According to experts, Apple's new M1 chip, which is used in the company's latest desktops and laptops, offers significantly more power and longer battery life than its competitors.

The chip, which was unveiled alongside MacBooks and the Mac Mini that are powered by the new silicon, was designed by Apple itself rather than Intel. The M1 is designed specifically for the Mac OS and also means the Mac can run iPad and iPhone apps. There’s nothing else on the market quite like the M1, observers say.

“With the introduction of ARM laptops, Apple has introduced vertical integration into the laptop space,” Simha Sethumadhavan, an associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, said in an email interview. “The ability to customize everything from software apps to the operating system to the hardware gives them a unique advantage that competitors don’t have.”

The M1 chip is powered by an eight-core CPU, which Apple claims has the best performance per watt of any CPU on the market. It's also power efficient, delivering the same peak performance as a typical laptop CPU but consuming a quarter of the power. An eight-core GPU has the world's fastest integrated graphics.