$999 MacBook Air & $1299 MacBook Pro Review
Tags: Apple, SEO, Future, Mac, Technology

If you are reading this and do not understand why we are talking about transitions or why these Macs represent such a profound change in the brand, it is convenient that we stop a second to explain it. We won’t go into too much technical detail but it is important to understand what changes are there and why they are being made now.

Throughout its history, Apple has had three hardware architecture transitions. This is the technology that integrates how Macs work on the inside. The first transition was from Motorola to IBM PowerPC processors in 1994. The second, the change from PowerPC to Intel processors. The reason for this latest change was important: IBM processors did not have enough performance per watt and were getting too hot. This caused Apple to be unable to create the PowerBook G5 (the MacBook Pro of the time), which led to the smash on the company’s table.

It was at WWDC in 2005, 15 years ago. I remember perfectly how that shook the Mac world of the time, raising doubts about how hardware and software could be migrated without disturbing the user. Apple answered that question with two major technologies: Universal Binaries and Rosetta. Applications must be compiled for the architecture of the computer where they will run, and that means that a hardware transition also implies a software migration. Developers had to update their applications and compile them for the new platform, ensuring that they were compatible.

The universal binaries eliminated doubts such as “what version should I download?” Since they included both compilations in the same app when we downloaded them from the Internet (there was no Mac App Store and it was the only way to get software at the time).

The second technology, Rosetta. Software integrated into the Intel version of Mac OS X that allowed to execute of PowerPC applications “emulating” a PPC architecture. The user simply ran the app, and it worked, without configuring anything. It was awarded by the Morgan Stanley Innovation Award. At that time it was based on a virtualization technology from a company called Transitive, which curiously in 2009 was bought by IBM (the turns of life). And that’s not all, few know that the original team that started the project today work for Apple and the ARM consortium based in Manchester.

Both of these allowed the early Intel Macs to be compatible with virtually all existing software, at least until the final native versions from each developer hit the market. At the time, virtually all Mac software was moved to Intel in about 12 months, although some were faster than others (Adobe and Microsoft were exceptionally slow on this, and it was one of the downsides of that transition). Also, remember that the technology of the time was not particularly brilliant in virtualization or powerful enough to offer optimal performance in many cases. This caused us to have to live with many apps that Rosetta moved with some slowness.

Even with these exceptions, the transition was completed ahead of schedule, and the Macs of both architectures were overlapping until in November 2007, the Intel Macs surpassed the Mac PPCs for the first time. In these 15 years, Intel architecture has brought very good machines to the Mac world, with a road map that Apple was able to fulfill this time. However, with the arrival of the iPhone, it was a matter of time before the company got to work with the only point of its technology that it did not master: its central processor.

The iPhone 4 was the first device made by the company to incorporate a new chip: the AX family, which started with the A4. It was surprising for its power, incorporating not only a central processor but also a GPU in the same package. It was developed under commission by Samsung and Intrinsity, an innovative company that had been doing very interesting things with the ARM architecture since 1997. Its technology was based on improving microprocessor designs to be highly efficient, obtain high performance, and have fewer transistors, also with low consumption. By the way, it is exactly the definition that Apple has presented us with the M1.

And we come to the third transition, after years of rumors and with an Apple that has exponentially improved this technology for 10 years making these chips for its “iDevices”. Creating these “System-on-chip” or SoC (a complete system encapsulated in a chip) for devices that require power, efficiency, and improvement in energy consumption, iterating them each year, inevitably caused alarms to go off, especially with the arrival of the A11 and its Neural Engine: the leap was close (as expected) and the question was to know how these new processors were going to be. The feedback they got with these developments was very valuable and finally, they no longer depend on the manufacturing processes (and times) of other companies for their computers. The goal is a new generation of Macs that are more powerful, more efficient, and with more design possibilities than ever.

Let Me Introduce You to M1

The M1 chip is a marvel of technology: the smallest unit of a processor are transistors, which in the M1 are 5 nanometers (the diameter of a human hair is 80,000 nanometers, for your reference). Each chip contains 16,000 million transistors, it is the chip with the highest density ever made by Apple.

In general, there are several important things to note about this chip. The first is that it contains 8 CPU cores and up to 8 GPU cores (integrated graphics) in the same package. The only difference between models is that the 256GB MacBook Air has 7 cores, while the 512GB SSD storage model and the new MacBook Pro have 8. All of them also have a 16-core Neural Engine, equal to the that incorporate the A14 chip mounted on the latest iPhone 12 and iPad Air. These artificial intelligence accelerator chips are responsible for improving the images of the FaceTime HD camera, detecting objects or people in photos or videos, etc … by downloading these calculations to the CPU.