Apple says its new M1-equipped Mac mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro are available to order today, arriving as early as next week

A new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini powered by M1, Apple's breakthrough chip for the Mac — Cupertino, California — On a momentous day for the Mac …

Apple 2020-11-12

Context & Ripple Effects

This is day one of Apple's break from Intel: the first three machines built on Apple's own M1 chip — MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini — go up for order with deliveries within days, making the transition real rather than announced.

The bet paid off fast: by April, Tim Cook reported more M1 Macs sold than Intel-based models despite the November start, and the roadmap Bloomberg sketched for 2022 shows the same three chassis getting M1 Pro/M2 successors while higher-end lines follow.

First-order effects

Buyers can order all three M1 machines today with arrival as early as next week, giving Apple an immediate shipping product where rivals' comparable ARM laptops were still pre-release.
The Intel-based MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini are instantly demoted to legacy status in Apple's own lineup.

Second-order effects

Intel loses its most visible premium design win, forcing its response on battery life and performance-per-watt rather than raw clock speeds.
The launch establishes the template Bloomberg's reporting tracks through 2022 and beyond: each Mac line migrates to Apple silicon generation by generation, from M1 to the M3 Pros shown at the 'Scary Fast' event and the M4 wave Greg Joswiak teased.

Third-order effects

If the pattern holds, the Mac becomes a annually refreshed, vertically integrated platform where Apple controls both silicon and OS cadence — structurally similar to the iPhone — leaving Intel-dependent PC makers to compete on commodity components.
A successful in-house chip program reduces Apple's exposure to external foundry and supplier roadmaps, shifting its competitive risk from vendor alignment to its own manufacturing execution.

The trend: The Mac is completing its multi-year migration from Intel processors to Apple-designed silicon, with each chip generation resetting the lineup's performance baseline.

Discussion

@stroughtonsmith Steve Troughton-Smith on x
That's some MacBook Air CPU. If true, that CPU would get you into the top few pages of Geekbench 5 single core results — in a fanless chassis — and it nearly doubles the A14's multicore results https://twitter.com/...
@erratarob @erratarob on x
“RISC” is the weirdest of techno cults. It ceased being meaningful way of describing microprocessors (such as the difference between Apple Silicon and Intel), yet any discussion of processors quickly devolves into RISC advocacy.
@horwitz Jeremy Horwitz on x
If you thought Parallels emulation for M1 chip Macs would be a day one slam dunk, nope: looks like virtual machine emulation isn't yet ready for the M1, but is in “active development.” And Parallels is looking to Windows itself to emulate x64 apps on ARM. https://www.parallels.co…
@markgurman Mark Gurman on x
However, as @horwitz also pointed out, it would have been nice to see yesterday Apple actually taking advantage of the new chips. These new Macs (save for fan-less on the Air) don't really have anything new enabled by the M1 other than the faster speeds. https://venturebeat.com/.…
@tldtoday @tldtoday on x
also also that $699 Mac mini everyone was disappointed in is looking pretty good rn https://twitter.com/...
@markgurman Mark Gurman on x
The M1 chip is absurdly fast — and expect to see it branded as the A14X or A14Z in the 2021 iPad Pro. And given the efficiency and software integration unmatched by Intel, you probably don't need as much RAM as you would otherwise for many tasks.
@virtudude Jeff Lopes on x
I don't know if it was deliberate or not, but Apple almost certainly undersold how fast M1 Macs are going to be. https://twitter.com/...
@tapbot_paul Paul Haddad on x
So the M1 is 4 A14 cores that runs at 3.2GHz instead of 3.0GHz. In PC terms the performance is very similar to the brand new 65W $300 6 core AMD 5600X. In Mac terms its a bit slower than the $6k 8 core 2019 Mac Pro.
@marcoarment Marco Arment on x
If this is real... it's spectacular. (And lines up pretty well with my speculation on @atpfm based on A14 Geekbench reports, extrapolating to twice the number of high-performance cores and a higher thermal limit.) https://twitter.com/...
@om @om on x
It would have been cool to plug an eGPU into M1 MacMini and connect to XDR display. Apple says no, you can't. And you don't need it. That and other notes on M1 Chip. https://om.co/...
@iancutress @iancutress on x
Full chip performance, Intel vs Apple. ➡ M1 should be up a bit higher ➡ Come on @nuvia_inc, pin the tail on the chart https://www.anandtech.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@iancutress @iancutress on x
If you want the full list: @AMD 5950X: 68.5 @AMD 5600X: 66.2 @Apple A14: 63.3 @Intel 10900K: 58.6 @Intel 1185G7: 55.3 @Apple A13: 52.8 @AMD 3950X: 50.1 @AMD 2700X: 39.0 @Qualcomm S865+: 36.5 @Amazon Graviton2: 30.0 https://twitter.com/...
@kiranks Kiran Kumar S on x
Apple's M1 chip has 16,000,000,000 transistors!! I still remember picking up transistors one by one during my Engineering lab long ago. How technology has shrunk the size of circuits.. https://twitter.com/...
@yiningkarlli Yining Karl Li on x
The Anandtech breakdown of the Apple M1 shows an incredible CPU. The craziest thing is: M1 is likely the slowest ARM Mac chip there will ever be, and it's already faster than a 10900K. Imagine what they'll be able to do with 100 watts instead of 18 watts. https://www.anandtech.co…
@bbatsov Bozhidar Batsov on x
I couldn't be more unexcited about M1. It's probably a good SoC for thin and light computers, but without some real-world benchmarks it's really hard to believe Apple's lofty (and vague) claims. And, of course, that's one of the final steps in ruining macOS completely for devs.
@kirby0louise @kirby0louise on x
Is it more impressive that the M1 (the chip, not the tank) delivers 1/3 the tensor power of the XSS in an ultrabook or that the XSS delivers 3x the tensor power of Apple's best chip yet in a $300 box the size of a Wii U? I can't decide. Maybe it's both?
@jprmercado @jprmercado on x
Apple's new M1-powered Macs are promising. It's a new era for Mac desktops and laptops. Still sitting this one out, though. I typically don't buy first-generation units. Besides, my newly upgraded, secondhand 2012 MacBook Pro is still more than enough for me.
@jwangark James Wang on x
Under appreciated: Apple's M1 chip makes the MacBook the first PC SoC with a dedicated AI accelerator. At 11 trillion op/s, the M1 has ~2x performance of the DLA in Nvidia's Xavier SoC. Intel could offer nothing like this. This is the power of vertical integration. https://twitte…
@ecamacho @ecamacho on x
This is how disruption looks like: Apple CPUs performance vs Intel CPUs (and this doesn't include the new M1) https://www.anandtech.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@stratechery @stratechery on x
Apple's Shifting Differentiation Apple is about the integration of hardware and software, but the balance between the two has shifted over time. https://stratechery.com/...
@patrickmoorhead Patrick Moorhead on x
AMD will likely beat Apple M1 at raw, synthetic, integer performance, hence debunking the “Apple has the highest performance CPU”. Synthetic, integer PPW is a different story. Real apps performance and compatibility matter in the end. #AppleEvent https://twitter.com/...

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