What are the pros and cons of the new Apple M1 chip?

Apple has designed the M1 System on a Chip (SoC) so that it has the memory included on the board, something it calls Unified Memory Architecture, which speeds up the transmission of data as well as added to the general swiftness of the performance. macOS Big Sur has also been built from the ground up with M1 in mind, so the software optimisation is no doubt playing its part.

Pros:

1.Value for Money (M1 Macs are definitely the value for money especially comparing the CPU Performance).

2.Laptop processor that went past the 1 Million Benchmark on Antutu and jaw dropping Geekbench scores too.

3.Longest battery life - M1 laptops offer best ever battery life while preserving the ergonomics of the laptop (Power efficiency is not a matter of fact for Mac mini users anyway it’s arguably the best ever in laptop).

4.Highest Single Core Clock Speed (which means no need for more cores to be activated to get job done) so more efficiency.

5.Excellent transitioning of the Intel based apps with Rosetta 2 (As many are aware the M1 is an ARM based 5nm chip and not of the regular desktop architecture, so the Intel based apps need to be converted - for this they brought Rosetta 2 that translates the binaries). The performance is good with Rosetta 2 except for very few apps. Native ARM based apps give the extra advantage though. Soon many app developers will fine tune and come up with Native apps for the Apple Silicon.

6. No Thermal Throttling - The M1 is super silent, the fan never kicks in (on M1 MacBook Pro and Mac mini) almost for all of the high performance tasks. You’re gonna have a hard time enabling the fan and the benchmarks are consistent (whereas Intel based Macs will scream out loud when you throw high performance tasks and gets extremely hot).

Cons:

1.No BOOT CAMP Windows! ARM based Macs do not support Bootcamp which allows Mac users to enjoy both worlds (windows and Mac without using Virtualization options like Parallels and VMware Fusion).

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2.Only 16 GB Max RAM option. 16 GB RAM is more than enough for almost all people but for some who need more it's a bad news.

3.No EGPU support yet. For Power Users who demand for even more GPU performance, the EGPUs are not supported on the M1 Macs yet although they get detected when plugged in through the Thunderbolt ports. A rollout of a software update might fix it but it's upto Apple.

4.Still old school Camera on M1 MacBooks (camera is way more inferior and competitors produce better cameras). The AI software tweak to improvise don’t help much considering the poor camera.

5.No room for upgradation. As per the latest articles making their rounds online, the M1 Macs do not support upgrading their components although on previous Macs (especially Mac mini) some sort of upgrades were possible.

M1 is the future Apple has in mind

You can be sure that the Intel MacBooks will be supported for a while yet, but the truth is that Apple doesn't seem to have them in its plans going forward. The company has already stated that it intends to transition all of the Mac line-up to its own chips by 2022, and this means that the majority of new capabilities introduced in subsequent versions of macOS could be M1-only or certainly work better on that platform.

With this in mind, it's worth asking yourself how long you generally take between upgrading your Mac? If it's every couple of years, then the Intel version could still be a sensible purchase, but if it's four or five years, it's harder to predict how compatible they will be with macOS upgrades.

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