Apple Silicon

Tom Morris

Tom Morris

Power User
Well the ball has dropped with Apple announcing three new Macs with their own M1 Chip available Nov 17th. The three new machines for 2020 are MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13" and Mac Mini. Naturally with the move there will be hiccups but I for one look forward to seeing it play out. Being able to run Mac OS and IOS applications on one device sounds interesting. Whats your opinion on the move?
 
Intel to ARM. It would interesting to see how running older software through some compatibility layer will work.

So think the cost of used 16" MBPs will go up or down?
 
They mumbled it was 4x's more efficient at loading stuff in Logic Pro.
Realize this is their entry CPU for Mac shared across 3 devices.
Max 16 GB ram, 20 hrs battery life is insane.
No fan needed in the Air.
They also mentioned from many developers that to make their software universal, some were saying it took 2hrs, others said it took a day to port.
remains to be seen, but next week we will likely see some machines doing audio work that will show hopefully real performance gains.
All the plugin developers will need to give it a once over.
 
Last edited:
seclusion said:
No fan needed in the Air.
Click to expand...
I found it odd the Air has no fan, but the Mini has a pretty big (but slow spinning) fan. Same chip. I wonder if the Air will have it's clock speeds severely throttled as a result? Curious, for certain.

Glad I held off buying Airs for the kids for school! They can be the test cases for M1-based Apple stuff in our house in a few weeks.
 
Nothing larger than 13" ... meh. Especially for video and music production - I don't always sit at my workstation with a 2nd monitor and prefer more real estate. Would love to see them release a Pro w/ the same specs but a 15 or 16"
 
Ah so its announced, nice. I just got a 2020 27' imac for the user expandable ram. I doubt that will exist much if at all going forward.

I guess it will be next gen ipads etc to see M1?
 
jefferski said:
Nothing larger than 13" ... meh. Especially for video and music production - I don't always sit at my workstation with a 2nd monitor and prefer more real estate. Would love to see them release a Pro w/ the same specs but a 15 or 16"
Click to expand...
It’s their first launch, upgrading their most popular products initially. I’m sure we’ll see a 16” in January or maybe March.
 
With the porting of software, Apple has obviously been through this once before when they switched from PowerPC to Intel. That’s when they developed Rosetta to run PowerPC apps on Intel (now they have Rosetta 2 to do the same thing to the M1). I’ve been a Mac user since about 2000 so went through this back then. The apps running under Rosetta actually worked surprisingly well. They where just slower but I can‘t remember them crashing any more than before. Most apps ported really quickly and the big ones like Office and Photoshop took a few years. Apple kept Rosetta support in the OS for a few years after the last of the big ones ported over and from memory I only had a couple of utilities I used that never got updated and I had to find new alternatives for, so I’m expecting the same thing now. Everything will be faster, run cooler, better battery life, and Apple won’t be forced to stick to Intels development timeline, Rosetta 2 is going to run existing apps good enough... I think this is going to be great once we’re through the initial pain of switching.
 
Yeah, that's the downside - commercial software devs allocate resources in accordance to sales, and there won't be much sales on Apple Silicon for quite a while. Catch 22, same as last time. To be fair, I do think the transition will happen a lot faster this time, simply because there are a lot more Mac users out there, and because there's now the App Store, which reduces piracy.
 
The only thing holding me back the past few years is old software. Cant run Adobe CS suite on newer systems because of moving the Mac OS to 64 bit so I can't even install Catalina on that machine, 2013 27" iMac stuck on Mojave. Not that I use Photoshop or Illustrator often but I really don't care to pay $50 a month to dabble so guess I will have to hold onto the old girl. Newest machine I have that can run Big Sur is a 2015 12" MacBook (Living room, kitchen, bill paying machine. Tempted to sell that and try a MacBook Air again just to be up to date with one machine. My music computer is a 2012 MacBook pro 15" CD thick model for AxeEdit and my music tools, also stuck on Mojave. Curious to see how much system ram these new models really need to function well. 8GB upgradable to 16 for $200 but iPhone and iPad have never had a system ram option so eager to see how this works. Would it be a non issue for IOS apps but more needed for Mac OS apps? Time will tell.

A little bird told me Fractal has a test Apple silicone Mac Mini in house for testing their software. Wooooot!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom