One of the more interesting things about Apple’s switch to its own Silicon is that the company is positioning its new M1 chip in the exact same way that it’s always talked about its A-series chips for its iPhones and iPads.
There’s only one M1 chip. Not a Core Duo M1, or a 2.4GHz M1 that can “Turbo Boost” up to 4.8GHz, or an “i7 M1.” It’s just the M1. Period.
It’s a move that’s classic Apple, but it’s also understandably a little bit unsettling after more than a decade of distinguishing Apple’s MacBooks by a whole laundry list of different Intel chip specs. For example, before this week, Apple’s MacBook Air could be configured with a 1.1GHz dual-core Core i3 CPU all the way up to a quad-core 1.2GHz tenth-generation Intel Core i7 that could Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz.
Honestly, it could be somewhat exhausting, and it’s really only now that Apple’s M1 has arrived that we can feel exactly how much that was truly the case. As of yesterday’s announcement, the new MacBooks Air all come with Apple’s M1 chip. No upgrades, no significant spec differences — just the M1.
It’s a breath of fresh air, but at the same time it’s got a lot of folks asking what’s really different between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro now that they have the same chips?
In the past, variations in Intel’s massive family of chips meant that it was really easy to distinguish Apple’s entry-level consumer MacBook from its pro-grade models — while the MacBook Air capped out at a 1.2GHz Core i7, the standard MacBook Pro was a quad-core 2.0GHz Intel Core i5, and it topped out at a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 that could reach Turbo Boost speeds of up to 4.1GHz.
These made for obvious performance differences that put Apple’s two MacBook lineups in entirely different classes, but now it seems that the Mac maker has completely rewritten the rules of the game with its new M1 silicon.
The MacBook Pro Lineup Today
To be clear, Apple is still selling Intel-based MacBook Pro models, and when you take a closer look at the lineup, what’s actually happened is that the new M1 MacBook Pro has simply replaced the entry-level MacBook Pro.
In other words, despite all of the hype around Apple’s incredible new M1 chip — and it really does appear to be insanely powerful — the company has clearly decided that it’s only suitable for the very lowest end of its Mac family. This is not a true comparison between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro families at this point, but merely between the MacBook Air family and the one MacBook Pro that’s only ever barely qualified for the “Pro” moniker.
To put this in perspective, we’re talking about the MacBook Pro model that’s been the red-headed stepchild in the family for years. When Apple introduced the Touch Bar back in 2016, this was the MacBook Pro that was left out of the party until three years later, when it also finally gained Apple’s T2 chip and Touch ID as well, but even then it continued to feature very entry-level specs compared to its more expensive siblings.
The lowest-end MacBook Pro hasn’t even been on the same refresh cycle as the rest of the family, leading many to repeatedly wonder how long Apple was going to keep it around.
Even after last year’s refresh, it still included only two USB-C ports (versus the four ports found on the more expensive models), and up until it was effectively replaced by the M1 MacBook Pro this week, still only included an 8th-gen 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 that could be upgraded to a 1.7GHz Core i7. It also maxed out at 16GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, just like the prior Intel versions of the MacBook Air and all of Apple’s new M1 MacBooks.
So there’s a valid reason that Apple is still selling its Intel MacBook Pro models — they remain the two higher-end versions, and will likely continue to stay in that slot until Apple is ready to release an even better version of the M1 chip, likely something like an M1X.
That said, there’s probably still going to be potential for a performance difference between the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models, and it ultimately comes down to a few key factors that Apple isn’t really talking about, but will almost certainly make for a few practical differences.
Fans and Thermal Management
Apple made a big deal about how the new MacBook Air doesn’t include any fan at all, since of course the M1 can run that much cooler, and yet the new MacBook Pro does include an “active cooling system” that involves — you guessed it — a fan.
No matter how power-efficient the M1 is, it’s an incontrovertible law of physics that processors get hotter when you put more of a workload into them, and this means that thermal and power management systems have to either slow down the processor or add more cooling to keep everything from melting down.
The fanless MacBook Air will undoubtedly have to opt for the former during heavy workloads, which means that the MacBook Pro and Mac mini should be able to eke more peak performance out of the M1.
Apple said as much during its presentation on the MacBook Pro, while obviously avoiding any mention of the flip side of that equation: that the MacBook Air would therefore be less ideally equipped for such workloads.
M1 GPU Cores
When Apple showed off the MacBook Air, it snuck in the words “up to” when describing the eight GPU cores. It turns out that this is because the entry-level $999 MacBook Air actually only has seven GPU cores.
It remains to be seen how much of a practical difference this is going to make, but it’s actually something we’ve already seen Apple do en masse with its last two generations of iPad Pro — the 2018 A12X iPad Pro only had seven GPU cores, while the A12Z that came to the 2020 iPad Pro had all eight up and running.
M1 Chip Binning
Manufacturing complex systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) like the M1 is incredibly complicated. We’re talking about 16 billion transistors on a wafer that’s smaller than your thumbnail.
Since no fabrication process is absolutely perfect, there are always going to be those chips that don’t quite measure up to the performance specs. Rather than throw these out, chip makers simply “bin” those chips and use them for lower-spec applications. This has been going on for decades — even the original Pentium chips that were sold as 60MHz versions were simply the 66MHz ones that didn’t make the cut.
In the case of the M1 chip, it’s entirely possible that the MacBook Air will get the second-tier “binned” versions that don’t clock in quite as fast as the others. Apple presumably has a minimum standard of performance for its MacBooks, but of course we don’t get to know what that is, and it’s likely lower for the MacBook Air than it is for the MacBook Pro.
This is also likely where Apple’s 7-GPU-core M1’s are coming from too, since it’s very unlikely that Apple is specifically manufacturing versions with seven cores; these are just the M1 chips where they can’t get all eight cores working reliable, much like the A12X used in the 2018 iPad Pro, which always had one core disabled.
The Bottom Line
Ultimately we won’t know for sure how much of a difference this is going to make until the new M1 MacBooks start landing in people’s hands and we can see some real-world benchmarks, but ultimately we really don’t think you should worry too much about it at this point.
The fact is that the M1 chip is by all estimations a massive leap forward. In fact, in some ways Apple has done with its MacBook lineup what it just did earlier this year with its new iPad Air — put its fastest chip in lower-end models ahead of its premium hardware.
With everything that Apple is promising for the M1, we have no doubt that the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro will likely outperform their Intel counterparts in a lot of key areas, but of course if you need more storage, more RAM, or simply more USB ports, Apple’s higher-end Intel MacBooks are still no slouches either.
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