Apple unveils M2, taking the breakthrough performance and capabilities of M1 even further

[BorisDG]

Well A16 is going to be a very small performance leap and only going into Pro phones, rest of the 1Phone 14's get A15 again.

Yeah and I read it will be again on 5nm which sucks.

In my opinion, most people will be hard pressed to observe any difference between a M1 and M2 MacBook Air in their day to day usage. I’ve used the M1 MacBook Air for quite a long time, and I never really feel like I am losing out by not getting the M1 Ultra/ Max for example. Also, while the M2 sounds quite a bit faster on paper, I feel it is less impressive than what the M1 chip delivered when it was launched. We are accustomed to hearing crappy performance from ARM based Windows system in the past. And as a result, Apple’s M1 shocked the industry when it proved to be very performant while also delivering battery life unheard of in a laptop that starts at USD 999 at launch. It is no gaming machine, but for work, surfing net, watching shows and doing some photo editing, it is convenient and a joy to use even with just 8GB of system ram.

I mean in general the M* series are not so impressive compared to A* series when you think about the power consumption.

A14 vs M1 performance is less than 2x compared than more than 2x power consumption (6W vs 14W)

Imagine A14/15 SoC in Nintendo Switch... will be impressive compared to the current X1+ in terms of performance/consumption. Plus those chips are small.

 

[Minus Infinity]

All the hype about the M2 and all they've done is use the A15 cores in the M2 rather than the A14 cores that the M1 used. This is the only real difference. Obviously A15 brought some nice changes in memory support compared to A14, but the M2 is not some clean sheet design and let's hope the M3 isn't going to rehash the mildly updated A16 cores. I don't think AMD and Intel will worry too much. From Meteor Lake on and especially with Arrow Lake Intel will be making huge mobile centric advancements in their CPU's, so will address the poor efficiency and AMD is already looking good with Rembrandt and Phoenix will further enhance efficiency and performance before the big changes comes with Zen 5. And for gaming Phoenix and Dragon APU's will destroy M2's (and Raptor Lake).

If they gave an M2 based iPad Pro MacOS that would be tempting and will never happen, so I'd much rather thin and light 2-in-1 AMD based 12-13' laptop running a real OS.

 

[tony359]

I'm no rocket surgeon, but releasing chips with such big performance increases so close to other recent chips is not going to make people too excited to drop several thousand on a new Mac and have it obsolete in 6 months or less. I'd be a little pissed to wake up to read this press release if I just bought into their ecosystem.

This is called innovation. The M1 won't die or become unusable, it will still be perfectly capable of doing its job. And to be honest for daily office work the M1 will be perfectly fine until the end of its support. If you need it for more heavy tasks (video editing etc) then we always need more power for that and a good upgrade will always be welcome!

As I said - toys. This is 6900hs vs M1 pro(8p +2e cores). M2 with just 18% over 4p+4e M1 has no chans. The release of 7900hs will be blood bath for whole m2 series

I am not an apple fan but I think you are missing the point. I don't disagree that the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD can compete with the M1, but you need to consider that the M1 achieve a similar/better result on a MacBook air with no active cooling!

My 11th gen Intel laptop drops its performance when on battery, the M1 doesn't.

 

[Steevo]

This is called innovation. The M1 won't die or become unusable, it will still be perfectly capable of doing its job. And to be honest for daily office work the M1 will be perfectly fine until the end of its support. If you need it for more heavy tasks (video editing etc) then we always need more power for that and a good upgrade will always be welcome!

I am not an apple fan but I think you are missing the point. I don't disagree that the latest and greatest from Intel and AMD can compete with the M1, but you need to consider that the M1 achieve a similar/better result on a MacBook air with no active cooling!

My 11th gen Intel laptop drops its performance when on battery, the M1 doesn't.

There are processor power controls so it won’t do that when on battery.

Also, https://www.macworld.com/article/782793/every-iphone-ipad-mac-apple-watch-obsolete.html/amp

Classic Apple, 5 year old Mac book pro no longer gets software upgrades, you could say it’s cause the Intel processors, but they are also dropping IPhone 7 and original SE.


I also find it hilarious (not pointing this at you) that most Apple snobs are also the people complaining about how terrible capitalism is, but have made Apple one of the richest companies in the world with their planned obsolescence model, while workers jump from roofs or have safety nets installed to prevent them from dying. I have seen them, Anarchy stickers on a MacBook Pro.

Back to the topic at hand though, the M1 is only able to perform well at specific things as the click to add has an option for hardware acceleration for that specific workload. It’s the same thing as Direct X back in the day, if your GPU didn’t support whatever level was required it wouldn’t work. Or vector acceleration, or AES hardware, or any specific hardware accelerator that will become obsolete unless it can be run in generic code at much much slower rates. I can’t run some new games as the performance is too low, I don’t have the required SSE version hardware acceleration. But my CPU is also from 2010. 7 or 8 years older than what Apple is dropping support for.

 

[trsttte]

If they gave an M2 based iPad Pro MacOS that would be tempting and will never happen, so I'd much rather thin and light 2-in-1 AMD based 12-13' laptop running a real OS.

iPadOS is a complete disservice for the quality of current iPad tablets. My hope is that eventually someone finds an exploit (or Apple is forced) to unlock the bootloader of the current gen. tablets so we can run linux instead of their crappy OS (the Asahi Linux project is already having some success with a compatible gpu driver so it's not that far from full Apple silicon support).

 

[BorisDG]

Obviously A15 brought some nice changes in memory support compared to A14

Both A14/A15 supports LPPDR5 if you are talking about this. M1 Pro ++ are on LPDDR5. Only M1 is on LPDDR4X just like A15 itself. A16 is expected to be LPDDR5 from the get-go.