Apple M1 Chip Review: How Apple's First Processor Is Taking The Laptop Industry By Storm

Apple's M1 chips have been quite revolutionary. These silicon chips were intended to create a new experience by enhancing the overall performance and improving battery life for their users. 

Apple released three new Mac devices on November 10 and two more on April 20, sliding towards the transition gradually. 

While M1 resembles A14 Bionic, Apple's favorite chip, to a great extent; its performance is far better than A14. With a stellar performance and breakthrough reviews, Apple is getting quite a knack of the hardware, which is getting Intel insecure. 

Let us understand how fast these chips are and how the two-year transition will affect the world.

How M1 dominates the market

Intel has been dominating the PC architecture for decades now. The competitions in the market are corrigible to an extent, making Intel always stay on top. 

This wasn't going down well with Apple because Intel's slow development had put Apple under performance pressure affecting its revenue on a bigger scale. Apple Ecosystem is divided into different subunits, and the PC world wasn't generating as much as the iPhone world. 

This was when Apple decided to take the plunge and have its chip in the market, assuring 100% transition by the next two years. And boy, did they make us proud!

This is because M1 isn't just a processor chip. It is an amalgamation of an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, SSD controller, unified memory, Secure Enclave, and image signal processor all in one chip.

This helped Apple reduce memory duplication, thereby improving the scope for batteries and unified memory experience, increasing the overall capacity. 

But this is just the first iteration, and the best is yet to come! Despite the chip being so new, it has managed to crush older Intel-based Macs and get the world talking about the future advancements already! Here are some numbers to back it up.

M1 in numbers:

According to the Market intelligence TrendForce, M1 Macs currently holds 0.8% of the market share. The number is likely to hit 7% by the next launch.

Apple's international shipments grew tremendously after the November event last year, with a growth of 31.3 percent.

The Cupertino-based giant managed to sell a whopping 6.9 million Macs from the 5.25 million simultaneously in 2019. 

These numbers indeed prove that M1 sure can expect a better future than we might presume, with the growth percentage hitting the new highs with the new iPad and iMac release. 

When the world started talking highly of the transition, Intel did not take it too well. And thus began the cold war between the giants. 

Intel vs. Apple

Have we not admired Justin Long as the Mac guy in those infamous Intel vs. Mac ads? Well, guess what? Intel's brilliant response to the increasing M1 threat was to have the Mac guy hired an Intel guy and come up with many ads that don't make sense. Call it childish, eh?

As if the campaign starring Justin wasn't enough, Intel took the cold war a notch higher by launching a website comparing M1 chips to their processors. I'll have to admit these were a trigger to some humorous memes last month.

Intel's kiddish response could have been due to the possible threat and a loss of market that Intel fears. Could they smell M1 success, or was it just a poorly executed marketing campaign? We will never know. What we shall know, though, is the real-time comparison between both the devices: 

Comparison: M1 Mac vs.Intel Mac

Performance

The Intel-powered MacBooks comes with a four-core i7 processor and Intel Iris Plus graphics. Whereas M1 has the upper hand here with an eight-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. 

This leaves the M1 chip MacBook with a 2.8% faster performance than the Intel models, practically crushing them with their beast mode. 

Battery Life:

The M1 MacBooks were advertised as having twice the battery life compared to Intel models. Apple may have exaggerated this a little bit, but it offers over 18 hours of battery life in the current models, which is almost double that Intel models. 

I forgot my charger at work while working from home over the weekend, and the baby did not blink at all.

M1 got the world talking! (find this tomorrow)

Here is what the who's who of the town think about the device

Kudos, Apple. You've rocked the desktop world and used the Mac to change everything. Again. Again.

-- Rene Ritchie, Youtuber

In real-world test after test, the M1 Macs are not merely inching past top-of-the-line Intel Macs; they are destroying them. In disbelief, people have started asking how on earth this is possible.

-- Erik Engheim, Developer

My 13 inch M1 MacBook edits 8K footage just as well as my $80k Mac Pro.

-- iJustine, YouTuber

Keeping it simple with M1

M1 has proven to be in the game for the long run. The battery blows my mind away. The iOS experience on the MacBook is smooth, and the app's integration also is now getting quite convenient. 

The first generation proved to surpass everyone's expectations for sure. Future developments are surely going to be revolutionary for the PC world. I consider ourselves lucky to be witnessing something so powerful yet so simple at the same time!