12 ms·
People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. Of course
by retskrad 5y ago
People love to ding Tim Cook for Apple's lack of innovation but the I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. Of course, it's not as sexy and in your face as the first iPhone but people in the industry and consumers immediately felt the impact of the shock wave.
When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today. Inch by inch.
- Thaxll 5y agoM1 is an implementation detail.
- pohl 5y ago* ...an implementation detail that makes the implementation possible.
- okamiueru 5y agoBy what metric do you consider the M1 revolutionary? "Inch by inch" and "revolutionary" are a bit contradictory, no?
- kzrdude 5y agoIt was developed gradually: The A series is already at number 15! Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.
- MangoCoffee 5y agoits the first ARM based PC that doesn't suck. Microsoft Windows ARM didn't move people to ARM based PC while Apple succeed.
- ghshephard 5y agoNot sure who downvoted you - I completely agree. People have been talking about Arm as the next generation for a long time. I would suggest that Amazon made it successful with Graviton in the cloud, and Apple made it successful on the laptop/desktop with the M1.
- fulafel 5y agoEarly Acorn Archimedes users would like a word about that "first" claim, it misses by a few decades!
- spacedcowboy 5y agoARM was a company created by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. The ARM was the Acorn RISC Machine, and I owned one, but the first ARM chip was by Apple as much as Acorn. They didn’t decamp dozens of engineers to Cambridge for no reason…
- solarkraft 5y agoIt’s not. The release was somewhat revolutionary (it’s not all it’s made out to be, but there are many remarkable things about it). Before releasing it though, they worked up to it (in secret), 2.54 centimeters by 2.54 centimeters.
- jws 5y agoThe revolutionary aspect of the M1 is that the processor for a computer is once again under control of the computer designers. For thirty years it has been outsourced as a commodity and been optimized for the interests of the CPU producers. The centralization of CPU design had benefits of scale, but maybe at this time Apple’s scale is big enough that taking control of the design is more advantageous.
- BoorishBears 5y agoHow so? If I build a house with a revolutionary blueprint, but I build that house brick by brick to make sure it's the best representation of that blueprint possible, is it still not a revolutionary home?
- askonomm 5y agoBy the metric that I can have an entry level Macbook outperform maxed out Macbooks of a previous era. Oh and, do that with a ~20 hour battery life. And no fan.
- s0ss 5y agoI see no contradiction. M1 powers by far the best arm based laptop available today - all arm laptops hence forth will be compared to it. revolutionary. Apple iterations on arm have been regular and consistent for a long time.
- solarkraft 5y agoNot just arm. The M1 is a point of reference for any portable computer.
- nightski 5y agoWell that's not true. M1 is great for certain workloads, but I'd take my G14 any day of the week with it's Nvidia GTX 3060.
- mwint 5y agoAnd, I might add, all laptops of any architecture.
- whiddershins 5y agoWouldn’t you imagine every revolution is really a catalyst moment that follows years of hardly-noticed incremental changes that set the stage for it?
- Koshkin 5y agoIt is indeed revolutionary, because it is at the heart of the first widely popular fully-functional powerful general-purpose ARM-based laptop ever being produced on a massive, industrial scale. If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.
- latch 5y ago> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation". Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
- ChrisLTD 5y agoI love my M1 Air, but ultimately it's a moderately faster version of what I had before. The real benefit, so far, is that I have a fanless machine with the same kind of power as the previous pro level machines. Otherwise, it hasn't exactly changed what the computer is on a fundamental level.
- cglace 5y agoThe fact that I can forget my power cord and not care is a game changer.
- duped 5y agoEven if that were true, it would still just be an incremental improvement. We've been mass marketing laptops for decades. Switching to a different architecture while a big engineering task isn't revolutionary. But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the market for years already and cornered educational markets and had massive consumer success overseas.
- The_Colonel 5y ago> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is. Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".
- yoz-y 5y agoOne interesting thing about the M1 is that a single chip (currently) powers apple's tablet, entry level laptop, entry level desktop, and their most recent all-in-one desktop and high end pro laptop. The differentiation is done elsewhere. What is missing is the high end pro level hardware, but if the rumors are true those will have the same but "more of it". It's the first chip I know of that answers the "should we optimise for speed or for power consumption" by "yes".
- r00fus 5y agoSimply by application of existing cutting-edge technology (mobile chipset) to a different use-case (laptops/desktops). The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable. My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness. And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary - it has destabilized the existing regime.
- okamiueru 5y agoIn which particular area are you suggesting that the M1 is ahead for x86 to catch up?
- dralley 5y agoThe A15 performance cores seem to be equivalent in performance to AMD Ryzen 5950x desktop cores, at 1/5th of the power budget. True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
- okamiueru 5y agoThe power consumption is very impressive indeed. But, I think there are many compromises to be made when scaling up, so we'll see how the M2 performs in this regard. However, aside from power consumption, I find it interesting that people refer to it as such a revolution. Maybe I'm just imagining a unspoken "... for what is to come". Because as is, the only thing the M1 does better than it's competition is arguably the power consumption. The 5950x you mention, although an apples to oranges comparison will outperform highly parallelizable tasks by a factor of 4. Throw in a top end GPU and it becomes a factor of 14. Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life. But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.
- cptskippy 5y agoDo revolutions typically start over night or do they build up until there's a tipping point? Apple has been working towards a revolution, the M1 is the tipping point.
- ant6n 5y agoTipping towards what? How will having this laptop change your life over having another laptop? What can you do now that you couldn't do before?
- kgermino 5y agoGood question. It completely untethers me from my desk. The battery life is so good I can get through an entire work day without worrying about power at any point. This frees me up to leave (e.g. for a meeting, to work in the park or just on a couch, or simply being frazzled and in a hurry) without even considering a power brick or when I'll be able to plug in again. To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no performance compromises is incredible.
- Jcowell 5y agoI would take an M1 MacBook Pro over my intel MacBook Pro in a heart beat. It’s a heating battery dying piece of shit to put it lightly
- cptskippy 5y agoARM replacing X86 as the desktop computing processor of choice. A revolution doesn't have to benefit you. This benefits Apple financially, any benefits you receive are secondary.
- matthew-wegner 5y agoIt is still the fastest single-threaded performance available on any chip you can buy today: Laptop, desktop, server. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html (Available in a fanless ~$1k laptop, no less!)
- kllrnohj 5y agoAt passmark, anyway, in a chart that seems to have some rather questionable orderings to it. Like the Ryzen 5900 is according to that AMD's fastest single core performance CPU. But that's certainly not the case as it's just a power-restricted & clock-restricted version of the 5900X, and the 5950X has then an even higher clock ceiling. Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both? Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are better comparison points here. The M1's single-core performance is of course very strong, but I'm not sure why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation. There hasn't really been anything newer.
- scoopertrooper 5y agoIn fairness though, that first link you posted had the M1 beating the 5950X in geekbench 5 single threaded, so that confirms the Passmark result under certain workloads. In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy! In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product. We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.
- pdpi 5y agoWhen you look at the history behind the M1, it's been an inch-by-inch progression, grinding away at that CPU architecture. The culmination of that work is having one single CPU power iPads, macbooks and iMacs, which I think can reasonably be called revolutionary.
- jdub 5y agoRevolutionary incremental improvement?
- pier25 5y agoOr rather "evolutionary"?
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoI'm not sure it's revolutionary but it is a remarkable device. The Air is the first laptop I've owned that I actually like using rather than tolerate.
- techrat 5y ago> The Air is the first laptop I've owned that I actually like using rather than tolerate. Either you have been buying extremely crappy devices and expecting too much from them or this is some grade a, piping hot bullshit. While the differences under the hood exist, they're not substantial and when the hood is closed, it's still the same device with the same operating system. Intel MBAs and M1 MBAs are not so different overall that you would have to say you like using it versus tolerating it, assuming you were using the Intel based MBAs before. Otherwise this comes off as a thinly veiled "Wintel ew, Apple good!" regurgitated bit of fanboy wank.
- ulfw 5y agoThe M1 Air is a lot faster than it's intel predecessor, the battery runtime is at least 50% longer in real use and the thing is fanless, silent and I haven't burned a single body part yet. That alone is revolutionary. Just because the machine hasn't changed in appearance (and sadly neither has it's so-so display), the chip difference alone makes it a whole different ballgame.
- techrat 5y agoFanboys have driven the word 'revolutionary' into the ground so deeply that it ceases to have any actual meaning anymore. Meanwhile, through temporal prescience, the previous Intel based Macbooks were simultaneously revolutionary and merely tolerated before the M1 variants ever existed. Don't you guys ever get tired of twisting your Apple apologeticism thought processes into a gordian knot all the time?
- spideymans 5y ago> Otherwise this comes off as a thinly veiled "Wintel ew, Apple good!" regurgitated bit of fanboy wank. No, the M1 Air is just a substantially better product than the Intel variants. You can find dozens of HN threads where people explain exactly why.
- lallysingh 5y agoIt makes them predictable and vulnerable.
- cobookman 5y ago100% the m1 reminds me of the leap from a BlackBerry to my first iPhone. With my m1 laptop, I never have to worry about bringing my charger. My intel MBP always had slowdowns, with my M1 I've never noticed a slowdown. The m1's compute/watt will enable designers to change the dimensions of a laptop to be even smaller and compact. If the iphone's a15 starts to be near m1 compute-power, we could actually see the iPhone merge to become the device powering our monitors and keyboards. The new possibilities of such a revolutionary technology is endless!
- thefounder 5y ago>> we could actually see the iPhone merge to become the device powering our monitors and keyboards. I highly doubt that because it means Apple will sell zero macbooks and they don't want less sales.
- intrasight 5y agoThe M1 is evolutionary. What I think will truly revolutionary is the AR classes that Apple makes in a couple years using the next-generation of that silicon.
- simonh 5y agoRevolutionary is always going to be controversial. The first iPhone was dismissed as nothing special. There were touch screens before, after all, and it didn't even have a proper keyboard. The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be revolutionary because it offered only evolutionary levels of performance comparable to previous Apple CPUs. I don't think it's arguable that the M1 wasn't a game changer though. M1 firmly established Apple's design prowess at the laptop/desktop class chip game. It was no longer arguable that mere phone chips weren't comparable to desktop class CPUs. That claim is dead. It also enabled performance and power efficiency levels years ahead of the competition, giving tangible immediate benefits to customers. So revolutionary? It's a matter of opinion, but I think it was a watershed moment and permanently changed the technical landscape for CPUs running 'full blown' desktop class software.
- deaddodo 5y ago> The first 64-bit ARM SOC was argued not to be revolutionary because it offered only evolutionary levels of performance comparable to previous Apple CPUs. It sounds like you are conflating AArch64 with Apple. Apple had nothing to do with AArch64, it was developed by ARM in-house; Apple simply released the first AArch64-compatible core (outside of ARM's Cortex series).
- simonh 5y agoI’m fully aware of that. Apple released the first SOC implementing it.
- deaddodo 5y agoThe Cortex-A53/A57 was the first core to implement it. And a Mali+Cortex-A53 vanilla SOC is the first implementation. Then AppliedMicro had a hardware version to demo. Apple simply had the first to market consumer product with one. Them buying up a good chunk of the fab space needed to produce them at the time probably contributed to that.
- monocasa 5y agoThat's not what I've heard. The rumor is that AArch64 is as much Apple's as it is ARM's. That's why they're able to flaunt the normal restrictions of the architectural license: creating custom instructions, and not implementing parts of the ISA.
- specialist 5y agoYes and: Riding Wright's Law. > I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone. This was first obvious with Apple's move to 64-bit for mobile. And should be more obvious with the Apple Watch. While M1 is quite the competitive advantage, there's nothing on the horizon to compete with Apple's wearables; Apple dominates both the profits and marketshare. I don't know what superlatives to use. Nor do I know how to summarize, much less describe, Apple's strategy. But it's working. Apple focused on profitability. Capture the highest margin market segments, then ride the price curve down. This sucked all the oxygen out of the competition. Similarly, Apple's monospony strategy repeatedly boxed out competitors. Most infuriatingly, Apple laser focused on select differentiators and competitive advantages to the exclusion of many others. For example, thinness for thinness sake. At the expense of reliability and repairability. Why? Because they could and copying them was prohibitively expensive. Again, boxing out competitors. -- Contrast and comparison sometimes helps understanding. Two other examples of Apple's Druckeresque strategy are Tesla and SpaceX. Capture the profits, plow the capital back into R&D, relentlessly drive Wright's Law. My hunch is the core strategic focus is on lowest cost of capital. What moat most protects the dominance of AWS, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX? I think, compared to their competitors, it's their lower cost of capital? Duh, right? So while I think it's fine to speculate and cheer. But it's hard to get excited by competitors who a) don't have cheaper capital and b) aren't driving Wright's law for crucial competitive technical advantage. Toyota used to have these advantages. But somehow lost the narrative. I think the case studies will argue that Toyota missed two opportunities. First, they punted on owning their own digital hardware and software, whereas Tesla treated the car as an iPhone on wheels, a new platform. Second, most importantly, Tesla jumped into EVs at the very moment Li-ion became feasible, and decided to relentlessly drive Wright's Law for battery tech. The other manufacturers simply waited too long to jump in. Tesla's Li-ion flywheel (access to capital, scale, Wright's Law) will kick in within a few years, cementing their dominance. Of course Tesla's story isn't finished. Like all hard driving efforts, balanced on a knife edge, Telsa could implode. But if they avoid a cash crunch, it's hard to imagine any EV competitor catching up. In that way, Apple's access to cheap capital is great deal more robust. FWIW, I anticipate Starlink will become SpaceX's Apple style money printing machine. And once that revenue kicks in, the existing cell and cable carriers will be buried. The Mars mission and national defense parts of SpaceX's story are fun and legit. But unlike all their competitors, SpaceX will be self-sustaining on Starlink. -- Thanks for reading this far. I write to understand. And this narrative has been eluding me. -- PS- The outlines of next technical turf battles are pretty obvious. Apple's next big challenge is baseband chips. They know this, of course. But for whatever reason, eliminating their dependence on Qualcomm is very hard. And whoever productizes the successor to 5G, whatever the satellite uplink chipset shapes up to be, will be sitting very pretty. The Li-ion story wrt BEVs now seems pretty obvious. Everything from light trucks to skateboards will be almost fully BEV by around 2030. Tesla will produce about 1/10th of the world's batteries; and maybe a 1/10th of the Model 3 sized automobiles. And like Apple, they'll capture most of the profits. The next frontier will be hydrogen. The hydrogen story today looks like Li-ion around 2005, +/- 3 years. Hydrogen's first use cases will be all the stuff BEV missed. Like trucks, transportation, utility scale energy storage. Someone like Toyota could survive long enough to see their hydrogen bet pay off. But I think it's more likely new entrants will access to cheap capital will prevail. Any way.
- fomine3 5y agoI believe anyone who read AnandTech's A-series analysis article know that their SoC is really really great from around A11 era. A7 was also very first ARMv8 implementaion.