Apple today freed more Mac models from their Intel shackles, announcing significantly more powerful homegrown Apple Silicon chips in a total redesign of its high-end MacBook Pro notebook computers.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The new components, called the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, are 70% faster than its M1 predecessors, Apple said. It also unveiled a redesigned MacBook Pro, adding larger screens, MagSafe charging and better resolution.
Apple is aiming squarely at the high-end chips that Intel has provided for the MacBook Pro and other top-end Macs for about 15 years. Last year, Apple started transitioning its low-end Macs to its own M1 Apple Silicon chip. The new chips, however, are a bolder stroke, aiming at far outclassing Intel’s highest-performing products.
Graphics performance with the M1 Max is as much as four times faster than on the earlier M1 chip, while the M1 Pro is twice as fast, Apple said. It’s also 13 times faster than earlier Intel models.
The new chips are at the center of the most significant update to the MacBook Pro since 2016. The new model comes in 14.2-inch and 16.2-inch screen sizes, and — like the latest iPad Pro — the displays use mini-LED panels… Apple is restoring three ports that users missed after they were removed five years ago: the HDMI port, an SD card slot and MagSafe charging…
The Mac has remained a steady seller for Apple. The computer line pulled in almost $30 billion, or about 10% sales, in the last fiscal year. The Mac has also seen its market share grow. It held about 9% of the global personal-computer market in the third quarter, with shipments rising 10% from the period a year earlier, according to data from IDC.
MacDailyNews Take: Begone, ye dog-slow Mac-polluting Intel snails!
BTW, the M1 still runs rings around the Intel Macs they replaced. Even Apple’s “entry-level” M1 is an exceptional SoC!
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Now get on with that 30”-32” iMac with a M1X-M2 chip. I need to give back some shareholder money.
Hear! Hear! I’m right behind you!
Lots of good here, unfortunately, that ugly notch ruined it for me.
Great machines with two downsides:
1. The notch – just ridiculous. What a design flaw.
2. No LAN connection in power brick like in the iMac.
The prog downvoting bots are in full swing, St. Apple is not to be criticized for their pioneering implementation of fugly notches.
I will buying the 14 inch. The notch fits unobtrusively in the menu bar and does not affect videos or full screen mode. This is an upgrade with which other PCs will find it difficult to compete. Apple will hit all time sales records with these machines.
“The notch fits unobtrusively in the menu bar and does not affect videos or full screen mode.”
Precisely!
All notch bitch and moan complainers pay attention and understand the DIFFERENCE.
Ordered my 14 inch Pro minutes after the unusual, but well done and very impressive keynote ended. Just the facts, ma’am…
Overall, I’m not too terribly concerned about the Notch, because it could have been worse, and we did get back a lot of I/O ports that the {Cook/Ive} era took away from us, so I see it as a “more good than bad” trade-off.
Although from a UI designer standpoint though, if I was designing a full screen interface, I’d seriously considering using some visual tricks to hide it, even if it means sacrificing total screen real estate. For example, sacrifice the top ~1/4″ with a static black band that the Notch is “black on black” blends into instead of jutting out.
FWIW, I think that these machines will sell quite well, because:
a) big performance boost
b) not the first generation, but a year after first introduction … software is more mature
c) roughly 3-5 years after the defective keyboard debacle, so from a lifecycle standpoint, many of those customers are ripe for a new (and non-butterfly) laptop that has scissor switches again.