Apple Silicon has attracted much attention since the official announcement of Apple . Especially when M1 came out, it achieved a considerable degree of success in public opinion with its fanless design, low power consumption, long battery life, and high performance.
However, M2 is not so lucky. According to a recent MacRumors report, after Apple launched the 13-inch MacBook Pro equipped with an M2 chip, people found that the 256GB storage version of the SSD ( solid state drive ) priced at $1,299 has significantly faster reading and writing speeds. lower than the previous generation equivalent model. On the one hand, the price of
is rising, and on the other hand, it is a problem caused by extreme frugality in hardware costs. However, Apple continues to show off new products and new chips in a PPT style at the press conference, revealing a hint of embarrassment.
M1 is also difficult to be alone.
The reason why Apple turned its back on Intel was because x86 due to Intel gradually increased the complexity of the processor itself in exchange for higher performance. As the number of integrated instruction set increases, the load placed on the hardware becomes greater and greater, which virtually increases power consumption and design difficulty.
However, Apple, which is considered to have been actively innovating the personal computer experience, has also fallen into a situation of squeezing toothpaste after tasting the sweetness of track switching. At WWDC 2022, Apple introduced at the press conference that the M2 chip CPU performance is improved compared to M1 18%; GPU performance is 35% higher than M1. Judging from the current published running scores, the performance of the M2 is in line with Apple’s expectations. However, the M2 single-core only improved by about 12%, and the lowest configuration version also began to increase in price, which makes people feel lack of sincerity.
In fact, although the M1 version of MacBook is good, it has also caused some controversy before. Some users found that after using it for a period of time, the amount of data written to SSD was very large. According to feedback, the SSD with huge write volume is not caused by tasks such as frequent downloads. This situation already occurs with SSDs in daily use. In fact, many operating systems will cause this situation, but this problem is more prominent on the M1 version of MacBook. Shortly after the release of the
M1 new machine, there were user reports that the M1 chip version of the Mac product was incompatible after being connected to a 21:9 ultra-wide screen, and it still could not be used normally after replacing the monitor, HDMI cable, and other operations. Apple also confirmed in a support document that Mac computers equipped with the M1 chip are not well compatible with ultra-wideband fish screens. In addition, there are many resolutions that are not supported.
Previously, the Mac mini equipped with the M1 chip also had problems with its Bluetooth connection, with frequent disconnections, and there were many devices with Bluetooth connection problems. The most embarrassing thing is that Apple's own Magic Mouse 2 and true wireless Bluetooth headphones AirPods Pro also have similar problems.
In addition, foreign media reported that some users found that Macs equipped with M1 chips displayed an error message after system restoration, causing the computer to be unable to enter the system. According to relevant users, after the problem occurred, the user contacted Apple engineers, who said they had received 75 reports of the same problem.
M2 Before is launched, SSD problems have been revealed. After the SSD problems of
M2 were revealed, YouTube channels such as Max Tech and Created Tech used Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test application to test the M2 MacBook Pro 256GB version and found the read and write speeds of the SSD. Both are around 1450 MB/s, which is about 50% slower than the 13-inch MacBook Pro equipped with an M1 chip and 256GB of storage space, and about 30% slower than the write speed. This update almost brings the M2's hard drive response speed back to the level it was in the Intel era three years ago.
Max Tech believes that the main difference between the old and new MacBook Pros is the configuration of the NAND flash memory chip. The old model uses two 128GB NAND chips, while the new model only uses a single 256GB NAND chip. Multiple memory chips can Make the overall reading and writing speed faster. In actual use, the impact of reading and writing speed is not small.When doing Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and some multitasking, the new MacBook Pro is noticeably less responsive and faster than the older model. However, this situation currently only occurs in the 256GB version, and there are no test results yet for higher configuration versions.
In this regard, Apple customer service said that due to the increase in transistors in the M2 chip, although the reading and writing speed has become slower, the processing performance has improved. Some netizens expressed dissatisfaction with Apple’s practice of “cutting corners” on low-end versions.
Summary
Apple's huge breakthrough in the M1 generation is more a result of the dividends from track conversion, which is the result of Apple's advantages under the X86 to Arm architecture. Generally speaking, in order to achieve such significant improvements in each generation, unless there is a large-scale chip manufacturing process breakthrough every year.
Considering that there is no new TSMC process, the improvement of this M2, which is more than a year and a half away, compared to the previous generation M1, is a conventional generational improvement. However, Apple’s publicity seems less “conventional”. When promoting the Apple M2 on its official website, it actually chose the 14nm Skylake dual-core i5, which is more than one generation away, for comparison. It can be seen that Apple also realizes that the dividends are limited after all, and can only rely on some publicity methods to attract users to continue to recharge their faith.
