Okay so I watched the whole event today. Have to say I was mightily impressed.
I certainly didn't see that coming, especially with the new M1 Max and M1 Pro.
The specs and performance they are touting are astonishing to say the least -
you literally have the power of a mighty new Mac Pro now on your laptop! With
that kind of performance and specs, it's no wonder. I kind of expect people are
going to upgrade their systems this time. And this time it may not have an Intel
chip inside.
This announcement is surely a bombshell for sure. A bombshell for the PC industry,
a wake up call. Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, Qualcomm, Xylinx - they're all affected.
By what exactly? By the power efficiency of the new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. And it
was all started by Intel (ironically) because they chose to sit on their laurels when
Skylake was still king. Had they made efforts to make the system and main core
performance boosts like AMD did with 7nm they wouldn't be where they are today.
That said, I get a feeling with the announcement that Intel is no longer welcome
on the Apple campus despite Intels' insistence they want to 'win back' Apples trust
and business. Now that the Thunderbolt chip is integrated into the M1 PRO, it's
gonna be tricky for them to navigate their relationship with Apple.
There are probably only 3 models now that have an Intel chip on them - the i5 Mac
Mini, the 27" i9 iMac and the Xeon Mac Pro. Unless Intel has something else special
up their sleeve, Apple is likely to be sticking to their own designs for the near future.
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https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/18/apple-macbook-pro-lineup-no-intel-chips/
That said, I think Apple is doing a tremendous job with the pricing - a Macbook
Pro 14" is the cost of a single Nvidia RTX 3080 gpu!. Considering the worldwide chip
shortage going on at the moment, you're getting a lot of computing power for the money.
That said, I think a hackintosh setup is still a great option because Apple's M1 series
can't do native x86 and certainly not x86 multiboot nor user system drive/PCIe upgrades.
In building our hackintoshes I think we now also have new product benchmarks to
consider - pricing and system efficiency or P/P ratio. Looking at this, I think AMD
Ryzens are a worthy contender as an alternative to the rather expensive Macbook Pros.