Lori Grunin

Senior Editor, CNET. 15,000 cat photos and counting. Also, have been testing and writing about tech since the dawn of time.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

@stshank I even chair danced a little 😉

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

I'm curious about the scalability of the M1/Apple silicon architecture.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

Both the Pro and Air are still limited to 16GB RAM. I wonder if that's a chip limitation.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

They're not providing any useful specs for these performance claims and comparisons, which really peeves me. But I should be used to marketing blather by now.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

Still has the touchbar, though.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

13-inch MacBook Pro gets the M1 as well.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

The M1 can drive the Pro XDR at 6K. That's nice.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

It's no surprise that the M1 comes to the Mac Mini -- that's what they used for developer kits.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

So, Apple didn't get very aggressive with the design, just subbed in the new silicon (which is nontrivial on its own).

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

No higher res for the webcam, but new processing. Air gets Retina P3 display, though, which is nice.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

A lot of this expands the Mac's ability to run games

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

The Photoshop port/native app probably takes advantage of all the cloud document and AI work Adobe's already done

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

It sounds like the universal apps are base ports. These devs are all highlighting things that take advantage of the single-threaded speed and neural nets

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

Supports iOS apps natively, which is no surprise

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

@iansherr it sounds a bit like AMDs Smart Access Memory

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

M1's CPU can access more graphics RAM then before. But Intel's iGPUs set a low bar.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

No info about what kind of resolutions/frame rates it can drive for displays.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

Apple's claiming the iGPU of the M1 (8 cores) is better and more efficient than an entry discrete GPU at every power level

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

M1 chips have 8 cores each single threaded but four of them are high speed and others are high efficiency -- they've jumped on the performance-per-watt bandwagon that AMD started.

[Lori Grunin @LoriGrunin]

They keep their presenters in the sub-basement?