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

This is pretty crazy to see, even if the full story isn't clear yet. A base level MacBook Air is taking the crown of the best MacBook Pro. Wow. SVP Johny Srouji and all of the Apple hardware + silicon team have been smashing it for the past many years.

For what it's worth, I have a fully specced out 16 inch MacBook Pro with the AMD Radeon Pro 5600m and even with that I'm regularly hitting 100% usage of the card, and not to mention the fan noise.

Looking forward to a version from Apple that is made for actual professionals, but I imagine these introductory M1 based devices are going to be great for the vast majority of people.

It's not just outperforming the MacBook Pro. It's also blowing away the current 2020 top-end iMac, which has a 10-core Intel i9.

And it's doing this while using more than an order of magnitude less power (10W vs. a TDP of 125W for that Intel part).

That's stunning.

While it sounds promising, I'm going to wait for some additional benchmarks and real world usage scenarios; factors like cooling, multi-process work, and of course suboptimal applications (browsers, Electron apps, stuff compiled for Intel) will be a big factor as well.

That said, it's promising and I'm really curious to see where this development will lead to in a few years' time.