Only worth upgrading if you are a professional video editor or programming at the bleeding edge where shaving 10-20min off a task 3-4 times per day adds up. Like exporting or running heavy scripts or compiling code.
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Five Years of Apple Silicon: M1 to M5 Performance Comparison
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MBP 2012 550 1100
M1 2350 8600
M5 4300 18000
M4 Max 4000 26100
M3 Ultra 3200 27700
I'm still rocking my 2018 11in iPad Pro! iPadOS 26 has brought it new life 😆 I feel like I'm still in a pretty good place for a little while. I hope..
sooo barely any faster...jk 😄. Upgraded the wifi to AC, replaced the battery 2x, replaced the thermal compound and installed macOS Sequoia via OpenCore. She still works great. Holding out for a MBP M6 Max.
Code:MBP 2012 550 1100 M1 2350 8600 M5 4300 18000 M4 Max 4000 26100 M3 Ultra 3200 27700
I agree. My M1 MBA with only 8GB ram is still more than adequate for the light duty "sofa" laptop that I use it for. The battery is showing its age which will eventually be the reason I end up replacing it.
Core 2 duo is already on the edge I guess. My MBP is quad core i7/16/500 SSD. Still quite powerfull for normal stuff. Of course noisy as fans get loud when doing anything more intense.
But maybe even your machine you can install unsupported Sequia with OpenCorePatcher. You need enough RAM to be usable.
I have the 14" M1 Max MBP - I've never owned a Mac this long before, they just can't give me a good enough reason to upgrade as its such a beast I love it. I had a 2019 i9 MBP before, thing was a bloody griddle!
Cherry picking (small selection of metrics) vs a bigger test suite. I'd definitely take Apple's claim with a kg of salt, like when they claimed the power pc macs were faster than Intel. Which was true only for a very small, but heavily shown, features.
Love my M1 Max, still screams through everything I ask of it. The only time I ever hear the fans is when using 100% of the CPU for calculations like mining crypto. Nothing else ever stresses it enough for them to ramp up at all.
Where on earth did you pluck those 5x faster numbers from? And then you list a series of benchmarks showing more accurately 2x performance increase M1 to M5.
You should take some journalistic responsibility, people could be spending their hard earned based on that 5x nonsense number.
Other than that 😁
You should take some journalistic responsibility, people could be spending their hard earned based on that 5x nonsense number.
Other than that 😁
This article would have been better written if it includes performance data from all 5 generations of the chip, possibly in a table and a few graphs. Let folks see how this new technology has performed over time.
Absolutely and a M1 iPad Pro with 16GB will be a capable machine unit the metaphorical wheels fly off, the 8GB versions already feel dated. That's why I don't think anyone should buy an older iPad Pro today if they "need" a Pro model unless they find a used 16GB model for a good price or just get the new12GB base iPad Pros.
a mere 50% more performance approximately, not more. A just ok increase over 5 years.
It would be an interesting follow-up article to compare the AS improvements (CPU / GPU, AI, 3D rendering, code compilation, etc.) to Intel, AMD offerings. Would be interesting to see if AS is keeping pace, pulling ahead, falling behind compared to the x86 world.
The M1 MBA was the best of all AS MBA because it had the best battery life of all of them. Apple in its M2 redesign, made sure to reduce the MBA to below the longevity of the MBP for reasons of product categorisation. The M2 was also less efficiency than the M1.
From intel to apple silicon, the big jump in performance was in large part directly related to the process, going from 13-15 nm intel to 5nm TSMC, that was a HUGE jump. Somehow this was barely unnoticed as the reason for the performance increase at that time. The other reason for the performance jump was the use of integrated application specific circuits on the chip itself, like video coding/decoding. This provided a huge boost in battery longevity and performance.
All in all after 5 years we can say that Apple struggled to keep increasing the performance as it only doubled in 5 years. And 50% of that increase is simply due to the increased clock speed (itself allowed by the smaller process).
From this we can conclude that the M1 MBA will still enjoy another 5 years of perfect usability and Apple will have to think very hard how to kill it in order to renew sales...
Typed on an M1 MBA.
From intel to apple silicon, the big jump in performance was in large part directly related to the process, going from 13-15 nm intel to 5nm TSMC, that was a HUGE jump. Somehow this was barely unnoticed as the reason for the performance increase at that time. The other reason for the performance jump was the use of integrated application specific circuits on the chip itself, like video coding/decoding. This provided a huge boost in battery longevity and performance.
All in all after 5 years we can say that Apple struggled to keep increasing the performance as it only doubled in 5 years. And 50% of that increase is simply due to the increased clock speed (itself allowed by the smaller process).
From this we can conclude that the M1 MBA will still enjoy another 5 years of perfect usability and Apple will have to think very hard how to kill it in order to renew sales...
Typed on an M1 MBA.