THE ALL NEW M1 MACBOOK'S

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Apple's M1 Macbookls is officially here in the wild and has shown some major performance gains compared to the competition. Psychically nothing has changed the design, the form factor, the keyboard, the display, everything remains the same. The main changes all happen on the inside.

NOTE: In this blog, I will mainly focus on the new Macbooks and not the Mac Mini. But most of what is written here also goes for the Mac Mini.

HARDWARE

Both the Macbook Air and the Macbook Pro have the same chipset with a total of 8 cores which includes 4 High-Efficiency cores and 4 High-performance Core. But the Air at its base model gets only a 7 core GPU while the Pro gets an 8 core GPU and both the model's cap out at 16GB RAM, max storage of 2TB and all this is packed inside the chipset to reduce the amount of latency it takes for all these components to communicate with each other.

Except for the GPU, the Macbook Pro also has a fan to cool the CPU while the Macbook Air does not. Which allows the Macbook Pro to sustain higher performance for a longer period of time. The M1 Macbook Pro also consists of some minor features like studio-quality microphones.

Both the Macbooks support WiFi-6, but still, have the same old 720p webcam with better image processing to reduce the noise during the call, which is disappointing as the new iMacs have received a much better 1080p webcam. The I/O in both the Macbooks is also exactly the same with two-thunderbolt ports on one side and a headphone jack on the other. Both the Macbooks also only support 1 60Hz 6K display compared to two 4k displays from the previous intel models. 

The display of the Macbook Pro gets slightly brighter at 500 nits whereas the Macbook Air only gets bright to up to 400 nits, but both displays are tremendous and color accurate with the same Retina Display.

PERFORMANCE

The initial tests mainly included native Apple applications which ran smoothly without any lag or hic-up, but these apps are optimized for the new processor which is not the case for all the applications. many have not been optimized yet, for this Apple created a solution by emulating X86-64 apps using Rosetta 2, which has been custom made to modify the X86 code to make the apps run on the new Apple Silicon as smoothly as possible. Unlike Microsoft, Apple is emulating these applications in 64 bit, not 32 bit which is why a smoother experience is available on these Macs.

Even though it is emulation still many applications work smoothly and perfectly, but some applications do have some glitches and significant performance issues which includes Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, etc. but that was not the case in all applications Microsoft Word worked seamlessly. Even Microsoft Windows is no longer available to be used via Bootcamp as Microsoft has not optimized it for these new Mac's but can be achieved with other workarounds.

Adobe's Creative Cloud also showed a few compatibility issues with the Rosetta 2 emulation. Other enterprise software is also not currently supported by the M1 Macs and run under emulation with a few glitches and problems here and there.

BATTERY LIFE

The M1 MacBooks battery life is fantastic putting all the other Intel or even AMD equipped laptops to shame and more importantly since the Macbook Pro has a bigger battery it has a better battery life than that of the Macbook Air. 

All this is possible due to the new 5nm processor that Apple is using for this M1 Chips, which the company claims give the best performance per watt.

CONCLUSION

The new M1 Macbooks are incredible and the performance that they are offering is unparalleled.  But it is not perfect with only two ports and that too on the same side may create some trouble while using dongles.

The laptop runs super-fast and super-cool with extremely long battery life. The fanless design of the Macbook Air is something to be desired for, I mean editing a 4K video without hearing the fan or losing any performance was a dream come true. The speaker and Microphone quality is exceptional.

The bezels are quite large compared to the competition like the new Dell XPS series, the webcam is quite rubbish with only 720p quality which even though is paired with a new image processor is not exactly amazing, and the lack of Face-ID like the iPads or many Windows laptops. There is also no Windows 10 support via Bootcamp, and it can only run one display with its USB-C port.

In the end, I would like to conclude by saying that these M1 Macs as a first-generation product has taken the world by a storm and the two-year transition that Apple has speculated will only lead to great things in the future.

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