They could have used lower power Intel chips. Nobody forced them to put 45W chips in a paper thin chassis, but their marketing guys really wanted to have the top of the line Intel chips in them despite the wattage.
What did you expect would happen?
It would be like Apple putting the chip from the Mac Studio in the Air.
They did use low power chips. They had core M CPUs (later rebranded i5-i7 because OEMs). These were 4.5W TDP chips, even the best i7 in the 2017 model (i7-7Y75). The ONLY chips Intel had with lower power usage at the time were the significantly slower Atom and Atom derivatives.
There's seeing at a superficial level and seeing at a deeper level. Plenty of companies were designing, building and selling hardware using the same components and making many of the same tradeoffs. The point is Apple realised what this meant, and saw what the implications would be to try and actually address those issues.
I loved my 12" macbook and would buy an Mx one in a heartbeat. It was so small I'd forget if I had it in my bag and would have to look. I traveled all over the planet and it was super convenient. I even wrote code on it.
12 had amazing form factor, but it was great only for native apps, web apps were running horrible on it.
But it was beautiful at that time, it was first macbook with various colors? Even once one lady at coffee shop approached me and asked what version of MacBook it was. No no... that's end of the story :)
I almost bought one - I had, if Apple had had one in stock when I tried to buy one. A truly faszinating device. Probably the smallest "full size" laptop, depending how you could, ever made.
For sure, the weakeast point of it was the processor, which had to sacrifice too much performance to stay in the thermal budget. I guess the basic design decisions for the 12" MacbBook were made when Intel still seemed to be on track for their 10nm process. But it wasn't the only caveat with its design. It had of course the horrible butterfly keybord which would plague the Apple laptops for years and 12" is the absolute minimum screen size for doing work.
I think Apple has another laptop design < 13" coming, that could be 12". The ARM processors pretty much solve the power/performance problem. The keyboard could actually be the biggest hurdle, as it increases the body thickness. But the keyboard of the new M2 Air is just wonderful, well worth whatever it adds to the device thickness. I wouldn't even be surprised, if they don't make an ultra-thin 12" MacBook but rather a 12" MB Pro, which might be slightly thicker than the Air.
Same. It certainly had its flaws, but it was ahead of its time in many ways. At the time I was traveling a lot and didn't need much power so it was perfect for me. It seems I got extremely lucky as I never had keyboard issues with mine.
Nowadays you could stick a (maybe throttled or fewer cores to get even more battery life) M1/M2 in there, add a second USB-C port, and it would be an excellent device without any of the downsides that the original version had.
I also never had keyboard issues but mine was 2015 Gen 1. I know a couple of people who got the 2016? Or 2017? Model and their keyboard had some issues with keys not registering.
That form factor with m1/2 would be awesome! Especially to use in bed cos the screen was so nice and it was so light.
The 12” MacBook (2015) was the last Apple laptop I bought before the current MacBook Air M2. I opted for a BTO with the i7 processor but it was still stultifying and slow, a constant exercise in frustration. Eventually the motherboard died requiring an out-of-warranty repair, which I conceded to, but shortly after that the batteries died… and then I set it aside. An absolutely stunning piece of design work but so unusably slow it put me off laptops for a full seven years. What did I use in the meantime? A 2012 Mac Mini upgraded to the hilt and more recently a Mac Studio, and various releases of iPads and iPad Pros throughout the years.
I’m talking about battery. If there’s a discrete gpu it drains the battery so quick because switching between integrated and descrete sucks on windows.
>>On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was.
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
For those who have being using Mac since the PowerPC days all have used this argument against X86 chips. As you all know, Apple actually had to switched from RISC chips to Intel X86 chips, before they switched back to ISAs chips now. Just saying performance is not the main reason to switch chip sets.
IBM's PowerPC chips were high performance workstation chips, which means you're going to get performance and heat. In a desktop computer, you can add robust cooling, in an ultra-portable laptop, you cannot.
Apple abandoned PPC after it became obvious that laptops were going to become more popular than desktops, and the G5 cheese grater Mac Pro required liquid cooling for the dual CPU chip versions.
Apple moved from Intel to ARM for the exact same reason. Intel no longer cares about pursuing high performance with a low power draw. They have returned to the Pentium 4 strategy of performance via clock speed and power increases.
I believe the specific reason (as far as Apple disclosed) was that lower performance / higher efficiency PowerPC CPUs just weren't on IBM's roadmap and whatever quantity of CPUs Apple was buying and/or willing to commit to buying wasn't enough for IBM to consider it. Intel was focusing on power efficiency after the whole Netburst disaster.
Have they really gone back to the pentium 4 strategy or are they behind in process node tech and can only compete with AMD’s performance by pumping power into their cpus? I think Intel’s top priority right now is to catch up to Tsmc’s node tech to have as close to performance per watt (or beyond) parity as they can against AMD (and Apple)
Stop feeding into hyperbole. The 13900k is for maybe 5% of the market, and the non k will give crazy enough performance for most buyers (if they even exist at this point). Giving the 13900 a high heat mode is just for the chance to keep up/beat AMD for bragging rights.
Intel isn’t relying on an architecture thats about to run them into a wall like the Pentium 4’s architecture was about to, what keeping them is second is being behind on their process, and beyond that, execution.
Sorry, but Intel is pretty obviously chasing performance via higher and higher clock speeds and ridiculously high power draws just like they did previously with their Pentium 4 strategy.
You can argue that it's not what they "want" to be doing, but it's certainly what they are doing.
> This became an easy decision [in 2015] for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
[1] implies that the M1 development started around 2008 - although you could also read it that the M1 was 5 years in development but that sounds a bit quick and also doesn't fit with [3] in 2014 - "Apple Testing ARM Based Mac Prototypes".
But there doesn't seem to be any other direct corroboration of the 2008 date that I can find.
2008 is probably about the time Apple started serious work on in house CPU cores, rather than specifically the M1? The A6 chip was the first with an Apple designed core, and was released in 2012, so they would have been working on it for several years before.
Also, it was around this time that the chips in ipad pros were strangely getting close to intel cpu performance in benchmarks while running in thin enclosures without fans.
Oh Im pretty sure since the ipad pro launched or maybe the gen after, their scores in various benchmarks were getting scary close to the intel benchmarks. It mightve started maybe 30% off but with each generation the gap closed. It was increasingly clear that apples arm chips weren’t just toy chips limited to tablets and tech media talked about how it was only a matter of time before there would be an arm mac or a mac/ios convergence.
Whenever Tim Cook was asked, why pretty much up until maybe a few months before the apple silicon announcement, he said there weren’t any plans to switch the mac to arm.
I personally like the 12" form factor, and I own one, but I saw approximately zero of them in the wild. It's significantly lighter, I can still get work done on it, it's great for travel... and yet I can't remember seeing other people using them.
2015 is the year both the (Intel) 12” MacBook and the first iPad Pro were released.
These we also both entirely new form factors for Apple (and both roughly the same size).
On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was.
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.