2020 Apple Silicon Event

M1 chip
- Unified memory architecture - same memory for CPU and GPU
- Like PS4
- Almost the same performance as a PS4
- Big.Little design - 4 high performance cores, 4 high efficiency cores
- All components on one die
  - CPU
  - GPU
  - RAM
  - I/O controllers
- Same approach as that on cell phones and iPads
- Can run iOS apps natively on Mac now
  - Is this the real solution to running Slack smoothly on your Mac? Just get the iOS version and run that?
- Fat binaries are back - one binary with both ARM and x86 executables
- Emulation of x86 apps with Rosetta 2 - some apps run faster under emulation thanks to the memory arch
Looks like it'll be introduced with the Macbook Air first
- Up to 5x improvement in GPU performance
  - But for real, does anyone actually care about the GPU performance of the Macbook Air?
- Can do 4k video editing on a fanless laptop
- 15 hours of battery life under light load
  - Yeah, now that's what I'm interested in
- No price increase - Macbook Air still starts at $999
  - Memory upgrade option - can get a Macbook air with 16GB RAM
M1 chip will also be coming to the Mac Mini
- No real external changes
- $100 price drop
13" Macbook Pro with M1
- Faster XCode compiles
- Real talk: why should a webdev buy a Macbook Pro? With the Air and the Pro having basically the same chip, and the Air now having a 16GB RAM option... what's the point of the low-end Macbook Pro?
- 17 hours of battery life under light load
- 16 GB RAM, 2TB SSD
- Wait a sec, that's the same specs as the Macbook Air?!
- The only difference is that the Macbook Pro will have active cooling, which will allow it to sustain performance for longer
- But, going back to the webdev use case above, most dev workloads are actually pretty bursty - you need bursts of performance when you're starting up a server or compiling, but it's not like a text editor is going to be stressing the system