16 ms·

Apple’s risky, yearslong effort to design its own silicon is paying off

149 points by carlycue 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Teletio 5y ago
They also have a very unique position. 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.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans That's a funny typo, but it is a typo, right?
  - Teletio 5y ago
    Yes ;)
retskrad 5y ago
Tim Cook is nowhere near the product guy that Steve Jobs was but Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. Apple has slowly adopted the Tim Cook doctrine the last 10 years and it has made Apple an 800 pound Gorilla that is also swift on it’s feet. Apple Silicon is the ticket to a 10T market cap and beyond. Their chips will instantly give them a huge advantage, from laptops to cars and AR/VR.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  The Tim Cook doctrine, in part: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
  - drexlspivey 5y ago
    Wait till TSMC gets nationalized by China. Apple doesn’t own any fabs and I don’t think anyone else can manufacture their chips.
    - evgen 5y ago
      Do you have any idea what the T in TSMC stands for? None of the important fabs (or at least none getting the latest tech) are in China and you are not going to see another TSMC fab built in China. Ever.
      - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
        Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. 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.
        neoromantique 5y ago
        > Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
        threeseed 5y ago
        You need three things to keep TSMC operational: facilities, supply chain and people. Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
They've done a phenomenal job of chip making... Android devices are years behind in performance.
- distances 5y ago
  Android hardware is behind, but I don't mind it that much. M1 made Android development finally nice on a laptop though. Before this it was a massive slog if you couldn't use a desktop machine, but developing on M1 is joyous. And this comes from a person who has never bought a single piece of Apple hardware nor has any interest in the ecosystem.
kungpao42 5y ago
https://archive.ph/Ru9Ni https://archive.ph/Ru9Ni
RandomWorker 5y ago
I have a M1, got it because I wanted to try something new. Now I love my M1, but it’s a special time. They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. While apple is strategically buying up time on a limited production capacity like no one else can. Innovative design integrating all kind of slow components. I think it was an opportunity that won’t last, intel and amd are waking up to this fact. I see AMD and Intel coming up with some RISC and hybrid type solutions. Where they might not be able to do better is the PC integration. Memory and processing have always been separated and it’s going to be hard to integrate those just because of the cooperative structures. I think Apple can stay ahead if they keep going. If there is a M2 this year that is better, I’m buying it again with more memory, because M1 has been workable it’s not optimal for all my workflows.
- scarface74 5y ago
  The personal computing market is a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things. Apple alone sells more ARM based mobile devices than the entire worldwide PC market not including servers. 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.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Even if the PC market (including laptops) is quite a bit more than a nothingburger, the segment of the PC market that really cares about the top decile or two of performance for whatever reason (real or imagined) is tiny. A lot of people are fine with a 5 year old system that's still supported, or even a Chromebook at this point.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. 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.
goosedragons 5y ago
I think slumping Mac sales just had more to do with Apple putting out tired, flawed products and letting them languish especially on the desktop side. Why buy a laptop that will cook itself and have the keyboard self destruct in a year or two or a desktop that hasn't been refreshed for 3+ years? Their investment in the late Intel era was particularly bad. Were they expecting AS earlier but just couldn't get it where they wanted?
- RandomWorker 5y ago
  One reason for me not upgrading my 2009 MacBook until the M1 was I put a SSD in there, more ram, and it just purred along. Then somewhere around 2014 I installed Linux on it and I never looked back. I don’t have much to do but write documents on this thing, email and light web browsing. The thing was a tank, and it still goes after 10+ years. Fun fact the cd drive broke just after 1 year… I still think the screen is the most beautiful screen I own, and the keyboard/trackpad is solid what else do I need? M1 for me was just interesting to try something different.. and turns out it was a good gamble, and I have retired the 09 model as my daily driver, because it turns out having a battery that works is useful.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Very similar boat here. I even installed OpenCore to upgrade to unsupported Mac OS once my Mac was too old to sync my music to my new phone. IMO, the only everyday computing task that can't be done with acceptable performance on a Raspberry Pi4 is opening a web browser.
- leros 5y ago
  Computers in general have just matured. Unless you're an extreme power user like a gamer or video editor, you don't need to upgrade that often anymore.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I have a fairly loaded M1 Pro MacBook and it's very nice. But I also have a couple 6 year old Macs in the house and, to be honest, aside from video and phoro editing which is all on my M1 now, I use all 3 systems pretty interchangeably--usually in the browser--except for the iMac which has a full setup (lighting/audio/etc.) to conference and record video.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
Apple's genius is in selling Rolls-Royces to the masses (or at least to a sizable fraction of the masses) - bespoke chip design seems in keeping with this strategy. 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.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Personal devices are practically an extension of one’s brain in that it is a key part of most people’s thought processes. Speeding this up globally is a holy mission.
  - happynacho 5y ago
    I have never thought of that but I agree. Personal combination of devices/OS/apps is a reflection of our own mind and everyone should choose what works for them best.
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Doubling down on the mass production of cheap electronics through unethical labor is not a holy mission.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      What's unethical about offering people jobs? The alternative must be worse for them, otherwise they'd be doing that.
      - spicybright 4y ago
        Because for a lot of people, it's either the job or starving on the streets. 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.
Abroszka 5y ago
No wonder, I don't particularly like Apple, most of their stuff is way too overpriced imo, but the new M1 MacBooks are pretty great. Every single laptop I had before the M1, whether it's Apple, Dell or whatever is simply crap compared to it. 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.
- false_lunik 5y ago
  Isn't Linux on M1 chips already a thing ? I have heard of Asahi Linux but didn't get the time to look into it
  - goosedragons 5y ago
    Not everything is supported yet. Depending on your workload/device it could be usable if you're okay with the limitations. See their feature support page: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
  - philistine 5y ago
    They don't have any drivers for the GPU as of last time I checked. You can boot, but that's a big hole for now.
- neogodless 5y ago
  Apple only sells Apple Silicon through proprietary, locked-down, non-upgradable hardware paired with Apple's choice of operating system. 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.
skilled 5y ago
The last time I bought a MacBook was in 2016. I swear, that thing was cursed. In the first 2 weeks, I cracked the bezel below the screen (I suspect a small shell of a peanut or something of a similar nature). Then, 2 weeks after that, my keys started to randomly fall out (this was very common for that particular model) and Apple refused to fix it for me. And then, a few months down the line, I managed to spill a can of beer on it while getting up from the bed in my hotel room. That was the end of that. 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.
- happynacho 5y ago
  Just so you know, rumors say M2 is around the corner, so you might save just enough to buy it when it comes out.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Or grab a refurbished M1 right after the M2 hits the street. That’s often been the sweet spot for Apple gear, and their refurbs are high quality.
- daniel-thompson 5y ago
  It's been better written about elsewhere, but the fifth-gen 2021 M1 MBPs are a really good (if not timely) course correction from the fourth-gen (2016 - 2020) debacle. Solid keyboard, no useless touch bar, most all the ports back including MagSafe, top-notch display, and internal upgrades. I bought one to finally replace my 3rd gen (2013) MBP and it's just been fantastic.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  I'm not sure how people have these structural issues with their Macbooks. Not saying you did anything wrong, but my experience with the screens is that they are relatively robust. 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.
ramshanker 5y ago
The climax would be when intel regains the process lead and Apple start manufacturing ARM processors at Intel foundry.
- philistine 5y ago
  That would be the best outcome for PC people. Apple never cared who made their chips; they want the best node at volume. If Intel can get their business, so be it. However, I doubt it in the next decade. Have you seen how many chips they need for the iPhone?
lordnacho 5y ago
Gotta say my M1 exceeds all expectations. Virtually no fan noise, I almost thought it was broken until I had a better look. 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.
- listless 5y ago
  I love it. I just got the M1 Pro and it screams. 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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    They bought a dev team with heritage on the Alpha and StrongARM and assigned them a new task. Not that ballsy.
    - imwillofficial 5y ago
      An expensive and risky move that large businesses are loathe to do. This is the definition of ballsy.
      - motoboi 5y ago
        Apple has too many cash on their hands. God knows how many hyper well funded projects they have. 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!
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Interestingly that devices on M1, per geekbench scores, all have basically identical performance. So in the end, M1 Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro differ only in the number of ports and the availability of a built-in display.
- noiv 5y ago
  Well, and in number of cores, battery life, acoustics, Watts, and some more....
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    The point is only about processing power. Previously, mini/air/pro lines on Intel all had wildly varying performance. Now many of Apple devices share identical processors and do not differ in this regard. (Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)
- pschastain 5y ago
  For single-core performance, yes. Anything that can make use of multiple cores, no
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Most M1 devices have indentical number of cores.
    - valine 5y ago
      That’s not true. The M1 has 8, the M1 pro has 10, and the M1 ultra has 20.
      - Casteil 5y ago
        Depending on the config, the M1 Pro has 8 or 10 cores - and unlike the M1, the M1 Pro's 8 core configuration uses 6 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores vs 4 / 4
NelsonMinar 5y ago
Is there any option for getting this kind of integration for general purpose Windows or Linux systems? It still seems pretty far off. Even getting an ARM system at all is still fairly exotic or you are using niche hardware like the Raspberry Pi.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  What would be key would be getting the chip designers to optimized their chips to support common operations in those OSs super efficiently. that is part of what makes the Apple Silicon chips so effective. With Window and Linux, there is no vertical integration and the chip makes are not focusing on this kind of optimization.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I still keep an old Intel MacBook around for compatibility reasons, but otherwise I am all-in on M1. 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.
sam0x17 5y ago
I love how we all pretend it isn't just ARM. You won't find that word anywhere on Apple's website
- wmf 5y ago
  It isn't just ARM. Other ARM chips are nowhere close to Apple.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    Not really. A large percentage of the world's super computers right now are using ARM-based setups. We are probably a few years away from seeing ARM-based desktop chips from a variety of manufacturers that put x86 in the dust in terms of performance and power consumption 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.
- dagmx 5y ago
  What ARM reference design is competitive? Also who founded ARM?
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    Well, certainly not Apple's, because there is no way to buy it and put it in non-Apple hardware.
- jen20 5y ago
  Wrong [1]. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm64-code-for-apple-platforms https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm6...
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    Technically I'm still right. This is on a developer-oriented subdomain and not on the main Apple website ;)
- 5y ago
mmcnl 5y ago
I haven't read the article due to the paywall, but was it actually risky? Apple had already proven they could make high-performant chips ever since the A4 in the iPhone 4. It was a long effort, sure, but given the tight integration between hardware and software Apple has, I wouldn't classify their effort as risky.
davidf18 5y ago
Looking forward to the TSMC N3 node Apple MacBook Pros coming out next year, 2023. These M1 Max machines are already very impressive at a reasonable price. M1Max + 64GB + 2TB is about $4K.
thenerdhead 5y ago
Was it really that risky? If anything this seemed like a pretty sure-fire bet by bringing in various operations in-house when partnerships would prove to go sour. I think Apple knew these limitations back with Jobs too. At least that's what I understood from reading various biographies on the many Apple characters & partnerships. 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 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.
- bombcar 5y ago
  People overestimate the risk. If the M1 had not worked out they’d stick it in an iPhone and try again. They’re still selling Intel processors so it’s not like Intel would tell them to F off either, so the real risk is whatever costs they incurred making it. 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.
- scarface74 5y ago
  Microsoft doesn’t sell hardware in enough volume to design its own competitive chips.
  - thenerdhead 5y ago
    Yeah but will they in 5-10 years? https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75f2e4dd38 https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75...
    - scarface74 5y ago
      Even if you take that article at face value (I don’t). Let’s look at chip volumes 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.
fidrelity 5y ago
I'm generally not an Apple fan, I only use it for work and have never bought an Apple product with my own money. 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!
- daxfohl 5y ago
  Yup, recently got one for work. I still do my open source work on Windows with a maxed out XPS i9 laptop, since I've used Windows almost exclusively for 20+ years, and VS is a bit nicer than VSCode for F# (or maybe I'm just used to it; VSCode on Mac is perfectly usable). Perf is about the same between the two (though TBH the Mac does usually run a couple of percent faster when I time it) , but that Mac just spoils you for battery life. I get frustrated now when the Dell starts asking for more juice after "only" two hours.
brunojppb 5y ago
I have been using the first edition of the M1 from work for development and it’s magical compared to the old i7 Intel. It almost never spins the fan, even with IntelliJ IDEA cranking up with Docker full speed. I recently purchased the M1 Pro for private use and the battery life on that thing is insane. 16 inch screen running VS Code, Docker, Elixir, Erlang and Chrome while lasting hours with no charge and able to use it in my lap without a sweat. It is incredible.
gameswithgo 5y ago
nazgulnarsil 5y ago
How is it risky? It's not like the R&D was all that substantial a fraction of their war chest.
pleb_nz 5y ago
Yeah I got an M1 pro recently but most of my dev workflows are in docker and docker is still painfully slow compared with Linux. 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
- klohto 5y ago
  Docker on mac already runs on Linux, so how can Linux be slower than Linux? Are you talking about cross-filesystem access? You have an imaginary problem.
ulfw 5y ago
100% agree for laptops (and desktops). 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.

149 points by carlycue 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

They also have a very unique position. 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.

JadeNB 5y ago
> the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans That's a funny typo, but it is a typo, right?
- Teletio 5y ago
  Yes ;)

retskrad 5y ago

Tim Cook is nowhere near the product guy that Steve Jobs was but Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. Apple has slowly adopted the Tim Cook doctrine the last 10 years and it has made Apple an 800 pound Gorilla that is also swift on it’s feet. Apple Silicon is the ticket to a 10T market cap and beyond. Their chips will instantly give them a huge advantage, from laptops to cars and AR/VR.

GeekyBear 5y ago
The Tim Cook doctrine, in part: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  Wait till TSMC gets nationalized by China. Apple doesn’t own any fabs and I don’t think anyone else can manufacture their chips.
  - evgen 5y ago
    Do you have any idea what the T in TSMC stands for? None of the important fabs (or at least none getting the latest tech) are in China and you are not going to see another TSMC fab built in China. Ever.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. 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.
      - neoromantique 5y ago
        > Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
        threeseed 5y ago
        You need three things to keep TSMC operational: facilities, supply chain and people. Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

They've done a phenomenal job of chip making... Android devices are years behind in performance.

distances 5y ago
Android hardware is behind, but I don't mind it that much. M1 made Android development finally nice on a laptop though. Before this it was a massive slog if you couldn't use a desktop machine, but developing on M1 is joyous. And this comes from a person who has never bought a single piece of Apple hardware nor has any interest in the ecosystem.

kungpao42 5y ago

https://archive.ph/Ru9Ni https://archive.ph/Ru9Ni

RandomWorker 5y ago

I have a M1, got it because I wanted to try something new. Now I love my M1, but it’s a special time. They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. While apple is strategically buying up time on a limited production capacity like no one else can. Innovative design integrating all kind of slow components. I think it was an opportunity that won’t last, intel and amd are waking up to this fact. I see AMD and Intel coming up with some RISC and hybrid type solutions. Where they might not be able to do better is the PC integration. Memory and processing have always been separated and it’s going to be hard to integrate those just because of the cooperative structures. I think Apple can stay ahead if they keep going. If there is a M2 this year that is better, I’m buying it again with more memory, because M1 has been workable it’s not optimal for all my workflows.

scarface74 5y ago
The personal computing market is a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things. Apple alone sells more ARM based mobile devices than the entire worldwide PC market not including servers. 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.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Even if the PC market (including laptops) is quite a bit more than a nothingburger, the segment of the PC market that really cares about the top decile or two of performance for whatever reason (real or imagined) is tiny. A lot of people are fine with a 5 year old system that's still supported, or even a Chromebook at this point.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right. 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.

goosedragons 5y ago

I think slumping Mac sales just had more to do with Apple putting out tired, flawed products and letting them languish especially on the desktop side. Why buy a laptop that will cook itself and have the keyboard self destruct in a year or two or a desktop that hasn't been refreshed for 3+ years? Their investment in the late Intel era was particularly bad. Were they expecting AS earlier but just couldn't get it where they wanted?

RandomWorker 5y ago
One reason for me not upgrading my 2009 MacBook until the M1 was I put a SSD in there, more ram, and it just purred along. Then somewhere around 2014 I installed Linux on it and I never looked back. I don’t have much to do but write documents on this thing, email and light web browsing. The thing was a tank, and it still goes after 10+ years. Fun fact the cd drive broke just after 1 year… I still think the screen is the most beautiful screen I own, and the keyboard/trackpad is solid what else do I need? M1 for me was just interesting to try something different.. and turns out it was a good gamble, and I have retired the 09 model as my daily driver, because it turns out having a battery that works is useful.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Very similar boat here. I even installed OpenCore to upgrade to unsupported Mac OS once my Mac was too old to sync my music to my new phone. IMO, the only everyday computing task that can't be done with acceptable performance on a Raspberry Pi4 is opening a web browser.
leros 5y ago
Computers in general have just matured. Unless you're an extreme power user like a gamer or video editor, you don't need to upgrade that often anymore.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I have a fairly loaded M1 Pro MacBook and it's very nice. But I also have a couple 6 year old Macs in the house and, to be honest, aside from video and phoro editing which is all on my M1 now, I use all 3 systems pretty interchangeably--usually in the browser--except for the iMac which has a full setup (lighting/audio/etc.) to conference and record video.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

Apple's genius is in selling Rolls-Royces to the masses (or at least to a sizable fraction of the masses) - bespoke chip design seems in keeping with this strategy. 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.

FredPret 5y ago
Personal devices are practically an extension of one’s brain in that it is a key part of most people’s thought processes. Speeding this up globally is a holy mission.
- happynacho 5y ago
  I have never thought of that but I agree. Personal combination of devices/OS/apps is a reflection of our own mind and everyone should choose what works for them best.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Doubling down on the mass production of cheap electronics through unethical labor is not a holy mission.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    What's unethical about offering people jobs? The alternative must be worse for them, otherwise they'd be doing that.
    - spicybright 4y ago
      Because for a lot of people, it's either the job or starving on the streets. 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.

Abroszka 5y ago

No wonder, I don't particularly like Apple, most of their stuff is way too overpriced imo, but the new M1 MacBooks are pretty great. Every single laptop I had before the M1, whether it's Apple, Dell or whatever is simply crap compared to it. 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.

false_lunik 5y ago
Isn't Linux on M1 chips already a thing ? I have heard of Asahi Linux but didn't get the time to look into it
- goosedragons 5y ago
  Not everything is supported yet. Depending on your workload/device it could be usable if you're okay with the limitations. See their feature support page: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- philistine 5y ago
  They don't have any drivers for the GPU as of last time I checked. You can boot, but that's a big hole for now.
neogodless 5y ago
Apple only sells Apple Silicon through proprietary, locked-down, non-upgradable hardware paired with Apple's choice of operating system. 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.

skilled 5y ago

The last time I bought a MacBook was in 2016. I swear, that thing was cursed. In the first 2 weeks, I cracked the bezel below the screen (I suspect a small shell of a peanut or something of a similar nature). Then, 2 weeks after that, my keys started to randomly fall out (this was very common for that particular model) and Apple refused to fix it for me. And then, a few months down the line, I managed to spill a can of beer on it while getting up from the bed in my hotel room. That was the end of that. 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.

happynacho 5y ago
Just so you know, rumors say M2 is around the corner, so you might save just enough to buy it when it comes out.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Or grab a refurbished M1 right after the M2 hits the street. That’s often been the sweet spot for Apple gear, and their refurbs are high quality.
daniel-thompson 5y ago
It's been better written about elsewhere, but the fifth-gen 2021 M1 MBPs are a really good (if not timely) course correction from the fourth-gen (2016 - 2020) debacle. Solid keyboard, no useless touch bar, most all the ports back including MagSafe, top-notch display, and internal upgrades. I bought one to finally replace my 3rd gen (2013) MBP and it's just been fantastic.
ravenstine 5y ago
I'm not sure how people have these structural issues with their Macbooks. Not saying you did anything wrong, but my experience with the screens is that they are relatively robust. 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.

ramshanker 5y ago

The climax would be when intel regains the process lead and Apple start manufacturing ARM processors at Intel foundry.

philistine 5y ago
That would be the best outcome for PC people. Apple never cared who made their chips; they want the best node at volume. If Intel can get their business, so be it. However, I doubt it in the next decade. Have you seen how many chips they need for the iPhone?

lordnacho 5y ago

Gotta say my M1 exceeds all expectations. Virtually no fan noise, I almost thought it was broken until I had a better look. 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.

listless 5y ago
I love it. I just got the M1 Pro and it screams. 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  They bought a dev team with heritage on the Alpha and StrongARM and assigned them a new task. Not that ballsy.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    An expensive and risky move that large businesses are loathe to do. This is the definition of ballsy.
    - motoboi 5y ago
      Apple has too many cash on their hands. God knows how many hyper well funded projects they have. 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!

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Interestingly that devices on M1, per geekbench scores, all have basically identical performance. So in the end, M1 Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro differ only in the number of ports and the availability of a built-in display.

noiv 5y ago
Well, and in number of cores, battery life, acoustics, Watts, and some more....
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  The point is only about processing power. Previously, mini/air/pro lines on Intel all had wildly varying performance. Now many of Apple devices share identical processors and do not differ in this regard. (Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)
pschastain 5y ago
For single-core performance, yes. Anything that can make use of multiple cores, no
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Most M1 devices have indentical number of cores.
  - valine 5y ago
    That’s not true. The M1 has 8, the M1 pro has 10, and the M1 ultra has 20.
    - Casteil 5y ago
      Depending on the config, the M1 Pro has 8 or 10 cores - and unlike the M1, the M1 Pro's 8 core configuration uses 6 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores vs 4 / 4

NelsonMinar 5y ago

Is there any option for getting this kind of integration for general purpose Windows or Linux systems? It still seems pretty far off. Even getting an ARM system at all is still fairly exotic or you are using niche hardware like the Raspberry Pi.

Tagbert 5y ago
What would be key would be getting the chip designers to optimized their chips to support common operations in those OSs super efficiently. that is part of what makes the Apple Silicon chips so effective. With Window and Linux, there is no vertical integration and the chip makes are not focusing on this kind of optimization.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I still keep an old Intel MacBook around for compatibility reasons, but otherwise I am all-in on M1. 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.

sam0x17 5y ago

I love how we all pretend it isn't just ARM. You won't find that word anywhere on Apple's website

wmf 5y ago
It isn't just ARM. Other ARM chips are nowhere close to Apple.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Not really. A large percentage of the world's super computers right now are using ARM-based setups. We are probably a few years away from seeing ARM-based desktop chips from a variety of manufacturers that put x86 in the dust in terms of performance and power consumption 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.
dagmx 5y ago
What ARM reference design is competitive? Also who founded ARM?
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Well, certainly not Apple's, because there is no way to buy it and put it in non-Apple hardware.
jen20 5y ago
Wrong [1]. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm64-code-for-apple-platforms https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm6...
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Technically I'm still right. This is on a developer-oriented subdomain and not on the main Apple website ;)
5y ago

mmcnl 5y ago

I haven't read the article due to the paywall, but was it actually risky? Apple had already proven they could make high-performant chips ever since the A4 in the iPhone 4. It was a long effort, sure, but given the tight integration between hardware and software Apple has, I wouldn't classify their effort as risky.

davidf18 5y ago

Looking forward to the TSMC N3 node Apple MacBook Pros coming out next year, 2023. These M1 Max machines are already very impressive at a reasonable price. M1Max + 64GB + 2TB is about $4K.

thenerdhead 5y ago

Was it really that risky? If anything this seemed like a pretty sure-fire bet by bringing in various operations in-house when partnerships would prove to go sour. I think Apple knew these limitations back with Jobs too. At least that's what I understood from reading various biographies on the many Apple characters & partnerships. 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 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.

bombcar 5y ago
People overestimate the risk. If the M1 had not worked out they’d stick it in an iPhone and try again. They’re still selling Intel processors so it’s not like Intel would tell them to F off either, so the real risk is whatever costs they incurred making it. 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.
scarface74 5y ago
Microsoft doesn’t sell hardware in enough volume to design its own competitive chips.
- thenerdhead 5y ago
  Yeah but will they in 5-10 years? https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75f2e4dd38 https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75...
  - scarface74 5y ago
    Even if you take that article at face value (I don’t). Let’s look at chip volumes 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.

fidrelity 5y ago

I'm generally not an Apple fan, I only use it for work and have never bought an Apple product with my own money. 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!

daxfohl 5y ago
Yup, recently got one for work. I still do my open source work on Windows with a maxed out XPS i9 laptop, since I've used Windows almost exclusively for 20+ years, and VS is a bit nicer than VSCode for F# (or maybe I'm just used to it; VSCode on Mac is perfectly usable). Perf is about the same between the two (though TBH the Mac does usually run a couple of percent faster when I time it) , but that Mac just spoils you for battery life. I get frustrated now when the Dell starts asking for more juice after "only" two hours.

brunojppb 5y ago

I have been using the first edition of the M1 from work for development and it’s magical compared to the old i7 Intel. It almost never spins the fan, even with IntelliJ IDEA cranking up with Docker full speed. I recently purchased the M1 Pro for private use and the battery life on that thing is insane. 16 inch screen running VS Code, Docker, Elixir, Erlang and Chrome while lasting hours with no charge and able to use it in my lap without a sweat. It is incredible.

gameswithgo 5y ago

nazgulnarsil 5y ago

How is it risky? It's not like the R&D was all that substantial a fraction of their war chest.

pleb_nz 5y ago

Yeah I got an M1 pro recently but most of my dev workflows are in docker and docker is still painfully slow compared with Linux. 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

klohto 5y ago
Docker on mac already runs on Linux, so how can Linux be slower than Linux? Are you talking about cross-filesystem access? You have an imaginary problem.

ulfw 5y ago

100% agree for laptops (and desktops). 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.