Five years ago, the first Apple silicon Macs shipped. While the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini looked like their Intel predecessors, they were vastly better machines.
To celebrate the anniversary, Basic Apple Guy created an impressive graphic outlining the releases we’ve seen since 2020:
Over on Macworld, Jason Snell wrote about what this change has meant for the Mac:
Then the results of the first M1 speed tests arrived, and nothing felt scary anymore. Everything was fast, much faster than Intel, so much faster that even software compiled for Intel running in a code-translation layer via Rosetta ran just fine. In fact, the M1 was such a fast chip that, five years later, Apple’s still selling the M1 MacBook Air. (For $599, at Walmart.) And it’s still a pretty nice computer!
Apple’s next trick was rolling out new versions of (almost) every Mac model, redesigned for Apple silicon, as well as an entirely new model, the Mac Studio. The new chips, new designs, and a pandemic-fueled increase in people working from home all sent Mac sales soaring.
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.
Sitting here today, I couldn’t be happier about where the platform is. Yes, there are some areas where Apple should push harder, but comparing where the Mac is today to where it was in the 2015-2020 era is breathtaking.