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- Apple has unveiled its M1 chip and the first computers to run on it: a MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini.
- In June, the company first announced its intention to move away from Intel and use its own chips based on the same mobile architecture as the iPhone for future Macs.
- Apple is not the first to design laptops based on mobile chip designs. But these laptops are generally designed for light duty, not heavy computing tasks like video editing or encoding.
- Apple made it clear that this was not the case for its Mac chips, which it envisions as the future of its line of laptops and desktops.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Apple unveiled its vision for the future of computing on Tuesday with the unveiling of the M1, its first internally designed Mac chip, and the new devices it will power: a new version of the MacBook Air, a 13-inch MacBook Pro. and a Mac Mini.
The change allows Apple to separate itself from Intel and exercise more freedom over the design, development, and launch cycle of its Mac computers. With its own chips, Apple can finally bring the “secret sauce” long built to the iPhone: homemade chips. that allow you to tune performance and features to your Mac.
But it is also an important bet. Apple isn’t the first tech giant to launch laptops with chips based on the Arm standard, the same basic architecture found in mobile devices. But Apple is taking a decidedly different approach.
Arm-based Windows PCs like Microsoft’s Surface Pro X boast long battery life and lightweight designs, but they often fall short of their more traditional Intel-based siblings when it comes to the raw computing power required. to do real work.
Apple has said that the new devices running on its M1 chip are the best of all possible worlds – the new MacBook Air is fanless, and promises to be the quietest MacBook yet, while the MacBook Pro is said to be the quietest. Updated shows big gains in battery life over the previous model. Even with all that, Apple says the M1 chip gives these machines, including the new Mac Mini, better performance than its own Intel-based lineup or most Windows PCs.
If Apple is right, then it points to an exciting future for the entire Mac line. But if these machines and the chip that powers them don’t live up to expectations, the future of Apple’s computer business is at risk.
Windows has already moved in this direction
In recent years, technology companies such as Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung have introduced laptops with chips that use the Arm architecture – a chip design licensed from the British company of the same name. Known for their balance of energy efficiency and processing power, Arm chips are best known for their role in the smartphone revolution, although more recently they can be found in everything from drones to data centers.
In laptops, those processors have helped Windows devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Book S, Lenovo’s Yoga 5G, and Microsoft’s Surface Pro X deliver ultrathin devices that are meant to deliver the convenience of a phone or tablet along with versatility. of a more traditional laptop. In fact, all three devices offer cellular connectivity, and those from Microsoft and Lenovo do double duty as a full Windows 10-based tablet.
Still, the Windows on Arm story is shaky: Microsoft released an Arm-powered Surface tablet in 2012 with a specially designed Windows RT operating system, based on Windows 8. That device, and Windows RT itself, failed in large part because of to issues with application compatibility and performance. Most Windows applications were built for Intel processors; Windows RT couldn’t run all of them, and even when it could, they rarely ran as well.
Things have certainly improved on that front. Microsoft has invested in the technology necessary to run most Intel-based applications on an Arm-based Windows machine, making it a much more reasonable proposition.
But it’s also worth noting The Verge’s review of this year’s Surface Pro X update, which praised Microsoft’s application compatibility work and hardware design, but also pointed out some headaches stemming from the fact that it didn’t It is based on Intel.
Apple’s big bet is that the M1 is as good or better than Intel’s chips
Apple’s M1 chips are based on the Arm architecture, just like those found in Windows PCs. However, that’s where the similarities largely end. The M1 was custom designed by Apple based on a decade dedicated to building highly acclaimed iPhone and iPad processors. Those processors are a big part of the success of Apple’s smartphones.
That may be why Apple is so confident in declaring the M1 the future of the Mac, period. While the Windows PC industry is still exploring the possibilities of using Arm instead of Intel’s x86 processor architecture, Apple says it expects to have the Mac line fully on its own chips within two years, starting with the announced devices. on Tuesday.
That’s an important distinction, because it means that M1-powered Macs are sure to be as good or better than their Intel-based predecessors for video editing, photo processing, music creation, encoding, or any other task. creative heavy computing. In fact, Apple’s presentation showed the potential of these new Macs to do all of those things.
In comparison, it would be difficult to recommend an Arm-based Windows 10 PC for anything other than light web browsing, document editing, or Netflix.
The payoff for Apple could be huge
The decision to walk away from Intel is dramatic, but it could pay off.
Without relying on Intel and its launch program, Apple gets the flexibility to design updated processors alongside the Macs that will go live. That, in turn, means that Apple can offer new features on Mac that might not have been possible before.
For example, on Tuesday, Apple showed how quickly a Mac with M1 technology could wake up from sleep mode, similar to an iPhone. Macs can also take advantage of Apple’s Image Signal Processor, which is used to make camera images sharper and cleaner on the iPhone. In fact, M1-based Macs can run iPhone and iPad apps, thanks to the similarity of the chips.
There are still outstanding questions about how well the devices actually deliver on Apple’s lofty promises, and we may not get answers until the devices officially start shipping next week. For starters, it will be interesting to see how well old Mac applications run on the new silicon, especially in light of Windows’ difficulties there.
After all, the initial launch of Apple’s Catalyst, its program to allow developers to port apps from iPad to Mac, ran into some roadblocks in its early days, as Bloomberg previously reported.
Still, the commitment to bring its new M1 chip to powerful computers like the MacBook Pro suggests that Apple is confident it will work and sees this risk as necessary for the future of the Mac.
