Tom’s Guide Awards 2021: The M1 Chip

Tom’s Guide:

After creating the A Series for the iPhone and scaling it up for the iPad, Apple’s team of engineers set its sights on the Mac, but the M1 chip couldn’t just match what Intel had to offer. It had to handily beat it.

“If somebody else could build a chip that was actually going to deliver better performance inside that enclosure, what’s the point? Why would we switch?” said Tim Milet, vice president of platform architecture at Apple. “And so for my chip architects, that was the target.” […]

The most striking thing about the M1 is its battery life. For example, the MacBook Pro lasted an astounding 16 hours and 25 minutes in our web-surfing test. The previous Intel model lasted 10:21. That’s a huge difference, and this increase caused more than one double take within Apple.

“When we saw that first system and then you sat there and played with it for a few hours and the battery didn’t move, we thought ‘Oh man, that’s a bug, the battery indicator is broken,’” said Bob Borchers, VP of worldwide product marketing for Apple. “And then Tim’s laughing in the background, ‘Nope, that’s the way it’s supposed to be’ and it was pretty phenomenal.”

★ Friday, 9 July 2021