Apple is finally making a shift from Intel to its custom-designed and built Silicon for Macs. During the ‘One More Thing’ event last night, the company announced a refresh to all its popular Macs including MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac mini with its in-house Silicon chipset. Besides the company also officially debut its next major update to macOS the Big Sur, which will roll out to all existing Macs starting November 12th.
Apple has always been in the chip designing business with its range of chips build for its iPhones, iPad and Apple Watches. It was only a matter of time when the company pushes the same to its last piece of products, the Mac line-up. Promising better performance and power efficiency, the company has officially launched its first Mac chip the ‘M1’.
The M1 chip is built on a 5-nanometer process with 16 billion transistors put on it. It combines the processor, I/O, security, and memory into a single system on a chip (SoC) delivering efficiency and performance. It also features unified memory architecture which unites its high-bandwidth, low-latency memory into a single pool within a custom package. The advantage here is that all the technologies built on the SoC can access the same data without copying it between multiple pools of memory. Theoretically, it makes the whole system faster and more responsive.
The Apple M1 chip has an 8-core CPU which contains four performance cores, which can run a single task as efficiently as possible while maximising performance and four efficiency cores to handle lighter workloads. The chip also packs an 8-core of discrete integrated graphics GPU which can execute nearly 25,000 threads at a time. Besides, the chip also comes with 16-core Neural Engine which is capable of executing a massive 11 trillion operations per second.
With all the above cutting-edge technologies embedded in the chip, the Apple M1 chip touted to offer incredible power efficiency. The company guarantees best battery life ever on a Mac which run this chip. According to companies own figures, the latest MacBook Pro 13 with M1 Chip promises up to 17 hours of battery life while browsing the web or up to 20 hours while watching videos.
Big Sur is the next-generation of Apple macOS which is engineered to take full advantage of all the capability and power of the M1 chip. It comes with a new and refreshed user interface along with new features and lots of performance improvements.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a bump up in the battery department and as we said earlier the battery life of the device can last up to 17 hours while browsing the web or up to 20 hours of video playback. It comes with up to 2.8x CPU performance, up to 5x graphics speed and up to 11x faster machine learning.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at Rs 1,22,990 for the 256GB SSD modal and Rs 1,42,900 for the 512GB SSD modal.
Coming to the 13-inch MacBook Air it has the new fan-less design and the M1 chip makes it 3.5x faster than earlier models. There is a massive battery efficiency compared to previous generations (and 98% of the PC laptops). The company promises up to 18 hours of battery-life while video playback or 15 hours of web browsing.
The new 13-inch MacBook Air starts at Rs 92,900 for the 256GB SSD modal and Rs 1,17,900 for the 512GB SSD modal.
Well, if you are looking for a true compact desktop that offers incredible performance, speedy graphics, superfast unified memory, and a powerful Neural Engine with the help of Apple’s M1 chip then lookout for the new Mac mini.
It too supports up to 2TB SSD storage and up to 16GB of unified memory. As for the ports, the device comes with two USB-A ports, two USB-C ports that support Thunderbolt/USB 4 support, DisplayPort, HDMI 2.0 port, Gigabit Ethernet port and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Price of Apple Mac mini with M1 chip in India starts at Rs 64,900 for the base 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD storage model. Whereas, the 512GB SSD model of the Mac mini is priced at Rs 84,900.
All the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini will be available for purchase starting November 17th directly through Apple Store Online in India.
This post was last modified on November 11, 2020 11:18 am