We’ve hardly been able to rest, and yesterday Apple held one more event. The “One More Thing” one. It was another virtual conference completely pre-recorded at Apple Park. This was the arrival of the first Mac with Apple Silicon chips.

The Cupertino giant introduced the new line of MacBook Air, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro with their own Apple Silicon chips (M1) moving away from Intel and the new macOS (Big Sur).

Let’s talk about the chip and macOS first.

M1 & Big Sur

The first announcement was the M1 chip. In previous versions, the MacBook had many different chips for security, processors, memory and so on. However, now it’s all combined in one. This chip also provides a unified memory architecture to improve performance and efficiency. It has also an 8-core CPU and many features to improve performance and power consumption.

macOS Big Sur is coming with the new line, designed and optimised around the M1 chip as mentioned in the event. You can now wake up your Mac as you do with your iPhone or iPad. In addition to this, in the event they showed how fast it is when you’re using Safari or different applications. They also introduced the concept of Universal Apps. These apps can work with both Apple Silicon and Intel chips and those existing apps not upgraded will continue to run on Rosetta 2. But the great news is that the M1 chip will allow now your Mac natively to run your iPhone and iPad applications.

macOS Big Sur will be available from tomorrow 12th November 2020.

MacBook Air

They keep the same silent design and 13.3” Retina display. It also comes with Touch ID, Wi-Fi 6 and advanced camera ISP. And Magic Keyboard of course.

Up to:
16 GB memory
2 TB SSD
2X faster SSD
3.5X faster CPU
5X faster graphics
9X faster machine learning
18 hours battery life

Available in Space Gray, Gold and Silver colours.

Price starts at $999 for the 8‑Core CPU/7‑Core GPU 256GB Storage and $1,249 for the 8‑Core CPU/8‑Core GPU 512GB Storage. If you want to add more memory, you need to add extra $200 and for storage (from 8 to 16 GB). Same with storage, you’ll keep adding extra.

Mac Mini

Their ultra-compact design is the same as the previous one but the key point as with the other Macs is the battery life. In fact, they mentioned that they improved it significantly as well as their general performance.

Up to:
16 GB memory
2 TB SSD
3X faster CPU
6X faster graphics
15X faster machine learning
60% more energy efficient

Price starts at $699 for the 256 GB Storage and $899 for the 512 GB Storage.

MacBook Pro

Similar to the MacBook Air in terms of keeping the same design, 13.3” Retina display and Touch ID. Additions with the Wi-Fi 6 and advanced camera ISP. Moreover, they mentioned an active cooling system and studio-quality mics.

There’s no 16-inch option with the M1 chip yet.

Up to:
16 GB memory
2 TB SSD
2.8X faster CPU
5X faster graphics
11X faster machine learning
20 hours battery life

Available in Space Gray and Silver colours.

Price starts at $1,299 for the 256 GB Storage (8 GB unified memory) and $1,499 for the 512 GB Storage (8 GB unified memory)

Final Thoughts

In the previous Apple event, I said that Wall Street analysts might have expected the “One more thing” with new products such as the AirTags and the Studio AirPods. This might have influenced the stock volatility. However, the 5G standalone for the iPhones was big itself and there was this event coming.

Last night’s event, Apple introduced the first MacBooks with Apple Silicon chips and this looks very promising. There was no real redesign yet but all the information they shared about the M1 chip can be a game changer.

Finally, the “One More Thing” was not the AirTags or Studio AirPods. It was John Hodgman to mock the news of the M1 processor. The PC guy challenged if the new Macs were really fast, silent and had a good battery life. Obviously, it was a joke and the real message was that they have no competition at the moment.