Five Years of Apple Silicon Macs

Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:

In that first event (which you can relive in the YouTube video below), Apple announced its first wave of M1 Macs: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The Macs themselves all used the same design as their Intel predecessors, as Apple wrapped potentially scary new technology in completely familiar shapes.

Then the results of the first M1 speed tests arrived, and nothing felt scary anymore. Everything was fast, much faster than Intel, so much faster that even software compiled for Intel running in a code-translation layer via Rosetta ran just fine. In fact, the M1 was such a fast chip that, five years later, Apple’s still selling the M1 MacBook Air. (For $599, at Walmart.) And it’s still a pretty nice computer! [...]

The result of all of this is, though every generation has its quirks, Apple has managed to not drop the ball after the gigantic leap from Intel to M1. Every generation of M-series processors has offered impressive speed boosts. Apple’s CPU cores just get 10% to 30% faster every generation. The GPU cores got faster in all but one generation–and in that generation, overall graphics performance still got faster because the chips all had more GPU cores.

These first five years of Apple Silicon Macs have been the best five-year-run for Mac hardware in the platform’s 41-year history. Hardware-wise, the Mac platform has never been in better shape. And there’s no sign of letup. I fully expect the next five years to be, if anything, even better than the last five — with MacBooks expanding to lower price points, and Mac Pros, finally, expanding the high end of personal supercomputing.

★ Monday, 10 November 2025