We should really have some bets what the next M chip will be called. I _personally_ think it will be called M1 and you'll have to check if you want M1 with 4+4 or 8+4 or 12+4 cores. And next year, when the chips all get 15-25% faster, those will be called M2, and M3 the year after that and so on.
I'm on my 3rd and final purchase of my new MacBook Pro and decided to stick with the M1. I originally purchased a MacBook Pro M1 and upgraded the RAM to 16GB and with a 500GB SSD but after a week of use I determined 500GB is too little of space. With Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop Elements installed, I realized I really don't have room for any other apps. So I returned it.
Hi,The M1 was introduced into the entry level machines, but do not confuse that with low end.
Apple's strategy was to avoid coming in with a completely new, in-house designed chip in their top end, pro-market machines. By introducing it in their entry level machines, if it fell short in any way then they had a safe and reasonable explanation. In reality, they exceeded even their own hopes and came in with something that amazed everyone.
The next machines to come out with new M chips (M1X, or M2 or whatever) will be better than these first ones of course, but that doesn't mean these are in any way a compromise.
As said above, unless you need a specific piece of non-AMR software on it, just be happy with your choice. Think of it as getting a bargain machine (in cost vs performance terms) compared to the previous generation. Apple over delivered, be happy that you get the benefit of it.
EDIT : Oh, and if you'd bought an Intel machine in September last year, I'd guarantee you'd be wishing you would have waited for a M1 !
This may also be issue with external drives and how Finder and Spotlight accesses them. And their format...
...and both Intel and AMD are lumbered by the need to support the complex x86 instruction set, which means a chunk of the die wasted on the x86 instruction decoder, space that ARM chips can put to better use... and they‘re also stuck producing a huge range of chips for an entire industry, whereas Apple can produce a few tailored chips designed specifically for Macs and iDevices.
The M1 is an ultra-low power chip for tablets, ultraportables and small-form-factor desktops. comparing it with an i9 is ridiculous. An M1 has 10W-15W TDP, 4 performance cores and 4 low-power cores. An i9 has 35-65 W TDP and 8 full-speed cores. Even the “low power” i9 uses twice as much power as an M1.
Thank you for your response! I will definitely toss those older sticks. I thinking I will return this M1 8gb memory for an available Intel with 16GB or request the M1 with 16GB.
I had a the last generation Intel i5 Air and replaced it with the 2020 M1 Air (pretty much exactly the same machine but with the Apple Silicon processor), both with 8 GB of RAM. The difference was night and day. The i5 would heat up and slow down pretty frequently and consume so much power that I could barely get 5-6 hours of it if I was lucky. The M1 never gets hot and I've rarely if ever managed to make it slow down much no matter what I'm doing. And it does so using much, much less power, to the point where I can easily get 12 hours or more out of a full battery.
I have the same 2 machines. The thermal pad mod helps my i5 alot. The battery life on the M1 is like 5 times as good.
Of course we will have to wait for the next offerings, but I believe you are correct. "Not in performance".
If the “M1X”, as rumoured, has something like double the number of CPU and GPU cores then it should be significantly faster on some workloads, particularly video, audio, image processing apps that are optimised for multi-threading & GPU-based comouting... at the expense of more power consumption & needing a larger laptop, or desktop, housing. C.f. the also-rumoured “M2” which will have new core designs and maybe a tweaked production process but will likely start out as a low-power configuration for MacBook Airs and iPads. The M1X is likely to be considerably faster than the M2 for many multithreaded “pro” applications. In time, there may be a “M2X” with more cores.
