When it was announced at WWDC 2020, Apple’s plan to move the Mac lineup from Intel processors to its own ARM-based silicon was really a big deal. By manufacturing its own chips, Apple could exercise more control and tailor hardware to the specific requirements of its machines, while reducing costs and improving energy efficiency.
And it started strong. The first M1 Macs were nothing short of a revelation, bringing massive speed increases and battery life gains, but with the same designs and similar prices. The 24-inch iMac followed the original launch with an impossibly thin design, the MacBook Pro returned power and expandability that had been lost, and the redesigned MacBook Air’s M2 chip brought power and performance-per-watt even further. bigger. But after waiting seven months for the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips that landed this week, it’s hard not to feel the excitement starting to wane.
It’s hard to stay excited for two and a half years, especially when the start has been so strong. There was a noticeable leap forward once the MacBook Air was freed from the constraints of Intel’s underpowered Y-series processors, as noted in our review of the late 2020 model which called its “performance and battery life considerably better drums”, and conceded that “the hype is real.” The same was true for the Mac mini M1 and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
But this progress has not been sustained. There is nothing fake with this week’s releases, but these are incremental speed bumps rather than big leaps forward. Perhaps the M1’s initial speed bump was exaggerated by Intel’s eccentric or overly cautious choice of chips towards the end of the corporate relationship, and like Intel and AMD, the big wins only come once per generation. Benchmarks will likely post decent enough gains, but this week’s Mac announcements looked as stereotypical as they did during the Intel years.
Foundry
Transient fatigue
It’s a bit of a giveaway when Apple compares the performance of the M2 Mac mini to the four-year-old Core i7 model rather than the M1, because this year’s gains are much less dramatic. The hoped-for leap to a 3nm manufacturing process hasn’t happened, and as my colleagues discuss in this week’s igamesnews podcast, new MacBook Pro and Mac mini models are still lagging far behind PCs with Nvidia GPUs. in terms of performance and gaming features. Apple’s silicon is no panacea for the limitations of the Mac and probably never would be.
The weight of those expectations should increase when the Mac Pro arrives this year. The latest rumors suggest it won’t have the rumored M2 Extreme chip, but instead a slightly faster M2 Ultra with a 24-core CPU and 76-core GPU and slots for storage, graphics, media and network cards (but no memory). Apple’s silicon will allow Apple to upgrade it more frequently, but when you go from a $50,000 machine that crushes absolutely everything in its path to one that’s maybe 20% faster than the Mac Studio , it’s hard to get all excited about it.
And while the new Mac Pro is almost certainly less expensive than the current model, Apple’s move to silicon clearly hasn’t resulted in, some might say predictably, lowering prices across the lineup. Most notably, the M2 Mac mini brings this line closer to its original budget design, but most silicon Apple Macs have either kept the same price or increased. The new MacBook Air starts at $200 more than before, the 16-inch MacBook Pro is $100 more than its Intel predecessor, and in territories outside of the US prices for most models have risen significantly .
Was it still likely that lower manufacturing costs would not translate into lower prices for consumers? Yes. Should we have realized by now that companies exist to maximize profits, not to improve the lives of their customers? Yes! But is the lack of significant price cuts undermining one of the greatest hopes of Apple’s silicon transition? Yes too.
The MacBook Air M2 has a higher starting price than when it was equipped with an Intel processor.
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But perhaps the biggest problem with Apple’s silicon transition is the fragmented and disorganized way Apple has handled it. While the M1 Mac mini arrived in November 2020, its more expensive Intel sibling dragged on for over two years. After the 24-inch iMac arrived in March 2021, the 21.5-inch Intel model remained on shelves until October. The Mac mini, which was part of the first wave of M1 releases, didn’t receive the M2 until seven months after the M2 MacBook Air arrived. And after a teaser last March, we are still waiting for Apple’s silicon Mac Pro. Altogether, you have a recipe for confusion and disappointment.
Intel’s move to Apple’s silicon was expected to take “about two years,” in the specific words of Tim Cook. We come to 31 months since that promise, or 26 if you measure the transition from the launch of the first M1 Macs. Apple just pulled the long-in-the-tooth Intel Mac mini from its store, and the Mac Pro is still struggling with aging Intel chips. It’s unclear why the Pro was left until the end – the wait hardly entices customers to spend a fortune on such a high-end machine when its components are so obviously obsolete – or when its upgrade. Apple’s silicon level will eventually take place, but the whole process has certainly taken longer than expected.
All of this isn’t to say that Intel’s move to Apple’s silicon hasn’t paid huge dividends. It was obviously a smart move, but what started out as a “huge leap forward for the Mac” turned into a slow ride. As Apple continues to sporadically roll out chips and confuse customers with a shuffled array of options, it’s getting harder and harder to feel the magic.
