As I write this, we’re right in the middle of fourth-generation Apple Silicon. The Cupertino house that Steve Jobs built took one of the biggest swings in tech history by pivoting to its own chips, and saying it was a homerun is something of an understatement.
The transition to Apple Silicon has been as smooth as butter, and everyone loves the high performance and low battery consumption, but there are some aspects to Apple Silicon that don’t get as much praise that definitely deserve some time in the spotlight.
Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4, 2025)
The M4 MacBook Air retains its sleek design while upgrading to the M4 chip, enhancing performance for media and AI tasks. It also adds a 12MP Center Stage camera, support for two external displays, and Wi-Fi 6E, making it an even better consumer laptop.
7Unified Memory Isn’t Just for Speed—It’s for Stability
Apple Silicon uses a “unified” memory architecture, which means there’s a single pool of RAM that’s used by both the CPU and GPU. This pool of memory is connected to those processors using an extremely wide and fast memory bus, and since everything is tightly integrated into a single package, it can run at faster speeds with more stability compared to off-package memory running through longer traces.
With some exceptions, most PCs use separate pools of physical memory for the CPU and GPU—RAM and VRAM. Laptops with integrated graphics and handheld PCs with APU-style CPU/GPU combo chips use one pool of memory. However, this isn’t truly unified, since the memory is virtually segregated. These days at least, the VRAM for shared memory on PCs can be dynamically allocated as needed.
The net effect of this approach is a computer that works better and more efficiently. That’s one of the key reasons that Apple Silicon Macs with only 8GB of RAM can outperform Windows PCs or Intel Macs with the same amount of memory. That’s not the only reason—super-fast SSD technology helps—but there’s no denying that loads that would make an 8GB PC or Intel Mac crawl or crash barely make an Apple Silicon Mac sweat.
6The Neural Engine Is Doing More Than You Think
Apple’s Neural Engine is often pitched as an ML accelerator for niche use cases—like blurring your Zoom background or helping with photo categorization. But it’s increasingly becoming a silent workhorse across the system.
macOS is starting to tap into the Neural Engine for speech recognition, translation, image analysis, OCR, and even audio effects. Not to mention that more and more apps are making use of generative AI of some sort, which is frankly better to run locally if at all possible.
Now, AI-accelerators are being pushed pretty hard on Windows computers (to drive things like CoPilot), so it’s not like this is unique to Mac, but it’s easy to forget that there’s a whole neural net processor nestled in with the package.
5Instant Wake and Always-On Responsiveness
One of the more subtle shifts with Apple Silicon Macs is that they behave more like iPads or iPhones when it comes to sleep and wake states. You open the lid, and it’s just on. No beachballs, no delay, no thermal ramp-up.
Compared to my handheld PC or Windows workstation laptop, it’smuchfaster to get back to what I was doing. In fact, I never have to think about it and I suspect that most Apple Silicon users are now just used to it. As someone who switches platforms for my job on the regular, it’s jarring. Not to mention that fairly often my Windows machines will just do a hard reboot instead of waking. Something I’ve never seen any of the three Apple Silicon Macs I’ve had do.
4Hardware-Accelerated ProRes, H.265, and More
Usually, I don’t bother talking about video editing and content creation when discussing features for regular people, but I’ve started to realize that video processing performance really is a mainstream feature now. It’s not just that we all consume high-quality video and would prefer it not stutter or drain our batteries; it’s that just about everyone shoots footage, and normal everyday people do some light editing on it.
That aside, if you’re working in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve, the gains are obvious. But even if you’re just watching a 4K video on YouTube or exporting a screen recording, you’re benefiting from hardware that’s built specifically to make that task seamless and efficient.
3App Nap and Power Efficiency Done Right
App Nap has been around since the Intel days, but on Apple Silicon, it works the way it always should have. When an app isn’t actively doing something, or when its not visible to you, macOS will throttle it aggressively and Apple Silicon is designed to work seamlessly with this feature. Thanks to the low-power efficiency cores in Apple Silicon chips, these processes can still run minimally in the background too, without putting strain on the power budget.
Many people seem to think the incredible battery life of Apple Silicon Macs is simply down to using ARM CPU technology, but that wouldn’t be nearly enough. Apple honed its aggressive power management technology on iPhones and iPads, and with the shift to its own chip, that technology came over to macOS.
The ability to run iOS and iPadOS apps natively on macOS still feels half-baked in many cases—but the underlying architectural shift is massive. Apple Silicon’s shared ARM architecture across iPhone, iPad, and Mac means the walls between these platforms are more porous than ever.
As long as mobile app developers don’t opt out, it means much more software that runs natively on Mac. Since so much of modern software development is focused on mobile apps, it means macOS will remain relevant despite most of Apple’s customers being on iOS and iPadOS. Also, it takes much less effort to make a universal app from an existing mobile app than to develop two separate app versions, so over time I expect more developers to simply Macify their mobile apps instead of developing a separate macOS build.
1Performance on Battery, Not Just Plugged In
My primary Windows computer is a workstation laptop with a 24-core Intel i9 CPU and an RTX 4060 GPU. It’s a pretty powerful general-purpose computer and a decent midrange gaming rig. If I’m playingCyberpunk 2077on this laptop and I pull the plug, the performance absolutely bottoms out from a nice smooth 60fps to maybe 20fps and then the battery is dead in 45 minutes.
Playing the same game with the same performance level dialed in on my Mac, pulling the plug does,well,nothing. There is absolutely zero difference in performance whether on battery power or connected to the mains. Even better, a heavy app like Cyberpunk can run about twice as long as it does on my Windows laptop with its enormous, barely flight-legal battery.
On a more realistic daily use note, it means that current MacBook owners with Apple Silicon enjoy a consistent level of performance regardless of what power source they use or where they’re working. It’s again something that you just get used to, but you will absolutely miss when it’s gone.
While not perfect (what is?), I don’t think saying that Apple Silicon has been a revolution for how we use computers and what we expect from them. What’s easy to forget are the parts that add up to an experience that seems like more than the mere sum of them.
Apple Mac Mini (M4)
Powered by an impressive M4 chip, the redesigned Mac Mini starts with 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, a 10-core CPU, and a 10-core GPU.
