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Comment by vicchenai | Hacker News Reader

15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.

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The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.

(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)

To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)

They’ve done a few impressive things also, remember that time they converted the root filesystem on every ios device on the fly with a point release? Kudos to whoever clicked that particular button I’d have bricked it personally ;)

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