New MacBook Air, 13-Inch MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini With M1 Chip Available to Order, Launch Next Week

[Tesix2]

On the laptop side it seems the pro is basically a waste. Right? It's got two hours more battery in exchange of being heavier and having a touch bar. Everything else is the same.

Did I miss something?

It's got 'Pro' in the name? You're not a Professional unless you have a Pro.
If Apple hadn't released a Pro, lots of people would have squealed 'what about us special Pro users, who are better than normal people?'.

 

[kemal]

I heard something about the power of M1 being unleashed in the mini. The cooling system behind it. I suppose this implies the M1 is throttled in the Air?

 

[bigtomato]

Mac mini is cheaper which is nice but wondering how fast standard 256 SSD is? too bad they don't publish these specs

 

[jdiamond]

I agree in terms of entry-level Macbook Air, but in terms of the Macbook Pro and Mac Mini, 16 is pretty sad. I would expect 32GB if not 64GB especially with the MacMini.

Yeah if true, that's horrible. I already have 64GB in my old Mac Mini. I have to assume Apple hasn't developed support for large DRAM yet but will next year with the Pro computers.

 

[Deinocheirus]

These look great, was very very interested in replacing my 2012 Mac mini, but then I see max 16GB of RAM, WTF, this is 2020, how is any machine limited to that, what a joke Apple.

Maybe take stock for a second and realize Apple Silicon doesn't need that much RAM. Hell the iPad Pro has 6 GB of RAM.

 

[FoxMcCloud]

No design updates, even on the mini? It’s been the same for nearly 10 years. I expected it to at least go in to the body of the ATV.
Oh well maybe once they fully drop intel so they don’t have to manufacture different shells I guess.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Not sure why everyone is disappointed at these Mac. These are all lower ends Macs. Not to defend apple but this is a good batch to update. Remember there are on uncharted territory here. There are limitations with the chips hence only 2 TB ports and 16gb of ram caps. To compensate they made the storage faster. Remember these are not "Pro" machines, despite getting tremendous performance boost. I think the iMac, and higher MBP with have M1X processor which would be the next class up. They do this with the iPads and iPad pros. We also have to look at 4 think, Storage speed, CPU, GPU, and Ram. Collectively they = performance. we can't just look at specs. Its about real world performance. Considering how quickly the M1 can process, Ram might be used differently in the sense that it's not a resource hog.

Great post

They attacked where they should have and hit the popular models as well as the ones that can most stand to shed Intel and get big gains straight away.

 

[sfwalter]

Sadly 1/2 the expansion ports.

 

[saxofunk]

What use case could you possibly need more than 16gb on an entry level macbook pro, or the low powered but energy efficientm acbook air?

I mean, they are advertising/offering Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro on these machines...

A 13" MacBook Pro used to be enough to run my mobile recording rig, but 16GB isn't moving forward or increasing my track/plugin counts. The 13" used to be able to be respectably equipped as a smaller form factor pro machine w/o a discrete GPU, now that is gone and it's just a thicker MacBook Air for all intents.

 

[x-evil-x]

My god what a boring event for being Mac, lots of bla bla, a massive opportunity to deliver fully redesigned macs with truly bumped hardware. Same old Apple tricks with Timmy over and over.

You want a flying spaceship for a chip update?

 

[applicious84]

Because no one wants such a ridiculous thing. There is an iPad already.

Who wanted a touch bar?

 

[otternonsense]

That's.. it? That's all they had to show? What a letdown upon letdowns

 

[mattopotamus]

Looks like a joke to me unless you have basic needs. Take these “5x faster than best selling laptop” with a grain of salt. Say what you want to say. No need to intentionally mislead.

These are definitely aimed at average non techie users. The whole presentation was nauseating to be honest.

You also realize they followed up with 2.8X, etc. faster than current Pros, etc. I agree the PC comparisons were useless, but when they compared them to the current pros, my ears perked up. The GPU upgrades were 5X+ better than current Macs.

Eg, the base 13" Pro has a 2.8X faster CPU and 5X the performance on the GPU. They compared the M1 to an i7 intel chip with 16gb RAM, which was what? $400 upgrade on the intel side?

 

[Dammit Cubs]

A fan so it can turbo all day, a much better screen and sound system, more battery life. But the main points are the screen and fan.

Much better screen is a great exaggeration. only difference is 100 nits.

I guess we will see once the official reviews are out.

 

[jdiamond]

OK, I checked online - they'd only currently replaced the lowest end Macbook Pros. Need to wait for the higher end models. So the 2 port / 2 TB limitations will hopefully disappear.

 

[adamw]

These look great, was very very interested in replacing my 2012 Mac mini, but then I see max 16GB of RAM, WTF, this is 2020, how is any machine limited to that, what a joke Apple.

The RAM is built inside the Apple Silicon M1 chip. There is no RAM expansion as there is no eternal RAM outside the M1 Chip. Should make for much faster RAM access speeds. You either order a Mac Mini with 8GB or 16GB of RAM inside the M1 Chip.

 

[kemal]

It's super strange that all of the new models are storage capped at 512GB.

I see 2TB with the mini.

 

[applicious84]

Macs market themselves to power users, power users don't use touch screen.

Got it. Because power users wanted a touch bar though?

 

[x-evil-x]

Anybody with the mac mini over the last few years just dropped a few hundred dollars in resale value.

 

[mariusignorello]

This should be considered a good thing. The old days of never having enough RAM no matter how much you have is a bad trend that needs to end.

The conversation with Apple Silicon should shift to appreciating how little RAM is needed to still see peak performance.

Yep. I think people, specifically actual pro users will be confused and put-off for a while until the reviews and proof of performance becomes widely known.

 

[WhiteHawk]

Did they mention clock speeds? Working today.

Clock speeds haven’t really mattered for years, it’s how many instructions per clock that’s important, so if you are trying to compare them that way to the Intel chips, that’s not the way to do it.

 

[JosephAW]

I think my mid-2012 MBP just went up in value

 

[Deinocheirus]

These aren’t the new Macs you’ve been looking for!

With the ability to run iOS apps natively, you want to be able to touch the screen at least occasionally (until your arm wants to fall off). A redefinition of the Mac input scheme is still necessary.

Which takes approximately 20 seconds, which is why the entire concept is failed and worthless. Not happening.

 

[deevey]

Its been improved according to the information in the keynote. But it's still 720p whatever way they tried to spin it.

I'll take decent 720p over crappy 1080p anyday.

A decent 1080p camera would take up quite lot of space. Most conference calls end up pixelated with a ton of dropped frames at the best of times anyhow.

They should bring back an external iSight with 4k - would be a nice addition for streamers and vloggers.

 

[Deinocheirus]

Clock speeds haven’t really mattered for years, it’s how many instructions per clock that’s important, so if you are trying to compare them that way to the Intel chips, that’s not the way to do it.

Says the person complaining about the amount of RAM.