Apple M1 Chip: Is It All Great?
Apple just announced their new Macs with, for the first time, their own custom designer Apple M1 Chip. At the 2020 November event, they talked about their new Macs with the Silicon chip. If you have seen the event, you probably know that this is a very big leap for Apple Macs. But Apple didn’t tell anything about the downsides of this new chip.
In this article, I will go over all the benefits and some of the downsides that these amazing new chips from Apple have.
The benefits of Apple Silicon M1
So let's begin with the many great benefits Apple Silicone gives Mac users who are planning to buy one.
- More power: more performance per Watt
- More energy efficient: a big leap in use time
- Cheaper
- Run iOS and iPadOS app natively
These are the 3 big, main benefits of the new Apple Silicon M1 chip. The new chip is built into the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro (13'’), and the new Mac Mini.
More power and performance
During the event, Apple talked a lot about the speed leaps of the new chip. Apple stated that the new Silicon M1 gets up to 3.5x CPU performance and up to 6x GPU performance, but they didn’t tell which machine they were referring to. Most likely they were comparing to the last generation of their Macs.
In this image above, you can see all the benefits of the new Silicon M1 Chip from Apple.
Stunning battery life for MacBooks
The next thing they went over is the new battery life in the new MacBooks. This is a huge leap. This isn't seen in any notebook ever before. These numbers are just amazing for people who want to work on the go and don’t want to charge many times a day. As you can see in the image above, the battery of the MacBooks goes up to 20 hours for the MacBook Pro and up to 16 hours for the MacBook Air. For the Pro, this means a battery life that has been doubled and for the Air, this means the battery life is improved by 6 hours. You can imagine this is a huge deal for people who work on the go.
Price decrease for Mac Mini
What we all like is a decrease in the starting price! The Mac Mini has gotten a price decrease from a starting price of $799 to a new price of $699 for the new Silicon M1 Chip version. This means you get a $100 discount and much better performance. This is great because the Mac Mini doesn’t come with a display, keyboard, and mouse. So the $100 you save can be spent on these things. You can check it out on Apple.com here
Natively run iPadOS and iOS apps
The next benefit of these new Silicon chips is that they now can run iOS and iPadOS apps natively on the Mac. This is ideal if you like to play iPhone or iPad games on your Mac.
Downsides of Apple Silicon M1
With all these great benefits that Apple Silicon delivers, come some downsides. The new announces Silicon chip is far from perfect at this moment. And this is to be expected with a 1st gen product.
- No Windows support
- Not runs all programs natively
- No eGPU support
- Maximum of one external display
- RAM not upgradeable
Lack of any of these things can be a nightmare for some Mac users. Take for example people who need state of the art GPU performance. While the new Macs get a big leap in GPU performance, they still aren’t of the level of a full sizes GPU or eGPU. Sadly for these users, these new Macs don’t support them.
No Windows support
Also for people who like to run both macOS and Windows on their machine, this is far from ideal. Because of the new Silicon chip and its new architecture. Bootcamp isn’t supported for Windows, because Windows primarily runs on x86 chips (Intel and AMD). However, Parallel has announced they are working on virtualization for Windows on these new Macs. But virtualization can’t match the speed and performance of natively running the OS on your own system.
Unupdated programs
Speaking of running natively. The programs that you already love to use on your machine probably aren’t updated to run natively on the new Silicon Macs. This doesn’t mean that you aren’t able to run them at all. But this means you have to use the Apple-designed Rosetta 2 to run them. Apple told in their keynote that programs using Rosetta 2 will still run great on these new Macs. But it will still take some time for many companies to update their software to run natively on the new Macs.
Maximum of one external display
The new Macs also aren’t able to use more than one external display. So if you are used to using 2 or 3 monitors at your setup, these Macs will disappoint you, because you aren’t able to use all three monitors, but just one.
Choose wise, RAM is not upgradeable
When buying one of the new machines, you probably want to keep them for the next couple of years. Because of that, it is important to decide how much RAM you want in your machine, because with all the M1 models, this can’t be upgraded! For future-proofing, I suggest going with the 16GB model only. The 8GB model might seem enough at first. But looking in the future (3–5 years ahead), it might be a good choice to upgrade RAM at the moment of buying. And again, you can’t and will never be able to upgrade the RAM afterward, because it is baked into the M1 SOC.
