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Friday, November 13, 2020

Apple's New Chip Is Apparently "The Real Deal" -- Part 2 -- November 13, 2020

"Apple is trying what no other computer company has been able to pull off." -- Daniel Howley, Finance!Yahoo technology editor, link here.  

That pretty much says it all.

Howley's lede: 

Apple’s most widely known product, by a country mile, is its iPhone. It’s the device that has helped turn the company into an empire and pushed its market valuation past the $2 trillion mark in August, a first for a publicly traded U.S. company. 
And while the new iPhone 12 lineup is expected to kickstart a major increase in device upgrades and sales, the biggest news out of Apple (AAPL) in 2020 has little to do with its popular smartphone. Instead, the company’s most significant advancement in years comes in the form of its new M1 system on a chip, or SoC.

From the article:

From a practical standpoint that means, as Apple tells it, that its new MacBook Air will offer 3.5 times the CPU performance and 5 times the GPU performance of the previous generation Air, all while extending battery life from 12 hours of video playback to a whopping 18 hours
What’s more, the Air won’t have an internal fan, so you won’t have to listen to the annoying whir of your laptop as it struggles to cool itself down while streaming Netflix. 
The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, gets a 2.8 times faster CPU thanks to the M1 chip and a 5 times faster GPU. That’s a massive gain for a system that professionals rely on for things like high-end video and photo editing. Oh, and it gets, according to Apple, 20 hours of battery life when using video playback.

Somehow I'm missing something. Apparently a lot has been written about the MacBook Air fan. I have two MacBook Airs -- I've never heard the fan. I honestly did not know there was a fan in the computer.  

But I guess there is. Review at The Verge. Great review by the way. 

If there is one thing that I enjoy more than the Bakken, it's Apple.

Yesterday, November 12, 2020, I posted:

Note: there will be more typographical errors, content errors, grammatical errors, and just plain poor writing than usual this morning due to "situations" beyond my control. I will come back to fix these errors later this morning. 

This is way too geeky for me, way above my pay grade, and I would not have posted it, except for the comments in social media regarding this story.

The other day, Apple held its third of three events in the past two months. This event was to announce the new chip that Apple itself is manufacturing after it broke away from Intel. 

Apple, of course, said it was their fastest chip ever. And they are releasing the chip first in their lower-end computers, which are now available for ordering. 

Normally, when and where these announcements are made, Apple is attacked for various reasons. But not this time.

 Apparently this is a big, big deal. Apparently these are really fast chips. 

The link is here. I'm not sure if you will get much out of the article. I certainly did not. But the comments were quite enlightening, to say the least. 

But look at that headline: the new Apple chip, the "Apple Silicon M1" chip, or simply the "M1" chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro.

That is simply astounding. The MacBook Air is "low-end." Something high school students and college-bound students might use.

But for professionals? Give me a break. They won't be caught dead with a MacBook Air. They "need" a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro.

By the way, as an aside, over the weekend I held a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro in my hands for the first time ever the other day. 

It was so much lighter (and thinner) than the MacBook Pro I had years ago. After problems with that MacBook Pro (hard drive problems) I went to the MacBook Air exclusively and never looked back.

The MacBook Pro may now be completely solid-state, no hard drive, I don't know. If so, then that's no longer an issue. 

But I still maintain that for the masses, the MacBook Air is a much, much better deal than the MacBook Pro. 

Wow, what a digression.

Go to the article at the link. Breeze through it. Then read the comments.

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