Today, Nov. 10, 2020, Apple announced three new models of Macs with Apple Silicon.
- Macbook Air (13 inch, base price $999)
- Macbook Pro (13 inch, base price $1299)
- Mac mini (base price $699)
All of them have the new M1 chip that integrates CPU, GPU and neural engine among with other features. The base models have 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD.
Customization options are few due to its integrated chip design. Upgrading RAM to 16GB (max) costs $200 and storage is about $400/TB up to 2TB.
There are more details on specs on other sites, so I’ll focus on writing just my opinions about them.
Apple seemed to focus on how “lazy” they can be on hardware this time. They focused on designing a minimum number (1!) of chips while trying to make a product lineup that can access the largest number of customers. So, it makes sense that they focused on the ‘entry’ models of their products. Also, they reduced the effort by reusing the exterior designs of the existing products. Probably they would still have extra space inside due to integrating functions to M1 chip and removing a fan (Air) so that space might have been filled with extra battery. (We’ll see when iFixit tear it down next week.) It is possible that they have been designing recent products compatible with both previous logic boards and the board for M1.
Where did they put the resources that they saved in hardware design? My guess is that they went to software that needs to be changed radically because of the switch of the CPU architecture. Intel CPUs are in the x86 family and M1 is in the ARM family that has a different instruction set. I don’t know how much effort is necessary to maintain perfect backward compatibility at a reasonable speed, but it won’t sell well if many problems arise upon release of these Macs. I think it is reasonable to be very cautious about this.
It will ultimately depend on preferences which one you should buy, but it should be noted that they are all using the same chip. The only possibility for performance difference is the thermal capability of Air that went fanless this time. If thermal throttling occurs, it may sacrifice some performance during intensive tasks. It is possible that fanless design is just fine because M1 will be very power efficient. (Based on A14’s 6W Thermal Design Power (TDP), I expect M1 TDP to be ~10W.) Other than that, they are all identical, so you can just choose based on your use cases. Laptops come with a complete set of interfaces, so they are more expensive than mini. The main features that make Pro different are the fan, touch bar, and microphone array. If you don’t care, Air is better and you save $300.
The differences between A14 Bionic and M1 are just the number of high-performance cores (2 to 4) and GPU cores (4 to 8). Several days before this event, there was a leaked Geekbench 5 score of a chip called A14X (non-existing). The score was ~7000. The score of A14 was ~4000 and if you think that the high-performance cores are doubled but the high-efficiency cores are the same (4), this seems a reasonable score for M1. This score is close to Ryzen 7 4800HS or Core-i7 10875H that are relatively high-end mobile processors (not the highest, though) and, by itself, it is not amazing yet. However, if the power necessary to do the calculation is expected to be 1/3 or 1/4, this suddenly becomes the king in performance/watt. Probably the closest competition is Ryzen 4800U which already has almost insane perf/watt with a score of ~6000 and 15W TDP. M1 well outperform this, and it sounds more insane. These numbers matter when you increase the core count further for more powerful desktops, so I want proper measurements to be done.
For scientific computing, this computer should be pretty good hardware. However, the software may not be ARM native at the beginning, and your favorite one may not even work, so it might be wiser to buy after making sure what you want to use works on these machines. These computers can replace pretty much every computer but high-end desktops, so if you want to do the very extensive computation, probably it’s better to wait until iMacs or Mac Pros that are coming later.
For me, if the computer can do neural network training using Neural Engine cores with Tensorflow or PyTorch, I’d think about buying one for the World Making project. Even in that case, probably waiting for a more powerful iMac might be better. At least I’d like to see what happens over the next few weeks. This is a very exciting year for computing.
