Should you upgrade to Apple's M1 chip MacBook Air/Pro? 

ONE MORE THING

Let’s discuss this one more thing. Apple announced the first Apple Silicon processor for the Mac named the "M1" chip, and it will power the new generation of Arm-based Macs. It is a 5nm processor that houses 16 billion transistors just like the A14 Bionic but has been designed specially for Mac making them outrageously fast and powerful.

We all know that Apple is known for making bold moves, you may have seen this when they introduced FaceID or removed the headphone jack, or when they reduced the box contents. And introducing their own processor means, that Apple is transitioning away from Intel’s processors which can again be considered a bold move in my opinion.

 

The new chip will power Apple’s new MacBook Air, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro 13 inch, and other mac models in the near future. Apple says the new processor will specialize in combining power efficiency with performance. Talking about the detailed specifications, it has an eight-core CPU, which the company claims to offer the world’s best performance per watt of a CPU.

They also said, this has four fast CPU cores, paired with four high-efficiency cores that offer comparable performance to an existing dual-core MacBook Air. It pairs this with up to an eight-core GPU, which Apple claims to offer the world’s fastest integrated graphics ever on processors. In addition, the M1 processor has a 16-coreNeural Engine, a universal memory architecture, an “Apple-designed Thunderbolt controller with support for USB 4,” an image signal processor, media encode and decode engines, and a host of security features.

Sounds good, right? Ok, now let’s talk about the graphics, the M1 includes up to an eight-core GPU, and is the "most advanced integrated graphics processor "Apple has created, said Tim. It is claimed to supply twice the performance of a PC chip's integrated graphics and may provide peak performance at a 3rd of the facility consumption.

It also includes a 16-core Neural Engine offering11 trillion operations per second, with the whole chip designed to figure optimally for machine learning. In terms of general performance, Apple says it delivers up to three .5 times faster CPU performance, up to 6x faster GPU performance, and up to15x faster machine learning than previous-generation of Macs.

It also helps to enable battery life of up-to twice the length as previous versions. Isn’t it amazing, but that’s not it as there are quite significant changes to battery life as well. Talking about the new MacBook Air, this chip allows it up to 18 hours of video playback on a single charge. Comparing it to the previous Mac, this is 6 hours more from Intel-powered MacBook Air.

This can offer up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing per charge which was 11 hours on the previously MacBook air. And oh, have I mentioned the fact that due to the presence of M1 in the MacBook Air 2020, the company has removed the fan, claiming that the processor itself is capable of managing the operations so that the MacBook does not heat up.

 

This is amazing. I mean now we will get to work on a Mac that’s absolutely silent no matter what load it’s handling. Talking about the MacBook Pro, the M1 makes17 hours of wireless web browsing and 20 hours of video playback possible. Apple claims that this new chip allows a Mac to instantly wake from sleep mode similar to iPhones and iPads and offers good performance even when running 3D programs or editing 4K video files.

The latest macOS Big Sur and its apps areal so optimized for the new processors M1, which means a smooth user experience on Mac like never before. Just the introduction of this chip has allowed the devices to have nine times faster machine learning speed, and two times faster SSD speed. However, there are some possible drawbacks to keep in mind too. Because the RAM is now built inside the M1Chip, you wont have any option to upgrade the RAM according to your preference.

I mean, if you take a look at the Apple’s website, you will get option to choose between 8 GB Unified RAM and 16GB Unified RAM but will have to pay $200 more. I really liked the fact that M1 has RAM that can be read by both CPU and GPU simultaneously. But that’s way too much money for 8GB of RAM. Anyways, those were my thoughts about this new development. What about you? What do you think about this new M1 Chip? 

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