Apple announces ARM-based M1 chip lineup (MacBook Air, 13" Pro, Mac Mini; Nov. 17th launch)

[KtSlime]

Folks - I'm losing my mind.

Literally zero suggestions I find online are working.

I'm in Big Sur. I'm browsing the net in Safari. I'm full screen. I click CMD + T and I get a new tab as I expect. I click CMD + N and I get a new.... tab again. No. I want CMD + N to open a new window like it always has. None of the Safari or Dock preferences are allowing this change. What am I missing?

EDIT: This option is to change how tabs open is no longer available in dock preferences for Big Sur:

EDIT: Welp, I did a restart and now option + CMD + N is finally working. So ... shrug.... guess it was just something being quirky. Boy, I was losing my mind, lol.

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I think they moved it to the more logical General section, try there?

 

[Terrell]

So here's a question I don't expect an answer to: how do Automator actions and AppleScripts run on these M1 Macs? In my experience, Intel processors kinda chugged when it came to scripts and automation at times, even for some of the simplest tasks, especially if you were calling on System Events or using AppleScript to navigate through repetitive actions like print dialog boxes and such.

 

[bxsonic]

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The 8 GB one is seriously impressive. Looks like these M1 Macs are truly better than Intel Macs in EVERY aspect. Including RAM.

 

[Wubby]

Anyone with a 2020 Air thinking of trading it in for a new M1?

Bought my Air in May. Whoops. I don't think I do enough heavy CPU work to justify it, though. This is mainly a reddit/internet forum machine. But the extended battery life sounds nice.

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Unfortunately my 2020 Air was bought by my work so isn't that easy. My debate is if I buy one for personal use. Then do I go for the Mini or the Air and get that screen and portability at a slight loss of performance by not having a fan.

 

[Futureman]

So reading through this I'll be fine with 8gb of ram for photoshop/premiere work?

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Probably depends on what you are actually doing in PS/PR, but I think it would be silly not to go with 16GB.

 

[GearDraxon]

Because I care about you (and not because it was on sale for $33 at Greenmangaming), I threw myself on the sword, and bought Crusader Kings III on Steam. Thoughts, on the 16GB/8-core GPU MBA:

• Running at 1440x900, feels like 30fps. Fine for this sort of game, although text is pretty small. Scaling UI to 80% didn't seem to cut much of importance off, despite the game's warning.
• CKIII reports to Activity Monitor that it's using ~8GB of RAM. Probably expanding to use what's available.
• Played for about an hour, while running Discord, Safari with ~10 tabs, Messages, and Mail. Battery ran down about 30% in this time.
• Chassis definitely got warmer than it has doing anything else. Still not what I'd call "hot," and not anywhere close to what my 2020 MBA would feel like, doing demanding tasks.
• Can't say enough how nice the lack of fan noise is. I know it's giving up sustained performance, but on this device, not having the fans sound like they were keeping it from melting just makes it feel nicer.
• CKIII continues to own.

 

[Ninjadom]

So it looks like it's an import from Hong Kong from what I can tell.

Do you know if Apple does an international warranty or would you need to ship to the seller to warranty on your behalf?

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I believe Apple warranty is international. In 2015, me and my girlfriend got our faulty U.K. iPhones swapped over under warranty at the Apple Store in Grand Central Station while on holiday in New York. No questions asked.

 

[Osiris397]

They've already said they aren't ending al x86 Macs anytime soon. My hope is that frankly they will use the Mx ARM processor line to replace the Tx ARM processor line in the x86 Mac machines they have left to offer maximum application compatibility and the advantages of integrated hardware. It would be even better if they switched those to AMD CPU machines too, but it doesn't seem like there's a snowball's chance in Hell of that happening.

 

[Deleted member 9330]

Second Mac mini is up and running. There are some serious bugs with the migration process, at least for me across both machines.

1) My MBP was on 11.0.1 while the Mac mini shipped with 11.0. When using migration assistant it prompted me to update. That update promptly failed on both Mac minis. What I had to do was create a temporary user, update the machine, then migrate my user.

2) Transferring over thunderbolt seems to be bugged as well. Wifi works, or thunderbolt when the source Mac is in Target Disk Mode works, but if the source is in Migration Assistant it will just get stuck on the first step and not move anything. I set my MBP to Target Disk Mode for this one.

Hopefully those get ironed out with 11.1, the initial setup/migration process is the one thing you absolutely do not want to fuck up, especially as the M1 machines get to the mainstream market from the glowing reviews.

 

[bxsonic]

They've already said they aren't ending al x86 Macs anytime soon. My hope is that frankly they will use the Mx ARM processor line to replace the Tx ARM processor line in the x86 Mac machines they have left to offer maximum application compatibility and the advantages of integrated hardware. It would be even better if they switched those to AMD CPU machines too, but it doesn't seem like there's a snowball's chance in Hell of that happening.

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I hope you're not really expecting this. I believe they said that x86 Macs will be supported for a very long time. But they already set out a 2 year transition period to replace all Macs with Apple Silicon. These chips take years to design and create. I'm pretty sure that whatever chips they have for their higher end Macs are already entering final design phase. x86 Macs will be gone within 1 - 2 years. For better or for worse.

 

[Wubby]

Kuo: Redesigned MacBooks With Apple Silicon to Launch in Second Half of 2021

Apple plans to release additional MacBook models with Apple Silicon in the second half of 2021, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, as part of the...

www.macrumors.com

What are the odds of the rumored 14" not having that touch bar I wonder.

 

[345]

i have two LG ultrafine 4K USB-C monitors that i daisychain to a single port on my macbook pro. will this really not work with the new mac mini? i don't understand why, the bandwidth is right there. sounds like it doesn't even work if you give each monitor its own USB-C cable.

i would switch to this thing in a heartbeat but not if i need to buy another HDMI monitor for a dumb reason.

 

[behOemoth]

My MacBook will arrive on 22nd December... Is the supply really this scarce?

 

[Gohlad]

They've already said they aren't ending al x86 Macs anytime soon. My hope is that frankly they will use the Mx ARM processor line to replace the Tx ARM processor line in the x86 Mac machines they have left to offer maximum application compatibility and the advantages of integrated hardware. It would be even better if they switched those to AMD CPU machines too, but it doesn't seem like there's a snowball's chance in Hell of that happening.

Click to shrink...

They already confirmed they won't release any new Intel based Macs. The "continuing to support for x86" narrative was meant in terms of software/OS releases:

“We are giddy”—interviewing Apple about its Mac silicon revolution

Craig Federighi, Johny Srouji, and Greg Joswiak tell us the Apple Silicon story.

arstechnica.com

Quote for people hoping that Apple will continue to release Intel based Macs alongside M-Series Macs:

When we said we would support Intel systems for years to come, that was talking about the operating system… What we did say from a system standpoint, is that we still had Intel systems that were in the pipeline, that we were yet to introduce. And certainly that was so. The very next month, we introduced an Intel-based iMac.

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Doesn't read like they have the intention to release any new Intel or AMD processor models, besides the one iMac that got released shortly after this summer.

 

[KtSlime]

If they do release one more Intel mac, it would be their very high end Power Mac, everything else will almost surely be Apple Silicon from here on out.

 

[Ninjadom]

Second Mac mini is up and running. There are some serious bugs with the migration process, at least for me across both machines.

1) My MBP was on 11.0.1 while the Mac mini shipped with 11.0. When using migration assistant it prompted me to update. That update promptly failed on both Mac minis. What I had to do was create a temporary user, update the machine, then migrate my user.

2) Transferring over thunderbolt seems to be bugged as well. Wifi works, or thunderbolt when the source Mac is in Target Disk Mode works, but if the source is in Migration Assistant it will just get stuck on the first step and not move anything. I set my MBP to Target Disk Mode for this one.

Hopefully those get ironed out with 11.1, the initial setup/migration process is the one thing you absolutely do not want to fuck up, especially as the M1 machines get to the mainstream market from the glowing reviews.

Click to shrink...

Would you suggest I do the same? Update the M1 Mac Mini with a temporary user before trying the process? Bear in mind that my source Mac is on High Sierra.

 

[earthsucks]

Anyone with a 2020 Air thinking of trading it in for a new M1?

Bought my Air in May. Whoops. I don't think I do enough heavy CPU work to justify it, though. This is mainly a reddit/internet forum machine. But the extended battery life sounds nice.

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i bought an intel air in august to replace my 2012 air, partially because my friend who works at apple didn't think the M1 would be out until Q1 or Q2 2021. regardless, like you, the (much) better battery in the m1 would be nice, but my laptop is plugged in 95% of the time and i really only use it to browse online and stream movies/music which it does well. assuming this lasts, i'll just buy a new air or pro in 3-5 years.

 

[Deleted member 4262]

Haven't been able to fix the scrolling/animation stutter, but it seems I'm not the only one with this problem. Re-installed Big Sur and reset the SMC thingie. Hopefully it's a software issue.

 

[Cien]

My MacBook will arrive on 22nd December... Is the supply really this scarce?

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Seems so. Especially any custom machine orders.

 

[DarkSora]

I believe Apple warranty is international. In 2015, me and my girlfriend got our faulty U.K. iPhones swapped over under warranty at the Apple Store in Grand Central Station while on holiday in New York. No questions asked.

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Yea, I was surprised I was able to take my Early 2011 MBP to an Apple store in Japan and have them fix a known issue that Apple said they would be able to fix for free at their American stores.

Walked over to the apple store in Osaka, explained the situation and they were able to accept it and shipped it to my apartment several days later.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

If they do release one more Intel mac, it would be their very high end Power Mac, everything else will almost surely be Apple Silicon from here on out.

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Given the comments in the Ars interview, the bump to the iMacs in the summer was the last new Intel-based revision.

 

[behOemoth]

Seems so. Especially any custom machine orders.

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Welp, I never bought my own X-Mas present.

 

[DarkSora]

My MacBook will arrive on 22nd December... Is the supply really this scarce?
[/QUOTE

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My local Best Buy still have plenty available for same day pickup.

 

[CloseTalker]

My MacBook will arrive on 22nd December... Is the supply really this scarce?

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My local Best Buy still have plenty available for same day pickup.

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Yeah it's kind of like this with every Apple product. Apple store is backed up for weeks, but Best Buy or Amazon just has them in stock.

Issue is big retailers usually only carry base models, so if you want to customize it in any way you're stuck waiting. But I got my base 8GB MBA easily from Best Buy

 

[entremet]

They already confirmed they won't release any new Intel based Macs. The "continuing to support for x86" narrative was meant in terms of software/OS releases:

“We are giddy”—interviewing Apple about its Mac silicon revolution

Craig Federighi, Johny Srouji, and Greg Joswiak tell us the Apple Silicon story.

arstechnica.com

Quote for people hoping that Apple will continue to release Intel based Macs alongside M-Series Macs:


Doesn't read like they have the intention to release any new Intel or AMD processor models, besides the one iMac that got released shortly after this summer.

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I thought this was assumed?

Support just means software updates and such. Not new hardware.

 

[Cien]

Yeah it's kind of like this with every Apple product. Apple store is backed up for weeks, but Best Buy or Amazon just has them in stock.

Issue is big retailers usually only carry base models, so if you want to customize it in any way you're stuck waiting. But I got my base 8GB MBA easily from Best Buy

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Yea, the second i went to 16GB it was Game over for shipping times.

 

[DarkSora]

Yeah it's kind of like this with every Apple product. Apple store is backed up for weeks, but Best Buy or Amazon just has them in stock.

Issue is big retailers usually only carry base models, so if you want to customize it in any way you're stuck waiting. But I got my base 8GB MBA easily from Best Buy

Click to shrink...

Yup. Same here! Just wanted the base model. Didn't need to upgrade it for any reason. And I can pay it off with my best busy card for 18 months.

 

[Loud Wrong]

So finally ran into a problem with my M1 Air. I hadn't connected anything via Bluetooth to it until yesterday and when I did, it clearly has issues staying connected. My AirPods glitch out every ten minutes or so, as does an external trackpad. Macrumors and Apples forums are full of people experiencing the same issues. Not sure if it's related to Sur or to the hardware.

 

[Deleted member 8901]

So finally ran into a problem with my M1 Air. I hadn't connected anything via Bluetooth to it until yesterday and when I did, it clearly has issues staying connected. My AirPods glitch out every ten minutes or so, as does an external trackpad. Macrumors and Apples forums are full of people experiencing the same issues. Not sure if it's related to Sur or to the hardware.

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Hmm, my wife is using a Logitech K380 and MX Anywhere 2 with her M1 Air and hasn't run into any connection issues yet.

 

[FisherTea]

So finally ran into a problem with my M1 Air. I hadn't connected anything via Bluetooth to it until yesterday and when I did, it clearly has issues staying connected. My AirPods glitch out every ten minutes or so, as does an external trackpad. Macrumors and Apples forums are full of people experiencing the same issues. Not sure if it's related to Sur or to the hardware.

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My Beats Studio 3 headphones work just fine on my M1 MacBook Air. What external trackpad are you using?

 

[Loud Wrong]

My Beats Studio 3 headphones work just fine on my M1 MacBook Air. What external trackpad are you using?

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Apple's

 

[Deleted member 9330]

i have two LG ultrafine 4K USB-C monitors that i daisychain to a single port on my macbook pro. will this really not work with the new macbook mini? i don't understand why, the bandwidth is right there. sounds like it doesn't even work if you give each monitor its own USB-C cable.

i would switch to this thing in a heartbeat but not if i need to buy another HDMI monitor for a dumb reason.

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That is interesting. I know the M1 devices are limited to two displays, would be interesting if the mini had a hard limit where one HAS to be HDMI. That is what the support article says, however: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202351

Would you suggest I do the same? Update the M1 Mac Mini with a temporary user before trying the process? Bear in mind that my source Mac is on High Sierra.

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If you're in High Sierra it shouldn't affect you, this was purely because my source was on a newer release than my target and the built-in upgrade function during migration didn't work. You might be affected by the transfer process though, so keep my point #2 in mind.

 

[345]

That is interesting. I know the M1 devices are limited to two displays, would be interesting if the mini had a hard limit where one HAS to be HDMI. That is what the support article says, however: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202351

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yeah, i don't get it. makes no sense that i couldn't at least run two USB-C monitors through two thunderbolt ports on the mac mini when i currently do so through one on a macbook pro.

niche use case, i know, but these are the LG monitors that apple sanctions and sells itself, so it's kind of a bummer if i can't just replicate the same setup with an M1.

 

[Dany]

is 8gb okay for ram or should get 16 gb to future proof it? Thinking of going back to school for DNP and would use it for general web browsing and education apps etc?

 

[Shalashaska]

is 8gb okay for ram or should get 16 gb to future proof it? Thinking of going back to school for DNP and would use it for general web browsing and education apps etc?

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8GB seems to go pretty far with these Mac's, so chances are you would probably be fine with 8GB. But since you can't upgrade later if you're concerned about future proofing then you should get the 16GB version.

 

[prophetvx]

is 8gb okay for ram or should get 16 gb to future proof it? Thinking of going back to school for DNP and would use it for general web browsing and education apps etc?

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It seems that unless you're doing heavy video editing or software development, 8GB is equal to or outperforms 16GB intel macs.

 

[Shola Akinnuso]

Holding off on purchasing an M1 now. My editing partner sent his new 16' back to apple because it was still new, and traded it for a mini. A week after all of the glowing GLOWING reviews, bad press is beginning to be revealed. M1 has a ton of problems. Most notably excluded from EVERY review was that the AMAAAAZING export speed is for pro rez files. .H264 actually exports slower than the intel chips by almost 2x slower. This was extremely disappointing.

Also, there have been issues with the mini being unable to hook up a secondary monitor. There are crazy performance issues like the system going to sleep and being unable to wake-up without a total reboot. Sofware updates to be sure, but things that have happened to lots of small youtubers and my friend (not a Youtuber), who are actually disgusted by the 180-degree turn. His expectations weren't too high, but he's disappointed most that the basic daily operational performance of regular tasks seems no different / better than his i3 PC laptop. He's bummed and it has defnitely cooled my decision to trade my 2018 mbp 16hgb for a 16mb mini. Now I just want to wait to see how this irons out in January.

 

[turbobrick]

If they do release one more Intel mac, it would be their very high end Power Mac, everything else will almost surely be Apple Silicon from here on out.

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While it would make sense, however given how long they left the old Mac Pro on sale with no updates leads me to believe that the intel Macs are going to stay how they are until they're replaced with their own arm chips.

 

[Figments]

Holding off on purchasing an M1 now. My editing partner sent his new 16' back to apple because it was still new, and traded it for a mini. A week after all of the glowing GLOWING reviews, bad press is beginning to be revealed. M1 has a ton of problems. Most notably excluded from EVERY review was that the AMAAAAZING export speed is for pro rez files. .H264 actually exports slower than the intel chips by almost 2x slower. This was extremely disappointing.

Also, there have been issues with the mini being unable to hook up a secondary monitor. There are crazy performance issues like the system going to sleep and being unable to wake-up without a total reboot. Sofware updates to be sure, but things that have happened to lots of small youtubers and my friend (not a Youtuber), who are actually disgusted by the 180-degree turn. His expectations weren't too high, but he's disappointed most that the basic daily operational performance of regular tasks seems no different / better than his i3 PC laptop. He's bummed and it has defnitely cooled my decision to trade my 2018 mbp 16hgb for a 16mb mini. Now I just want to wait to see how this irons out in January.

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at the end of the day, these are still Gen 1 products. admittedly very *promising* Gen 1 products, but Gen 1 products nonetheless.

 

[Anton Sugar]

Head to head test of the Apple M1 Macbook Pro and the top-of-the line Dell XPS 13 (9310).

Who will win the battle of the premium 13" laptops?!

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Man, I'm never owned an Apple laptop but I work mostly in DaVinci Resolve. This is extremely tempting.

 

[Astronut325]

Any new rumors on the updated Apple TV device?

 

[CloseTalker]

Any new rumors on the updated Apple TV device?

Click to shrink...

Not really

 

[JoeyJungle]

Anyone with a 2020 Air thinking of trading it in for a new M1?

Bought my Air in May. Whoops. I don't think I do enough heavy CPU work to justify it, though. This is mainly a reddit/internet forum machine. But the extended battery life sounds nice.

Click to shrink...

Yep I did this, went from the base early-2020 Air to the base M1 Air, best purchase I've ever made. I traded in through the education discount, and I ended up paying something like $380 for the upgrade. The performance in this thing is unreal, I know it does well in benchmarks but the thing that blows me away is all the small interactions. Being able to scroll through webpages and 200 page PDFs with hardly ever a hiccup is just awesome. Even when I was deliberately scrolling through a PDF book as fast as possible, I only ever once got the thing where text/images get loaded in super blurry and then after a second or two the actual page loads in.

I'm just constantly impressed with it. Ever now and then there will be some kind of jitter or there will be a brief "loading" type of moment, but they're only noticeable because they're so infrequent. And the whole time, this thing makes no noise and hardly even gets warm. It's awesome to have a laptop with the performance of a high-end desktop, that never has a fan trying to take off like an airplane, and never gets hot to the touch.

 

[Osiris397]

... x86 Macs will be gone within 1 - 2 years. For better or for worse.

Click to shrink...

I'm not expecting x86 development from Apple for any significant number of products, but ideally 1 or 2 products will maintain x86 CPUs if only to pay-off the R&D they already put into developing and fixing the x86/T1 ARM combos in current non-Apple Silicon Macs. Also, the advantage of x86 for Pro creative app development over the years since switching to x86 has been invaluable.

I do know that the Mac Pro will never go Apple Silicon, so I hope some industry push back may nudge Apple in the direction of AMD for CPUs there and I hope the 16" MBP also goes AMD, but I know it's more likely that will go Apple Silicon.

Apple has already at one point stated that they will be supporting eGPUs, and while there have been rumors of Apple building it's own discreet GPUs, the Mac Pro with it's accelerators are probably proof of concept for that, but these are for only a handful of apps. Apple has in recent history been more about embracing some more open standards as to potentially not get left behind in industries that have corporate players that have specialized in some the hardware development areas for DECADES that Apple is just moving into now.

Apple Silicon was really designed to facilitate building thinner, lighter, cooler running, roughly performant mobile computers. When you get to Pro machines these features just aren't that valuable and I'm hoping that Apple will come to the same conclusion for atleast a couple of Mac models.

 

[Deleted member 9330]

I'm not expecting x86 development from Apple for any significant number of products, but ideally 1 or 2 products will maintain x86 CPUs if only to pay-off the R&D they already put into developing and fixing the x86/T1 ARM combos in current non-Apple Silicon Macs. Also, the advantage of x86 for Pro creative app development over the years since switching to x86 has been invaluable.

I do know that the Mac Pro will never go Apple Silicon, so I hope some industry push back may nudge Apple in the direction of AMD for CPUs there and I hope the 16" MBP also goes AMD, but I know it's more likely that will go Apple Silicon.

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I think the odds of Apple making an x86 machine after 2022 hover around 0%. The R&D for the T-series chips were likely paid off a while ago, and even if it wasn't the R&D for Apple Silicon was orders of magnitude greater. Also I wouldn't be so confident that the Mac Pro doesn't go Apple Silicon. It'll probably be the last to change, but switching from Intel to AMD would just be a waste of Apple's time. That time is better spent beefing up the silicon and improving the translation layer so that people don't miss x86 at all.

 

[Foltzie]

That is interesting. I know the M1 devices are limited to two displays, would be interesting if the mini had a hard limit where one HAS to be HDMI. That is what the support article says, however: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202351

Click to shrink...

It seems that way, it is a weird limitation of M1. Its wild to think that for all of the benefits Apple has seemingly nailed on the first rendition of their Apple Silicon, that number of concurrent displays is the limit.

 

[Ninjadom]

Any new rumors on the updated Apple TV device?

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Not really

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Yeah, the attention has shifted away from the Apple TV to these new M1's.

I know that a lot of people want a new Apple TV, but what improvements can it bring over the existing unit? Yeah it's 3 years old now but the unit still performs exceptionally for media content (A10X Fusion from the 2017 iPad Pro). However, I don't game on it though.

 

[8bit]

I do know that the Mac Pro will never go Apple Silicon, so I hope some industry push back may nudge Apple in the direction of AMD for CPUs there and I hope the 16" MBP also goes AMD, but I know it's more likely that will go Apple Silicon.

Click to shrink...

Never is unlikely, I'd guess Mac Pro will be Apple Silicon within 3 years, x86 is too much of a millstone around their neck.

 

[StopMakingSense]

It seems that way, it is a weird limitation of M1. Its wild to think that for all of the benefits Apple has seemingly nailed on the first rendition of their Apple Silicon, that number of concurrent displays is the limit.

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That the chipset is a little immature for their first personal computing Apple Silicon devices isn't that terribly surprising.

 

[CrudeDiatribe]

I do know that the Mac Pro will never go Apple Silicon

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Do you? That's a bold claim.