Anyone else feel that Apple nailed it with the new Apple Silicon machines?

[Moakesy]

During yesterday's announcement, I got fed up reading all the negative comments about what was being released. I for one felt they had exactly the right approach to this.

They've started with entry level machines, so we shouldn't be comparing to high end specs of the Intel options which are still available to order. We need to compare entry level Intel to entry level AS Macs. From my perspective..

• Entry level machines are typically bought on getting acceptable performance for the right price. They are less likely to be the power users. These new machines push battery life to new levels AND give a performance boost, both of which will appeal to this market.
• Whilst quicker Intel chips remain availablle if performance is your thing, you need to pay more dollar and accept a significant battery life drop.
• As the target market is not the Pro user, any compatibility issues with higher end 'pro' software can be worked on for the next 'x' months as things settle down, ready for the next phase of releases.
• Given the performance bump, the MB Air now becomes a feasible 2nd machine for those who can afford it. You have you max spec machine at home, but have the £999 MB Air as your travel machine that is good enough for being on the road.

If they'd gone the performance route first, I can only imagine the negative comments where people say they have good speed, but no App compatibility.

For me, they did it right. They can learn valuable lessons with the lower end machines so that when they get to the high end stuff, there is less pain to be had.

Thoughts?

 

[leman]

You are right on the money. This is the most reasonable marketing strategy I can think of. It revitalizes most popular Macs, sends out a string message, is economically meaningful and leaves the Pros time to prepare the transition.

 

[nothingtoseehere]

In forums like these, negative opinions are more frequently communicated than positive ones. Thank you @Moakesy for your thread! I share your view.

 

[Yebubbleman]

During yesterday's announcement, I got fed up reading all the negative comments about what was being released. I for one felt they had exactly the right approach to this.

They've started with entry level machines, so we shouldn't be comparing to high end specs of the Intel options which are still available to order. We need to compare entry level Intel to entry level AS Macs. From my perspective..

• Entry level machines are typically bought on getting acceptable performance for the right price. They are less likely to be the power users. These new machines push battery life to new levels AND give a performance boost, both of which will appeal to this market.
• Whilst quicker Intel chips remain availablle if performance is your thing, you need to pay more dollar and accept a significant battery life drop.
• As the target market is not the Pro user, any compatibility issues with higher end 'pro' software can be worked on for the next 'x' months as things settle down, ready for the next phase of releases.
• Given the performance bump, the MB Air now becomes a feasible 2nd machine for those who can afford it. You have you max spec machine at home, but have the £999 MB Air as your travel machine that is good enough for being on the road.

If they'd gone the performance route first, I can only imagine the negative comments where people say they have good speed, but no App compatibility.

For me, they did it right. They can learn valuable lessons with the lower end machines so that when they get to the high end stuff, there is less pain to be had.

Thoughts?

They made it so that there was no clear explanation as to why one would go for a 13" Pro with M1 when the higher-end Air with M1 has the same exact specs under the hood (with the only computing power difference seeming to be passive vs. active cooling). If the Air is just as good, but I'm only sacrificing 100 nits of brightness and the Touch Bar, why do I care to go Pro?

They also launched a Mac mini that had fewer Thunderbolt 3 ports than its direct predecessor, lacked the 10GbE upgrade option, and a fourth of the maximum RAM capacitiy of the Intel mini it replaced. That one was a bit of a mess.

Otherwise, I think they targeted the correct machines and if the performance compared to the 8th Gen Intel and 10th Gen Intel Y-series is what they say it is, they are good upgrades. Hell, the Air might actually be usable this time!

 

[leman]

Otherwise, I think they targeted the correct machines and if the performance compared to the 8th Gen Intel and 10th Gen Intel Y-series is what they say it is, they are good upgrades. Hell, the Air might actually be usable this time!

Let me put it like this: the Air is going to blow the new XPS 13" out of the water while being $500 cheaper

 

[bobmans]

Their strategy by starting at the low-end is great but they should have made it more clear that this chipset isn't a replacement for their mid/high-end chips.

People seem to not realise that the M1 is their entry-level low-end chipset and the first of a whole family of chipsets that will cover low to ultra-high end.
I see too many posts saying "limited to 16GB ram, 2 thunderbolt ports, 2TB SSD", the Macbooks that got replaced were also limited to that.
They're looking for a high-end machine but those do not have their AS chipset replacement released yet.

 

[lolling]

I have no problem with the hardware lineup, but for the launch event I was really hoping for more Craig and other geeky stuff to be the main. The whole event felt like a bunch of Emily in Paris telling me how good their MacBook was. More like a huawei marketing rather than an Apple one.

 

[kazmac]

Yes, I agree. Work from the ground up. Ordered an MBA as I need a laptop now. Couldn’t see spending more on an MBP for my usage (plus more powerful Macs are coming.) Happy to jump in on the transition.

Looking forward to the smaller iMac, and/or a more powerful Mac Mini too. Perhaps we might see a more powerful, redesigned Mini late in the transition that adds more ports, Ethernet back.

I think yesterday’s launch bodes well for the more powerful Macs. It will be interesting to see what comes next.

And, yes, the marketing jargon made me giggle (Unimportant gush: I adore the component assembly footage of these Macs. That was so cool and I keep watching those bits. Hope they do that with future announcements.) It will be fun to see how accurate the claims are with battery life and the integrated graphics (If I do not have to think about charging etc. that is great.)

I think if you knew the Mac line up, it was understood that these were the low tier Macs.

Seeing some posts complain about the two port MBP was puzzling when 1) It replaced the 8th gen MBP with two ports, 2) The more powerful Intel MBPs are still available, and, 3) Apple did say it would take two years for the transition to M (AS) chips to be completed.

Ah well.

Cannot wait to see where the Macs will go from here (and where these will take me creatively).

 

[dsmush]

The lineup seems very half-baked as if they rushed it out to just have something for this year IMO. Wouldn't like to be the test consumer for these.

 

[dingclancy23]

The lineup seems very half-baked as if they rushed it out to just have something for this year IMO. Wouldn't like to be the test consumer for these.

Half baked? They both increased and battery exponentially.. at the same time!

If you tell me that there is an Intel Late 2020 MacBook Air Update with the same specs but with a 15 hour battery life. It will be the best MacBook Air update ever!

Or if you tell me that an updated laptop has the same 10 hour battery but 3x the compute performance, it will also the best update ever!

There seems to some reality distortion field going on in the last 24 hours in a bad way. I think people think it is too good to be true so they are just rationalising stuff.

 

[matrix07]

The lineup seems very half-baked as if they rushed it out to just have something for this year IMO. Wouldn't like to be the test consumer for these.

Didn’t see that. Will order MBA as soon as it’s available.

 

[Cassandle]

Half-baked?! I'm not sure people are really grasping what Apple has achieved in an ENTRY-LEVEL chip.

 

[Spindel]

I've ordered a M1 Mac Mini, so guess what I answered in the poll

 

[Zazoh]

I think they did right.

To the average consumer they gave extra battery life, nearly double. That will keep those the highest selling models.

Most consumers are not asking for speed now, but in providing they appease the tech nerds who are on the fringe of needing more power and now don’t need to bump specs to the $2000+ range.

 

[DHagan4755]

We gotta wait to see how these perform in the real world. That said, if these entry level models show performance that matches or beats the higher end models the people bitching about how Apple messed up are gonna look silly. And thankfully we know soon. Like next week...

 

[Strangedream]

It's too early to say whether or not they "nailed it". Devs they interviewed seemed thrilled by the performance of the M1 but I'd need to put these to the test myself.

 

[kazmac]

Didn’t see that. Will order MBA as soon as it’s available.

The MBAs are available for purchase right now.

 

[ratherbebowling]

Seems sensible roll out, always thought they would converge iOS with OS. will wait for reviews but in any event will wait for 3rd gen of this new tech...

that said bought ipad pro a couple of years ago and the cpu is immense.

 

[MacModMachine]

I think they did right.

To the average consumer they gave extra battery life, nearly double. That will keep those the highest selling models.

Most consumers are not asking for speed now, but in providing they appease the tech nerds who are on the fringe of needing more power and now don’t need to bump specs to the $2000+ range.

for sure,

alot of people complaining about the memory being only 16gb max have no idea how ARM handles memory , how applications are made for ARM.

my job for the past year has been transitioning our packet capture appliances to m6 on ARM instances. we have been able to move from 256g intel m5 boxes down to 32gb arm m6 boxes and achieve the same performance capturing line rate from 40g interfaces.

the battery life should be much closer and consistent to the numbers they give. before intel cpu's had a very variable power envelope. so you could get 4 hours under load or 12 browsing web. this will be different. a full load on the cpu would only change battery life slightly. since the power draw components now become the screen and ssd. not the cpu.

 

[user1234]

I feel that they almost nailed it. If they had offered a 32 GB RAM option for the 13" MacBook Pro I think they would have nailed it. Then I and many others could have used one for portable needs. The CPU and GPU performance is great, but that doesn't help if there isn't enough RAM to load what has to be loaded. For me that would have been lots of big sampled instruments in Logic/Mainstage for example. Or the occasional processing of HDR panoramas in Lightroom.

Sure I get the argument that they are entry level machines but the MacBook Pro does have "Pro" in its name and is not slow by any means.

I do think they nailed the Air though. Fanless with better performance and battery life? Yes please.

 

[phobos]

alot of people complaining about the memory being only 16gb max have no idea how ARM handles memory , how applications are made for ARM.

my job for the past year has been transitioning our packet capture appliances to m6 on ARM instances. we have been able to move from 256g intel m5 boxes down to 32gb arm m6 boxes and achieve the same performance capturing line rate from 40g interfaces.

no matter how ARM handles memory it doesn't change the fact that some projects just need more memory. Doing 3D work is one of those fields. You can easily fill up 16gigs of memory with high poly counts, sub polygon displacement and big rendering resolutions. These things just gobble up memory. It's just a lot of data that need to be processed.

On top of that memory is now shared between the CPU and GPU which makes things even worse
I've easily had GPU renders taking 12 gigs of GPU memory which means the system now has to work with the 4 gigs left.

And we haven't even covered multitasking and other memory hungry apps like Photoshop or music.
No matter how you cut it 16GB of RAM is not enough in 2020. 10 years ago would be fine. But now no. It's not enough.

 

[matrix07]

The MBAs are available for purchase right now.

Not where I live sadly.

 

[nick9191]

I think they’re ok. I’m sure they won’t feel anything like Rev A machines, all of the designs are tried and tested, in addition they’ve been shipping SoC’s for years in iPads and iPhones. The software might be a bit buggy but that is solvable.

So I’m sure they will be reliable and probably run better than the Intel equivalents.

My gripe is the memory limit, the loss of SoDIMMS in the Mac Mini and the fact that they still ship with 8GB as standard. I’m not paying £200 just to get a usable amount of memory. That makes the Mac Mini basically £900. If it was £699 with 16GB or even 12GB, or if the upgrade to 16 was only £100, I might have ordered.

 

[DNichter]

Definitely the right strategy, but I was hoping for a redesign to show off the new chips. From a business perspective, I get why they wouldn't do this, but I still think it misses a good opportunity to market these machines as the future.

 

[krazzix]

You can see Tim Cooks supply chain focus here. The M1 chip alone is reason enough to make a great new Mac. So that is what they've done. The jump from M1 to M2 will be smaller, so the next time a redesign and new features will be the main focus.