Apple is making a fool of the traditional PC industry

On November 17, 2020, a paradigm shift was created in the segment of laptops and, obviously, personal computers. For many years, if we wanted power we knew we were going to sacrifice autonomy. AMD and Intel processors are currently real beasts in heavy tasks, but also demanding on the battery.

If we wanted processors that took care of the battery and they allowed us to be 4-5 hours away from the plug, we had to opt for low consumption options of those processors that, the vast majority of the time, they do not allow to have a good performance in heavy tasks.

However, in November 2020 Apple introduced the M1 and without fear of being wrong, it was a revolution. And all thanks to its ARM architecture. Yes, we’ve had laptops with that architecture before, but Windows + ARM doesn’t work terribly well outside of Windows S mode, and there are tons of apps that aren’t compatible.

With the Apple Silicon M1, Apple managed to combine power, good energy efficiency and, in addition, it included the hardware with a software -Rosetta 2- which translates non-native apps for ARM so they can run smoothly. Therefore, it was efficient, it performed well and, in addition, it was compatible with practically all the apps we had.

As a new architecture and tailor-made for your computers, many of us wonder… where is the limit? How much will they be able to scale generation after generation? Well, after the M1 Max/Pro of their 14” and 16” MacBook Pros (they won our 202nd prize for technological innovation, by the way), all that remained was to see how they would perform on the desktop. And boy, are they going to put Intel, AMD and… Qualcomm on the ropes.

And I say all this because we had already seen that the M1 Max and M1 Ultra of the Mac Studio were true beasts in performance, capable of satisfying the creative capacities of 3D or video professionals. However, it is true that they were expensive equipment and that they were not available to everyone.

With the Mac Mini with M2 announced last week, things change. The M2, the truth, is not much superior to the M1, we already saw that in the analysis of the MacBook Air last year, but the novelty of this Mac Mini is that it can be bought with the SoC -System on Chip- M2 Pro. And, friend, things change.

Just take a look at the table where you can see the results of different performance tests to see that, both in terms of GPU and CPU, the Mac Mini is up to par with its supposed older brothers:

Yes, they are very powerful and so on, but you may be wondering why Intel has to tremble over this. Well, why? the Mac Mini with M2 Pro starts at 1,569 euros, which is a very, very good price for a product capable of editing 4K60 HDR without the need for proxies, for example, and because it is proving that the power scaling is beastly generation after generation without affecting autonomy too much.

Right now, I have the feeling that Apple is quite a few steps ahead of those who dominated the processor industry for decades and, furthermore, that they do not know very well how to react.

Efforts are being made, there are unions between AMD and Intel with other companies and I think that sooner rather than later they will start making ARM-based processors to try to enter a market that is no longer ultrabook, but the industry of personal computers in general.

And then there’s Qualcommthe undisputed leader in the mobile segment, but which is not shining on laptops, not so much because of its processors, which is a bit too, but because the software (Windows in this case) does not accompany it.

And in the end, the success of Apple and its architecture is there: they make their processors for their operating system and they can optimize everything down to the micron. In a traditional PC, Intel/AMD have to come to an agreement with Microsoft, Nvidia, storage manufacturers, RAM manufacturers and other components to match Apple in this regard, and that is very, very difficult to achieve.