 After the Apple Silicon announcement at WWDC this year, we knew they were coming, but it still felt weird to see Apple executives get up on stage and proudly announce to the world that you can now pay real actual money for a computer with basically the same guts as an iPad. That's right, three different machines at three different price points, one spec sheet. I mean, remember how people thought the iPad was gonna be a portable touchscreen MacBook? Turns out it was opposite day. But now that opposite day has arrived, if I'm an Apple user looking for a new Mac, do I want the iPad with no touchscreen, the iPad with no screen, or the iPad with a touch bar? Hard to say. What I do know is that I wanna tell you about our sponsor, Honey. Honey is a free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on shopping websites like Amazon, eBay, and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. And we'll see you there. If you've got no idea what Apple Silicon is, it's an ARM CPU, kind of like you'd find in your phone or your smart toaster, but also not. ARM does license their core designs, allowing customers like Samsung or Qualcomm to integrate their own intellectual property, adding, let's say, a more powerful GPU to create a full SoC. But, it's not like it's a full-scale processor, it's a full-scale processor. So, they're not only offering a full-scale processor to create a full SoC, but they also offer what's called an architecture license. This allows customers with the engineering chops to pull it off to build off of ARM's technology, using what they want and altering or outright discarding what they don't. The resulting SoC, or system on a chip, will run code compiled for ARM processors, but may have markedly different performance and or power consumption characteristics. It kind of like how Intel and AMD both make x86 compatible processors, but with very different approaches, and in some case, even different features. On the subject of Intel, after Intel's post-Skylake CPUs failed to meet their expectations, Apple took it upon themselves to be the change they wanted to see in the world. Who wrote this crap? Anthony, did you pull that right out of their slides? Anyway, this is a huge move for Apple, but it also isn't unprecedented. Apple was among the three founding members of the AIM Alliance that developed the power architecture that Mac computers used prior to switching to Intel in the first place. And in fact, most of Apple's history has involved CPUs other than Intel x86. So they've survived this kind of painful transition twice now, what's one more time? The new thing is that they've never really gone it alone before, and there's never really been a direct competitor in PC hardware since the power days. So everyone was hoping for a big splashy announcement today, and that's what we got. Three new Macs were announced, the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini, all powered by the Apple Silicon M1 processor. I guess they really are officially calling it Apple Silicon. I think I'll call it As for short. The As M1 processor is Apple's first PC-grade processor and consists of a big little design with four fast cores that light up for heavy tasks and four power efficient cores for background and lighter workloads to extend battery life of the new Macs to almost 20 hours, or just lower their power consumption. Virtually everything that makes the Mac, a Mac is baked right into one silicon die. CPU cores, GPU cores, I.O. secure enclave and neural accelerator, all of which can communicate directly with each other and access the same pool of system memory, which by the way is also built in. So RIP after purchase RAM upgrades. Apple claims that this arrangement gives the As M1 the title of the world's fastest CPU core, but their comparisons all seemed intentionally vague. What exactly is the most popular Windows laptop? Is it a fast one? I kinda doubt it, but an improvement over last gen Macs of up to three and a half times in CPU speed and up to six times in GPU speed, all while using just 10 Watts of power, sounds pretty good. Especially because like the iPad Pro, the MacBook Air is completely fanless, which Apple boasts makes the system fully silent. Although what this costs in chassis surface temperatures or CPU throttling, we don't know. Now, because CPU and wireless connectivity is identical for all three new Macs, Apple has got some big claims for MacBook Air performance, including the ability to handle multiple streams of 4K ProRes at a time, which has Colin Overt, this does not compute points out, isn't actually all that impressive, until you remember it's fanless. As for the MacBook Pro, it's got a fan. And while in many respects, it resembles a larger MacBook Air, no, yeah, that's pretty much what it is, but that's okay because for your extra $300, you still get a touch bar. And with that extra internal space, they were also able to cram a whole lot more battery in there, so even with thermal limitations removed thanks to active cooling, the Asimone-based MacBook Pro promises to have even better endurance than the Air. Disappointingly, despite being called Pro, we're stuck with a 720p webcam rather than the 1080p version found in the new iMacs, although Apple claims that they're able to use the advanced image processing that they've developed for iDevices to clean up the image. With so little to differentiate the Air from the Pro now, it'll be interesting to get our hands on them for direct comparison. Honestly, I think this could be the end of the MacBook Pro as we know it, assuming of course, that the Asimone CPU is as efficient as Apple claims. As for the new Mac Mini, it looks to be essentially the same computer as Apple's developer transition kit, which we tried and succeeded in getting our hands on, but unfortunately weren't able to do anything with because Apple's legal team smelled blood in the water. So rather than risk legal action against us, or worse, our informant, we sent it back and abandoned the project so we could make more shirts on lttstore.com instead. Hey, nice. Despite that drama, the Mac Mini is perhaps the most disappointing of the lineup. And given the $100 price drop over last gen, Apple clearly knows it. While it may be more powerful by whatever metric Apple is using here, there's no expandable memory or storage even, and there's no 10 gig networking option. Damn it, Apple, you were doing so well. I even bought like three of these things. I guess it could be just down to Apple's M1 processors not having enough IO bandwidth or something, but as it stands, there's a lot of empty space in the Mac Mini when they probably could have, you know, put an SSD in there or just put it in something the size of an Apple TV or a smartphone instead. I don't know, at least it has Thunderbolt-ish. All of these new Macs will be running macOS Big Sur set for public release this Thursday, November the 12th with support for automatic pinning of tasks to the correct cores in the new big little CPU design and fun features like near instantaneous wake from idle on Apple Silicon Macs, neat. Unfortunately, it also comes with some less neat stuff. While Apple tried to make it sound like Universal Binary 2 had pretty good support out of the gate, which theoretically would allow developers to compile their apps for both ARM and x86 simply, Photoshop, well, for example, won't be available until 2021, meaning anyone who's running Creative Cloud will probably wanna hold off on buying for now, that is unless they really wanna figure out whether or not Rosetta 2 is any good on their work computer, derp. Oh, and additional security measures baked into the operating system reinforce what a lot of open source and independent developers already feared. Apple is moving to lock down their ecosystem even further in the name of security, which means anyone who wants to develop for the Mac will have to either get their software blessed by Apple or convince end users to bypass it. Still, this transition is happening, whether you're ready or not, Apple's holding a lot of cards right now and compatibility with iOS apps may make this transition easier than the previous two. We've got ours on order already, so make sure that you get subscribed so you don't miss our reviews. Before that though, it's bold prediction time. Number one, the ass transition works out fine in the end, but these first generation products look pretty rough and Apple's gonna replace them and sweep them under the rug as quickly as possible, kind of like the iPad 1 and Apple Watch Series Zero. Second, Apple will continue to fight right to repair behind the scenes and shred working devices for no reason while posturing as an environmentally friendly company. And third, this video will be brought to you by Squarespace. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. You may have heard of Squarespace. It's an easy way for you to make a website in just minutes. 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