see if real life performance holds up to their vague claim and boy was the wait worth it!

For more than a decade, there has been only a single competing player in desktop and laptop computing CPU designing and manufacturing space with incomparable performance, and that’s Intel. On the other hand, mobile devices like tablets and smartphones have largely been running on ARM based processors from manufacturers like Snapdragon, Samsung or Huawei for android devices and Apple themselves for iOS devices. Apple has always had an edge in terms of performance for these mobile devices.

The main difference in these two types of processors was the architecture used for their builds, with Intel using Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) models for their desktop and laptop processors while the mobile devices were based on Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine (ARM) models. As the names suggest, CISC models were much more complex, advanced and less portable than ARM based CPUs. For this very reason, they were almost non-existent in the desktop and laptop spaces. Well, at least until now.

After a long period of waiting and anticipation, Apple has finally announced and revealed their rumored ARM based SoC along with a refresh to a few key Mac Products. So... where does the M1 stand? Let’s find out!

(If you wanna know more about how ARM processors compare with CISC processors, here’s a great article that dives deep into the comparison: ARM vs Intel Processors: What’s the Difference? (alphr.com))​

The Launch

First let’s talk about the launch event itself. First of all, props to Apple for once again absolutely blowing the production game out of the water. Even if we aren’t die hard fans of the company there's one thing for sure, no one makes a launch look better than Apple. Now, if I had two words to describe the launch event, they would be - Beautifully misleading. They kept shooting bullets into absolutely thin air with their vague and very misleading charts and graphs, but they all somehow seemed to be passable because of how elegantly they presented the whole thing, a classic Apple move. But this obviously rattled a very huge part of the tech community. Heck, our very own @dsmonteiro was probably planning on taking the next flight to California to confront Tim Apple, luckily Portugal is under a lockdown.

The vaguely labelled graphs and claims obviously became the highlight of every article, but we’ll dive deep into that later in this article. There was a ton of interesting stuff announced at the event, including support for iOS apps on Macs with M1 chips, which makes sense since now both iPhones and these macs will have SoCs based on the same ARM architecture. Since I’m in no way a part of the Apple ecosystem, it didn’t exactly strike the bell with me.

One hilarious thing that I noticed about the presentation was the use of Asphalt 8 (mobile version) as a poster game to display the Mac’s gaming and graphical capabilities, which is bonkers because they can’t seriously claim 5x performance and then go on to use a mobile game on a PC for reference. But it’s Apple, so they did just that.

Performance

Moving on to the chip itself, the chip has 4 high performance cores for running the demanding and hefty tasks, and also has 4 efficiency cores which would help with performing relatively easy tasks like browsing or scrolling, and focus on saving battery life for extended use. The system features a 4 core integrated GPU, which Apple claims to be 5x faster than Intel’s integrated graphics, the generation and model of which are completely unknown. All of this was really impressive.

However, one thing that bugged a lot of people was the inclusion of non-upgradable and integrated RAM. This makes sense for Apple because every element of the system would be closer than ever and would result in better communication between internal components, but for users, it completely takes away the option to upgrade in the near future, which is a bummer. Anyway, Apple likes to have control and that’s exactly what they have done here.

In terms of real world performance, the first thing I wanna address is the battery life. Apple claimed over 13 hours of video playback on the MacBook Air and 18 hours on the MacBook Pro. To put into perspective, crossing 8 hours is a very huge achievement on any laptop. This is a claim with more 100% improvement over previous records, which in itself is something that is extremely commendable, that is, if it actually translated in real life usage. And guess what, IT DOES! Almost all the reviews I’ve come across until now have verified Apple’s claims. I can imagine how compelling this might be for someone who wants a laptop for their on-the-go usage. Most tech reviewers mentioned they got multiple days of use out of a single charge, and here I am with a Lenovo laptop that barely survives through an hour of heavy use (closed eyed monkey emoji)

If you look at benchmarks, things get pretty wild as Apple’s claims seem to be backed by facts now. The new MacBook Pro scored a whopping 1705 on single core on Geekbench, outperforming all tested Mac products including last year's cheesegrater Mac Pro. After seeing the single core scores, it’s not surprising to see the new SoC shining even through multi-core performance against most Macs on the test. It’s honestly amazing to see these benchmarks coming from a first-gen product.

As weeks go by we’ll learn more and more about the real world usage of the new products featuring the M1 chip.

Along with the introduction of the SoC, they introduced a refresh on a few core products on the Mac Line Up. The MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini were introduced as the first Mac products with the new M1. We won’t go into the details about the refreshed products, but we will highlight the fact that Apple had the courage to take out the fan from the new MacBook Air 😲

The Future

While speaking about the new M1 with a friend, he opened my mind to the idea of Apple now having the ability to potentially introduce an X series of the SoCs like they have for products such as the iPad Pro. Do not forget that Apple probably will introduce the ‘M’ Chips on refreshed versions of the iMac, iMac Pro, the 16 inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro in the near future. This would completely change the ‘pro-sumer’ market as Apple would have a greater hold on program specific optimizations due to their seemingly close relation with devs thus meaning performance of the ‘M’ chips will continue to impress both on paper and in real world scenarios.

The introduction of the M1 also means that Apple is in a better position to price their future M-based products in a more competitive manner, bridging the huge price gap between Windows and Mac systems.

All I’ll say is, from this launch, it seems like Apple has a magnificent future in store for their entire Mac lineup. It’s amazing and exciting to see that this is just the beginning of Apple’s soiree into this new world of personal computing. Also want to note that this launch will probably mean AMD and Intel will be investing heavily into their R&D (hopefully) to keep up and hopefully remain healthy competitors.

One More Thing

The launch that was titled “One more thing” definitely stood true as they brought back the infamous ‘PC guy’ in a short skit at the very end of the launch events stream. Here’s some context from the past and here’s the bit from the M1 Launch, it’s fun to see a company like Apple keeping true to old traditions by taking a stab at their computing competitors like they have for years!

As always, @yashonagori and I are more than happy to answer any and all questions you may have. Also let us know what you thought of this thread by leaving a comment below ​