> Apple have screwed themselves over a bit here by sticking ARM-based Apple silicon in their lower-end/entry level devices first

This is the Innovator's Dilemma [1] Apple built its success on avoiding.

> if they'd started at the high end

They'd have to R&D through the M1 to something more advanced. It would go to market later to be bought in smaller volumes by pickier customers.

Usually, this is a good strategy. Scaling is expensive. Starting small at the highest unit volumes subsidises scaling. But Apple is uniquely unconstrained here. Starting with the most technically forgiving makes sense.

You may not buy an Apple product now. But you will wonder "what will Apple's high end product be" when weighing a competitor's offerings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

>> I think Apple have screwed themselves over a bit here by sticking ARM-based Apple silicon in their lower-end/entry level devices first.

I’m pretty sure Apple already has an 8+8 core version with 32GB+ RAM in their lab that runs at higher clocks and blows the doors off the performance of these M1 chips, and they are simply going for maximum shock effect by releasing this ‘low-end’ chip first then tighten the screws to Intel and AMD even further when they release the MBP and iMac with an M1X chip or whatever they will call it.

Well, just to provide a positive opinion, isn't it nice that a company puts baseline good hardware in their consumer grade product that more people can afford, and gives the option for add on better features? (I mean, with the acknowledgement that baseline = relatively expensive with Apple)

Rather than dumbing down / intentionally hobbling a product so they can sell it for cheaper or segment the market and extract maximum profits.

I think it could be a capabilities issue. An ARM equipped Mac is a non-starter for me because my workstation is driven with a dock that has 2x 4K displays connected to it, ethernet, USB hub, etc.

I'm not willing to part ways with my 2nd external display and I'm sure a lot of professionals with my setup would also consider that a deal breaker.

They probably wanted to get something public so developers could start cranking out compatible apps ASAP so when the bulk start buying this hardware for production use, everything is fully baked.

You mean "the current M1-equipped Macs are a non-starter", then. I have no doubt that either the first or second generation of Apple's high-end chips will support 2 external displays.

The M1 Mac Mini also supports two displays, one of them just needs to be through HDMI.

So the M1 computers all support 2 displays—1 internal and 1 external for the laptops, both external for the Mini.

No they didn't.

There is simply too much complex, professional software that will take time to be ported to ARM versus the relative straightforward needs of entry-level users e.g. Go, Photoshop, Docker.

And they need a large install base to push developers to invest the necessary resources.

Adobe has a native M1 Photoshop in beta now and plans to port Premiere after the first of the year. You may be overestimating the effort to “port” to M1. For most apps, it is just a new compile target and a bunch of regression testing.

Adobe is a top tier developer.

They get access to pre-release hardware, on-site Apple engineers and rapid fixes whenever something doesn't work.

Very different from all of the other third party developers.

It's a beta, not a release version.

And it wouldn't be possible to run an M1 beta if there were no M1 products on the market.

But, in theory at any rate, Rosetta2 will allow you to run all that software on Apple silicon.

We already know that Rosetta2 doesn't support everything.

Do you have any links? Other than virtualization, I hadn't heard about any limitations.

Edit: Looks like kernel extensions aren't supported either.

Certain advanced instruction sets are also unsupported by Rosetta 2.

Post-1996 Apple has never shied away from cannibalizing their own products. https://hbr.org/2016/07/the-best-companies-arent-afraid-to-r...

That's because we might be just seeing the low-end version of the M1 and we might see the high-end version of these chips next year or so. :)

Apple’s ‘low end’ segment is the lion’s share of both revenue and profit.

A decade ago, the Intel Mac Pro also came out after the rest of the product line. For awhile you could only get a Powermac G5.

This is a fair point, but it's certainly a very peculiar - and somewhat offputting - dynamic where the bottom of the range outperforms the top end.

These machines are Apple’s volume in Macs. The MacBook Air, in particular. And today, Apple gets to tout their best-seller is dramatically faster and has dramatically better battery life.

Makes marketing sense to me.

It also gives them a nice profit win since they're not paying Intel anything anymore on their most popular Macs.

I don’t think it will make a huge difference for their profits unless the (modest for the mini, significant for the 13” MBP, nonexistent for the MBA) price cuts significantly move more volume. Apple is notorious for sticking to consistent profit margins and stuffing in as much value as they can to meet their target price points. I would expect that their margins on the MBA are ~20-25%, and ~30% on the rest of the Mac line, just as it’s been since at least the original iMac.

Yes, but that a temporary situation and likely to be resolved in 6-12 months.

Some customers will still choose the older models due to various concerns. -Some customers will hold off out of fear of incompatible software. -Others will hold off because they need to run boot camp or x86 VMs. -Others will need extra RAM or Ports.

Others will have no such concerns and will embrace the new.

The first MacBook Pro immediately outperformed the Power Mac G5.

Putting M1 into low-end devices before Christmas gets the device into the hands of users, solving a chicken-and-egg problem by motivating developers to roll out software that runs natively on M1.

The people who care most about using specific applications that are designed for x86, are the same people who buy the upper-end MBP13 and the MBP16. It makes sense to flesh out the software ecosystem and snag a free iteration on M chips before moving those devices to Apple Silicon.

I don't think the M1 chip is a great choice for the 16" MacBook Pro. It's designed for lower power devices. It may do well on certain workloads like compilation, but may even regress (in terms of performance, not performance-per-watt) on other workloads.

Their future iterations would be much better suited to a higher power device.

It does create this weird short-term demand planning issue, but plenty of corporate customers are buying Intel Macs in large numbers right now (this past quarter was huge) because they want to avoid the bumpy initial years of the transition and stay on Intel until the app ecosystem is stable.

> I don't think the M1 chip is a great choice for the 16" MacBook Pro. It's designed for lower power devices. It may do well on certain workloads like compilation, but may even regress (in terms of performance, not performance-per-watt) on other workloads.

What workloads do you think won't run better in some manner (faster, lower power consumption, etc.)? It's a general purpose CPU. Apple's own benchmarks talked about a broad range of use cases and the public experience and benchmarks are demonstrating this.

There are obvious performance considerations. With a fan, these M1 CPUs have a higher thermal range and sustained performance. This is the thing that's going to be important in the equivalent of the 16" MacBook Pro. They should have the cooling and battery capacity already in the current form factor. The question is do they have the M1 with many more cores, a new variant of the M1, or do they have some more exotic configuration? Only time will tell.

Corporates buying Macs are going to have to decide if their work can be done on these new models. There is no option but to test it. It'll suit some dev environments, but others (e.g. docker-heavy web shops) will have to stick to Intel for now. There are practicalities like needing to replace broken machines and upgrade from slower 2016/2017 models in many places that means it'd be silly to do a wholesale conversion. iOS and Mac dev shops will have much better flexibility in upgrading, but they are in the minority.

Bigger picture, the new M1 models are great for getting solid machines in the hands of the masses without being revolutionary. Devs can get to work on migrating software without the launch running on like the Mac Pro update did (that was a faux pas from Apple that they seem to have recognized.) It leaves open the possibility that next year we may see a complete form factor update across all laptop lines at Apple. It's to Apple's advantage that they delay that because it's high cost (retooling manufacturing) and high risk (the market doesn't like the product change).

I agree with the bulk of what you're saying -- especially about practical considerations involving the software ecosystem and advantages of moving slowly, but I do believe there are some workloads where I'd prefer a hotter machine with more (and not shared) memory.

I think one of the advantages of M1 is its single-thread access to lots of RAM. That advantage kind of starts to fall off when your workload is heavily multi-threaded, which is often the case for buyers of larger machines with more compute cores.

I also believe that the advantages of low power consumption (or equivalently, thermal efficiency) fall off a little bit when you have a larger thermal envelope, because with a larger device (A) you can fit better cooling, and (B) bursts of compute take a longer time to bring the device to throttle temperatures.

Apple's own benchmarks of the M1 are not compared against the 16" MacBook Pro. They aren't yet offering Apple Silicon on the 16" because it isn't clearly better than the current Intel version, and would have elicited comparisons that aren't as glowing.

I'm thinking specifically games, CAD, and video editing. Even Final Cut Pro workloads (running natively) seem to be faster on a 16" MacBook Pro than on an M1 13" MacBook Pro based on the initial reviews on YouTube today. Sure, an M1 machine could do it consuming less power, but who cares? People buy a 16" because they want speed.

I think they will need redesigned high-performance cores for the 16" and the higher-end 13" [or 14"]. Simply using more of them probably won't cut it.

And MacBooks are not just used in dev environments. They're used in education, finance, media, government, and many other sectors - and some of them do want to be the last to switch. If the performance gains aren't dazzling, they can't be convinced to switch sooner. And if they stay on Intel, they can even be convinced to move back to Windows.

I don't think it matters. They get good margins on all their hardware. Some people will still need the pro hardware or can just switch, and then switch again when the 16" has ARM.

> Some people will still need the pro hardware or can just switch, and then switch again when the 16" has ARM.

I don't know: at pro level prices I'm not sure how many people will switch and then switch again. That's a lot of money and a lot of depreciation on the flip. Granted, I'd been about to spend £5k on a laptop, which is a lot, but I'd expected it to last me 5 years or more. I'm not about to spend that money on a machine that seems to have been substantially rendered obsolete before it's even left the factory.

I have to fight the urge myself, but that's a weaker strategy in these times. I've always invested in upgrades to lengthen the life of my laptops (I'm typing on on a 2015 rMBP 13.) It's probably better to spend £2500 now and £2500 in a few years with how things are going to change with ARM.

I think the strategy is simple:

Go hard and go low to make CERTAIN that this transition is for the best.

If this were the high-end, some folks could have say: "Yeah, sure cost the same than i9 but you fork $$$$$$$, when go low you will get less and still pay $$$$".

With this, instead, you rest the case!

IMO, the Mac Mini is the most peculiar purchase of the recent M1 upgrades as normally the tradeoff to the stationary form factor means much better performance; but here the M1 Mini has similar performance with the M1 Macbook Pro.

> can't stick enough memory in one

Sorely disappointed that the Mini is limited to 16GB. That alone makes it feel obsolete, because 16GB is the new 8GB with as much desktop virtualization I find myself doing.

It does. The developer kits, however, did not.

Maybe they tried and the yield isn't there. There could be more memory and cores in the design right now and they are just having to disable some of it, for example.

But you are not going to buy a lenovo either. You are intrigued, what will their high-end offering be like? It may be worth the wait.

Ports, memory, SSD and of course x86-compatibility still speak for the 16" laptop.