Don’t overestimate the Apple M1
Intro
Remember when the first iPhone came out? After Steve Jobs envisioned the publication of a touchscreen based gadget back in 2005 the first iPhone was released on June 2007. Before that historic event, people were using their dump phones for as long as they didn’t fall apart or where immersed in water. Later on and with the ongoing success of the iPhone and the following smartphone era, people began to hype for every new model even though their old phone was still doing pretty well.
As it seems, this hype lasts until today. It also includes Apples new M1 series of Macintosh computers.
I have always been a friend of efficiency and clever design. Speaking of cars, I would always any day prefer a silent but powerful car to one with a loud exhaust. It never seemed clever to me to have an engine that was loud thinking the power of that sound should rather channeled into the forward motion.
Back on subject
In getting back on the subject, when Apple released their new product line based on the M1 chip, I was equally thrilled as almost all Apple boys, though my excitement didn’t come out of nowhere. I had already realized how powerful Apples A-series of SoC (System-on-a-chip) was and bringing these to the Mac was not much of a surprise.
Having seen all these impressive benchmarks of the M1 chip was very appealing to me too, even more when you grasp the bigger picture: The currently available M1 equipped computers denote the entry line of computers yet they outperform machines that should at least be classified as mid-range if not even higher. All this performance seems to come out of nowhere — or almost. The M1 has a power dissipation of no more than around 35 Watts. Performancewise it beats other processors with a substantially bigger thermal design power.
I have had the luck of being able to equip employees with around 15 machines of the type MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and consequently had to set these machines up and was able see their performance. I did not take any benchmarks, I just tried to sense the performance by using them.
Real world perceptive benchmark ?
While the M1 MacBooks I could test were performing very well, and at least some of the software already had been ported to the M1 architecture leaving the Rosetta emulation behind, they did not outperform our other machines in a way that would have forced me to scratch my eyes. Word, Excel, Firefox, even Adobe Acrobat (running in Rosetta, unfortunately) would launch quickly. But its not instant and you don’t feel like its slamming windows on your face with its sheer speed. I am trying to say that these benchmarks may not translate into your average daily work, despite the existence of these synthetic benchmarks or timed application benchmarks that are hugely impressive.
The overall beauty of the new processor architecture lies not in the raw processing power, but in what you get from this intelligent hardware design: A well balanced, energy efficient thus silent computer with long lasting battery power. In a way, the gap between Macs and iOS devices has narrowed. You can now use your Macbook like an iPad: You don’t need to sit in the range of a power plug all day.
Yet your internet connection and your LAN speed remains the same. If your computer has to load 4GB of media data from a server into an InDesign document, your new M1 won’t be of any help. It will have to wait for the data just as any other CPU idling around when you work.
TL;DR
The conclusion is simple: The M1 computers from Apple are extremely powerful yet energy efficient computers that bring you the well known almost perfect haptic experience based on the materials used. They are powerful enough for almost every task you might plan to perform. But the subjectively perceived difference in performance is not going to blow you away — at least if you already have one of the recent computers. Since most of the time you are not going to depend on raw processing power but on network bottlenecks and your own speed of work, your 2019 MacBook Pro will do fine, if you can afford to charge it at least once a day.
If you need a new computer, get one. At any point, after your purchase, there will be a situation where your brand new computer will become the second newest model. Now, or anytime.
So I got myself a MacBook Pro 13" with a M1:-)
