Apple announces opening trio of Apple Silicon Macs

[HEXUS]

MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini powered by the "revolutionary M1" chip.

Read more.

[Boon72]

shame about the prices, should of dropped them now they don't pay intel

[DanceswithUnix]

shame about the prices, should of dropped them now they don't pay intel

Like with their super cheap iphones?

[Tabbykatze]

shame about the prices, should of dropped them now they don't pay intel

Tbh, for an ultraportable (Air) and a mid range portable workstation (13in Pro), those prices are actually beyond reasonable. It really does depend on their final performance. What is interesting is that they're TB4/USB4 compatible which means they're one of (if not the) first to market with this tech (not really paid much attention). This highlights that they got TB certification for the full top end range of the USB4 spec to get the TB4 cert.

Honestly, if they do perform well with as little emulation overhead as possible and the software has been optimised, Apple may have made one of the best decisions to move away from Intel...

[Zhaoman]

I thought the 13in Pro looked decent at $1299 until I noticed it only has 8gb ram and a 256gb SSD.

[kompukare]

That they integrated TB4/USB4 is impressive.
Still, while I expect their ARM silicon to be impressive since all the A series have been, it sort of sad that this marks yet another step in closing off all Apple products. The closed-off-garden and total absence of any upgradability or repairability is why I would personally never buy any Apple products.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Expect the tech press to hype it to the ends of the world. I think a few have shown benchmarks compared to desktop CPUs and Intel....sorry Apple....sorry Anandtech proclaming that AMD and Intel are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!
Ever since Anand went to work for Apple,some of their writers seem to have a real love affair with everything Apple.

However,what they convenient ignore is a few basic facts:
1.)Like all ARM based performance CPUs they HAVE to be on a cutting edge node,which masks the enormous amount of transistors they use at each generation.
2.)The M4 is basically a quad core with 4 lower power cores,but uses 16 billion transistors.
3.)Most of the benchmarks we have seen,appear to be lightly threaded ones too(so best case of maximum clockspeed boost).
4.)Power measurements ignores that CPUs such as AMD Zen,use things such as IF which scale very well with more cores,but is a big part of the power budget of the CPU. The chiplets are designed to be scaleable to 100s of cores.
5.)Have much more IO capabilities unlike a laptop CPU,which does also required more transistors and more power.
6.)Still monolithic designs,unlike AMD who has realised new nodes are getting harder. AMD are prepared for this.
7.)Apple CPUs are tightly integrated with the OS which runs on them. You can see how even AMD and Intel CPUs can perform better under Linux for example.

A 16C Zen3 will probably use less transistors with two chiplets with 16C and 32 threads. Each Zen2 chiplet with 8C/16T is around 3.9 billion transistors. It would not surprise me if each of the 4+4 M1 clusters are bigger than an 8C/16T Zen3 chiplet in transistor count. AMD Renoir is 9.8 billlion transistors and is an SOC.

So I would be utterly suprised if Apple is essentially making a 4C SOC with so many transistors on a cutting edge process,and they can't post very good single threaded and lightly threaded scores.

Edit!!

Another thing - Apple also tended to use LPDDR3 in its laptops,instead of faster LPDDR4. Hence expect comparisons to be even more lopsided.

[chj]

Its a good move for Apple. Is it reasonable to assume all desktop applications can be developed to natively run on ARM?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Is it reasonable to assume all desktop applications can be developed to natively run on ARM?

No,because tons of software is made to run on X86,and how many apart companies from the largest companies will care? Even if they want to emulate stuff again is it really going to work well with all applications?

OS X has a tiny share of the desktop/laptop market. This is more about merging OS X into iOS which saves money for Apple due to economies of scale.

This is more down to margins. Apple has said they see the future is in services. As I predicted a while back this would mean OS X essentially becomes iOS with a skin,and the app store will slowly takeover and be the only way you can install apps on a Mac. This is because Apple can take a cut of EVERY software sale. So wait and see how things change in a few years time.

Also,being essentially a glorified tablet with even more proprietry parts,expect worse repairability and the ability to make that Mac a brick in a few years,once OS updates are switched off. Want to install Windows or Linux on a new Mac,you won't be having much luck.

Plenty of the older Macs lasted for years,but as time progressed repairability has gone down the drain,and some of the design decisions seem to cause reliability problems. For example lack of cooling of key voltage regulation components on the logic board,which can overheat and destroy the CPU. Removal of data ports on the logic board,meaning you can't recover SSD data forcing you into expensive Apple cloud storage plans.

[3dcandy]

No,because tons of software is made to run on X86,and how many apart companies from the largest companies will care? Even if they want to emulate stuff again is it really going to work well with all applications?

OS X has a tiny share of the desktop/laptop market. This is more about merging OS X into iOS which saves money for Apple due to economies of scale.

This is more down to margins. Apple has said they see the future is in services. As I predicted a while back this would mean OS X essentially becomes iOS with a skin,and the app store will slowly takeover and be the only way you can install apps on a Mac. This is because Apple can take a cut of EVERY software sale. So wait and see how things change in a few years time.

Also,being essentially a glorified tablet with even more proprietry parts,expect worse repairability and the ability to make that Mac a brick in a few years,once OS updates are switched off. Want to install Windows or Linux on a new Mac,you won't be having much luck.

Plenty of the older Macs lasted for years,but as time progressed repairability has gone down the drain,and some of the design decisions seem to cause reliability problems. For example lack of cooling of key voltage regulation components on the logic board,which can overheat and destroy the CPU. Removal of data ports on the logic board,meaning you can't recover SSD data forcing you into expensive Apple cloud storage plans.

I hate to admit it but this is on the money (literally)

[chj]

No,because tons of software is made to run on X86,and how many apart companies from the largest companies will care? Even if they want to emulate stuff again is it really going to work well with all applications?

OS X has a tiny share of the desktop/laptop market. This is more about merging OS X into iOS which saves money for Apple due to economies of scale.

This is more down to margins. Apple has said they see the future is in services. As I predicted a while back this would mean OS X essentially becomes iOS with a skin,and the app store will slowly takeover and be the only way you can install apps on a Mac. This is because Apple can take a cut of EVERY software sale. So wait and see how things change in a few years time.

Also,being essentially a glorified tablet with even more proprietry parts,expect worse repairability and the ability to make that Mac a brick in a few years,once OS updates are switched off. Want to install Windows or Linux on a new Mac,you won't be having much luck.

Plenty of the older Macs lasted for years,but as time progressed repairability has gone down the drain,and some of the design decisions seem to cause reliability problems. For example lack of cooling of key voltage regulation components on the logic board,which can overheat and destroy the CPU. Removal of data ports on the logic board,meaning you can't recover SSD data forcing you into expensive Apple cloud storage plans.

I understand that, what I mean is are there limitations to developing on ARM or is it just a case of the developers putting time into doing it? Because now there's an incentive for a select few applications which cater to Apple (such as Adobe, some DAWs) to make the ARM equivalent of their desktop applications. But will this be possible? Emulation just isn't adequate for a lot of programs, as seen on windows on ARM.

[LSG501]

Meh I'll wait for the actual product to be reviewed by an unbiased site ... the entire presentation was an exercise in marketing, something Apple is VERY good at and sadly something many tech sites seem to believe with open arms..... There's a clear bias towards apple from most tech sites versus others brands.

No real metrics shown anywhere in the presentation and even the graphs shown to show the m1 is the best thing since sliced bread neglected any relevant information such as scaling and what it was comparing against....
Got to laugh as well because they've basically made a 24 core cpu (8 cores plus 16 'neural' cores) to compete with intel's 4/8 core cpu's....and it caps out at 16GB ram (they've said something about a unified memory...sounds like a page file to me), um maybe it's me but as a 'professional' that they're targeting 16GB is barely enough these days.

Hell even some apple forums are a bit lacklustre over the release and that's saying something lol.

And lets be honest, the entire reason for going over to arm is to gradually shift os-x into iOS and gradually lock it down, Apple are shifting towards a 'services' company after all and locking users in has been proven to be successful for the bank balance on iPhone and iPad.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I hate to admit it but this is on the money (literally)

It seems to be the way things are going now. I really don't like the built obsolescence the tablet/phone model brings to things,especially with all these companies talking about the environment,etc! More and more things seem to be built to fail,are harder to repair,and are locked out at the software level.

I understand that, what I mean is are there limitations to developing on ARM or is it just a case of the developers putting time into doing it? Because now there's an incentive for a select few applications which cater to Apple (such as Adobe, some DAWs) to make the ARM equivalent of their desktop applications. But will this be possible? Emulation just isn't adequate for a lot of programs, as seen on windows on ARM.

I mean just to look in the X86 space and Windows,look how long it takes for companies to make optimisations for CPU such as Ryzen? So its resources really. Now WRT to the actual hardware again,it might have some limitations itself which will cause problems for certain workloads,but I don't think it is down to a limitation of ARM per se...AFAIK.

Meh I'll wait for the actual product to be reviewed by an unbiased site ... the entire presentation was an exercise in marketing, something Apple is VERY good at and sadly something many tech sites seem to believe with open arms..... There's a clear bias towards apple from most tech sites versus others brands.

Make sure you don't put too much stock on the benchmarks AT might run,because they tested an A14 already and proclaimed AMD and Intel are DOOOOOOOOOMED!

[MrJim]

Expect the tech press to hype it to the ends of the world. I think a few have shown benchmarks compared to desktop CPUs and Intel....sorry Apple....sorry Anandtech proclaming that AMD and Intel are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!
Ever since Anand went to work for Apple,some of their writers seem to have a real love affair with everything Apple.

I follow Ian Cutress on Twitter, and don't think he could be accused of having a love affair with everything Apple. In fact, a lot of his tweets are quite disparaging about the company. I don't know about the other Anantech writers though...

[lumireleon]

Apple things are an-interesting-read BUT not-interesting-purchase

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I follow Ian Cutress on Twitter, and don't think he could be accused of having a love affair with everything Apple. In fact, a lot of his tweets are quite disparaging about the company. I don't know about the other Anantech writers though...

Ian doesn't do any of the ARM or mobile testing,and you are correct he was mocking Apple for some of its marketing:
https://twitter.com/IanCutress/statu...51953622540295

However,one or two of the other writers literally proclaimed Intel and AMD are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!