Five Years of Apple Silicon Macs ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

The five years before the arrival of Apple silicon were the five best years in the history of Mac sales to that point, averaging $25.5 billion a year. It was a pretty scary move to pull the rug out from under the Intel Mac era, but Apple’s move was vindicated: The first five years of Apple silicon are now the five best years in the Mac’s history. Mac sales were up nearly one-third compared to the previous five-year period, to $33.7 billion a year on average.

So it went pretty well, especially considering the huge question that hovered over Apple’s entire plan to switch to its own processors: could a chip designed for a phone ever possibly power a Mac?!

It made sense at the time to question Apple’s choice, but the change has been almost entirely vindicated — “almost” because desktop Macs have lost their modularity which, as Snell writes, has particularly impacted the Mac Pro. (Update: The lack of modularity is also bad news for repairability.) Otherwise, Mac hardware is the best it has ever been. In laptops, especially, there are no bad choices.

There is one oddity in the Mac landscape: the unsynchronized rollout of different chips. From Walmart, you can still buy an M1 MacBook Air, the Mac Pro remains powered by the M2 Ultra, the Mac Studio’s high-end configuration uses the M3 Ultra, and everything else in Apple’s lineup is M4-powered with the exception of the base MacBook Pro on the M5. They all perform well, so decisions mostly come down to price and form factor. On the other hand, how many more years of software updates will be released for that M1 MacBook Air, or the M2 Mac Pro?