Some of us have been waiting for years for the event Apple wrapped up in under 50 minutes (and likely spent years preparing for). Macs are moving to ARM-based Apple Silicon, and the way the company sees it, the transition should be better for everyone.

Apple was pretty aggressive when it introduced its new Apple Silicon Macs, which (as expected) deliver screaming performance, thanks in part to the 5-nanometer (nm) chips Apple has developed on ARM, and thanks also to the work of the company’s silicon design teams.

Some benchmarks:

That’s the Mac/PC discussion right there. Apple knows it. It ended the event with a short reprise of its famous "Get A Mac" ads starring John Hodgman as PC. The point he made? Now that Apple’s shifted to its own chips, those PCs can no longer keep up.

We’ve all expected Apple to deliver a new Mac chip based in some way on the A-series processors it uses in iPhones and iPads. Apple wasn’t too specific around the relationships between these silicon siblings, but it did detail the following about the M1 chip it’s putting inside these new Macs:

But wait, there's more: advanced power management, low-power video playback, HDR imaging and video processor, high-bandwidth caches, machine learning accelerators, a high-quality image signal processor (ISP), high-efficiency audio, fourth-generation PCI express and NVMe storage.

The company worked to put a little context around these “speeds and feeds” claims, noting real-life benefits, such as:

Perhaps the most impressive statistic in terms of sheer computational power (to me) was Apple’s claim that the first M1-powered MacBook Pro will play back full quality 8k ProRes video in DaVinci Resolve with zero dropped frames.

Now link your new pro laptop up to Apple’s Pro Display XDR and have a little giggle as you consider the performance you would expect from a notebook attempting high-end video graphics as recently as early 2018.

The first Apple Silicon Macs include the $999 MacBook Air, 13-in. MacBook Pro (from $1,299) and Mac mini. An Intel version of the 13-in MacBook Pro remains available.

Apple says it is engaged in a two-year (actually, “about two-year”) transition and is expected to introduce an Apple Silicon iMac in 2021 and Mac Pro later down the line.

Pricing remains the same, with the exception of the Mac mini, which is around $100 cheaper. There had been some expectation of a slight price reduction because of savings seen by using Apple rather than Intel chips.

Battery life is astonishing. One developer noted that his Mac’s battery life now exceeds the amount of time he “customarily” spends in between sleeps. In more real terms, Apple claims the longest battery life ever on both its notebook — 20 hours of video playback on the MacBook Pro and 18 hours pn the Air. The Pro also features studio quality microphones and has graphics that's five times faster than before.

During its presentation, Apple also quietly pointed out that the M1’s storage controller means you’ll see SSD performance twice as fast as before. There’s lots more to say about these machines individually, but the fact that a Mac mini now runs an XDR display and can render a complex Final Cut Pro timeline up to six times faster means I’ll be reading Geekbench performance data with a great deal of interest in the next few months. How high up the grid will these machines get? Rest assured, I’ll be taking a deeper look at them when I get the chance.

Want to see for yourself? All three new Macs are available to order now to ship next week.

Apple has gone through several transitions. It migrated from PowerPC to Intel, and from Mac OS 9 all the way to Big Sur. It even figured out how to deliver real computing experiences on iPhones. No surprise, the usual suspects found something to moan about just before the Apple Silicon Mac launch. You should ignore them.

In the real world, those “major developers” who build the software we use to get things done seem to be having a relatively good time during this particular migration from Intel Macs to M1. At least, that’s what the Apple marketing told us.

In a video, developers from Panic, mmhmm, Adobe, OmniGraffle, Shapr3D, Affinity Publisher, and GOAT all shared comments such as: “Incredibly fast,” “Transition took a day,” “Almost limitless interactivity,” and boasted of seamless workflow across Apple devices.

The biggest claim in there, of course, is the speed and ease with which transition to Apple Silicon can take place – “transition took a day." Apple knows it needs developers, is working to woo them, and told us Adobe Photoshop will become an Apple Silicon Native App as soon as early next year. I’m relatively convinced we can expect a few more announcements on key apps – though one thing we didn’t hear one solitary word About is the future of Windows on Mac.

That future could be a deal-breaker for some enterprise users, I expect – though perhaps there is a bigger plan….

The feedback seems to be that for some of the world’s most important applications, the process of migrating apps to Apple Silicon Native status isn’t too tough. We’ll have to wait on real-world feedback to see if this is the case, and to what extent the transition-easing Rosetta 2 layer (which lets Intel Mac apps roam happy and free onApple Silicon) delivers on its promise.

The one more thing in this story is that Apple is not entirely unique in its migration to ARM-based processors. Microsoft, Qualcomm and others are all heading in the same direction, coalesced around Snapdragon.

Apple is years ahead in terms of processor design, has made deep investments in the attempt, and already sits in the catbird's seat when it comes to manufacturing 5nm (and, soon, 3nm) iterations of these processors.

CCS analyst Wayne Lam puts it thusly:

“Apple’s moves will help validate Arm-based chips for personal computing and even in the data centre, meaning the whole Arm ecosystem will benefit. This, rather than the loss of the Mac business, is the longer-term concern for Intel.”

Big Sur ships Thursday.

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