New Apple Laptops Are Game Changers for Investors

Tech reviewers are now posting opinions of Apple Inc.’s (Nasdaq: AAPL, Rated “B”) latest computers running a proprietary processor. And it turns out these machines are so impressive that competitors will be forced to follow.

Apple is doing to personal computers what Tesla, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA, Rated “C”) is doing to automobiles, only faster and with wider implications.

Investors need to be ahead of the curve, because the losers will be decimated.

To recap, Apple is transitioning away from Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC, Rated “C”) chips for its computers to proprietary units based on designs from ARM Holdings, the same architecture that powers iPhones and iPads. The first benefit of the change is lower power consumption. However, Apple’s new M1 chip brings a quantum leap in performance, too.

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Source: Architosh.com

It’s a hard combination to pull off. Power efficient products are supposed to come with weaker performance. It’s a trade-off consumers have come to accept. But not anymore.

When Toyota Motor Co. (NYSE: TM, Rated “C+”) made the hybrid electric Prius, consumers quickly rationalized that saving the planet from climate change meant living with a white-knuckle experience during every freeway merge. Then Tesla came along with heart-thumping performance and a full electric power plant. It was a revelation that seemed too good to be true. It also changed the trajectory of making cars forever.

Related Post: Why the New Tesla Dream Is Battery Powered

A decade later, all of the world’s leading carmakers are headed toward electric propulsion. In the not-too-distant future, vehicles will not have radiators for cooling, transmissions and drivetrains for transferring power, or internal combustion engines for that matter.

As groundbreaking as those events were for the auto industry, the M1 represents a similar sea change for personal computers. With 16 billion transistors and matching 8 core central processing unit and graphics processing units, M1 flips traditional design on its head by bringing the entire system onto one chip. The SoC also incorporates security, input/output capabilities and memory that is simultaneously shared between all of the parts of the chip.

This 16-core design is capable of processing a mind-blowing 11 trillion operations per second.

When Apple managers made claims a week ago about 20-hour battery life, plus much better CPU and GPU performance, technology writers were understandably skeptical.

However, based on fresh reviews from tech outlets like the Verge, Cnet and Wired on Tuesday, MacBook computers with the new M1 are living up to their hype.

Marques Brownlee, a popular YouTube tech reviewer, noted that the entry level M1 machines had better CPU performance than any Intel-based Mac machine ever. The GPU scores were better than even the most expensive MacBook computer.

This transition to custom SoC silicon for computers is clearly the start of something big and important. Competitors such as Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HP, Rated “C-”), Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE: DELL, Rated “C”) and others will follow. They have little choice.

Investors need understand what this means … so to better explain I’ll go back to the Tesla analogy.

If the entire global auto fleet is headed toward electric propulsion, longer-term investments in companies that make radiators, transmissions and combustion engines would be unwise.

Similarly, investments in companies like Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU, Rated “C”), Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD, Rated “B”) and Intel,  which make separate memory modules like GPUs and CPUs, could be equally unwise. That ecosystem is not dead, but SoC designs means the longer-term growth of these markets is certainly in peril.

On the other hand, some businesses are going to be big winners.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (NYSE: TSM, Rated “B-”) is the world’s largest microprocessor contractor. In addition to working with Apple engineers on the M1, TSM makes ARM-based processors for QUALCOMM Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM, Rated “B-”), the supplier of most of the SoCs running on Android devices.

Related Post: New Apple Chips Could Send Intel into Oblivion

It’s noteworthy that Qualcomm and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT, Rated “B”) partnered in October 2019 to bring ARM chips to the Windows operating system. The always on, always connected PCs had great battery life but got relatively poor reviews based on underwhelming performance.

Given the new MacBooks, expect the next iteration from this pairing to be much better.

The bottom line is a really big change is underway in personal computing, bringing new chips that dramatically shrink the current ecosystem. And you can certainly bet there will also be new opportunities for investors who are adept at looking forward and accepting change.

Best wishes,

Jon D. Markman

About the Editor

Jon D. Markman is winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding financial journalism and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi award. He was also on Los Angeles Times staffs that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. He invented Microsoft’s StockScouter, the world’s first online app for analyzing and picking stocks.

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