Today Apple their One More Thing event held an event where they announced the first Apple Silicon Macs. If you’re wondering what that means, basically in June at their developer’s conference WWDC they announced that they’re moving Macs onto their in-house chips.
The Chips
Apple is calling the first Apple Silicon chip M1. M1 isn’t just a CPU, it’s what is called a System on a chip (SOC) which means that the processor, I/O, T2 security chip and, RAM integrated into one. It being a SOC would mean that speeds would increase there’s not a bus between those components, which means that it has chip-level memory access. The M1 has 8 core, 4 high-performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores which Apple claims are each as fast as the “current-generation, dual-core MacBook Air at much lower power”.
Hardware
The new MacBook Air obliviously has the new M1 chip. It starts with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. Also, it has a fanless design, an “18-hour” battery life and, Apple’s image processing on the webcam (the webcam is still just 720p). Next, they announced that they also announced an upgraded Mac Mini (which has a fan). The Mini gets Apple’s neural engine chip. I/O wise it has 2 Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, 2 USB-A ports, Ethernet, HDMI 2.0 and, a headphone jack. Lastly, they announced the upgraded MacBook Pro but the only differences between the Air and Pro are that the Pro has a screen with higher peak brightness, a larger battery, Touch ID and the TouchBar. All models include except the lowest tier Air have P3 wide colour, 8-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine and, the Force Touch trackpad. The lowest tier Air has all of that but a 7 core GPU
Pricing and Availability
Everything can be preordered now and are releasing next Tuesday:
- MacBook Air with M1 – $999
- Mac Mini – $699
- MacBook Pro – $1299
Update 7:06 PM: The new MacBook Pros only have 2 USB-C port
Presentation Charts
Video Of Presentation
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