Apple promised at WWDC 2020 to launch its first Mac with Apple Silicon before the end of the year. And he lied, but he lied for the better. Not only will a Mac be launched with the company’s own chips, but there will be three that will be put on sale next week. These teams, like almost everything in life, are full of contrasts and that is why in this article we will briefly tell you the most prominent positive and negative aspects of these teams.
Three new Macs were introduced
Before carrying out the task of analyzing the negative and positive parts, we want to give you a background. Yesterday Apple introduced a Mac mini, a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro. All of them, despite their differences in design and some hardware components, incorporate the M1 chip . This is the first own processor that the Cupertino company adds to a computer and that on paper aims very high, surpassing even the Intel chips that have been used by Macs so far.
Bad is not so bad, right?
Depending on how objectively you look at things, sometimes it is more difficult to get negative things out than positive ones. The case of these Macs, in our opinion, is that they offer many more positive things . In fact we could say that the worst of these new Macs does not outshine the entire product, but it is no less remarkable that there are some aspects that could have been improved.
- Same design in all three teams . Although it must be recognized that the design of these three teams was already very refined before, with quality materials and adjusted to a premium product, the truth is that perhaps it was expected that the internal change would also be accompanied by an external one. In the case of MacBooks, especially in the ‘Pro’ model, a reduction in screen bezels was expected to equate it to the 16-inch model, thus having a 14-inch panel in the same body.
- 720p camera in the middle of 2020. Yes, in the era of videoconferencing we still have an HD camera on Mac. It doesn’t look bad, although it depends on the light you have, but it is clear that this resolution is already outdated and more when we have I’ve already seen teams like the 27-inch iMac 2020 with a 1080p FaceTime camera.
- Only two USB-C connectors. That this standard is present and future is beyond doubt. We have even been able to overcome the fact that they do not additionally include USB-A, however we cannot be entirely satisfied when observing that the versions with Apple Silicon in the MacBook will have a maximum of two connectors without being able to add more, thus forcing buy a hub for many users.
- App compatibility. It is true that developers already have enough tools to transfer the code of their applications to Apple Silicon, but it will be inevitable that there will be many incompatible with these computers.
- They do not have support for external graphics. It is not known for sure whether this problem can be solved in the future at the software level, but the truth is that the ARM architecture does not currently support compatibility with external graphics cards.
The best of Apple’s new Macs
Although there will be full analyzes of each device, first we have to trust the data shown by Apple. And as we already advanced in the previous section, these look very good and are a good guarantee that Apple has worked well in the first own processors for Mac. Next, the aspects that have most positively caught our attention.
- Power and speed in abundance. Apple got ‘tired’ of offering figures and percentages regarding the higher speed and power rates of its new Macs. If this is true, it will be a jug of cold water for the competition, since they are far above them.
- Much greater autonomy. One of the advantages offered by Apple being the one who designs the software and hardware is being able to better optimize resources. The jump in autonomy in the MacBook Air and Pro is brutal and probably they are even using the same batteries as in previous generations.
- macOS Big Sur and native applications . Although before we mentioned that there would be many applications still without optimization, with the native ones the opposite happens. Whether simple apps like Photos or advanced apps like Final Cut, these are more than ready to run very smoothly on Mac with Apple Silicon. macOS 11 Big Sur in general also works perfectly.
- IPhone and iPad apps on a Mac. Apple already anticipated some of this months ago and yesterday the ease of running third-party applications designed for iPhone and iPad on a Mac was confirmed.
- Connection with 6K screens. Although there were already Macs that allowed good integration with external displays with 6K resolution, now it is the entire range that allows it. It is also expected that this is already a standard for all new Macs that come from now on with Apple Silicon.
Many unknowns
Despite all this, there are still many unknowns to be resolved and they will have their answer in the next few days and weeks when we can be analyzing these products. One of them is the fact that all these computers allow ‘only’ to install a maximum of 1 6 GB of RAM , since at first, comparing it with versions of Intel chips, it is a capacity at least small, however we remain pending performance analysis to see if, as in the iPhone, Macs with Apple Silicon can perform better with less RAM. Therefore, we invite you to remain attentive to this medium in order to learn more about everything new that the M1 chip and its successive generations will bring us in these years.