I did it five years ago unpacked and assessed My first Apple Silicon laptop, the MacBook Air M1. This laptop and SOC would change the course of laptop history, especially MacBook history, and my computing experience.
However, it all started with the announcement.
It’s been five years since Apple unveiled Apple silicon during its first-ever virtual WWDC keynote in the middle of a global pandemic. Even without the emotional moment on stage when CEO Tim Cook emerged from the shadows and revealed a huge dose of enthusiasm for Apple’s platform, it was significant.
“One world, one universe, one platform, unification. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote just painted a picture of a world where the walls fall and the Apple ecosystem becomes one, from the silicon underneath to the pixels in front of your face.”
What Apple Silicon Will Mean for the Mac. #WWDC20 #WWDC2020 pic.twitter.com/oqJ4MtG8zVJune 22, 2020
Changing hardware platforms at Apple was not unusual: after all, the company had only migrated its systems from IBM and Motorola’s PowerPC to Intel fourteen years earlier.
But this time it was different. Like an A-level student preparing for final exams, Apple was well prepared for this new transition. The company used XCode to rewrite all of its own applications and worked with key partners such as microsoft and Adobe to ensure that key third-party applications could run on the revolutionary new hardware. A ready-to-use developer transition kit was also available for application partners.
It also released Rosetta 2, a software compatibility layer, which promises to ease the transition for applications not supported by Arm.
The promise of silicon
At the time, I was well aware of the potential benefits of an energy efficient five nanometer platform. This was the holy grail of mobile computing that Microsoft had already tackled, albeit with less success, with Windows on Arm on the Surface X Pro, which ran on the SQ2 chip.
Apple’s silicon would transform MacBooks from decent-performing battery packs to 17-hour marathon runners. I doubted the integrated graphics, but I also knew that the graphics performance of Apple’s custom A-series chips in iPhones and iPads had always been excellent, so I also had reason to be hopeful.
Realizing the potential, I wrote: “What Apple is doing is switching all of its systems that run on a variety of fuels, like wind, solar, and gas, to just one, which you might call rocket fuel.”
However, I wasn’t going to switch from Windows to Mac.
I had my reasons
It’s not that I wasn’t familiar with the Mac. I had been using the original Macintosh in the 80s, but eventually switched to Windows when I started. PCMag early nineties.
For me, Windows was like an old but beloved car. It may have been clumsy and sometimes even broke in the middle of the road, but it knew all the controls and contours. It suited me and me too. He knew his weaknesses, but he also knew how to overcome them. I accepted the fact that no Windows laptop could give me more than five hours of battery life (on a good day), as well as the fact that the blue screen of death always seemed to lurk in an unexpected corner.
Almost five months after the announcement, developers received the Transition Kit, which, among other things, enabled them to develop universal applications for all systems equipped with Apple chips. I tested the first Apple MacBook Air with the M1 chip. I called him”an incredible turning point“.
Especially in the area of integrated graphics, the benchmarks even made fun of Intel Core i7 systems. The battery life was incredible, from 15 to 20 hours. I knew intuitively that a system like this could change my life.
But the thought of switching from Windows to macOS (the operating system that Mac computers run on) was terrifying. I guess I was afraid that I would eventually find out that most of my most important apps didn’t run on Apple chips, or that Apple would miss the two-year deadline to completely divest Intel, or that the company might even abandon the project altogether and return to Intel.
I shouldn’t have worried. In 2023, the Mac Pro was also upgraded to an M2 Ultra. I’m impressed by Apple’s innovative approach to creating increasingly powerful Apple silicon chips, often by combining them (the M2 Ultra is actually two M2 Max chips). I’ve also never found an app that didn’t work on Apple chips.
Making the change and what could have been
The first time I touched a MacBook Air M2 was until I started using it regularly.
After a three-year journey at Apple Silicon, I switched to the MacBook Air M2 and documented my efforts in a journal. There were a few challenges, but almost all of them revolved around long-standing differences between macOS and Windows. I had to learn a lot of new commands and keyboard shortcuts.
Two weeks after my trip I wrote:
“Using Mac has become second nature to me. Will I ever go back?”
Spoiler alert: I’ve never done this before.
If Apple had not fulfilled the Apple Silicon promise on June 22, 2020, the story would have been different (perhaps closer to Apple’s intelligence). The fact that it has done its best from the start to make the hard stuff look easy (support all these apps, make cross-platform apps work on different systems, be bulletproof and deliver industry-leading efficiency) has turned its back on Apple’s chips. Apple showed immediate commitment by introducing the M1 MacBook Air, as well as an iMac and Mac Mini, within the first six months.
Apple has never looked back and continues to evolve and innovate on the Apple Silicon platform to deliver more powerful mobile processors. Only in the last year, with the help of Qualcomm, has the Windows world started to catch up and almost match Apple’s chips in performance, efficiency and stability.
Apple Silicon changed the computing world, but it also changed me. I left a platform that I loved (and still love) and haven’t looked back. Apple’s market share has grown thanks to Apple Silicon and I think the best is yet to come, especially in the Mac space.
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