I know exactly what drove you to buy your latest laptop. It was the processor’s high-performance cores. Oh, wait, it was the neural engine. Or the nanometer processes per second. Or the industry-leading performance per watt. Yes, it was definitely that.
Fine, I don’t know what most of that means, either. Yet at a virtual event out of Cupertino, Calif., on Tuesday, Apple executives made a very good case for why we should spend a little time thinking about our laptop’s chipset—at least once a decade or so.
Starting next week, the $999 MacBook Air and $1,299 MacBook Pro will begin shipping with Apple’s new M1 chip. That chip—which Apple spent a lot of time waxing on about—promises hours and hours of battery-life gains, much faster performance and the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps right on your Mac’s screen. The $699 Mac Mini desktop is getting the M1 update, too.
Apple’s latest MacOS Big Sur, which includes a makeover to make the operating system look more like iOS and iPadOS, will be available on Thursday for older Macs, and will ship on these systems, too.
While Apple has been making its own chips for iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches for over a decade, based on design from Arm Holdings, this is the first one it’s putting into a publicly available Mac. The company said in June it would transition its entire Mac lineup from Intel ’s chips to its own in-house silicon over the next two years.
