Daring Fireball: The M1 Macs

What you need to understand is that the best aspects of these Macs aren’t benchmark-able. It’s about how nice they are. The cooling system never making any noise doesn’t show up in a benchmark. I suppose you could assign it a decibel value in an anechoic chamber, but silent operation, and a palm rest that remains cool to the touch even under heavy load, aren’t quantities. They’re qualities. They’re just nice.

The benchmarks are great, and speed is always important in a computer, no matter if it’s a laptop, a workstation, or a phone. The fact that these new Macs leapfrog their predecessors is exciting, no doubt. The fact that they also leapfrog the rest of the market is thrilling. The fact they do all this without appearing to break a sweat is a triumph.

Maybe there’s some catch here that will reveal itself in time, but I think there are a lot of meetings going on this week at the big PC and component makers around the world asking why the hell they’re not able to do this too.