APPLE SILICON
How Intel Is Dictating the Rollout of Apple Silicon
When in doubt, trust the process.
When Apple announced the Mac’s transition to its custom silicon during the 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference it promised “industry-leading performance” with plans to “ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years.” But instead of one new Mac, Apple shipped three: a new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, all with the same Apple silicon M1 SoC. The reviews for these new Macs readily affirmed Apple’s performance claims:
- Tom’s Guide: “A computing revolution”
- ArsTechnica: “Not so crazy after all”
- PetalPixel: “This Changes Everything”
- MacRumors: “M1 Chip Delivers Exceptional Performance, Thermals, and Battery Life”
- The Verge: “The new Arm-based system has exceeded almost every expectation”
I happened to be at my local Apple store on the November 17 release date and decided to purchase an 8GB M1 Mac mini as a replacement for my 2018 Mac mini (16GB/3.2 GHz Core i7). Before trading in my old system to Apple, I ran Xcode performance tests for some of my iPhone apps, tests that showed an amazing improvement over the Intel-based Mac mini.
