This First Post has to be about Apple, Right?
Apple is the most interesting purveyor of phones and computers on the market. It's always been interesting, and Apple Silicon just makes it more so.
It feels like a fitting inaugural post on substack to write about Apple. In this post I’ve linked to some of the articles on the subject that I have found most interesting, and I hope you’ll agree. Some are easy to browse, but some are a deeper read. I’ve been writing on-and-off about Apple for over a decade, partly because it is such a black box. We don’t really know how the operation works on the inside, but we can attempt to infer a lot from the outside, and we might even learn something that Apple itself does without knowing why. And if not, we have at least opened our own minds to different ideas and approaches. To me, Apple’s products evoke a deep sense of process in order to design and refine them year after year. But I’ve heard others describe the inside of Apple as more about elbow grease and culture than process. I will continue to use a process lens with which to look at this black box, and see what we might learn.
Why design and produce their own custom silicon for their Macs? The more core cultural reason is that Apple believes it can create the best experiences when they can design all of the components that create them.
However, it isn’t like Apple won’t leverage third party components that are ahead of their time - like the small hard drive of Apple iPod fame, or Corning’s Gorilla Glass. It’s just that, once Apple starts leveraging these components they keep looking for, demanding, and designing better. They never stop looking for better materials, better designs, better production processes. And in many cases that eventually leads to Apple designing their own components - or as Steve Jobs would say - the whole widget.
In fact, I wrote blog post about that whole phenomenon back in 2018, about the iterative deepening process that Apple applies to product experiences. Using iPods, iPhone Screens, iPhone CPUs, and Apple Maps as examples…
So it goes with Apple Silicon. This is the road that Apple has already traveled for its iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs, HomePods, and AirPods…
In a previous blog post over at BP3, I wrote about why Apple might pursue its own silicon for Mac hardware. And of course those rumors turned out to be well-founded. Apple indeed announced that they were releasing Apple Silicon Macs starting this year. In the November event, the specific machines were announced, and now people have them in their hands.
And if you’re going to talk about a new chip for Macs, you have to talk about speed. Anandtech confirms that the M1 is likely the world’s fastest CPU based on their analysis of the A14 (a predecessor). They do one of their infamously deep deep-dives on Apple’s A14 chip in this review. And then they turn around and do the same for the M1 set in a Mac Mini:
“What’s really important for the general public and Apple’s success is the fact that the performance of the M1 doesn’t feel any different than if you were using a very high-end Intel or AMD CPU. Apple achieving this in-house with their own design is a paradigm shift, and in the future will allow them to achieve a certain level of software-hardware vertical integration that just hasn’t been seen before and isn’t achieved yet by anybody else.” - in other words, the M1 is faster in translation mode of x86 code than the old Macs were in native x86 execution. That’s saying something.
As you would imagine, the reviews of the first two laptops carrying the M1 are fairly glowing: “The MacBook Air is once again the benchmark by which other laptops will be measured” - it is, after all, the entry-level MacBook that is outperforming all but the very very best machines on the market, which cost hundreds or thousands more.
“We have a running joke at The Verge that our old colleague Joanna Stern (now at the WSJ) would end every Windows laptop review with “for a hundred dollars more, you could get a MacBook Air.” For the next year or two, we all might be ending reviews of thin and light Windows laptops with something like “for the same price, you can get a MacBook Air that’s faster, lasts longer on a battery, and doesn’t have a fan.”
A review of the MacBook Pro 13” goes into a bit more depth on the chip itself:
a 5nm manufacturing process (the same as the A14, but a generation or two ahead of the processes being used for Intel’s chips at the moment
Integrated GPU (in fact, it is in the SOC)
16 billion transistors, packing 8 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores
Unified memory of 8 or 16GB (built into the SOC)
All of this makes for a very efficient, and very fast, chip. That also can run iOS apps natively (though the reviews of such are not flattering at the moment). The battery lasts so long that it beggars belief (20 hours in the MacBook pro 13”)…
John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:
“Apple’s new Macs based on the M1 system on a chip, the first Macs based on Apple Silicon, are that sort of mind-bending better. To acknowledge how good they are — and I am here to tell you they are astonishingly good — you must acknowledge that certain longstanding assumptions about how computers should be designed, about what makes a better computer better, about what good computers need, are wrong.
Some people will remain in denial about what Apple has accomplished here for years. That’s how it goes.”
And what about that internal fan? John Gruber says: “I’ve never once heard it in an entire week. Never. Not once. Not a whisper.” (As I’m writing this my current 16” MacBook Pro is about to take off on runway 3)
“The M1 chip can’t be viewed in isolation. It is a silicon-level manifestation of what is happening across computing, especially in the software layer. In large part due to mobile devices, which are always connected, computers now must startup instantaneously, allowing the user to look, interact, and move away from them. There is low latency in these devices, and they are efficient. There is a higher emphasis on privacy and data protection. They can’t have fans, run hot, make noise, or run out of power. This expectation is universal, and as a result, the software has had to evolve along with it. “
But what does it all mean in the economic cross-currents of tech titans?
Jean-Louis Gassée posits that Apple’s gambit puts pressure on Microsoft to provide a more serious ARM-based answer for Windows - which might, in turn, determine Intel’s fate vis-a-vis dominating PCs. One has to think that however impressive Apple’s engineering and design prowess are, that others will bring ARM chips to the market in the future that can compete - or at least reduce the difference to a level that doesn’t matter to consumer buyers. The question is, how far off is that day, and how much marketshare can Apple take between now and then?
And *then* the question will be what differentiates the next run of Apple devices…
Neil Cybart of Above Avalon proposes a compelling unification theory for Apple products, and one element of the virtuous cycle is “push the boundaries of a computer by using lessons learned from mobile devices and wearables” - Apple’s M1 chip is that to a T.
What really is a mind-bender for long-time Apple fans, is that for the first time in memory, Apple’s devices not only run the software that Apple fans crow about, but Apple’s machines will also boast the fastest chips on the market - significantly faster and more efficient than competing PCs…
The ripples of this sea-change are yet to be seen. Casual users of PCs may still opt for a cheaper WinTel machine - but by building its own chips, Apple has a margin advantage over these other manufacturers - as well as a performance advantage and a battery life advantage. It’s hard to imagine that those advantages won’t be telling over the next 12 months. Another theory is that the effect on the PC market will be similar to what happens when oil prices drop too far - low cost providers still make money, while higher priced providers are forced to produce at lower margins or at negative margins for a period of time to stay in the game. One has only to look at the Android handset market to see that proud conglomerates will continue to operate with losses in an area that is culturally core to their business - for many years running. Or perhaps Apple supply constraints will prevent a re-ordering of the PC landscape… but I’m not betting on that outcome.
Still, the most interesting thing to me is that Apple has realized a long-held dream - owning the design and means of its own CPUs, and doing so from a position of strength rather than weakness. They have proven that owning the SOC is differentiating for their phones, and now we will get to see how far they can take it with their Mac devices. If we know anything about Apple, they will leverage this new technology envelope to deliver new experiences, not just speeds and feeds:
instant-on
work-all-day (for real) without a plug - really, just leave your plug at home (or in the office) - you don’t need to take it with you
run your apps anywhere across the Apple ecosystem
a quieter experience (!)
a laptop that doesn’t get hot (!)
That’s just a start… but you can imagine that they might take it much further than my meager imagination will go.