Macs with the M1 chip do not support eGPUs

Apple today announced its first self-developed processor for Mac hardware. Called the M1, the system on a chip (SoC) is based on an ARM architecture rather than an Intel-built platform. This is a massive switch, and as the dust settles from the announcement, details are starting to appear around options for the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.

Apple’s first Macs built around its self-developed SoC do not support eGPUs, Apple tells TechCrunch. It’s unclear exactly where the incompatibility begins; does the M1 chip itself not play friendly with eGPUs, or is it something else about the three new Macs announced today?

Consumers have long turned to these external graphics cards to give computers a dramatic boost in memory-intensive tasks. eGPUs allow laptops or underpowered desktops to punch out of their weight class. In particular, Apple’s past laptops were known for having substantial RAM and processing power but lacking in graphical processing power. Likewise, users have found that a past-generation Mac Mini with extra RAM and an eGPU can match a Mac Pro’s performance for a fraction of the price — that’s not currently possible with the just-announced Macs.

Today during the M1’s unveiling, the company’s spokespersons repeatedly praised the chip’s integrated GPU though failed to reveal detailed technical specifications. The version of the M1 announced today features 7 or 8 cores, and Apple says it’s capable of twice the GPU performance while using 33% of the power compared to a PC GPU when matching performance. If true — and we’ll see after benchmarking the chip — the M1 has serious GPU performance in a mobile chip, but it will not compare to a dedicated external graphics card, and that will leave some users feeling abandoned.

Apple announces the M1, the first chip in its Apple Silicon family

Apple brings back its ‘I’m a PC’ spokesman for ARM-based Mac launch event

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New forecast pegs TikTok to top 1.2B monthly active users in 2021

TikTok’s upward trajectory is expected to continue in 2021, according to a new forecast from mobile data and analytics firm App Annie, which estimates the short-form video app will surpass the 1 billion monthly active user mark next year. The expanded forecast also looked into future trends around mobile ad spending and the growth in “at-home” activities fueled by mobile, like e-commerce and online meetings, for example.

TikTok’s growth numbers, however, were the standout estimate from the new report. The video app has grown in popularity, having nearly tripled in size since 2018, App Annie noted. And, as of the third quarter this year, TikTok became the No. 2 non-gaming app by consumer spending, due to its use of a combination of revenue streams, including advertising and sales of virtual gifts used for tipping streamers.

In 2021, App Annie expects TikTok to not only join the 1 billion monthly active user (MAU) club alongside Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, YouTube and WeChat — it predicts TikTok will actually sail past the 1 billion MAU milestone to reach 1.2 billion average monthly active users.

Image Credits: App Annie

This is remarkable growth, given that TikTok still remains banned in one of the world’s largest mobile markets, India.

And, of course, the fate of the social video app in the U.S. will have to do with how the incoming Biden administration handles the Trump TikTok ban. (And there are some signals his view doesn’t differ that much from Trump on this front.)

App Annie also predicted 2021 will see continued growth for “at-home” activities, fueled by mobile. Though there is promising news about a potential COVID vaccine, it’s not likely that everything will simply shift back to the way it was before the pandemic upon its release. The pandemic just accelerated trends that were already underway.

The report estimates that time spent in key “at-home” categories — like remote business and education apps, e-commerce, mobile finance apps and at-home fitness apps — will top 1.3 trillion hours on Android phones in 2021, for example.

Specifically, remote business apps (e.g Zoom) are expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% and remote learning apps will see 62% growth. Total time in mobile banking and finance apps will surpass 31 billion hours annually in 2021, representing a 4-year CAGR of 35%. Fitness and e-commerce will grow as well, at +23% and +40%, respectively.

Image Credits: App Annie

In addition, the firm predicts consumers will install up to 85% more video streaming apps in 2021 in the U.S., compared with pre-COVID levels.

And it expects mobile ad spend to reach $290 billion in 2021, in part thanks to strong mobile commerce growth and a further shift from offline advertising to digital.

“While the U.S. presidential election has helped fuel mobile ad spend in the latter part of 2020, App Annie expects ad dollars to continue to flow to smartphones in 2021,” the firm said. “Particularly given the consumer shift to mobile is not an isolated trend — COVID-19 catalysed the habits we were already forming,” the company added.

 

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The 13-inch MacBook Pro gets Apple’s new M1 chip, starting at $1,299

And just like that, we’ve got three new devices sporting Apple’s new proprietary chips. Following its announcement of a new MacBook Air and Mac Mini, the company just upgraded another popular model. The 13-inch MacBook Pro will be one of the first three models to launch with the newly announced M1 chip.

During this morning’s event, the company called the system, “the ultimate expression of what the M1 chip can do.” And at very least, the system does appear to be pushing the limits of what its new chip can do. The system supports a massive 17 hours of battery life for web browsing and 20 hours for video playback — that’s the highest rating the company has offered on a MacBook product. 

There’s not a ton of specifics on benchmarks at the moment, the company claims it will sport nearly a nearly 2.8x performance bump over the previous model, with 5x faster graphics. And yes, unlike the MacBook Air, there is a fan inside. For better or worse, the TouchBar returns here, as well, as does the familiar webcam, though the company is claiming some software-based performance bumps. The mics have been enhanced, however.

It features two Thunderbolt/USB 4 ports (like the Air) and starts with 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, upgradable to 16GB and 2TB, respectively.

Per Apple,

When compared to the previous generation, the M1-powered 13-inch MacBook Pro can:

• Build code in Xcode up to 2.8x faster.

• Render a complex 3D title in Final Cut Pro up to 5.9x faster. 

• Fluidly design intricate game scenes in Unity Editor up to 3.5x faster. 

• Perform ML tasks in Create ML up to 11x faster.

• Separate out beats, instrumentals, and vocal tracks from a recording in real time in djay Pro AI, thanks to the amazing performance of the Neural Engine. 

• Play back full-quality, 8K ProRes video in DaVinci Resolve without dropping a single frame. 

• Compile four times as much code on a single charge, thanks to the game-changing performance per watt of the M1 chip.

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Like the Air, the price is staying put. The system starts at $1,299 (or $1,199 for education) and will be available for pre-order starting today. It should start shipping next week.

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Apple announces the M1, the first chip in its Apple Silicon family

As expected, Apple today announced its first Arm-based laptops, the MacBook Air, Mac mini and Macbook Pro, and, with that, it also announced its family of Arm-based Apple Silicon chips. When it first announced Apple Silicon, the company didn’t provide a lot of details, but in today’s presentation, we learned quite a bit more. The first chip in this family is the M1, based on a 5nm process.

“We’ve been making Apple Silicon for more than a decade. It’s at the heart of iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch – and now we want to bring it to the Mac, so the Mac can take a huge leap forward with the incredible performance, custom technologies and industry-leading power efficiency of Apple Silicon,” Apple said.

The M1 will feature four high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores, following what has long become the standard for Arm chips.

Apple argues that the M1 is its highest-performance chip yet and that low-power high-efficiency cores deliver similar performance to its current Intel-based dual-core MacBook Air (though to be fair, that’s not a performance machine by any stretch). The high-performance cores are significantly faster, of course.

Maybe more importantly, these chips also offer a better performance per watt than other systems.

On the GPU side, the M1 will feature up to eight cores with 128 execution units. It’ll be able to handle up to 24,576 concurrent threads and peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. This, Apple argues, makes it the world’s fasted integrated graphics experience on a laptop.

As expected, the chip will also feature Apple’s neural engine for accelerating machine learning workloads.

Image Credits: Apple

The first set of developer units that Apple shipped out earlier this year were powered by the A12Z chip, a variant of the A12 that made its debut in the 2020 iPad Pro earlier this year. It doesn’t look like Apple really modified that eight-core A12Z chip for its so-called “Developer Transition Kit,” but even without doing so, these developer kits also hit performance levels comparable with an entry-level MacBook Air.

And while Apple has obviously modified this chip design to suit its own purposes, it’s worth noting that Arm itself has spent the last few years building an IP portfolio of server and desktop/laptop-ready chips. On the laptop side, it had a few wins, with Microsoft betting on Arm for some of its Surface devices, but overall, this remains a niche market. In the server space, though, Arm has clearly shown that it is able to offer its partners the right designs to build chips with the right power and performance trade-offs.

Image Credits: Apple

Arm wants to power your next laptop

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Live from Apple’s 2020 Mac event featuring the first ever Apple Silicon Macs

Apple’s had a packed fall, and today is the day of its third big product reveal event this season. This one is going to be squarely focused on the first Macs with Apple Silicon, the company’s first in-house processors designed for its macOS computers. Apple announced its transition away from Intel chips and to its own processors at its developer conference in June, but this is the first official look we’ll get at shipping Macs that are actually powered by the new chips.

We’ve heard via early reports that at least two new 13-inch MacBooks, including a Pro and an Air variant, should break cover at this event, and it’s possible that a 16-inch MacBook Pro might be introduced too, though that’s less likely. macOS 11 Big Sur will probably also finally get an official public release date, and that’ll be available for ARM and non-ARM Macs alike. There’s also a lot up in the air about potential accessories, including Apple’s long-rumored AirTags locator devices and potentially updated headphones.

We’ll have everything that Apple does announce below live as it happens, starting when the virtual event kicks off at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET).

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Apple’s new Mac lineup and chip work fail to excite investors

Worth $1,985 billion at the close of the show, Apple’s Mac event could not find that last $15 billion in market cap that it needed to crest the $2,000 billion mark, a market cap value more commonly referred to as $2 trillion.

Your watchful friends at TechCrunch not only kept tabs on Apple’s new M1 processor — more on that shortly — and the company’s refreshed line of laptops, but also its value, as the company spoke. Our question, each time Apple demands the world’s attention, is: Will what the company announces change how the market sees the company and, thus, how it is valued?

The answer is nearly always no. This has become perhaps more true as the company’s pace of new product line additions has slowed, and it has instead built increasingly large and expensive iPhones; it’s easier to model the latter than the former, so most product news feels baked into Apple’s value by the time we get around to actual demos.

Today was no exception, though I was curious going in. What if Apple announced lots of new computers running its own chips, as expected? Would the possibility of better gross margins on a chunk of its hardware revenues juice investor demand and its worth?

As it turns out, the answer was no.

The Apple event began at 10 am Pacific time, or 1 pm in the above chart.

Apple’s value gyrated during the performance, initially rising some heading toward the new Macbook Air demo. Then its shares dropped, and the new Mac Mini could not stall the decline. The new Macbook Pro also appeared to have limited impact. By the time Apple CEO Tim Cook came back to the stage, the company was back in black on the day, which you can read any way you’d like.

Regardless of what you think about the M1 chip, Apple’s future as a bigger chip company, and the new computers from Cupertino, investors were unsurprised by the new product line — at best.

Which is more than we could say about Intel, which had a somewhat shit day starting just about when Apple rolled out its M1 tech:

Perhaps all the Apple investors who knew about the M1 news could have told the Intel investors to expect it. That would have saved Intel a bit of face.

Regardless, Apple’s holiday line appears to be established. Let’s see how it performs as global lockdowns once again become the norm. Perhaps it can reverse its recent revenue stagnation.

 

 

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Here’s everything Apple announced at the “One More Thing” event today

Ready for more Apple news? Because it’s time for more Apple news.

This morning the company hosted its third event in as many months, where they finally detailed how and why they’ll be shifting Macs to chips designed and built by Apple and showed off the first Macs that’ll make the jump. New MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini!

Didn’t have time to catch it live? We get it. We’ve wrapped up everything announced this morning into one quick digest — find it below, and click through the links for more details on any topic that catches your eye.

Apple Silicon for Macs

Image Credits: Apple

Apple has been building its own chips for its iPads, iPhones, and Apple Watches for years. Now they’ll be doing the same for Macs, promising better performance with greater power efficiency.

Apple calls its first Mac chip the “M1”. Some of the specs they shared:

• 8-core CPU (4 high performance, 4 high efficiency)
• Up to 8-core GPU
• 16 billion transistors
• Apple’s Secure Enclave system built in
• Thunderbolt/USB 4 support

iOS Apps on Mac

As Apple touched upon back in June at WWDC, iOS apps will now be able to run on the Mac. Apple showed the HBO Max and Among Us iOS apps running in macOS as examples.

New MacBook Air

The first M1-powered Mac Apple announced was the new, fanless (!) MacBook Air.

Apple says the new MacBook Air is up to 3.5x faster than the previous generation and, thanks to the absence of any fans, runs fully silent. They’re promising up to 15 hours of battery life while browsing the web, or 18 hours while watching video. It’s got a 13.3″ display, SSD support up to 2TB, Touch ID, Thunderbolt/USB 4, WiFi 6. It’ll start at $999, or $899 for education customers.

New Mac Mini

The Mac Mini is also getting overhauled for the M1, and its base price is dropping $100 down to $699. It’ll support up to 2TB SSD and up to 16GB of memory. Port-wise, it’s got two USB-A ports, two USB-C ports (with Thunderbolt/USB 4 support), a 3.5mm headphone jack, HDMI 2.0, and gigabit ethernet.

New MacBook Pro

Next up: the MacBook Pro. Apple says the M1 chip bumps the MacBook Pro’s battery life up to 17 hours while browsing the web, or 20 hours of video playback. Like the Air, it’s got a 13.3″ display, and support SSDs up to 2TB and up to 16GB of memory. Its got TouchID, WiFi 6, support for Thunderbolt/USB4, and, perhaps to the disappointment of some, a TouchBar. It’ll start at $1299, or $1199 for education users.

Big Sur Coming Soon

The next major update to macOS — version 11.0, otherwise known as Big Sur — was first announced back in June at WWDC. Apple now says that it’ll ship this Thursday, November 12th.

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