Apple's New M1 Chip: Should You Preorder?

So, what’s the catch?

For months now, I’ve heard how much better the new Apple Silicon will be. While a little skeptical, I assumed it would be a significant improvement considering how much hype has been built around it. It turns out it’s not that big of a deal.

The following claims and disclaimers can be found on Apple’s M1 sales page and use prerelease ARM optimized versions of either Apple’s Final Cut or Adobe’s Lightroom. More details can be found in the disclaimers themselves.

Claim: “Up to 3.5X faster CPU performance.”

Disclaimer: vs. an Intel 1.2GHz quad-core

Comment: It better be with an 8 core CPU that’s surely faster than 1.2GHz. 😂

Claim: “Up to 7.1X faster image processing.”

Disclaimer: vs. an Intel Coffee Lake quad-core i3-8100 CPU with Intel UHD graphics

Comment: Again, it better be. They’re comparing an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU against a tiny 4-core processor with minimal integrated graphics with 2 GPU cores.

I expected better than this.

Additionally, scores on Puget System’s Puget Bench aren’t looking good for the new Apple computers. In this After Effects test, the latest top-spec Apple MacBook Pro is only getting a 589, which is very low compared to PC competitors. As Cade Embery of Fluro pointed out to me in VMC’s Church Creatives Facebook group, these tests are being done on a version of After Effects that, to my knowledge, is not fully optimized for ARM processors. That's fair and that being the case, hopefully 🤞 we will get to see higher scores as time goes on.

So until programs can be optimized and more benchmarks can be done to test Apple’s new ARM chip’s performance, it’s safe to say you should hold off on any pre-orders.

Featured Photo by Tianyi Ma on Unsplash

Screenshot of the disclaimers in case they’re changed: