What Apple’s new in-house silicon chip means for you

Apple may have released four new iPhones this fall, but Tim Cook isn't done flooding homes with hardware for 2020. There are two new MacBooks and a Mac Mini coming soon, and they all bring something new: Apple's custom-made M1 silicon chip.

From a business perspective, this means Apple can use its own proprietary chips without giving Intel as much of a cut anymore. That's not very interesting to us because we're not investors — we're regular people who just want nice laptops. So let's focus on some of the benefits Apple says M1 will bring to these new devices if you happen to shell out the cash for one of them.

Improved performance and battery life

It's tough to get super excited about something as generic as "the devices are faster and will last longer." Apple (and other tech companies) say that every time they release new hardware, M1 or not. Why advertise a new device as being worse than before?

We don't yet have any M1-powered devices in our hands for proper testing, but Apple did provide some numbers in its announcement Tuesday. With M1, you'll get eight cores that can allegedly match "peak PC performance" using just 25 percent of the power. In other words, it can go real fast without much effort, at least if Apple is to be believed.

Again, we need to do some real testing before we can declare much of anything about M1's performance enhancements. But Apple's marketing materials are hyping up M1's ability to fast-track things like video and photo editing thanks to improved processing power, so creatives who might have abandoned Mac recently in favor of PCs may find something to like here.

Better gaming, maybe

Apple seems to think people will play video games on new Mac computers. Credit: apple

One of the more interesting things about Apple's M1 hype is how much of it revolved around gaming. The Mac has never been an especially popular or well-supported gaming platform. Yeah, you can play some games on Mac if you want, but lots of major releases don't have Mac versions and Apple's hardware isn't as easy to tear down and rebuild with custom, high-end parts as a PC.

That said, Apple seems to think games will work on M1 and people will want to play them. Apple claimed the new M1-powered Mac Mini renders graphics six times faster than before, but again, "before" wasn't especially great. The upcoming Baldur's Gate 3 was repeatedly used as an example of something that will work well on M1.

We're putting this one in the "we'll see" category for now considering Apple's spotty history with gaming. Those who are really serious about gaming probably already have a console or nice PC, but maybe folks who get a new Mac for other reasons can join the fun.

Bring your apps everywhere

The last big M1 change we'll cover today is also one of the more fascinating. Due to whatever technological wizardry Tim Cook's engineers have cooked up, M1 devices like the new MacBooks and Mac Mini can run iPhone and iPad apps, not just Mac apps.

If there's something you really like using on your iPhone, like an alternative weather or navigation app, you can theoretically install it on an M1-ready machine. Don't like the way Netflix or HBO Max work in Safari? Just install the app! At least, we think that's how it'll work.

Once again, we're going to have to see all of these new features in action before we can judge their usefulness. We still don't know if M1 is the real deal or if Apple's just happy to cut out Intel. But if at least some (and hopefully more) of this stuff is true, Mac fans are about to get some big performance boosts going forward.