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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

While compute performance and power efficiency seems to be really good, the M1 chip is apparently limited to 16GB RAM, 2TB storage and 2 Thunderbolt/USB4 controllers.

In other words, M1 is for the majority of consumers.

    - power efficiency
    - 16GB RAM
    - 2TB storage
    - 2 Thunderbolt/USB4

That looks like a really good feature set for ordinary consumers. My guess is that there's going to be 2 "Pro" variants for a high powered laptop and a professional workstation.

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> My guess is that there's going to be 2 "Pro" variants for a high powered laptop and a professional workstation.

My guess is that they'll introduce one other ARM-based chip for Macs in 2021, targeted at all remaining Macs (except for the Mac Pro). I believe the differences in performance can be achieved with a single chip simply by binning and different power envelopes.

I expect (or rather I hope) that chip then supports at least 64GB of memory, 8TB of NVMe storage and 4 Thunderbolt 4 ports.

I'm thinking we might see a M1X which might add a couple cores to all the compute units in the SoC.

If every model had the 16 GB I'd say it's a really good feature set for ordinary consumers but a new MacBook Pro having 8 GB of shared memory seems quite limiting even just for ordinary browsing. It's a great step but I think the 2nd gen of this is going to be what knocks it out of the park.

Seems like Apple is relying on MacOS's (arguably good) memory compression and fast ssd swap performance to get high margins from the 8gb ram while still not cripping regular users' light workloads.

I definitely feel like that's the case. I'm still on an 8GB 2015 MBP and it still works pretty well for multiple windows of Chrome + VSCode + node servers + spotify etc even at 1-4GB swap. The only thing that really bothers me is 4k performance and not being able to run multiple Docker containers (especially ones that needs a lot of RAM).

Lets be honest - Apple has not really expanded its share of PC/Laptop market in a long time. Ordinary consumers are not going to care about this, especially with the Apple premium tacked on. I think combined it runs 10% +/- year to year variation.

Be interesting to see what market share actually is now.

Tim said at the beginning that 50% of Mac buyers were buying their first Mac. Apple’s quarter that just concluded at the end of Oct was massive for the Mac. $7.1B which is a 22% YoY growth. And 50% of those macs went to first time Mac buyers. That is insane growth in new users for a 36 year old product

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