From Touch Bar to M2
The end of the road for Intel and a whole new world of Macs
BETWEEN 2015 AND 2019, it seemed to many of us that Apple was losing its way with its laptop designs; Apple was concentrating on the iPhone, iPad and the newly launched Apple Watch, with design chief Jony Ive reportedly becoming more distant and less hands–on before his departure in 2019. With hindsight, the 2015 Touch Bar seems like evidence of that, a case of something that could go into a laptop rather than should.
Late–2010s Mac laptops were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The third–gen MacBook Air got a Retina display in 2018 and all Mac laptops moved to Thunderbolt/USB–C ports and the divisive “butterfly” keyboard. Many reviews of the fourth–gen MacBook Pro suggested Apple had prioritised thinness over functionality and bemoaned its lack of ports.
If it seemed that Apple was in a holding pattern with its Mac laptops at the end of the 2010s, it was. While it made minor updates to keep the MacBooks current, Apple was secretly preparing the next generation of Macs. The 2020 M1 MacBook Pro didn’t look any different, but it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Intel was no longer inside. This Mac was M–powered.
INTEL ISN’T INSIDE
The M1 is a system–on–a–chip (SoC) that combines the CPU, graphic processor and memory on a single piece of silicon. That unified architecture means there’s no need to shuttle data between different components so it’s faster than traditional CPU–based systems, and with 16 billion transistors the M1 was the most powerful processor ever to appear in an Apple device.
The M1 and its successors use similar ARM–based architecture to that which we have already seen in the A–series systems inside iPhones and iPads. The M1 has an 8–core CPU and up to eight graphics cores (depending on which Mac it was in), and four of its CPU cores are high–performance ones. As with the iPhone, the mix of high performance and high–efficiency cores enables the M1 to adjust its performance and power usage depending on what you’re doing, so if you’re not pushing your Mac particularly hard it’s not using too much energy.
It all comes down to performance per watt, which tells you how much you get per watt of energy expended. When it was launched, the Apple silicon M1 had the highest performance per watt of any laptop chip, enabling it to outperform the Intel Core i9 in the 16–inch Intel MacBook Pro while doubling the battery life of the previous 13–inch MacBook Pro. You could now expect up to 20 hours from a MacBook Pro. To use Apple’s favourite superlative, that’s incredible.
In late 2021, Apple improved the M1 even further with its new 14- and 16–inch MacBook Pros. The M1 Pro chip inside these machines doubled the number of high performance cores from four to eight and the number of graphics cores from eight to 16. Plus, you could also configure it with more unified memory: up to 32GB compared to the M1’s 16GB. The MacBook Pros also offered better connectivity options: triple Thunderbolt/ USB 4, HDMI, SDXC and MagSafe.
The M1 Max went further still, delivering 32 GPU cores and up to 64GB of unified memory. According to Apple it’s 13 times faster in Final Cut Pro compared to the previous generation and consumes 40% less power than an equivalent pro laptop with a high–end GPU.
WHAT’S NEXT?
That brings us to 2022, and Apple has already upped its MacBook game with the introduction of M2 silicon in the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro — but that’s likely just the start. You can certainly expect to see M2 Pro and M2 Max variants appearing in the 14–inch and 16–inch MacBook Pro and maybe redesigned form factors too. With Apple moving on from the Jony Ive era, the company is once again offering a finely balanced combination of form and function — and that’s welcome news, whichever MacBook you buy.
The inclusion of Apple silicon has transformed the MacBook range