Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Dan Howley discuss the latest news out of today’s Apple event.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: At a virtual event today, CEO Tim Cook also introduced three new Macs powered by those Apple chips.
TIM COOK: It’s amazing to think that this is our third major event in just the past two months. In the midst of enormous challenges of this year, our teams have remained focused, and they haven’t stopped innovating. We’re on an unbelievable pace of new product releases, delivering more new products this fall than ever before.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, let’s bring in our Tech Editor Dan Howley, who has been watching the virtual event. He joins us now. So Dan, anything in particular either surprise and/or impress you from what you saw so far today?
DAN HOWLEY: I think one of the surprises was the fact that we actually got a new Mac Mini. That was something that we weren’t really expecting to see out of this event, but you know, we were expecting this ARM based processor from Apple. It is supposedly faster than what Intel is offering in the same range. They do say that it has two times performance of the leading PC processors. That obviously would mean Intel. They also say that the new computers that these are going into are going to be a lot faster.
So let’s go over the chip real quick. It’s called the M1. Obviously, they’re saying it offers, as I said, two times that performance. It’s a five nanometer chip. That’s something that Intel frankly can’t do right now. That basically means the distance between the transistors and really what you’re getting out of a five nanometer chip means more power efficiency, less having to deal with heat, and that is really what can build up a bottleneck in some of these processors.
So Intel right now is stuck on a 10 nanometer processor. They say they’re going to have a seven nanometer chip coming out in the future, but that and their desktop level 10 nanometer chips have been delayed. Now, Apple has just said, forget that. We’re going to skip the 10 and the seven, and we’re going to go right to five. So this is ahead of what we’re seeing out of AMD as well, which is already eating Intel’s lunch as far as capabilities go, so a huge upgrade there. They’re also going to be in the new MacBook Air and the MacBook 13 inch Pro as well as the Mac Mini.
So for the MacBook Air, that needs three times faster performance, they say, Apple, than the best selling Windows PC in its class. As far as battery life, you’re looking at up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing, 16 hours of video playback. They say that that’s some of the best you’ll get out of an Air yet. As far as the CPU and GPU, those are going to be much faster for the Mac, and it will get two times faster solid state drive, so we’re looking at a much faster Air here.
The big thing is there’s no fan inside this thing. So rather that annoying whine that you would get when you would start to watch too many videos or browse to many different websites, you’re not going to have that with this at all, and that’s because of the efficiency of these new processors. As for the Pro, it’s also using that M1 chip. That is going to be 2.8 times faster as far as CPU performance and five times faster as far as GDP performance. So we’re looking at some big jumps here as far as the capabilities of these Macs go.
They’re also going to be able to do things like run 8K video playback. And as far as the battery life goes on the Pro, Apple says that it’s the best battery they’ve ever put in a Mac with 17 hours of wireless web browsing and 20 hours of video playback, so that’s absolutely monstrous for the Pro. And then for the Mini, they say that it’s going to offer six times the graphics capabilities and that despite the fact that it’s a tenth the size of the leading windows desktop on the market, it’s five times faster as far as performance goes. So really some big claims here coming out of Apple today with these new chips, but that five nanometer processor is really something incredible.
I think as far as, you know, what we’re expecting for when you get the computers themselves, that will really be shown in Apple’s new Mac OS Big Sur, and they announced that back at WWDC in June. But we got out of the event today was news that, you know, we’re going to see universal apps that are able to run on both Intel and M1 based machines, so that means that, you know, we won’t have any issues where, oh, you can’t run this because you have an M1 chip, or you can’t run this because you don’t have an M1 chip and you would have an older Mac. There’s also going to be something called Rosetta 2 that was announced at WWDC in June, and that’s going to allow for Intel based apps to be translated to these new M1 chips so they’ll be able to run on these systems.
And then also that iOS and iPad OS apps will be coming to these Macs with M1 chips. So it’s going to be a big change up, and this is something we’ve seen throughout the last couple of years with Apple where it’s been more of a transition of from let’s take the, you know, millions of apps that we have and iOS and iPad OS and try to bring them into Mac OS. And now these chips, that is finally possible. So we’ll see what that means for the future of these desktops and laptops. But look, from what they’re saying, it seems really impressive.
As for Intel, they’re kind of left there hanging. They’re not going to have access to Apple after 2022. That’s when Apple says that they’ll complete that transition. And as far as money, they’re leaving $2.9 billion a year on the table that Apple would have been usually giving them. That’s how much Apple paid in 2019 for their processors. So all in all, this seems to be a win for Apple. We’ll just have to make sure that these claims are backed up when we get our hands on the devices themselves.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Wow, that’s a lot to take in, and they certainly sound impressive. These chips sound really fast. The great news there on batteries. So with all that power, with all that speed, what are we going to be paying for these? Do we know price points yet, and aren’t they going to be going on preorder very soon? Because I would imagine Apple wants these in people’s hands in time for the holidays.
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, you can start preordering them right now actually. They’ll be available next week. The Air itself will be 999. The Pro, the MacBook Pro, that’s the 13 inch model, that’ll be $1,299, and then the Mini will be 699. So, you know, pricing doesn’t seem to be changing very much for these machines. The Air is 999 right now. It’s going to stay 999. I think a lot of people are going to want to, you know, potentially wait for this generation for the reviews to come out before they put money down on them.
Just because if you are a person who’s using, for instance, a Pro, you want to make sure that you have the power and capabilities that you need to do things like edit heavy duty video or photos or things along those lines, compiling code. I think if you’re going to be a Pro user, you might wait before preordering. But look, if we can live up to what Apple is promising, these will be some seriously impressive systems.
