The fifth anniversary of Apple silicon marks a significant milestone, with the M1 chip’s debut this month (November 10, 2020), kickstarting a transformative era for Macs. The anniversary has been noted by Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg “Joz” Joswiak via X.
Hard to believe it’s been five years since Apple silicon transformed the Mac. The performance, battery life, new designs, amazing features, and user creativity it unlocked have been remarkable. The impact has been profound, and the Mac has never been better!
MacDailyNews Take: Apple has since released five generations of chips, with the M5 unveiled last month in the 14-inch MacBook Pro, showcasing dramatic improvements in CPU, GPU, and AI performance. The transition from hot, inefficient Intel chips to state-of-the-art Apple Silicon blessedly concluded in June 2023, when Apple discontinued the last Intel-handicapped Mac Pro, fully committing to its in-house chips. Mac sales have surged by nearly one-third over the past five years, averaging $33.7 billion annually, fueled by new designs and operating system advancements.
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I still use one of those initial M1 Macs, 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s the best Mac I’ve ever owned. I got a great deal on a 16GB/1TB config toward the end of its run before M2 came out. I use it completely unplugged most of the time, like my iPad, because battery lasts so long per charge. And battery still strong for same reason, low number of accumulated charge cycles (compared to previous Intel MacBook), because battery lasts much longer per charge cycle. I could probably keep using it a few more years, but I’m looking to upgrade.
I have the same model. The MX based laptops do not get hot like the Intel based laptops. Heat is the biggest killer of batteries, which is a key reason for the MX laptop batteries lasting much longer.
Apple, which never really teamed with NVIDIA on anything substantial, now has a full line of sealed consumer computers with integrated graphics, but not a single true professional-level computer with a GPU that can keep up with the state of the art workstations.
Apple will struggle to compete in the emerging AI, machine learning, LLM, and big data crunching fields if it continues to ignore the reality: A Mac Pro needs to be fully upgradeable with the latest and best CPU and GPU offerings on the planet.
To paraphrase Jobs: What is the Mac Pro supposed to do? Why doesn’t it do it?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Of course we all know why this is so. Apple firmly believes today that it’s highest profitability products are all portable. Despite the reality that many consumers would prefer to keep their digital lives secure with the Mac as the center of their digital lives (as opposed to renting storage on a cloud of unknown security level) … Apple has decided to keep pushing a hodgepodge of online services that is rents from its competition AWS, Azure, and Alphabet instead of continuing to offer clearly to users how to avoid the cloud and rely instead on local data hosting with Macs and personally owned NAS. Instead of thinking different, Apple has basically just become another flavor of the big tech model where consumers are just the source of rental fees.
A real Mac Pro upgradeable workstation and a new generation of real Airport NAS would convince me that Apple still gets it. But ever since the iPhone, we all know Apple has made the Mac a second class citizen inside its walled garden. Now don’t you want to subscribe to more stuff from your disposable touchscreen device?