In June 2020, Apple announced a very important update at WWDC, this is that it will abandon Intel chips, to use its own research and development of the ARM framework of Apple Silicon, this morning Apple M1 chip arrived as scheduled, And then there are the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini.
In freeing itself from the constraints of others and bringing greater control and profit margins to its Mac line, Apple will usher in a new era — the era of Apple’s ecological unity.
Apple chips M1
The SoC contains 16 billion transistors and combines the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU), neural network engine, connectivity functions, and many other components on a single small chip. Apple’s fastest CPU ever.
The Apple M1 chip’s eight-core CPU is the most powerful one Apple has ever built. It combines four performance cores and four energy efficiency cores, all of which work together to handle demanding multithreaded tasks, greatly improving performance while achieving very low power consumption and greatly extending battery life.
With a graphics processor with up to eight cores, the M1 chip gives the MacBook Air up to five times the graphics performance of its predecessor. The MacBook Air can handle heavier graphics projects than in the past. Video content creators will also be able to clip and play multiple full-quality 4K streams of video on the MacBook Air without losing frames. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, gives users the experience of playing games on a Mac at a very smooth frame rate.
The neural network engine, the proprietary 16-core neural network engine built into the Apple M1 chip, is capable of up to an astonishing 11 trillion operations per second, enabling users to perform extremely difficult tasks, such as giving the Djay Pro AI app the ability to separate the musical and vocal parts of a song in real time. It’s worth noting that the entire M1 chip is built around machine learning. The central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and neural network engine are designed for different types of machine learning tasks, while the machine learning performance controller is responsible for allocating various machine learning tasks reasonably to maximize the performance. Apple has also designed two dedicated machine learning accelerators to perform matrix multiplications at a rate of up to one trillion operations per second. Can efficiently handle low-latency machine learning tasks that do not require the powerful computing power of a neural network engine.
Having said the “configuration” of this chip, let’s see what sparks it can collide with the system. The M1 chip is more compatible with the Mac OS Big Sur system, which not only makes the whole system smoother and smoother.
From this point on, you’ll also be able to use iPhone and iPad apps on computers with this chip, because the Apple M1 chip is built on the same architecture as Apple’s A-series chip, so it works with iPados and iOS software, All of the current iPADOS software and iOS software will be added to make it a reality for you to use iOS and iPadOS on your Mac.
All this is also good for Rosetta 2, where all third-party Mac apps can be automatically translated through Apple’s Rosetta 2 platform to run on an M1 CPU, which Apple claims is “very efficient” and has GPUs that perform even better than Intel’s core graphics cards.
Three Macs
The specific release dates of the three new Macs have yet to be confirmed in a follow-up official website update.
MacBook Air
There is no difference in appearance between the product and its predecessor. The MacBook Air 13 still has no fan, and is the same size and weight as previous Intel models.
It offers up to 3.5 times better CPU, 5 times better GPU and 9 times better NPU — the same mold, screen size, number of ports, battery capacity, scissor keyboard, Touch ID and even color. It also supports WiFi 6. The maximum battery life is 18 hours, up 6 hours. It comes with a 30W USB-C charger, starting at 7,999 yuan.
Since the appearance is unchanged (no fan) but the performance is greatly improved, this model has an aluminum heat sink to prevent overheating.
The MacBook Pro is 13 inches
The MacBook Pro 13 still has the same look, weight and size, with up to 2.8 times improved CPU performance, up to 5 times improved GPU performance, and up to 11 times improved NPU performance. The longest battery life ever reached 20 hours! It comes with a 61W USB-C charger, starting at 9,999 yuan. The heat dissipation aspect is the active heat dissipation.
Mac mini
The Mac Mini has a larger fan and a larger radiator inside, and should consume between 45W and 65W. Starting at 5,299 RMB, it comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD.
The Mac Mini comes with two Thunderbolt ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The Mac is the only product in Apple’s mainstream product line that doesn’t control its software and chips. Its MacOS was developed by Apple itself, but its chips have long been dominated by Intel. Now the Apple M1 will change that, and create a whole new ecosystem of Apple.
What Apple has done in the past is to lock all of its apps into its ecosystem, which interacts with each other but doesn’t communicate,
Now, the Mac with the Apple M1 can run apps from iOS and iPados because of the same architecture.
For users, the cost of learning three products will be minimized. If you have used iPhone or iPad, you can easily use Mac. For developers, it will be easier to develop and distribute applications in the whole ecosystem, with lower development cost and more users.
Do these several computer push recommend to buy? If you’re buying this computer as a productivity tool for a professional job, I don’t recommend it. As we’ve seen in the last couple of products, Apple is testing the waters by not using this chip in more professional computers like the 16-inch model. But if you don’t have a lot of hardware to work with or just use it on a daily basis, I recommend you buy it because these computers are a big leap forward compared to previous generations.
