From a year ago:
Been watching this thread sideways - just wanted to point out one thing to the OP as well as anyone else in here that might not understand the difference:
We’re talking about Apple Silicon not Silicone…
Silicon is a metalloid atomic element used to make semiconductors.
Silicone is a family of polymers which incorporate silicon as part of the molecular chain.
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Just imagine Apple silicone! 
You’d be stuck with them for the rest of your life!
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- Military Intelligence
- Country Music
- Microsoft Works
I don’t know Mitch, Apple Silicone is a very relevant and pretty skin for a nice design tool. A very good companion for real Pro hardware & software.
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The performance is actually superior to any previous Mac or windows computer without dedicated graphics! All of the benchmarks even the gaming ones seem to indicate that.
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Based on everything I’ve seen, if you were planning to buy a Mac for under 2000 USD you will now be better off than before, even without support. Emulation is quite good, better than expected. It surpasses any Mac for under that price that has ever been released. So far after going thru 10’s of benchmarks and metrics of performance this seems to be the case. It also beets the previous 15 inch macs in nearly every category. The 16 inch just gets beaten in some workloads and usually without emulation.
However, if you can spend more than 2000 dollars and absolutely need a Mac right now and can’t wait a few months, then get the best 16inch Mac you can afford. Especially try to get the 5600m graphics card. Then the cpu. If you can wait though then wait for the 16 inch Apple Silicon. Because the performance I talked about before is for the low power Macs using the M1 chip. This is the slowest Mac chip Apple will ever make, and it is able to run on the fan-less MacBook Air without heating up for minutes of full load. Therefore, on the thermal envelope of a 16 inch machine the performance can be leaps above this first generation Macs.
The battery hours has very little to do with the performance. Apple has always rates batteries based on this metrics.
The reason it does not list the VRAM is because it is in the chip alongside the GPU and CPU. Therefore the chip will manage the total amount of RAM between the two. Therefore, if you get 16gb of ram you can get a “VRAM” of arround 8gb. This is way more efficient and fast. Before a gpu would have to rely on its own RAM and if it wasn’t enough then it would have to rely on the System ram that was nowhere nearly as available, causing massive performance drops. Of course, even 16GB of ram is not a lot for total gpu and CPI ram, but for the segment of the market this is targeting, is more than enough. There is currently no 13 inch ultrabook (thin and integrated graphics) with this level of performance.
Yeah 16GB total for CPU and GPU is about right for zoom meetings, emails, and Netflix binging.
16GB dedicated VRAM plus 128GB for a work PC is the way to good. Super expensive in a laptop but quite affordable in a desktop.
I think they will sip real Pro machines at some point. They always start with the low end.
G
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Yeah, I agree although for my work is somewhere around 32gb ram and 8gb vram, but yeah if you are using a desktop of that caliber these machines are definitely not for you.
This is for someone with light pro workflows who is getting a 13 XPS or MAC anyway, for that kind of machine this is where is at right now.
I’m using a laptop of that caliber 
. If I couldn’t afford it, I’d be using a desktop, not a weak sauce laptop.
I did try the compromised, easy to carry laptop life before. It made me a horrible designers, because trying things was slow. It was a motivation to settle, continuously. It leads to a life of frustration and mediocrity IMO. Your hardware should never be what holds your career back.
It pains me to see how most people don’t see this. They rather buy something portable than something good. I understand it, I did it too. I even run MacPros on VMware. What an idiot I was 
G
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The reason is we don’t have one yet and have no idea what will be involved to support them.
If you need a computer now, don’t buy one of those.
We can’t stop you and it might work. We can’t help if it doesn’t.
My best guess is we may be able to support them with V8 but that’s a wild ass guess.
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Yes, I understand. Better support / integration for Mac would be great. But I assume it is a lot of work.
Thank you.
I can confirm that 7 and M1 Mac are not currently compatible. I’m just using the evaluation version but there is a conflict with “materials” such that the software crashes if you try even to select material properties and it will not open any Rhino 6 files which use materials other than default. I guess my 3 months will be up before it’s fixed.
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ok, let me be the one… could someone finally edit that title? 
Edited
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I tried today and it seems Rosetta has issues with the display subsystem, as well as in other similar software.
M1 has a “unified memory” model for both CPU & GPU. It’s probably better than the traditional shared memory (as per bus & link) but is definitely worse than dedicated graphics memory. 