At the WWDC 2020, the Cupertino tech giant Apple told the world it’ll be introducing its own custom silicon SoC (ARM-based) to power future MacBook computers. This means Apple is preparing to move away from Intel and power its MacBooks with its own hardware alone as we’ve seen with the iPhones.
This move will give Apple complete control over the MacBook, boost performance and as well as improve power efficiency. Although fans were expecting the A12Z Bionic chip Apple announced at the event to be its first SoC to release, the company instead introduced the M1 chip as its first ARM chip for its MacBook computers.
The M1 chip was announced at Apple’s November Mac Event which took place yesterday and is Apples’ first transition to the silicon chip and is built on a 5nm fabrication process with 16 billion transistors. The chip bags a total of 8-core CPU, four cores dedicated to improving performance (also called the performance cores) and the other four serves as efficiency cores.
According to the company, the M1 chip has one of the best performance per watt numbers in the market right now. The M1 also packs a 16 core Neural Engine capable of executing up to 11 trillion operations per second and is nearly as powerful as the dual-core MacBook, Apple currently sells.
What’s even more interesting is that Apple’s M1 will allow iPad and iPhone apps to run on MacBooks, I guess this is quite similar to the Windows 10 your phone app development or totally different, either way, we’ll learn more about it in the future. This will also be addressing the issue of app scarcity for macOS.
Apple Launches M1-Powered MacBook Air, Mac Mini, An MacBook Pro
Following the announcement of the new M! chip, Apple also launched three new MacBook computers powered by the new chip, a MacBook Air, Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro. Thanks to Apple’s new silicon chip, the new Mac lineup will deliver faster CPU processing, faster storage performance, faster machine learning, and better battery life for MacBooks.
The MacBook Air and Pro retain the same form factor as the previous generation, but what’s more exciting is that Apple claims the new MacBook Air is up to 3 times faster than 98% of Windows laptops manufactured last year and its machine learning process is 9 times faster.
The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is 2.8 times faster than the previous generation or the Intel-backed MacBook Pro while the machine learning process is 11 times faster. Apple has crowned it as the “world’s fastest compact pro notebook.”
As for the battery life, the MacBook Air promise up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing or 10 hours of video conferencing while the Pro will deliver up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing, or 20 hours of video conferencing, which is the longest battery life in a MacBook PC.
Lastly, the Mac Mini. The Mini is a compact PC with advanced thermal design that allows it to remain cool when in use and is 3 times faster in CPU performance than previous generation. The Mini also gets 6 times better graphic performance, and Apple says it’s 5 times faster than the best selling Windows desktop in its price range. That’s some serious acclaim.
The trio will run the Mac OS Big Sur OS and starts pricing at $999 for the MacBook Air and at a special price of $899 for education edition. The MacBook Pro starts at $1299 and $1199 for education while the Mac Mini which is the cheapest starts at $699. All three device is already available for pre-order on Apple’s online Store will begin shipping next week.