New Apple Silicon Macs: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini

[Celeri]

Doubt it also. Making a dual product line adds substantial design work and logistics costs, with an effect of slowing down the transition, since you have to support both products for the same time range.

Apple does not like to mix things up, and migrations periods have always been in "binary" mode : once a product line gets the new architecture, the other one is dropped : it was like this in the 68k-PPC transition as well as the PPC-intel transition.

Contrary to Microsoft which favors long-term support of legacy architecture, Apple likes making transition easy and swift (through seamless emulation especially), but also radical. Remember Rosetta, which ran so well to emulate PPC code ? It was supported only 5 years and a half, which is roughly a Mac's support period.

 

[Micalllee]

Doubt it also. Making a dual product line adds substantial design work and logistics costs, with an effect of slowing down the transition, since you have to support both products for the same time range.

Apple does not like to mix things up, and migrations periods have always been in "binary" mode : once a product line gets the new architecture, the other one is dropped : it was like this in the 68k-PPC transition as well as the PPC-intel transition.

Contrary to Microsoft which favors long-term support of legacy architecture, Apple likes making transition easy and swift (through seamless emulation especially), but also radical. Remember Rosetta, which ran so well to emulate PPC code ? It was supported only 5 years and a half, which is roughly a Mac's support period.

I'm not disagreeing with your premise, but Rosetta was a technology licensed from another company, which affected its support period.

 

[nicksoph]

Whilst ARM is behind Intel on a core by core basis at the top end, Apple have specific hardware for the things that content creators need and the M1 SoC is a cheaper option that for the most part brings a better experience. The average computer user wouldn't notice the benefit in getting a very powerful machine to run most desktop apps, what other reason might Apple have for keeping Intel chips? My guess is that they wont produce any new Intel machines but if they do it will be an updated version of the MacPro with as few changes needed to get it working on the very latest Intel chips for their power users who need the AMD GPU's and to reassure others that they continue to support Intel.

How does the PC market react to the M1 (and how quickly)? It might be worth comparing Microsoft to Apple as they both make the OS but I've never been impressed with MS hardware and wonder if they are up to the task of making an SoC that competes with the M1. If it's not MS that makes the new SoC, who can? And importantly can they work with MS so the OS takes advantage of the particular features on the SoC?

I suspect that Apple will be looking to expand their base with cheaper products and that the PC market is going to lose market share until some new hardware standard emerges because without that standard it will be more expensive to buy a PC with similar performance to a Mac.

 

[Lundli]

Picked up a MacBook Air yesterday and I must say I'm impressed so far, either my i9 sucks or it really is that good

 

[moshes]

You may want to buy the Apple gear. Here is a Black Friday "Best Price" list from Ars Technica.

The best Apple deals of Black Friday 2020

Including price drops on new M1 Macs, AirPods Pro, and Apple Watch Series 6.

arstechnica.com

Discount on Apple Mac Mini to $639 !

 

[Whiteman]

Hi! new here! As a Mac user my modest opinion is that after all it feels good to have again different hardware than PC , like when cpu were G3 G4 G5, back then felt intel were expensive toys compared to a G4 ! So maybe it's going to be cool again to have real proprietary apple hardware and not a PC branded with a bitten apple! That's why I love hackintosh best thing ever made after a G5!

 

[nicksoph]

Interesting the discounts seem only to be on the 8GB models.

 

[pastrychef]

Interesting the discounts seem only to be on the 8GB models.

I don't know how Apple is doing it, but it seems 8GB is pretty good on these M1 Macs...

 

[nicksoph]

I don't know how Apple is doing it, but it seems 8GB is pretty good on these M1 Macs...

Suspect that Apple thought that too and are selling more of the 16GB models than expected but I have seen some reports of machines reporting they have run out of (Unified) "Application Memory' on the 8gb but they did have to try quite hard.

Also interesting is that lots of reviews are suggesting that for most use scenarios the fans on the pro never come on so the Air can save 300 ($ or £) and rarely notice the throttling.

 

[nicksoph]

16/256GB MacBookPro was expected 15th Dec. Got mail from Apple overnight, now expected delivery 3rd Dec.