Apple’s risky, yearslong effort to design its own silicon is paying off
wsj.com
wsj.com
Performance wise it compiles my code much much faster than my 2019.
In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I don't even have to think about maybe closing one of the apps, I just run it with 5 IDEs and 15 projects open, though that's probably down to having plenty of RAM rather than the CPU.
The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff.
On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.
Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
If you have this plus some of the other electron hogs (teams, slack, a browser with 30 tabs of stack overflow), your system does have a proper load.
The beach ball occurs when some UI process does not service its event loop. This can be an issue with the process, or it can be caused because that process is contending for resources with the compilation processes.
If the critical resource that's causing a beachball here is CPU, there's two very easy paths forward: either modify your compilation scripts to use fewer threads than the system has physical performance cores, or run the compilation at a higher nice level. In either case the UI process should be able to get CPU when it needs it and not beachball. The higher nice level is generally both the easier and more effective solution, since it will allow the compilation process to continue to use all cores when UI processes are not scheduled.
If the critical resource is memory the system will page, which will turn the critical resource into disk bandwidth. Fixes specific to memory usage here are to get more memory (not really actionable), or to reduce parallelism on the build process.
If the critical resource is disk bandwidth, this is the hardest problem to fix. To my knowledge MacOS doesn't provide good tools for managing disk priority. If the disk bandwidth being used is to access build-related files (source, object files, etc) rather than swap, one possibility is to use a thunderbolt-connected external SSD for the build artifacts, leaving the internal storage for swap and for the UI program. However, if your build process is using so many disk operations that it's starving a UI program, you're likely to see a performance hit going to a slower external SSD.
Also SpaceX doesn’t suck, you suck. :P
It is not that the M-series chips can never trigger a beachball but that there are significantly fewer scenarios where that happens to the point that many users never find themselves in those scenarios. You see their enthusiasm as fanboyism and they could see you as being grumpy, but the you are just both seeing different parts of a distribution curve.
It literally takes 15 seconds to join a meeting with one of the fastest user computers available.
Absolutely horrible garbage of an app.
Microsoft has zero incentive to fix it, because they have a captive audience i. Their enterprise customers.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-i...
An apples to apples comparison would require you to change the settings to disable autostart on Windows.
Even WhatsApp, which seemed to be a pretty light app, run smoother on Firefox than chrome or electron.
Still no perceptible fan noise :)
There were a few 16" MBP models that could be equipped with 64gb of memory, before the Apple silicon transition.
Also worth noting, a lot of the older Intel chips also had memory capacities that went beyond 64 gigs. In theory Apple could have shipped a 128gb MBP.
Designing your own chip is a ballsy thing to do. I think it might be one of the most underrated innovations Apple has ever done. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. But he's still delivering on innovation where it's typically stalled.
Not my definition of balsy project. Balsy would be risking the business level of funding. This is peanuts money level of risk. They didn’t told anyone about it either, so no reputation risk also (how many failed projects at this point on apple we don’t even hear about?).
So, in my humble opinion, not risky nor balsy. But a smart and rewarding move? FUCK YES!
Where else are they going to invest this money? Having your own components is the most obvious way to strengthen their moat.
If they took a step outside consumer electronics and invested into a new market, or invented something never seen before, which they can do 3 times over, then yeah, that would be ballsy.
It’s absolutely ballsy when you look at what happened with PowerPC (where they made the opposite decision to great effect), and the failure of competing attempts to do this such as Windows on ARM.
They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success despite their largest competitor attempting and failing to make the migration.
They didn't - they obviously had tested performance of these CPUs and knew it was excellent before deciding to switch to them. They were only risking whatever amount they invested.
PowerPC was unpopular and dying. ARM was the most popular instruction set on the planet before Apple developed M1.
Apple has tight control over software on their platform, they say jump, everyone asks 'how high. Apple dropped 32 bit support overnight and everyone has to deal with it. Microsoft still has support for 16 bit software in Windows 10. Open Process manager on Windows, Discord, Steam and much of other software is still 32 bit. No-one is compiling for Windows for ARM, Noone is using their Store. Some corportaes are still on windows 7, the world took 15 years to get off windows XP and I have seen some ATMs still running on it. Very different market.
Don't forget what Apple has a virtually no variations in the hardware, compared to Windows.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U...
Though it does use TurboBoost up to 55W apparently. I don't know about the M1. If anyone wants to try, you can lock TDP on some laptops to exactly 15W (or whatever the compared M1 runs at) and run Passmark or something.
* the memory model is slightly more relaxed
* instruction decoding is obviously simpler, and while the impact of x86 decoding was not that major at a point, I suspect it has increased with time
What matters is mostly the microarchitecture of Apple, and, yes, the 5nm.
IIRC at the beginning of the Zen projet, AMD wanted to do 2 versions: 1 with an x86 frontend, and one with an ARM one. They would probably have had very similar performance profiles, and I suspect at most a dozen percent of diff for energy consumption. Intel is currently very far from that to reach a core perf similar to the one of the M1.
Can you elaborate why decode would become more problematic over time?
Hopefully I got that right. Now in theory Intel and AMD do employ tricks to optimize x86 decode. If I recall this correctly, they decide opportunistically several possible paths simultaneously and start speculatively executing the ones that turn out to be valid instructions. Likely this works pretty well (+ the variable length means better utilization of the code cache).
- No 32 bit support
- Fewer other legacy ISA features to support
- big.LITTLE style efficiency/ performance cores (until latest generation Intel)
On the first two fewer transistors wasted mean more to spend elsewhere (eg on caches).
I agree.
The M1 architecture is fabulous. But the fact they've managed to cram it into a laptop, without throttling performance and without killing battery life, infact quite the opposite on both fronts, i.e. amazing performance and amazing battery life. Its quite the tour de force.
Hats off to all those at Apple. That's some hardcore engineering there.
The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one.
I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.
I bought an MBP with M1 two months ago. The main reason was to run video conferencing software, which so far it has done well at. That it is a powerful machine yet small and lightweight was a plus for it as well - its easy portability.
I bought it for some secondary reasons, but those have not panned out yet. In mid-February I tried to compile a program with the release version of Android Studio, the project had NDK (C language) components. Even with Rosetta it was not working ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). Google said they had M1 support coming down in Android Studio canary version and other fixes coming out as well in the future. I'm not in a rush, but it compiles on my Ubuntu box and on Intel-based Macs, but not M1 out of the box yet (not without having to fiddle around to do it any how).
For my Android projects that were fully Java/Kotlin based, the M1 did compile fast though.
Also, Fidelity said they have an application called Active Trader Pro that works on Macs. It's not something I ever used, or that I would probably use regularly, but I decided to check it out. It would not work for me either, and support forums made mention of difficulties it has on M1.
One thing I haven't tried yet is loading Unity 3d and futzing around with it, hopefully when I have the time to do that it will be working.
Still happy with my purchase as it's working for my primary need, and more Android Studio support seems to be coming, and it is not a big rush to me. It's probably good that Apple is pulling software into a world where it supports ARM (kind of weird Android code primarily targets ARM devices, yet has trouble compiling on ARM devices). I had heard about how fast things compile on it, but it was even faster than I expected. So all in all I like it, and hopefully more software will be supported as time goes on.
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion.
It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
See IBM, Solaris and hp big iron. Even car makers would source various parts from other smaller companies
I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc..
But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics].
Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.
inb4 'Tim Cool, formerly known as Tim Apple'
Other 'Big Corp CEO' features are antitrust and abuse of dominant market position, forbidding suppliers from selling spare parts to device owners, lobbying opposition to right to repair and spreading lies, disabling the device in case of 'unautorised repair', and running software on your device with the goal of sending their own customers to jail.
He is wholesomely taking part in taking away property rights from masses of people and bringin about a new age of digital serfdom. You will own nothing, and anything from your phone to your toaster can be used against you.
IMO, the only everyday computing task that can't be done with acceptable performance on a Raspberry Pi4 is opening a web browser.
There are always bunch of people on both sides of the fence, but the usability & familiarity generally is perceived to have taken a dip with the flat glassy design. Admitted, now we are used to it (the iOS look & feel). But the change between skeumorphic & flat was a hard change & tad unpleasant for its times. Form should have never take precedence over function. This is something that the Thinkpad team got overwhelmingly right.
Saying that the M1 MBP is pure bliss, so much that I'm for the first time considering spending my own money on an Apple product. And that is even though I still had a few issues here and there with Docker but the 'no fan, no heat' and strong battery life make well up for it!
I actually miss the plasma desktop and Linux more than I anticipated and might consider putting Linux on the m1 when there are more options unless I get more find of MacOS.
But the hardware is great
Even with the server market, AWS is moving toward ARM where ever it can (disclaimer I work at AWS). Even if Intel regains momentum in the PC market, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if they can’t get into the mobile market.
Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive.
I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century.
The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design.
It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.
Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong.
Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you.
The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet.
But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate.
Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think:
1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or
2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server)
Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
So, to respond, buyers will:
1/ Not give a crap about whether it's x86 or Apple Flavored ARM (read: an ARM with undocumented extensions that is pretty much CISC), but merely look at price, in which case Apple buyers are an extreme minority. A $500 laptop with a mobile Ryzen is more than enough for the average user, and mostly, most people cannot afford a $1200+ macbook air.
2/ Not care about power consumption because it does not matter to a boatload of people. Get out of your bubble, noone outside of software developer nerds care if they have to plug in their laptop once every four hours. Most people have lunch breaks. Is it a great thing to have in a laptop ? Absolutely, and Apple has done great in that regard. Does it matter anywhere else ? Absolutely not. Once again, it's HN jerking itself off about pErFoRmaNcE pEr WaTt when Apple put out a CPU that can't even draw the 105W it's rated for, and has no proof that it can improve in single threaded performance with more power. But sure, toss out more cores, it's what x86 has been doing for years, but when Apple comes out with the M1 Ultra it's a stroke of genius to slap two of these bad boys together.
3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
ARM is not a forward looking architecture, and neither is x86. They both are architectures, with their advantages and flaws (and the Apple flaws are fucking massive, unupgradable-except-if-you-buy-next-year's-version is the very definition of non-forward thinking, especially for end users).
Also you're taking it all off on an angry tangent about the HN audience when I am talking about buyers (I meant including institutional buyers, not end users, and I didn't clarify that enough but I would have thought the focus on architecture would have made it clearer) but:
> I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh).
I would. Between this April and next April my energy bill will double, and it is unlikely to ever fall back to where it is now. Power consumption matters A LOT in Europe right now. Corporate buyers will have to care about that, for the long term.
> 3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
No, they really don't upgrade their hardware, in fact. Almost no computer buyer upgrades through anything other than replacement.
But I'm using a seven year old, secondhand MacBook Pro, so I'm not the target of your comment.
Should have gone with nuclear years ago, our prices are stable.
Between those and an intel Mac Mini and an older iMac, I got over $3000 in trade-in value. Made me feel quite foolish for not having tried that before. The oldest iMac still got me a couple hundred bucks, as would your seven year old MacBook Pro most likely. A two year old high-specced computer?
I get that the list price for any of these is still way higher than putting together a PC from parts… but again, I belatedly traded a bunch of stuff in, and got more than $3000 in gift card value from Apple doing it. That makes 'rebuying a macbook pro every two years' a whole other state of affairs. I'm kicking myself for not having tried that earlier: I'm sure I left over $1000 on the table simply by letting recent computers sit around unused rather than immediately trading them in for Apple credit.
So to the point at discussion: Apple uses their common tech across their entire Market. The M1 chips are the result of making the fastest mobile phones. The M1 is going into tablets. They are just printing money and pumping that money into chip design. If your DIY PC Building is what is going to keep Intel/x86 alive, then I agree with GP: Intel is the walking dead. And it really is just us gamers.
Who needs raw CPU/GPU at their desk? I had one of the first nehalems under my desk (NDA and everything). Then I heard about AWS and started running my shit on that. Back then, that was intel. Now it's Graviton ARM: more processing per $.
Apple is singlehandedly using up almost all of TSMC's 5nm processes. There are no smaller processes available anywhere in the world, and Samsung's is disappointing. Processes that have largely been driven by demand from AMD and Apple (EPYCs and Ryzens from AMD, and Apple's mobile chips). They capitalized on nothing except having fat wads of cash to slap people around with.
Additionally, it's not "being a RISC architecture" that makes the M1 a beast. Slap a 5950X on a SoC with directly available memory and GPU, and you get similar (better, even, considering current gen CPUs do get better performance already) results. "Deep integration of an entire stack makes things more performant" is not a new thing, it's merely that Intel and AMD have been upholding the contract of x86/64 that is interoperability and replaceability (well, Intel has been doing some socket fuckery for upgrades, but upgrades are still entirely possible), and Apple can afford to throw it away.
EDIT: bUt ThIs oVeRlOoKs PoWeR CoNsUmPtIoN
I swear I'm going to come out with a souped up raspberry pi and tell HN "look, it uses 1W of power for 10GFlops" and you would buy it because tHe PoWeR pEr wATt iS BeTTeR !11!!
When opening a second chrome tab*
This is the upside: if they want to make a quantum leap, they will absolutely do so if it benefits them, and everybody's expected to just re-buy, at Apple prices (mind you, trade-ins are a thing). Apple absolutely can afford to throw away anything that impedes them from doing what they want, and in the case of the M1 processors it's serving them really well. Turns out the fat wads of cash can be used to buy useful things, and when Apple wants to, they can CHANGE THE WORRRLLLD ;)
I'm sure the PC (not necessarily 'x86') world will find ways to more or less keep up: there are plenty of people who really, really want to keep up. It's just that complacency won't cut it: PC-land has to really seriously work to not fall way behind. Good. That's best for everybody. As a lifelong Mac guy since the 68040, I'm delighted the PC world has driven Apple to these extremes, because now I get to enjoy the results.
A big part of what makes Apple’s chips so fast is that they optimize them for the needs of the OS. In interviews they have given examples of how to profiled the common operations in the OS and then made sure that those operations were as fast as possible on the chips. that integration is a big part of it. Other hardware and software vendors are not as tightly coupled and don’t do this kind of optimization.
Their most credible strategy was to produce modems to steal Qualcomm's insane margins on those chips and break the forced mariage of their modems with their not-so-good processors. It was such a resounding failure that Apple bought the whole division for scraps.
I don't see how Intel suddenly gets its shit together now that the ARM chips are in computers. The fact that the chips ended up in computers is a direct consequence of their decade of failure. I expect Apple to stay ahead of Intel and AMD in terms of power per watt for a decade at least.
Didn't get another one and instead got an Asus with an RTX card, which is really nice for all kinds of things, and even gaming when I want.
But, the M1 looks really promising. And it seems they have finally gotten rid of the Touch Bar also. I think I need to start putting some money in the piggy bank.
The only time I had a serious problem with Macs was back in the 2000's when they were shipping with cheap ass Hitachi hard drives that were extremely failure prone. I had an early iBook (yes the weird one with the translucent color) and one day the drive had an unrecoverable head collision and that was the end of that thing. Years later all my college friends had Macs and, no joke, half of them ended up with the same thing.
I got an M1 Macbook Air last year and I still feel like I'm living in the future. It's small, light, noiseless, and snappy to boot. The battery life is crazy good as well. I can take it on a plane and not even need to think about whether the plane has an outlet. As a web developer also doing SCAD for 3D printing, it's been a joy. It handles a bajillion browser tabs quite well. Maybe something else will fail after 7 years, but at least that will be 7 good years. lol
There's a lot to criticize about Apple as a company, but recently they've really been knocking it out of the park with their laptops in my opinion.
As an aside, if anyone reading this has an M1 or a Mac of any kind, at your own risk, look into disabling ReportCrash and see what happens. This improved performance even further for me, and it's easy to undo.
While the M1 models have been an improvement, 2016-2019 were particularly not great.
(Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)
Yes you were.
Model Processor Geekbench multi/single core score
MacMini (2020) M1, 8 cores 7782/1747
MacBook Air M1 M1, 8 cores 7618/1734
MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020) M1, 8 cores 7739/1753
iMac (24-inch Mid 2021) M1, 8 cores 7660/1742
Intel had unlocked TDP/TPL on many i7 chips and lower end models had exactly the same performance as higher end models (assuming equal core/thread/cache count) heh
Now that Apple has paved the way, you'll likely see this with other big computer companies like Microsoft for their mainline products & development. I think Steve Jobs would regularly quote Alan Kay on this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfTXYa36f4
I think that given Intel has recently changed leadership (for the better ridding the culture of MBAs), we may even see unique partnerships as well that may act as this "in-house" hardware providers.
Like the Intel transition before, they controlled risks well and were able to develop the iPhone processor until it could run a Mac.
Just because something is daring and amazing doesn’t mean it was a huge risk.
https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75...
1. Apple uses the same processors (the Mx series) on Macs and high end and midrange iPads.
2. Looking more broadly, Apple uses slightly modified versions of the same ARM chip in Macs, iPads, iPhones, set top boxes and monitors (yes the newest Apple monitor has the same processor as an iPhone 11)
Just taking 1 and two into account, Apple probably sells between 250 - 300 million computing devices with high end ARM chips.
Now let’s add the processors that Apple sells in the Watch and AirPods that are also ARM variants.
I'm not really sure what AMD or Intel were doing in these past 10 or so years, but they need to change ASAP. The M1 Mac is great, but a similar linux laptop would be incredible.
Even if Intel/AMD processing power was not competitive with Apple Silicon (which it is), there is a laundry list of reasons for many people to continue buying PCs.
To be sure, Intel has struggled "these past 10 years or so", taking their sweet time pushing PC processing power forward, and then making a series of mistakes in engineering. AMD also struggled prior to 2017, but they've been riding a series of successful engineering ventures recently. In the meantime, Intel will likely succeed well enough in remaining competitive with their massive resources and investments in research and development.
While the impressive performance, and especially efficiency, of Apple Silicon brings Apple into the mainstream as eligible devices, there's still, as I said, plenty of reasons outside of performance (and efficiency) that make PC's worthwhile options. Of course, if you're a fan of macOS, there's already no reason for you to consider a PC, but if you really do like Linux, then I'm not sure what it is about the current state of AMD/Intel processing hardware that you dislike so much.
On PC, Intel and AMD is great, the desktop M1 is not that great vs. those CPUs. The problem is the laptop form factor. All Intel and AMD laptops I owned so far were noisy, overheated, had worse trackpad, and didn't last long on battery. Those are not a problem with PCs.
A little bit like what uber does vs how taxis work.
In Germany uber only exists were it is reasonable profitable. Taxies exist everywhere in Germany and do all the other things society needs: dialisis drives to hospital etc.
Apple doesn't bother with providing cheap and affordable hardware (the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans).
I don't critisis apple for it. It's just that the margin they have and the general size of how many people want and need hardware is just that big.
But it makes this 'gamble' very predictable and controllable .
Even developers just accept what apple requires from them.
I would be impressed by what apple does if it would actually help the normal people.
That's a funny typo, but it is a typo, right?
A couple of years ago I noticed that my old iPad Pro (not M1, but ARM) compiled Swift code in Playground projects twice as fast as compiling the same code on an Intel MacBook.
Off topic, but to me the most amazing Apple silicon enabled product is the Apple Watch. It is so fantastic being able to leave my iPhone at home and still get calls and messages from my wife, Dad, etc. It seems so much healthier to just be wearing the watch. Mobile phones are intentionally addictive.
But putting an M1 into iPad 11 and 12.9 (and now Air!?) was a huge mistake. I get it - economies of scale. The new thing, why not take the power etc.
Problem is: ipads (for me at least) were all about battery power on the go. My 12.9er is useless and basically only used at home. My 11" Cellular model is still good but definitely a few hours less than my old A12X 11"er was. And the difference in speed is negligible on a non-multitasking device.
However, I doubt it in the next decade. Have you seen how many chips they need for the iPhone?
I would argue that the masses don't need Rolls-Royces, thus this is resource mis-allocation on a global scale - but certainly Apple have pushed device and UI design forward strongly, so maybe we can live with that.
These jobs aren't great. 16 hour work days and company provided boarding makes them into borderline slaves.
I'm not saying stopping the demand for electronics is going to fix that, but promoting that is far from a "holy mission".
Unless you care more about plastic gadgets than the people making them for you.
Who's saying they're great? All I'm saying is that they're better than starving on the street, which as you pointed out is what would be happening to these people without the shitty sweatshop jobs. I really struggle to see how offering an alternative to starving on the street is a bad thing. Would you prefer these companies pack up the sweatshops, return production to countries with expensive labor, and force some of their former workers back to starve on the street? Personally I would not. If those people want to work in those conditions I think it's immoral to stop them.
> but promoting that is far from a "holy mission".
I don't think anyone is saying this either. Obviously sweatshop operators are looking out for their own interests, but that's the great thing about trade. When all participants are willing they are necessarily better off due to the trade, otherwise it wouldn't happen.
And on the big scale, we should be happy that finally the x86 monoculture is coming to an end. I can still remember the times when there were several competing cpu architectures which made for a lot of innovation.
Those are hardly Rolls Royces prices.
Apple also releases security updates for phones two years older.
Not to mention that the $100 Android is slow and clunky with worse battery life and a horrible camera.
But a $100 cell phone is no substitute for a $429 iPhone SE. While there are some mid tier $250-$300 Android phones that are “good enough”. The only phones that currently exist that have the performance of even an iPhone SE are - other iPhones.
These M1 Max machines are already very impressive at a reasonable price. M1Max + 64GB + 2TB is about $4K.
Apple's design is remarkable, but it is completely useless as we can't buy one and use it for something other than a Mac, so in effect, it doesn't exist.
Also who founded ARM?