Insert: the new M6 iMac range. But back in 2020, Apple — and we — thought the 27-inch Intel iMac was fast – image credit: Apple.
It’s been about six years since Apple Silicon hardware first started shipping and still Apple will not launch a Mac without stressing how much better it would be if everyone moved on from Intel, please.
It’s a truism that if you were an Intel Mac user and you tried even the first M1 Apple Silicon equivalent, you could even be shocked at the It’s six years since Apple Silicon was introduced and still Apple will not launch a Mac without stressing how much better it would be if everyone moved on from Intel, please.. You definitely didn’t want to go back.
But you had to try it, you had to see the difference, and seemingly enough people have not tried Apple Silicon that Apple is continuing to target them. It’s not altruism from Apple, it is not the company wanting to rescue users from what does now genuinely seem like incredibly slow Macs of yesteryear.
Instead, Apple may also be facing the issue that Apple Silicon users aren’t looking at new Apple Silicon Macs. They don’t have to. The jump from Intel to M1 is enormous, but from M1 to M2 isn’t.
Or from M2 to M3, and so on. It now needs a couple of generations before Apple Silicon Macs are demonstrably worth upgrading to.
That’s not in any way a criticism of the new Macs, it’s an acknowledgement of just how good all Apple Silicon Macs are.
So Apple is fighting a battle on two fronts, trying to get everyone and anyone to upgrade, whether they are on Intel or older Apple Silicon. Consequently its PR for the New iMac and MacBook Pro is replete with phrases hoping to persuade the holdouts.
“There’s never been a better time for customers to upgrade from a previous-generation MacBook Pro with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac,” says Apple in its announcement of the new 14-inch MacBook Pro.
This 2020 iMac was the last to use an Intel processor.
Or “for Intel-based upgraders, the leap is even greater, with up to 18x faster performance than the most popular Intel-based iMac,” says the announcement of the M6 iMac.
Checking the details
Curiously, Apple doesn’t specify what that “most popular Intel-based Mac is.” It’s probably a MacBook Air given what we know about sales volumes at the time.
Let’s up the ante a little though, and do some like-for-like comparisons. One of Apple’s M6 launches is of the iMac, and back in 2020 if you had a desktop Mac and you regularly read AppleInsider, it was probably the then-current 27-inch iMac or an equivalent.
To be clear, this can’t be a statistically impeccable comparison since that iMac was a 27-inch one and the new Macs have 24-inch screens. Plus of course the new models are not out for testing yet.
However, it will be very peculiar if the performance of the 12-core M6 iMac is any different to that of the existing M6 Mac mini. And there are comparable Geekbench test scores for that Mac mini and the 2020 iMac, so the same tests have been run on both types of machine.
That all said, the iMac M6 performance under Geekbench tests for single core activities is likely to be 4002. For more intensive multi-core use, it’s going to be 21880.
By 2021, it was the same desk and a similar iMac chassis, but everything had changed.
By comparison, a recent Geekbench 7 test of a 2020 27-inch iMac saw it get a single core score of 1538. The multi-core score for it was 8725.
Some of the other scores for the same model came in below this one, with a single core score of 1447 and multi-core of 6274, for instance.
But taking that greatest score for the 2020 27-inch iMac, the new M6 Apple Silicon would appear to be 2.6 times faster at single core, and 2.5 times at multi-core. That’s not even close to 18 times faster, so it would be good to know what Apple tested.
If it’s true that the most popular Intel-based Mac around 2020 was the MacBook Air, then Apple could expect to get a more marked comparison. If nothing else, that’s just because any laptop will be constrained because of thermal differences.
But then the MacBook Air of 2020 had a 13.3-inch screen, so you could spend all day splitting hairs.
Instead, what’s important here is the issue of specifications versus real-world use. If there were ever a demonstration that specification figures are not as useful as getting to try a device in person, this is it.
That figure of Apple Silicon being 2.5 times faster than Intel just doesn’t fit the experience of anyone using these Macs.
Uphill struggle
Maybe this explains why Apple also tries a different approach to persuading Intel users to get with the program. Although some of its arguments are more persuasive than others.
On the persuasive side, Apple says that in “addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders.”
Less persuasively, since it’s meaningless until you try it, Apple notes that users “coming from Intel-based… systems will also get 16GB of starting unified memory [and] an additional Thunderbolt port.”
But then in what really does feel like a bit of desperation, Apple ends by talking about the available colors of its new Macs. “[The] space black finish with an anodization seal for fewer fingerprints,” it says.
Apple must believe that there is a huge market of people still on Intel-based Macs and of course it’s better for the company if they all now upgrade, please. But just because it’s targeting that audience and ones on older Apple Silicon, it doesn’t mean that the company is wrong.
Apple Silicon Macs are unquestionably a vast improvement on everything that went before. They’re such an improvement that the question becomes how anyone ever put up with Intel Macs.
But then, Apple is trying this sales tactic at a bad time. It raised the prices of its Macs, so that the new M6 iMac starts at $1,499 instead of the $1,299 it did before. The rise is down to the global chip shortage, too, so it’s unlikely that prices will lower again soon.
Source: www.appleinsider.com
Source link
