The M1-powered MacBook Air has been one of the most interesting Apple products in a long time, and that says a lot when you’re talking about a company that literally creates new industries every few years (think Apple Watch, AirPods, etc.). And the irony is that such phenomenal innovation has come out of a product that was thought to be on the downside of the productivity curve. When people think about the most exciting tech products, they think of smartphones, wearables and even cars now. They do not think about computers.

Sometimes they actually live up to the hype…

I believe it was Adam Lashinsky who once wrote, “the problem with Apple is that they create a lot of hype, but the reality of Apple is that they sometimes live up to the hype”. The transition from Intel processors to ARM-based SOCs was not a total shocker - it had been rumored for years. Ever since Apple brought a custom design to the ARM architecture with the A6 SOC in the iPhone 5 and then brought out its 64-bit “desktop class architecture” a year later with the A7 chip in the iPhone 5S, there have been rumors that Apple’s mobile chip design was getting so good that it would eventually power its Mac PCs. The fact of the matter is that for the past 7 years, Apple has been working on industry-leading SOC architecture that it believed could change the performance and efficiency of computers. And that is exactly what the M1 chip has done.

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

So when Apple announced it would be transitioning to Apple Silicon at its virtual 2020 WWDC conference in June, everybody suspected that they would either make gains in performance (power per watt) or efficiency (battery life). There were very few that thought they could do both so fast. This M1 Chip in the MacBook Air is pretty amazing by overtaking the very things we have just come to tolerate in laptop computers:

Prepare for liftoff: Intel processors that are not even a year old yet sound like jet engines that are about to take your laptop into orbit as the turbine fan powers up just running simple spreadsheets in Excel.
Can I borrow your charger? You can get 6 hours our of an Intel-based laptop…if you turn on battery-saver, turn the brightness down to 5% and don’t run any applications like Chrome in the background.
Is this really a new generation? Every time I get my laptop upgraded, I notice no meaningful performance improvements, nor do I notice any additional battery life. It’s just another ‘….lake” processor with the same issues.

So what’s in the M1 cake?

Apple is great at putting up flashy charts during its Keynote presentations to show off new hardware by comparing its latest processing power and efficiency against undefined machines with no real data on the axes of its charts. So, they leave it to a lot of tech nerds to hypothesize what Apple has done (or hasn’t done) to achieve the gains that it so often actually achieves. All you know is that the chip has x billion transistors squeezed onto the latest 5nm fabrication process. And perhaps that’s why Apple has always been different - it doesn’t need to show off “speeds and feeds” because when you design the processor and code the operating system, you achieve a lot more with less. People still are trying to figure out how much RAM is in an iPhone and the reality is, it doesn’t really matter because that end-to-end control makes specs irrelevant.

I’m not a professional user, so perhaps these new M1 chips are simply amateur-level architecture and design, but I highly doubt it. I’m running the Microsoft Office Suite, which has now been coded for the M1 (it’s not running off an emulator), and it runs 10x more smoothly than it does on my PC. I’m getting 16 hours of battery life - take that with a grain-of-salt as I’m not exactly a power user, but hell, I could only get 7 - 8 hours max on Intel-based Macs.

Is this really Gen 1?

There is a lot of debate out there right now as to whether this M1 chip is really the first generation of PC-based SOCs for Apple, or just the next generation of the AX series that it uses in its iPhone and iPad. I don’t think it really matters.

What matters is that Apple did what everybody said they were going to do, yet they did it better than everyone said that they could.

So whether this is the next-gen A-Series chip on steroids or the beginning of how the industry rethinks the use of RISC (ARM-based processors) for laptop computers, I think that Apple has once again shown us what is possible when you own the entire widget - the sum is far greater than the compilation of the parts, and we will all be beneficiaries as the PC has been dying for the past 25 years with no actual death in sight.