Five Different M1 Configurations
Despite Apple breaking the higher-end M1 chips into Pro and Max versions, it turns out there are actually a total of five different configurations that you can put into your MacBook Pro, and this means that the base $1,999 price of the 14-inch MacBook Pro should come with a pretty big asterisk beside it.
Thanks to something called chip binning, there are two lower-end versions of the M1 Pro chip, along with a lower-end M1 Max. With Apple’s M1 chip-making process at the bleeding edge of technology, it’s understandable that there will be some chips that don’t quite make the cut. In this case, instead of throwing them away, Apple simply disables the cores that don’t work, and sells them as lower-end versions.
We saw this last year with the entry-level MacBook Air, which had an M1 with a 7-core GPU instead of the standard eight cores. This was the only distinction in the M1 Mac lineup, but sadly things are considerably more complicated with the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Specifically, here are the configurations that Apple is offering:
- M1 Pro with 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
- M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
All five of these are available on the 14-inch MacBook Pro, and the $1,999 model naturally starts with an 8-core CPU and 14-core GPU version. You’ll pay an extra $400 to move up to the “real” M1 Pro, or $700 more to go with the full M1 Max.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts with the standard M1 Pro, but still offers the two variants of the M1 Max, for $200 and $400 more, respectively.
To be fair, it’s still less confusing than the days of Intel CPUs, when most non-technical users were left scratching their heads about the differences between an i3, i5, and i7 and the various clock speeds. In this case, qualifying the chips by the number of CPU and GPU cores seems pretty clear, although we’ll have to wait for the real-world benchmarks before we know what the means in practical terms.