Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?

- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

- only 2 thunderbolt ports

- limited to 16GB RAM

- no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards

- no AAA gaming

- can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.

But these “features” are not highlighted on the product page. (Aside from memory) The core count and battery performance are listed. I think many people will buy these. And arm64 containers will come in time with adoption.

You lost me at "good Windows laptops".

macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac.

Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.

> "no AAA gaming"

This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac.

But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

It's more about losing the ability to boot into windows to game there, as well as losing egpu support.

Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Maybe the gaming part.

If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.

I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low.

Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.

To the extent that games are made available for MacOS/ARM in the first place (admittedly a sticking point), it looks like these machines will be able to play most of them reasonably well. Certainly much better than most of Apples previous machines with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.

"uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down"

Citation Needed.

Apple detractors LOVE to bring this idea up, but there's nothing to it in any real sense. Do Macs ship with a checkbox filled in that limits software vendors? Yes. This is a good thing. Is it trivial to change this setting? Also yes.

Anyone who buys a Mac can run any software on it they like. There is no lockdown.

I work on multiple OSX machines, servers run linux, and i have a single windows machine just got the few games that can't be run elsewhere.

That and streaming direct to the browser

As a related benefit to a non Mac user - ARM64 support for packages at build time is going to greatly improve over the next few years!

Hmm. I might buy one anyway and use a remote docker host for x86...

I agree. It is not without danger, the same as with Apps actually, that developers target only the iPad (touch interface) and don't care about optimizing for the Mac experience.

But on the whole I am optimistic.

I bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.

IIRC, binaries on arm on osx have to be signed.

I.e. "We raised the walls on our garden further"

Balls to that, if I buy hardware I want to be able to run what I want on it or it's not a general purpose computer, it's something else.

It's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)

In my experience, Microsoft and PC laptop manufacturers still haven't figured out how to make a trackpad that works as well as a 2008 era Macbook.

Most games played by most players are on iOS & iPadOS, and macOS Big Sur will run them on your MacBook.

> - no AAA gaming

I thought Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. were all pushing streaming gaming services that will run on any hardware with a decent internet connection. I would imagine the hardware video decoder in the M1 chip would allow 4K streaming video pretty well.

In my experience, the Thinkpads are indeed the only real competition, hardware-wise.

When my current Mac dies, that's where I'm headed, but running Linux; Microsoft is less of a danger, so I don't outright boycott anymore, but I still find Windows super annoying to use.

> Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

Buyers don't especially care about performance either to be honest, unless they care about one of those factors in order to need it.

> But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market.

I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iOS will even run on an ARM Mac because developers will block them.

It used to be possible to do some gaming on a Mac - the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac, especially with an eGPU. The end of x86 is the end of that market, forever.

Yep, though sadly, in my view, the current line up of Macbooks trackpads aren't as good as the 2008 era Macbooks either....

I disagree, my razer blade 15 has been amazing.

iOS games/apps run on Apple Silicon Mac, so that by itself opens up a huge gaming market.

There is a lockdown as you cannot even boot linux anymore...

Why would developers "block" their iOS games from running on ARM Macs?

If you need a computer for serious (long hours) use, I would always go for desktop, as you can get a vastly superior machine to any laptop, with massive amounts of disk space, memory, tons of cores, screens, etc. If you want a Mac, I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do.

For travelling, I don't think anything beats a Macbook due to how light, thin, and resilient they are. But my 2016 MBP is a pretty shit machine for its price. It's also loud (like every other laptop I've had). I avoid using it. Sure, if you take size/design/mechanical quality into account, it is probably unmatched. But for 95% of my computer usage, those are irrelevant, as I just sit at my desk. I had a company provided HP laptop (not sure if stock or upgraded by our IT staff) at my previous job which was far more performant than my Macbook, so I don't really agree that Windows laptops are necessarily bad, but it was even louder than the Macbook, and of course clunky and ugly.

For me personally, the new Macbooks are disqualified as viable work machines if it's really true that you can't use more than 1 external screen. That's just not a viable computer for me (for work). I will always have a Macbook though just because of how much I love them for travel. But a Macbook is more of a toy than a serious computer, especially if the 1 screen limit is true.

I have both platforms at the office for years, still haven't discovered what is so magic about the trackpad.

Maybe that's Windows or Windows pre installed bloatware specific ? The high end thinkpads (t/x/p/w/carbon) are generally well supported by Linux distros, partially thanks to many kernel and distro developers using them.

As for bios (well EFI these days) that should be handled very seamlessly via fwupd on all major Linux distros: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/

(Frankly seems much more robust to how it is handled on Windows - not at oll or via half broken OEM bloatware.)

" I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do."

Unfortunately they will also blow your wallet.

> "the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac"

Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

It was never worth the effort for most game developers to bother porting games to the Mac because writing a custom port for Metal was way too expensive to justify for such a niche market.

But now with Apple Silicon, that all changes. If you're going to port your game to iOS (and that's surely tempting - it's a huge platform/market with powerful GPUs and a "spendy" customer base) then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.

Wow, I just checked and yeah those prices are pretty insane, especially if you want a better-than-base model. I guess then in the desktop arena, Macs are at a disadvantage, because you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount.

1) Macs are harder to consider secure, they're effectively all jailbroken. Cheating/bypassing in app purchases will be rampant, reducing the opportunity for cross play, and the Mac market isn't big enough itself. These aren't insurmountable issues, but they require investment, and the additional Mac market probably isn't worth the outlay and risk.

2) You have to rebuild the UI, which costs money which the Mac version may well not recoup.

3) You have a different version for desktops that costs more upfront with less reliance on in-app mechanics that you don't want to undermine.

> "Macs are harder to consider secure, they're effectively all jailbroken."

OK, but that's no different to Windows and Android.

> "You have to rebuild the UI"

No. Even with apps this is no longer the case (see: "Mac Catalyst"), but it's certainly not true for games. Maybe you'd need to add some keyboard/mouse bindings, but that's about it. Even iPads support keyboards and mice now days!

Casual gaming market.

I'm in the market for a new work machine myself, and have been eying a final-generation loaded Intel MBP16. I'm sure the AS models will catch up on graphics capability by the end of their transition time, though I'm certainly wondering what the first AS MBP16 will do for graphics. I certainly wouldn't buy less capability than the 5600M myself.

ARM Macs can't run unsigned software.

And don’t forget that all of the iPad/iPhone games will work on these laptops. That’s not quite the same thing as having major PC titles, but it’s not nothing either.

Yes, but code signing can be ad-hoc, can be done automatically at build time, and doesn't require notarization. So it's basically just a way to ensure the binary has not been tampered with. I don't really see the problem here, as the code signing itself does not prevent any kind of code from running on macOS Big Sur.

Catalina already broke a TON of legacy software and you cannot downgrade newer Macs to Mojave (at least not without some serious hacking efforts, and I know at least one person who tried and failed).

Edge to edge uniformity, physical feel, virtual feel of the scroll and motion, gestures. Other than that, sure, same.

You can change that on T2-based Intel Macs, at least, just like on Windows: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330

Of course, Apple as an OEM does not support running non-Mac OSes, so virtualization should still be preferred for most use cases.

That's why I'm saying anymore. It was the case but it is no more possible with the new Apple Silicone laptop.

Consumers absolutely care that their Apple MacBook Pro has 20 hours of battery life, when the comparable XPS has only 10 hours or whatever.

umm there are more ports than you think.

If Lenovo could for once figure out why the speakers on these Thinkpads are SO BAD, I wouldn't be reading this thread because I wouldn't care about Macs. I know there are headphones, but many times when I'm alone, I just want to watch a video and actually hear the people talk, can't do with the Thinkpad.

In other words, the biggest gaming market.

The biggest difference between Macbook trackpads vs the best for Windows is the super low hysteresis of pointer motion vs finger motion. I recently bought and returned a Microsoft Surface Book with "precision touchpad". The main reason for returing it was that pointer control feels sluggish compared to the Macbook and its pointer speed was too slow even at its fastest. The best Dell touchpads are no better and Lenovo trackpads are even worse.

I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it.

If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?

So if an ios title uses a multi touch gesture how do you replicate that on MacOS?

I guess Microsoft will have to hurry up and build an ARM version of Windows so they can keep the rounding error number of BootCamp users satisfied.

The Macintosh, by design, was never a general purpose computer. It was a computer that Steve Jobs allowed you to use. The Apple II was the general purpose computer that Woz championed.

You can do those multitouch gestures on TouchBar /s

Certainly the Pro Desktops must be intended for Pro people that can quantify the number of billable hours they will save in Final Cut or Logic and come up with a "return of investment" figure.

The iMacs are a mistery to me, but guess I'm not the target market anyway. (I have a 2018 MBP)

Every MacBook has a multitouch trackpad. It's rare that I ever use a mouse.

If you can sign ad-hoc then there's no point, right? Just modify and re-sign.

There is an ARM version of Windows 10 that runs on the Surface Pro X [1].

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/

> you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount

It's not even a contest or similarly powerful, spend $3000 on an AMD + Nvidia PC and its significantly more powerful than the $5000 Mac Pro in both CPU and GPU compute.

There’s no indication from Apple that they are intentionally not supporting this feature - just that it doesn’t exist right now. That said in practice I never use BootCamp because the driver support is always sub-par. It’s a much nicer experience to virtualize, especially now that most virtualization platforms offer native support for Apple’s virtualization libraries, such that installing third party kernel extensions are less necessary now than ever before. (I think the only ones I tend to install now are Tuxera NTFS support which tends to be really high quality. Apple should just buy Tuxera and ship them natively.)

The windows market is all over the place. All the way from leftover bin junk from 5 years ago sold as new to high end cutting edge. When you get bellow 900 dollars the market decidedly on the crap side with respect to windows. There are some exceptions but usually you have to get 1200-1800 before you start get quality items. Not saying you can not find good stuff near the bottom. But you get what you pay for. Usually they skimp on the screen, memory, and disk. I am currently using an MSI stealth gaming laptop. other than the keyboard layout being slightly odd i am liking it a lot. i replaced my previous hp of 8 years. that will find a new home doing something else once I do a full teardown and repasting. luckily it is one of the last hp laptops where taking it apart is not a total nightmare. finding a decent laptop takes a lot of work. going with apple has a lot of advantages as the hassle of 'picking' is cut down to a few models, and you have a good shot of it being decent. I personally would not buy an apple but that is because of other 'petty' reasons and not quality.

Maybe, but distinct from real "gaming".

With iOS, you have to be an Apple developer paying $99/yr to do ad-hoc signing, I'm guessing it's the same now for MacOS..

Sounds like exactly the kind of thing you can optimize much easier when you control both the hardware and the software.

You can also buy some ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled now if you don't want to worry about hardware compatibility issues.

And then sit at a desk all day within reach of a power socket

Not only that, the first released version of NT on ARM was in 2012.

They had crappy code signing policies (only store apps on Windows RT tablet) which guaranteed poor adoption but that was a policy decision, not a technical one.

This. The amount of times I've truly needed more then a couple of hours of battery life are rare. I think most people think they want more battery life when they really don't need it. Just add more cooling to stop those processors from throttling all the time.

An ARM version of Windows has existed for almost a decade. In fact it's running on quite a few laptops right now.

A game is a game. There is no "real gaming". Apple Arcade with a Xbox controller paired to a Mac is actually a fun gaming device for some types of gamers.

Genshin Impact is a great game that is on iOS in addition to "real consoles". Oceanhorn 2 is an amazing game that was originally on Apple Arcade and brought to Nintendo's "real console".

There is also quite a number of ports that I think you aren't aware of.

There is a difference between Tetris on Facebook versus Dota or CSGO on PC. The later is "real gaming", the former not. The border might be a gradient.

It's like calling yourself a programmer because you can set a timer on your VCR. (dated but still accurate)

And since when CSGO is a GPU-demanding game?

You think "real games" are for "hard triers only", but it's just your point of view.

That's not true at all. You can use recovery mode to trivially revert back to the OS that was installed when the computer was purchased. If that's pre-Mojave then you can just upgrade back to Mojave afterwards.

The claim of no AAA gaming is totally uncertain -- Apple seems to think that you'll be able to run games in Rosetta with better performance than what you can get on the existing 16" Macs. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but if these new Macs really are so great, I'd expect devs to start porting their games.

What if the Mac had a newer OS than Mojave originally installed on it? That is how I interpreted the parent poster's comment. Given this interpretation, I'm don't think I'd have the expectation to be able to install an earlier OS.

With that interpretation, you'd be correct but I don't think you've ever been able to downgrade to something earlier than what it came with since the older OS wouldn't include the appropriate drivers or kexts to properly run the hardware.

Mine and many others. Rightfully so, see the example.

GPU was not the issue here.

Since 1997 to be exact. WinCE ran on arm since time immemorial.

That's not true. Anyone with an Apple ID is able to sign software they build/binaries and install them on their iOS devices.

Although instead of lasting 1 year they only last 7 days, but there is no fee for a user to sign and install their own binaries.

My question was about MacOS and if similar behaviour exists there too with the M1 Macs.

To clarify iOS, so the app erases itself after 7 days? Or is it something like you can install an app for only 7 days after downloading/using Xcode?

Apple has had support for game pads for a while now. This will just make it more viable.

The only issue might be multi-touch based games on M1

Can be ad-hoc? For how long?

Like Surface laptops?

Cite?

I guess that may count for you, but I mean lockdowns within the OS itself.

I don't care that I can't run Linux on my Mac. If I wanted to run Linux, I'd have different hardware.

To answer my own question, an ad-hoc signed iOS App will deactivate after 7 days unless you pay $99/yr. This behaviour is not present on Big Sur and likely M1 Macs, they can still run notarized and non-notarized apps: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/macos-11-0-big-sur-t...

> Exactly. So it was never really the hardware that held back gaming on Mac, but the fact that from a game-development perspective it's an esoteric platform that has limited or no support for the main industry standard APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, etc).

I think it's more that gaming wasn't held back on the Mac. It was just bootcamp was much more common than people think.

> If you're going to port your game to iOS (and why not? It's a huge platform with powerful GPUs and a huge, "spendy" market)

Because mobile gaming and desktop gaming have very little in common. Note that Nintendo didn't port their titles when they released iOS games, they made new games. Users want different experiences, and flat ports of successful console gaming titles to iOS tend to fail. There are, all told, very few ports of successful PC/console games to iOS, and those that exist tend to be brand reuse rather than literal ports.

> then you basically get Mac for free with close to zero additional effort.

Not even remotely. The way you secure your service has to be totally different, the UI paradigm is completely different, you have to cope with totally different aspect ratios etc etc. It's significant effort, and it will be very hard to justify for most game studios. It's certainly more work in most cases than porting a Windows game to MacOS was when using a mainstream engine, and that was not a huge market.

The ROI for battery life falls off at a certain point, right? For phones, it's probably about a day -- how often is it a problem to plug in your phone at some point in a 24-hour period? -- and for laptops it's often about a full workday, 8-10 hours. I'm not saying that a 20-hour laptop battery isn't an incredible accomplishment, but I do think that I care a lot less about 20 vs 10 hours than I do about 10 vs 5.

So the choice is between running an older OS version that will go EOL sooner, or abandoning the ability to dual-boot? How is that OK?

Still doesn't account for desktop devices. And no, it's not a given that every desktop mac user has a Magic Trackpad.

>- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows

This has been a claim made about the Macs since the T2 chip came out. It was strictly false then (you just had to boot into Recovery Mode and turn off the requirement that OSes had to be signed by Apple to boot) and we still don't know for sure now. Apple has stated in their WWDC that they're still using SecureBoot, so it's likely that we can again just turn off Apple signature requirements in Recovery Mode and boot into ARM distros.

Whether or not that experience will be good is another thing entirely, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it a bitch and a half for driver devs to make the experience usable at all.

>- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines

True, but this isn't a strictly unsolvable limitation of AS and more like one of those teething pains you have to deal with, as it is the first-generation chip in an ISA shift. By this logic, you could say that make doesn't even work yet. Give it some time. In a few months I expect all of these quirks to be ironed out. Although, I suppose if you're concerned about containers it sounds like you want to be in the server market, not the laptop market.

>- only 2 thunderbolt ports, limited to 16GB RAM, no external gpu support/drivers, can't use nvidia or amd cards, can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static

See above about "give it some time".

>- no AAA gaming

I mean, if you're concerned about gaming, you shouldn't buy any Mac at all. Nor should you be in the laptop market, really. Although, this being said, the GPU in the new M1 is strong enough to be noted. In the Verge's benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running on the M1 MacBook Air at 38FPS at 1920x1200. Yes, it was at very low settings, but regardless – this is a playable framerate of a modern triple-A game, in a completely fanless ultrabook ... running through a JIT instruction set translation layer.

>- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

I disagree. I know we were talking about the M1 specifically, but Apple has shown that the future of ARM on desktop doesn't have to be as dismal as Windows made it out to be. Teething pains aside, the reported battery life and thermal performance on the new AS machines have been absurdly fantastic. I think, going down the road, we'll stop seeing x86 CPUs on all energy-minded machines like laptops entirely.