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Apple Doesn’t Reveal All with the Release of the M11
Apple’s introduced its Arm-based M1 chip as its new Apple silicon chipset, and announced three new Macs that will sport the no-longer-Intel hardware: the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini. The new Macs look just about identical, with some keyboard changes, and the main promise is more battery life. These are the low-end Macs getting a boost as they go on sale next week, at more or less at the same prices as the current Intel versions.
Figure 1:Apple’s M1 SOC
Apple Doesn’t Reveal All with the Release of the M11
Apple’s introduced its Arm-based M1 chip as its new Apple silicon chipset, and announced three new Macs that will sport the no-longer-Intel hardware: the 13-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini. The new Macs look just about identical, with some keyboard changes, and the main promise is more battery life. These are the low-end Macs getting a boost as they go on sale next week, at more or less at the same prices as the current Intel versions.
Figure 1:Apple’s M1 SOC
Source: Company
The first Apple silicon system-on-a-chip (SoC) for Macs are built on a 5nm process, with 16B transistors (up 35% from the A14), 8-core CPU (four performance cores, four high-efficiency cores), up to 8-core GPU, and a 16-core neural engine.
Figure 2:Apple’s M1 SOC Performance Comparison
- The integrated chipset means buying a new Apple Mac with its silicon is more like an iPad: with a choice of RAM, plus storage size.
- Apple carefully or even bizarrely framed to look great. For example, it promised, on many occasions, “up to 5x” better CPU performance or “up to 3x” better GPU performance. But the key is that it depends on your reference. As it turns out, Apple does release the fine print, but that makes comparisons clearly weak. Here’s one of its graphs with no X or Y labels, and no true reference (which “laptop chip”?):
Figure 2:Apple’s M1 SOC Performance Comparison
Source: Company
Apple noted an increase in battery life for as much as between 6 and 10 hours, while batteries remain the same size.
Apple didn’t define the difference between the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The Air does have a 7 core GPU, the Pro 8 cores, plus a “USB-C power port” on the Pro. The Air is lighter and thinner, the Pro heavier, which gives the Pro two hours better battery life, it has a fan, it has a Touch Bar, louder speakers, better mics… and the screen can go 100 nits brighter. Apple is only offering a max of 16GB of RAM with this lineup, suggesting limitations (The Verge).
Despite their legal entanglements over modems over the past years, Qualcomm represents an ally of sorts for Apple, and sees Apple’s Arm-based desktop chips as a catalyst for real change. But Qualcomm did point out issues it has seen itself with its Arm-based chips, and those are with legacy apps:
- Apple also rolled out phrases like the MacBook Air is “faster than 98% of laptops sold last year,” which is meaningless.
- The vast range of laptops sold are entry-level and budget devices which are simple, battery-life focused. It includes $270 laptops, $350 laptops, and all the low-end that are sold to most people. The average selling price is around $650.
- Apple is careful to pick and choose its figures here — the MacBook Air is $999. Yes, it should be faster than most PC laptops, but is it faster than $999 laptops?
- Only one of the top 50 bestselling PC laptops from Amazon costs more than the MacBook Air. PCs.
- Anandtech commented on the M1, "Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel's designs, and just falling short of AMD's newest 5950X Zen3 – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim."
Apple noted an increase in battery life for as much as between 6 and 10 hours, while batteries remain the same size.
- The MacBook Air now has no fan, with only passive cooling and Apple suggesting no performance or heating issues when under load.
- Apple didn’t include 4G LTE connectivity, just as it does with the iPad range. Not that Macs have had this in the past, but Arm-based chipsets and modems are the bread and butter of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
- Apple didn’t put out a touchscreen version Mac either, despite noting that apps written for iOS/iPadOS now run on macOS Big Sur with Apple silicon hardware.
- The M1 Macs won’t support external GPUs (Engadget).
Apple didn’t define the difference between the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. The Air does have a 7 core GPU, the Pro 8 cores, plus a “USB-C power port” on the Pro. The Air is lighter and thinner, the Pro heavier, which gives the Pro two hours better battery life, it has a fan, it has a Touch Bar, louder speakers, better mics… and the screen can go 100 nits brighter. Apple is only offering a max of 16GB of RAM with this lineup, suggesting limitations (The Verge).
Despite their legal entanglements over modems over the past years, Qualcomm represents an ally of sorts for Apple, and sees Apple’s Arm-based desktop chips as a catalyst for real change. But Qualcomm did point out issues it has seen itself with its Arm-based chips, and those are with legacy apps:
- “Having emulators to bridge the legacy ecosystem with the new ecosystem is good, but challenges exist,” a company representative noted in response to a question from Android Authority.
- “There’s a lot of very badly written, old software out there. And the emulators don’t resolve all of that. So, as you can imagine over the past few years, it’s like whack-a-mole, knocking them out one-by-one.”