Apple Silicon is Apple's new lineup of processors for the Mac platform. It was announced in 2020 with the first Macs appearing at Apple's "One More Thing" event in November 2020. The first was the M1, and it first appeared in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.
Apple Silicon
Apple launched its new M2 Pro and M2 Max custom silicon inside the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini machines. Along with more powerful CPUs, GPUs, and media engines, the chips support up to 96GB of unified memory, and even 8K video output. Follow along for our detailed M2 Pro/Max vs M1 Pro/Max comparison for how everything stacks up and how much of an improvement to expect.
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Apple is halting the development of its own custom Wi-Fi chip in an effort to direct more attention to Apple Silicon processors. According to Ming-Chi Kuo, the “slowdown of processor upgrades” is a concern for Apple. Therefore, it wants to devote more resources to the development of 3-nanometer chips for Apple Silicon products.
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Powered by M1 Pro and M1 Max Apple Silicon, the most modern MacBook Pro laptops feature the most powerful CPU and GPUs (outside of the M1 Ultra), increased RAM, miniLED ProMotion displays, expanded I/O, and much more. Read on for an in-depth comparison of the 14 and 16″ MacBook Pro vs the 13″ M2 and 16″ Intel machines to help you decide which to pick.
Apple has announced the M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBook Pro laptops, check out our full comparison on the new hardware:
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Apple has apparently scrapped plans to make a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro with a high-end “M2 Extreme” chip featuring 48 CPU cores and 152 GPU cores. That’s according to Mark Gurman in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter. Gurman also says the new Mac Pro will be manufactured in Vietnam, a stark departure from the “Made in USA” 2019 Intel Mac Pro.
The “Extreme” chip would have essentially been a dual M2 Ultra. But complexity and cost concerns seem to have shelved those plans. Gurman still says Apple is preparing to launch a new Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra inside, with a design that enables expandability of some components, like RAM and storage.
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Apple announced its plans to transition the Mac from Intel to Apple Silicon processors on June 22, 2020. At the time, the company said it would “ship the first Mac” with Apple Silicon by the end of 2020 and “complete the transition in about two years.” That two-year road map has passed, and Apple hasn’t completed the transition quite yet. Here’s what we’re still waiting on.
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Over recent weeks, we’ve seen some unreleased Mac hardware emerge via Geekbench testing results. Now, a pair of unreleased Macs has surfaced in another database: the Steam Hardware and Software Survey for November. This comes as Apple is widely expected to release upgrade versions of the MacBook Pro and Mac Studio sometime in early 2023.
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Tor Browser is now optimized for Apple Silicon, thanks to a new update rolling out this week. With the newest release of Tor Bowser 12.0, the Mac version of the Firefox-based browser is now a Universal app, meaning it can run natively on Macs with Apple Silicon or Intel chips using the same binary.
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VMware has announced the official launch of Fusion 13, a big update to its virtualization software that offers native support for Apple Silicon. This marks the first version of VMware Fusion that offers Apple Silicon support in final form, with the company having previously tested the feature in beta.
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ExpressVPN has been updated to version 11.5.0 for macOS users. It finally brings native support for Apple silicon Macs, which means M1 and M2 Mac users can take full advantage of this VPN running natively on their computers.
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It’s been several years since Apple announced its intentions to move beyond its retail presence in San Diego and build a hub of hardware and software engineering. Now in what looks like the company’s first commercial purchase in the area, Apple has bought HP’s old 67-acre campus as it ramps up work on making an in-house modem and more.
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It wasn’t long after the new(ish) MacBook Pro went on sale that we got to see some M2 speed benchmarks. These confirmed Apple’s claims in terms of improvements over the base M1 chip, but also confirmed that, as expected, the M1 Pro, Max, and Ultra chips still leave the M2 in the dust.
A new comparison table shows how the M2 speed compares to every other recent Apple Silicon chip, from the A13 Bionic in the iPhone 11, through to the M1 Ultra – and it makes for interesting viewing …
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As Apple continues the transition to Apple Silicon, it is also still supporting Intel-powered Macs with its latest macOS releases. macOS Ventura is capable of running on most every Mac release since 2017, including those powered by Intel as well as Apple Silicon. But with that being said, some of the new features of macOS Ventura are only supported on Macs powered by Apple Silicon.
According to Apple’s website, there are a few primary features in macOS Ventura that you’ll only be able to use if you have an Apple Silicon-powered Mac.
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We didn’t have long to wait after the launch of the Mac Studio to see a bunch of M1 Ultra benchmarks. These ranged from comparisons to the 28-core Intel Mac Pro to a comprehensive set of tests by Macworld.
A new set of tests not only aims to see how the M1 Ultra and M1 Max compare in real-life usage, but also when performing tasks specifically suggested by pro app users …
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Get ready to conquer some daemons! Total War: WARHAMMER III is out now on macOS, but only for Apple Silicon Macs with M1 chip or higher – not Intel.
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Intel last week provided an update on its 14th-generation Meteor Lake processors due to launch next year, but it seems that there may have been a crucial change to the company’s plans.
Intel has said as recently as last week that it would fabricate the chips itself, using a 7nm process, but a supply-chain report today claims that the company will instead outsource the work to TSMC, so it can benefit from the same 5nm process used for Apple’s M1 chips …
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After digging into Apple Silicon, researchers have discovered a new vulnerability that affects Apple’s latest M1 and A14 chips. The Augury Apple Silicon microarchitectural flaw has been demonstrated to leak data at rest but doesn’t appear to be “that bad” at this point.
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Over 18 months after the release of the first Mac powered by the M1 chip, Microsoft has released a version of Microsoft Teams that is optimized for Apple Silicon. While the Apple Silicon version of Microsoft Teams is not publicly available to Teams users yet, you can download it via the company’s website.
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Pro users of M1 Macs have reported disappointing transfer speeds with external SSDs, and tests appear to show that most M1 Mac Thunderbolt ports don’t support USB 3.1 Gen 2 – which means they don’t offer the maximum 10Gb/s transfer speeds that would be expected from Thunderbolt 4.
The tests were conducted on a 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro M1 Max, and a 2022 Mac Studio M1 Max …
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When Apple compared the M1 Ultra GPU performance to what was then Nvidia’s most powerful graphics card, the company’s chart and quote were technically true, but rather misleading, says Macworld.
Apple gave the impression that the M1 Ultra outperformed the Nvidia RTX 3090, but this was not the case – and will be even less so now that Nvidia has launched the 3090 Ti …
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The global chip shortage doesn’t appear likely to end any time soon. The manufacturer of crucial chipmaking machines has warned that its kit will be in short supply for another two years.
That’s particularly bad news for Intel as it seeks to play catch-up with the capabilities of Apple’s M1 chips …
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Apple on Tuesday introduced Mac Studio, which comes with the powerful M1 Max chip by default. However, the company also offers a more expensive model with M1 Ultra, a new Apple Silicon chip that is even faster than the M1 Max. To give us a better idea of that performance, a Geekbench test shows that Apple’s latest chip beats the 28-core Intel Mac Pro.
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There have been a number of reports of an M2 Mac this year, including the slightly odd idea of an entry-level M2 MacBook Pro model sitting below the M1 Pro and M1 Max models. We’ll need to see whether that happens and wait for M2 Mac benchmarks if it does.
But a new piece today suggests that we may be able to get a reasonably good idea of M2 Mac benchmarks by extrapolating…
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Apple chipmaker TSMC has reported record profits for the holiday quarter, comfortably beating analyst expectations. The company has also reported year-on-year revenue growth of 24.1%, a quarter of it generated by Apple.
TSMC, which makes Apple’s A-series and M-series chips, says that it has big expectations and big plans for the next few years …
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As Apple continues to transition the Mac to its own Apple Silicon processors, Intel isn’t looking the direction. As first reported by Tom’s Hardware, Apple’s director of Mac System Architecture, Jeff Wilcox, is departing the company to join Intel. At Intel, Wilcox will become an “Intel Fellow” and service as the chief technology officer of the design engineering group.
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