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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

>Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation.

This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the transition but I have no doubt there will be M2, M3, etc options for most of the range.

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But the point is that people do not care about the cpu in their mac. They care about screen size, price and other stuff.

Apple is still selling intel versions, because either they are cheaper (older generations), or because the newest version does not have the M1 yet (like the 16" mac book pro).

That's not the only reason - the M1 is limited to 16GB which is fine for many workloads, but not for all. Plus not everything works on the M1 yet e.g. running Linux in a VM.

> This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini

I can think of other reasons some customers may prefer or need to buy the Intel version. AFAIK, you cannot run virtualized x86 code (docker, parallels, vmware) on the M1 macs (yet?) or maybe you need a driver for HW that is not yet available for M1/ARM. You can't conclude that they sell Intel versions for performance reasons.

Docker for Apple Silicon was just released. It uses emulation for x86 based images and works mostly seamless.

> This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini

They're only doing that until they can replace the entire line with "Apple Silicon", which they said will take less than 2 years from when they announced the first M1 Macs. It's simply a stop-gap measure.

Did they also offer a range of processor options back when they were using PowerPC? I get the impression that they did not.

I seem to remember the Mac Pro had an option for more than one processor.

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