Apple Releases the First M1 Macs

Apple released the first Macs with its M1 system-on-chip in November 2020: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The performance and battery-life results immediately showed why Apple had left Intel.

M1 combined high-performance and efficiency CPU cores, an integrated GPU, Neural Engine, media hardware, and memory controllers in one SoC. Its “unified memory” architecture let CPU and GPU access the same physical memory pool instead of constantly copying data between separate memory spaces.

Because M1 used the ARM64 instruction set, older Intel applications relied on Rosetta 2 translation. In many cases translated software still performed well enough that the architecture transition felt surprisingly smooth. The fanless MacBook Air became a particularly clear demonstration of the chip’s performance-per-watt advantage.