This is, at least, the first 10nm Mac.
About half a decade late. Boy, did Intel have a bad few years.
So, a few things:
- unusually, the first CPU upgrade is a no-brainer. Normally, CPU BTO options aren't worth it, but in this case — do not buy the base model. $100 buys you quad-core!* The next step above that is far less worthwhile (despite being another $150). Weird that Apple spaced them out like that — really, the first upgrade is arguably worth $250, and the second only $100.
- this also means Gruber was wrong — the 2018 MacBook Air was a one-off in terms of offering no CPU upgrades at all. Gruber saw a future in which all Macs, or at least consumer ones, would reduce those choices. Which I can kind of see: it's not like you choose your iPhone's or iPad's CPU and RAM either. But for now at least, that future hasn't happened. Maybe Apple had a change of heart?
- all CPUs have the good Iris Plus GPU. That's not at all a given on an Ice Lake laptop. Kudos to Apple for not cheaping out here.
- there's basically no benchmarks yet. We'll probably see a nice single-core performance boost because the move to 10nm gives Intel more headroom, and the move from the Skylake to Sunny Cove microarchitecture gave them a multitude of long-postponed architectural improvements. That's why Apple says these have 3733 MHz memory, whereas that brand-new 16-inch MacBook Pro from November? Still has only 2666 MHz memory. Even the crazy-high-end Mac Pro only goes to 2933 MHz. For years, Intel couldn't ship these generational improvements, and now we're possibly seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
- as a no-brainer, the multi-core performance will be way up. Apple says "up to two times faster CPU performance". It's unclear if they're being their usual grammatically incorrect selves and mean twice as fast (in which case that might even be pessimistic), or if they literally mean up to thrice as fast, which could be in the realm of possibilities here.
- aaaaaand GPU performance will be way, way up. And also, the next-gen MacBook Air, which will probably use Tiger Lake, will yield another massive GPU performance boost.
All in all? First impressions suggest to me that this is an
excellent MacBook to have, if you don't have high-end needs.
*) I'd say quad-core is currently the sweet spot for most people. Even if your app is single-threaded (for the most part, odds are it will be), the dozens of background processes now have three cores across which to spread. And these are all hyper-threaded, so you sort-of get four more "threads". Aaaaand even if not, Ice Lake can turboboost like hell. Assuming Apple's thermals allow for it, anyway. Interestingly, Apple's specs actually give a much higher base clock than what Intel says.
AMD wants to go to more cores than that, and I don't really see the mass-market applications that make good use of that. Yeah, it sounds great on paper to have an eight-core laptop, but will your app benefit? Probably not.