How Fast Is Apple's New M1 Chip? Is It Worth The Price?
M1 Apple's new CPU debuting in its latest Mac line up of products offers a lot of performance and battery life. M1 CPU is what is commonly known these days as a system-on-chip (SoC) processor. Because the CPU is more efficient the battery life of an Apple laptop could reach up to 30 hours of working operation without a recharge. That in itself is a significant breakthrough.
Apple's focus is to design a working workhorse of a laptop that could almost act like a portable cellphone device. Given that new software and hardware is focused on speed, responsiveness and mobility, Apple has moved the goal post forward for everyone else to follow. Moving software to a new CPU is not a trivial effort. Apple has been using Intel CPUs now for over 15 years. Most software that runs on Apple has been specifically written to utilize Intel CPU functionality, to increase efficiency and most importantly speed.
Given that M1 CPU contains a completely different instruction set from Intel, all software has to be rewritten in order to utilize the new language of M1 CPU. The software that has not yet been written directly to run on the M1 CPU natively, will have to run in emulation mode that converts the instruction sets from Intel to M1. You can think of it as learning a new language such as French, and having to go through a translator from English to French and back in order to communicate. Obviously this emulator in the middle will slow down the processing and efficiency of the software. This is most noticeable in high end software that requires a lot of graphics rendering. Software such as Photoshop for editing pictures and movies and various high end games are the most affected by Apple's emulation that needs to work correctly in order to convert Intel instructions to M1. Native versions of these Applications are due out in a year or two.
For most users that rely on native OS applications, utilities and internet browsing will actually see a performance increase. Significant increase will be noticed in the battery life due to M1 being more of an efficient CPU. Preliminary results and tests are showing up to 30 hours of battery life with normal usage. With Apple's new OS the entire suite of applications such as Email, Safari, iTunes, Photos and utilities have all been written to natively run on M1 CPU without emulation. Any user that has a Mac that is a few years old will be happily surprised and impressed with the new performance of the M1 CPU.
If you are a basic to medium power user that relies mostly on built in OS software and internet browsing, and are looking for a new machine, the new M1 Macs are a great value. Upgrading from older machines that are older than three years old, will enjoy a significant increase in performance and battery life. But if you rely on and use high end software such as 3D rendering, gaming or Photoshop, you probably would want to wait for native versions of the software to be released before investing in M1 Mac.