M-series (Apple Silicon)
Apple's family of ARM-based system-on-chip designs (M1 through M4) that power every modern Mac and ship with a Neural Engine.
M-series is the marketing name for Apple's in-house ARM SoCs for the Mac, starting with M1 in November 2020 and continuing through M4 in 2024-2025. Every M-series chip contains a CPU, a GPU, a Neural Engine, and a unified memory architecture that lets all three access the same RAM without copying.
Mac Note Taker requires an M-series Mac (M1 or newer) running macOS 14.2 or later. The on-device ASR, diarization, and embedding models all rely on the Neural Engine; running them on the CPU alone, as on an Intel Mac, would be far too slow to keep up with a live meeting. Unified memory is also why a 7B-class Ollama LLM fits comfortably alongside the recording pipeline on an M3 Pro with 18GB.
Related terms
- Apple Neural Engine (ANE) ↗The dedicated ML accelerator inside every Apple Silicon chip, used to run ASR and diarization without burning the CPU or GPU.
- ANE (Apple Neural Engine) ↗Shorter name for the Apple Neural Engine - the per-chip ML accelerator that runs Mac Note Taker's transcription and diarization models.
- Edge AI ↗The pattern of running ML inference on the end-user's device rather than in a centralized data center.