ASCII.jp: Is Apple Silicon Mac an iPad with Mac skin? (1/3)



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Original “M1” CPU greatly improves processing performance and battery life New Mac special feature
Chapter 10

Updated at 09:00 on November 12, 2020

Sentence ● Edited by Fumihiko Shibata ● Eriko Iijima / ASCII

As for Mac-related announcements, I saw the delivery of the “One More Thing” event, which makes me feel a huge change in trend that has never been seen in recent years. As a result, what came to mind was that this new product, which was the first Mac to adopt Apple Silicon, is not a twisted vision, even if it is considered an advanced version of the iPad rather than a new series of transformed Macs. . It’s not like that?

Apple Silicon Mac as an evolution of the iPad

The new Arm-based integrated chip for Mac is called M1. M is probably Mac M. The chip designations used in iPhones and iPads so far are A with a generational number, but it’s probably Apple’s A. The Mac name carries the same weight as the Apple company name, but as a user who has been using it since the very first Mac, it seems natural.

Regardless, the internal architecture of this new M1-centric Mac is of course closer to an iPhone or iPad than an older Mac. If you make the A-series chip built into the iPad even more powerful and integrate it with the keyboard and trackpad, it doesn’t seem difficult to convert it into a 13-inch MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

On the contrary, if you remove the screen and incorporate an external interface such as HDMI 2.0 or Ethernet, and an AC power supply, it seems that it will become a machine that can be called Mac mini as it is. That is, the three new products this time are not far from the contents that strengthened the iPad, the exterior and the equipment similar to the previous Mac, so to speak, the iPad covered with the skin of the Mac. Is not it?

It is not just hardware. The new macOS Big Sur drives the evolution of iPadOS and MacOS, which have been gradually approaching, to a much closer level in content and appearance. Also, many iOS and iPad applications can run almost natively on Apple Silicon Mac. Of course, things that rely on sensors that are unique to iPhone and iPad devices will not work properly, but there should be quite a few applications that can use as is. On the other hand, at the moment, some Mac applications will not work natively, but will work through the Rosetta 2 conversion.



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