The original Air created the class of ultrabooks which made the bulky Windows laptops at the time obsolete for average users.
The new M1 Air has created a class of laptops with ultrabook bodies, but remains cool to the touch under load without sacrificing much in performance and having 16+ hours of battery life.
Like the original Air the new one has basically made every ~$1,000 Windows laptop obsolete. Even really nice ones like the Dell XPS 13 have worse battery life and performance while reaching CPU temperatures as high as 100 °C.
This price qualification is important and insightful, and has been ignored by all the breathless prose about how it will replace all (or no) PCs.
The real historic lesson that applies here: Apple by and large aims to serve the highest margin segments and are happy to ignore other segments, even higher revenue ones.*
M1 will help them dominate a couple of other segments; everyone else will fight over the scraps.
By contrast, a Dell or LG tries to serve all but a tiny sliver of the market, which is more expensive and difficult.
* sometimes they have halo product like the Mac Pro that might better be thought of as part of the marketing budget, though I’m sure they’re pretty high margin too.
I had a Sharp Muramasa MM10 years before that!
And likewise, competitors to Apple's laptops and workstations are very much going to continue to be relevant, and to improve and compete. The M1 has shown that power, battery life, and minimal heat production are more possible than ever. That doesn't mean end users will all suddenly drop everything and stop buying products from the competition. They'll just raise their expectations for future revisions.
Apple has captured 66% [1] of the profit in the cell phone industry. Other than Samsung in the US and other manufacturers in Asia, Apple has made the other companies a lot less relevant. When the iPhone shipped in 2007, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Motorola and others were the giants in the industry; I'd argue none of what's left of these companies is relevant today.
The same thing will happen with laptops; we already caught a glimpse of this in Japan, where Apple became the #1 selling desktop when the M1 Mac mini started shipping [2].
As the price/performance and performance/watt becomes more obvious, Apple will make inroads with new customers and markets.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-...
[2]: https://www.imore.com/apple-now-top-desktop-pc-maker-japan-t...
The discussion above was specifically about how the advance in performance of the A7[0] in 2013 changed things. Honestly I don't know the numbers for market or profit share in 2013 to compare to now, but for consumers the decisions are not wildly different, except for someone specifically comparing phones on CPU performance alone, and ignoring the other differences. Of course, some will also be affected by Apple's marketing of "the fastest smartphones" and that helps with selling phones.
To apply this to laptops is, in my opinion, much trickier. Now I can't speak for all consumers considering purchasing a laptop, but as technical as I am, performance/watt is not my number one consideration. It kind of is, indirectly, an important one. I don't want a hot, loud laptop, and I want some battery life. But things like playing demanding games, or compiling code with as many cores as I can throw at it are more important to me. That and price, being able to upgrade RAM and SSDs when the need arises, etc.
So I have a $950 laptop with a dedicated GPU, 8 cores, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, and I can add RAM and another NVME SSD when the need arises. Of course, I only get about 4 hours of battery life, and I'd love more, but it isn't going to change my life much either way (it's freezing outside, I am almost always within range of an outlet!), and I can't give up all the other things that this laptop has that an M1 Macbook lacks, even if the performance/watt is much better.
It’s a leap for sure. It’s a really really good chip. We’ll look back from 2027 and see.
The M1 is a really good new processor. We've been doing really good new processors for the last couple decades. It's great to have more competition in the CPU space, which was seeming to stagnate, but not matter how big an iteration, it's still just an iteration, it won't be remembered like coming up with a new type of device.
The moment came for me when I realized I wasn’t plugged in all day and was doing some pretty heavy compilation and code (aarm64 so gotta build from source).
It’s a smashing breakthrough in pretty much all areas other than form factor. The changes are subtle but you then shake your head and remember your on a MacBook air...
The implications from a chip this powerful, with its low-wattage, heat dissipation...will enable the next generation of laptop form factor.
I think it is more about the fact that apple successfully makes things "mainstream". For instance, the air form factor had been done before by Sony (and those even had hires screens), but only got popular after the air.
Extreme battery life + extreme performance is the main point!
The Thinkpads with extra battery weren't in the same "small and light" class as the Air and MBP 13. These "small and light" laptops with 20 hour video playback are faster than current workstation class laptops!
That convinced me for sure.
I'm mostly afraid of all the Apple lock-in otherwise i might have bought in to the M1 already.
There is already a crowdfunded attempt to port Linux to M1 led by a guy who previously ported Linux to jailbroken PS4 hardware.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/12/01/new-patreon-proje...
The M1 is a quantitative, not qualitative improvement. That's why it won't be as memorable.
The battery life is impressive, but it should be noted that you could have essentially the same experience with an older device by keeping the heavy computations on another machine -- remote desktop has always been a pain of course, but everybody loves SSH, right?
You're missing the forest for the trees. The quantitative improvements allow for advances in the qualitative experience. GP pointed out feeling impressed by coding all day and spending just 18% battery life. That's a qualitative experience. M1 (and chips like it that we'll see come up) will allow for a qualitative transformation like that. I remember when, if I had to get a powerful computer in the $1000 range, I'd either have to give up some power to get portability and battery life, or get a bulky powerful laptop with ~2-3 hours of battery life. With the M1 macs, you can get both, and that will set expectations that the rest of the market will have to follow if they want to survive. It's not as "revolutionary" as a new form factor, but it's a step towards a broader change in portable computing.
Sure, the claim's been walked back from "as memorable as the iPhone" to "a step towards a broader change in portable computing." At this point I guess I agree with that level of importance.
Having said all that, anything pertaining to battery life I'm skeptical of. In the products I've used, the battery life always declines over time, and in my experience Apple products have been the worst. I love my Macbook Air, but similar dramatic improvements in battery life were touted at the time I bought mine, and I've not been impressed over the years. Sure, at first, the battery life was amazing, but then not too long after I obtained it (a few months or so) the battery life dramatically declined. My Dells, in contrast, started out with less impressive battery use, but declined much less, so after about a year, the battery life was about the same: the Apples just started out great and declined dramatically, and the Dells started out less great and declined less.
There's reasons to think this might be different, but so far the devices haven't been around enough to really speak to me about the long-term battery life patterns. I'm hopeful and open-minded but also skeptical.
I thought about this for a moment and realised it is probably correct, but not in a good way
Previously we used durable, work-orientated smartphones with productive keyboard input. Then the iPhone arrived and popularised a flashy but fragile and less efficient form factor that became dominant.
Every time I type in a touchscreen phone I regret that change. It was a triumph of a consumption mindset over usability.
Touché. At the time the iPhone launched I had a Nokia N91. I later got an N95 and finally a N900, after which I've only used non-productive touchscreen devices.
Speaking of which, I've been following and drooling a bit after the Gemini PDA and its successors (Cosmo Communicator) but now with their latest Astro Slide I'm actually considering biting the bullet and getting one, thanks to the new keyboard mechanism which doesn't require you to open the device to see the screen: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
I hope people will not forget about TSMC who made this all possible.
Qualcomm got rid of their mobile ARM CPU designs a while back. Can the snapdragon cx / SQ2 series hope to compete using ARM reference designs, with Apple out so far ahead?
Unfortunately, I could not find any data on TDP of A12Z under full load, so it is impossible to guesstimate at the moment which design is superior.
UPD. Actually, there's this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
If I am to believe the successor to 4800U will gain 10% perf from switching 7nm -> 5nm, design-wise it matches M1.
TSMC is a fantastic and innovative company, and they've done amazing things (in no small part to Apple's massive investment in them). But Apple chip design is superior to their competitors.
Combine Apple's superior designs with first access to TSMC's premier nodes and you get some pretty special results, as we've been seeing for years with the A series chips, and which is finally getting the notoriety it deserves with this M series debut.
Your sentiment is better expressed as "I hope TSMC gets some credit for the role they've played."
Would recommend reading "Mobile Unleashed" by Daniel Nenni if you want to know more about ARM history in general.
The M1 is amazing but it doesn’t compare. Performance (both raw and thermal) is a big boost but it’s not going to reinvent computing.
No physical keyboard, other devices have large touch screens, no stylus, can’t copy and paste. Appreciating the iPhone is largely done in hindsight.
Best not to make predictions too far into the future.
I’m sorry but that’s definitely not true. Yes, there were a vocal minority of folks who said the iPhone was nothing special but the mass market response was huge and it was heralded as a huge deal by the vast majority.
And to go back to my original point: there’s a difference between “this new invention allows you to do new things, but those things aren’t important” and “this new invention does not allow you to do new things”. Reaction to the iPhone was the former. My reaction to the M1 is the latter. It allows you to do the things you already do faster and cooler and it’s a big technological shift. But it isn’t going to change the way people use computers in the way the iPhone did.
I think the point is that they have a single unified platform now (or soon). I think MS was right to have the Surface run windows and build in touch to Windows. But that never really took off.
Now, if I’m not mistaken, the M1 is giving you full performance for a work day running off a battery. And you can run iOS apps on Big Sur.
I think Apple will pull off what MS couldn’t. Single platform, multiple form factors, all capable of running the same software because the hardware is literally the same. Without just shoving everything into a web browser, because native apps are almost always better. And Apple has all the pieces of the puzzle: desktop, laptops, tablets, phones.
My first iPhone was a 3G, but felt the iPhone really started taking off with the iPhone 4. It felt like a huge leap.
To a normal consumer, that's not a big deal (although 17 hour battery life is already pretty huge). To future PC hardware and server/backend infrastructure, that's a huge deal.
But entire industries (e.g. ride hailing) were created in the aftermath of the iPhone’s launch. I just don’t think we’ll see that kind of change reflected in most people’s lives.
Intel has 90+% market share in servers.
Apple has 15% market share in personal computers.
This is Intel’s Nokia moment, when they lost a dominant position to Samsung/Android. Apple was the catalyst there as well, but Apple did not directly kill Nokia. The industry shift Apple sparked killed them.
For the task worker populations at my employer, we only committed serious cash to upgrades when Windows 10 started cutting off support. The funny thing is in some ways the newer devices are slower than the old Haswell stuff. Cheaper laptops are lighter but have awful thermals.
It's great for an ARM system for a vertically oriented company, but it isn't sufficiently performative to be a significant threat to the competition. And that's before you consider all the non-technical crap Apple has thrown at its customers recently.
And of course, the big issue is that in order to use the M1 you must switch your entire stack to Apple. Considering the broad swaths of essential business software that is simply incompatible with Apple OS, that's not going to happen.
I haven't seen a review where it has underperformed any other comparable device.
I've seen a lot of talk about how the Threadripper from AMD is faster… duh. Of course a 32- or 64-core processor that costs 2x-3x than a Mac mini and draws 280 watts is faster than an M1.
The M1 peaks at 20-24 watts and doesn't even require a fan in the MacBook Air.
It's graphic blows away all integrated graphics and is comparable to many discrete GPUs. On CPU benchmarks, it's faster than all but the latest Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, which are in laptops that run hotter, are louder and don't have 18-20 battery life doing real world things.
x86 applications generally just work and often run faster on an M1 Mac than they did on Intel Macs.
Considering the broad swaths of essential business software that is simply incompatible with Apple OS, that's not going to happen.
Depends on what business you're in. If you're in the content creation business, you're good to go [1].
Microsoft Office is already in beta for running natively on M1 and so much other business software is web-based or Electron apps (like Slack) and those work fine.
[1]: "Hollywood thinks new Mac mini 'could be huge' for video editors"—https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/hollywood-thinks-...
In some of the benchmarks, the 15W Ryzen 7 4800U outperforms the Apple Silicon M1.
There, now you have seen a review where the M1 underperformed a comparable device.
(This is not to take away from the fact that the M1 is impressive, and is incredibly efficient, and much better for battery life. It's just a reminder that there are actual, real, worthwhile competitors.)
The M1 struggles to run 4-year old games that modern AMD and Intel chips breeze through. While the M1 appears to have good burst capabilities, its ability to handle extended processing loads for anything that isn't hardcoded into the chip (aka, anything other than video processing) is woefully deficient. Whether that's a function of the CPU design, or poor cooling, or both, is not yet clear.
Summary of article:
> Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency.
Yes, in some benchmarks, the M1 outperforms... in absolute performance but if you only look at that wording, you miss all the cases where the M1 competitors outperform it... in absolute performance. That's important, only because there seems to be a new commonly held belief by the faithful that "no CPUs compete with the M1 in any sense of the word." That's an inaccurate belief.
Remember the original statement I responded to:
> I haven't seen a review where it has underperformed any other comparable device.
I am definitely going to differ on that. My last job (until this summer) was in Hollywood for a content creation company (live broadcast + streaming) and I worked very heavily with the content creation guys and the digital production team (as a result of working on them for R&D tax credit documentation purposes. That means I not only saw every expense, I also documented the reasons for all of those expenses based on discussions with the teams). We switched off Apple software 4 years ago. They began the transition off Apple hardware 2 years ago. Apple was great for content creation a long time ago, but these days content creators use *nix based systems if they need performance and Windows-based systems if they care about costs. If you suggest using Apple to the content creation guys these days, they'll laugh your ass out of the room and tell you to go back to film school.
These guys didn't choose to switch away from Mac because they wanted to complicate their lives and have to learn a new OS; they did so because the switchover was industry-wide and and they'd already made the switch at their previous jobs. The studios got burned by Apple's lack of support for a decade, combined with the Mac's excessive costs and switched to nix and Windows (primarily nix) starting during the Great Recession.
Generally, Windows is in the mix simply because a lot of the software that the (non-technical) artists use is stabler or easier to support on Windows than it is on nix, like Maya, 3DS, Premiere, etc., and running these on Windows is a quarter of the cost, or less, of running the same software on Mac.
I'd love to see a study on this; the total cost of ownership has always been far less for the Mac than Windows, especially when you factor in the amount of support Windows requires compared to the Mac.
Casual googling confirms this:
https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus...
https://www.endpointprotector.com/blog/why-macs-have-a-lower...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-...
An M1 Mac mini starts at $699, so there's no excessive cost. As usual, Adobe doesn't have it apps ready for Apple's latest and greatest… but other vendors are on the case and it'll be just a matter of time before all major video apps are running natively on the M1.
Of course, FinalCut Pro (and the rest of Apple's suite) is good to go; DaVinci Resolve (editing 4k, 6k and 8k RAW video) is also looking pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE
This is simply not true, based on real-world experience. (Again, I did R&D tax credits for 4 years for a media company; I had line-item access to expenses and the reasons for every expense.) Macs cost more than Windows PCs of the same or better performance, are more expensive to replace (since usually the entire device must be replaced), and generally cannot be upgraded. Moreover, the fact that Macs may last years longer is irrelevant to a business, since the "useful life" for computer equipment for financial purposes and actual use is 5 years or less (emphasis on the "or less"; we replaced machines at least every other year with newer equipment).
An M1 Mac mini starts at $699, so there's no excessive cost.
So what? An M1 Mac mini can't run any of the software that you would be running in a video production environment, let alone one requiring real-time editing capabilities for a live broadcast.
Of course, FinalCut Pro (and the rest of Apple's suite) is good to go; DaVinci Resolve (editing 4k, 6k and 8k RAW video) is also looking pretty great:
Final Cut Pro has not been industry standard since before I started at my old job. Apple did a great job of screwing the pooch on that one. As for DaVinci Resolve, it runs even better on Windows, especially since you can put as much RAM as you want, and multiple GPUs, and whatever cooling system you want, and make the machine literally run laps around the top-of-the-line Mac.
Not necessarily; the ARM version of Windows 10 is already running on the M1: https://hothardware.com/news/apple-silicon-m1-mac-windows-10...
> First of all, there is no video or sound driver, so we were stuck with a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. The network drivers apparently don't totally register with Windows
As a Windows user, testing out my friend's Macbook Air M1 was an underwhelming experience. I've had bigger performance boosts from adding more RAM or switching out HDs to SSDs, and a large part of the M1's performance "gains" can be attributed to the increased RAM on the systems currently featuring the M1.
Furthermore, one of the most stunning things about these devices is their long running battery life, which you'd hardly get much experience with in a quick test drive.
Bad take is bad.
> a large part of the M1's performance "gains" can be attributed to the increased RAM on the systems currently featuring the M1.
Not sure I understand your point. M1 systems have 8 or 16 GB RAM. There are no increased RAM compared to non-M1 Mac.