For well over a decade, Apple’s laptops have had Intel CPUs and either Intel, Nvidia, or AMD graphics. The big news specs-wise, of course, is the M1 system-on-a-chip. The M1 is an 8-core CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores, as well as an 8-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine for on-device machine-learning tasks.īased on an ARM instruction set, it’s the first Apple-designed CPU and GPU for the Mac. (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.) The M1 makes Apple's strategy seem soberingly sane.

But if this Mac mini proves anything, it's that Apple was not, in fact, crazy. Not everything is perfect we'll talk about iOS apps on the Mac and some other problems, too. Sure, longer battery life and quick waking from sleep are already out there on other ARM computers. But as you may have seen in our hands-on earlier this week, what we're encountering here is also a performance leap-and as you'll also see in this review, a remarkable success at making this new architecture compatible with a large library of what could now, suddenly, be called legacy Mac software. And this is not exactly the same story as all the other ARM machines we've looked at before, like Windows 10 on ARM-a respectable option with some serious tradeoffs. In a way, we're not just reviewing the new Mac mini-a Mac mini is always a Mac mini, right? We're reviewing an ARM-based Mac for the first time.

Apple is beginning the process of replacing industry-standard Intel chips with its own, custom-designed silicon. Apple is crazy, right? The Mac just had its best year of sales ever, and Cupertino is hitting the platform with a shock like it hasn’t had in nearly 15 years-back in a time when the Mac was not having such a good year.

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