Apple M1 — What Does it Mean for iXperiential
Last week Apple announced their new line-up of hardware for 2021 making the switch to their proprietary microchips to power their Mac Mini and MacBook laptops. While the design hasn’t changed much the core of these new Macs is the new Apple M1, a supercharged version of the A14. The M1 has 8 CPU cores (4 high performance and 4 low consumption) as well as 7 or 8 GPU cores and 16 cores dedicated to machine learning. From a hardware perspective this is a huge leap forward –the new M1 Macs are capable of compiling code 3x faster than Intel Macs. In addition to the increased horsepower the laptops will also have the longest battery life ever — clocking in at about 16 hours battery life for continuous web browsing or up to 20 hours of video playback (on the MacBook Pro model) without needing to be plugged in/recharged.
What does this mean from a software perspective — or for iXperiential and our clients? It surely does not mean that iXperiential will be ditching our PC’s for Macs anytime soon. The ability to build custom rigs suited to a particular project use case is one of the strengths of sticking with Intel based PCs for development of our software. However — there are some benefits that might be passed to our clients in particular use cases. One particular benefit is that applications developed for this new generation of iPad or iPhone will run natively on M1 equipped Mac laptops and computers. From an iXperiential client point of view this could be a benefit for sales or marketing teams who use Apple devices/computers as our applications that have been ported to iPad would have the potential to run (depending on device performance) seamlessly between Apple devices. As usual though- with Apple products- while the new generation of hardware gains new capabilities it also furthers closes off the Apple system to PC based software and technology. Applications developed on x86 architecture will need to be recompiled to run on the M1 systems — or they can be run through Rosetta 2, a software layer that translates x86 instructions into ARM ones.
