Thoughts on Apple M1 | Will the 13" MacBook Pro M1 be faster than the MacBook Air M1?
Yesterday Apple announced three Macs, all seemingly running the same M1 chip: the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the new Mac mini. Apple made bold performance claims and showed a bunch of graphs, but are they really the same chip? Is the Pro going to be faster than the Air? The M1 looks amazing, a great start to Apple silicon Macs.
Same chip?
On the spec pages for all three, it says only “M1”: nothing about speed or wattage. The graphs show performance arcs far exceeding Intel processors, without saying which Intel chip or computer. At first glance there’s little difference between the base MacBook Air and the base 13-inch Pro: both have the M1, 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of storage. The only spec difference is 7 GPU cores on the Air vs. 8 on the Pro. Then there’s the Touch Bar and a slightly better screen: is that worth $300 if the processor and memory are the same?
The thermal clue
Apple pointed out that the Air has no fan, which sounds amazing, like my fanless iPad Pro. In the performance charts, Apple specifically calls out 10-watt performance: Apple silicon at 10 W performs at twice the speed of an existing Intel chip. Then I found this sentence: “at just 10 watts, the thermal envelope of the MacBook Air M1 delivers up to two times the CPU performance of the PC chip.” Looking at the graph, the M1’s performance goes well beyond 10 W, so is the Air limited to 10 watts, while the Pro and Mac mini with active cooling aren’t? That’s an assumption, and just eyeballing the graph with no measuring tools, it looks like the Pro could be 50% faster than the Air. There’s no way to tell until reviewers test. I’ll get a Pro and an Air next week, but I’m thinking the Pro will be quite a bit faster.
Unified memory
The new chips have memory built into the package: the M1 SoC combines the processor, I/O, security and memory. I guess that makes memory faster with less latency, which would help performance. But you absolutely have to pay Apple’s memory prices, and it’s pretty steep to go from 8 GB to 16 GB: $200 for 8 GB. It’s disappointing that a pro-level computer maxes out at 16 GB and starts at 8.
A comment on the channel raised a good point: if the 2020 iPad Pros have 6 GB of memory and nobody says they’re sluggish, then maybe Apple silicon can perform far better with less memory than we’re used to with Intel. Nobody does memory optimization better than Apple with iOS hardware and software, and Apple has made a big deal of macOS Big Sur being optimized for Apple silicon. Does 8 or 16 GB matter as much as it used to? Time will tell.
What about the iMac and Mac Pro?
There’s no way you can get a terabyte and a half of memory on one of these tiny 5 nm chips, so there will have to be other designs that allow external memory; maybe the hope for upgradable iMacs is still alive.
Cellular
I was disappointed there’s no cellular option. I was sure that adding Apple’s own silicon to the Macs would bring cellular options for a MacBook, and it didn’t. So I’ll hold on to my iPad Pro a bit longer as my truly mobile computing device, and I really hope cellular Macs arrive in the future.
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