Apple executives talk M1 chip, macOS Big Sur redesign, and more
A trio of Apple executives sat down to discuss the first Apple Silicon M1 chip, the possibility of a touchscreen Mac, and more in a new interview.
Credit: Apple
Just a couple of days after Apple unveiled the M1 chip at its Nov. 10 event, The Independent spoke with Apple software chief Craig Federighi, hardware engineering chief John Ternus, and marketing chief Greg Joswiak about a variety of Apple Silicon- and macOS Big Sur-related topics.
On the performance of the M1, for example, Joswiak and Federighi told The Independent that they almost "couldn't believe" the type of power Apple's hardware team was able to achieve.
"We overshot," Federighi said. "You have these projects where, sometimes you have a goal and you're like, well, we got close, that was fine'. This one, part of what has us all just bouncing off the walls here - just smiling - is that as we brought the pieces together, we're like, this is working better than we even thought it would."
Ternus added that as the development momentum built, the team realized that the chip was doing thing that they hadn't expected.
"We started getting back our battery life numbers, and we're like, You're kidding. I thought we had people that knew how to estimate these things," Federighi said.
As far as the branding of the M1 chip, Joswiak said the "M-series" "makes a lot of sense for a Mac chip." He added that the letter "A" was started as the first chips from Apple, but after that family of silicon, the company started using letters that made sense -- such as "H" for headphones.
When asked about how the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are differentiated, Federighi pointed out that the Pro model notebook has a cooling system, and explained that the more cooling these devices have, the faster they become.
On the note of the new Macs, Ternus said it didn't make much sense to "just go and change the design just for the sake of changing a design." Hence why the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models appear roughly identical to their Intel counterparts.
"I think these systems do make a statement of like: Look, look at what's possible with M1 and with all our technologies. I think they're a tremendous foundation for for this transition, just to start with M1," Ternus said.
The actual switch to Apple Silicon from Intel was a process that was years in the making, Federighi said. But, of course, it's not the first architecture transition that Apple has made for its Macs.
"We've done this before," the Apple VP said. "We've watched others in the industry do it in the meantime, not so successfully. But we've, I believe, really perfected these sorts of transitions, we know exactly how to handle the tools to make it really easy for developers."
Federighi was also asked about rumors of a move to touchscreen for macOS, and he downplayed -- but didn't outright deny -- those rumors.
The Apple software chief explained that, despite its similarities to iOS and iPadOS, macOS Big Sur wasn't designed with touch in mind. Instead, it was created "in a way that felt most comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch."
"We're living with iPads, we're living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic - the sort of openness and airiness of the interface - the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch," Federighi said.
The full interview contains some more details and tidbits, and can be found here.
Credit: Apple
Just a couple of days after Apple unveiled the M1 chip at its Nov. 10 event, The Independent spoke with Apple software chief Craig Federighi, hardware engineering chief John Ternus, and marketing chief Greg Joswiak about a variety of Apple Silicon- and macOS Big Sur-related topics.
On the performance of the M1, for example, Joswiak and Federighi told The Independent that they almost "couldn't believe" the type of power Apple's hardware team was able to achieve.
"We overshot," Federighi said. "You have these projects where, sometimes you have a goal and you're like, well, we got close, that was fine'. This one, part of what has us all just bouncing off the walls here - just smiling - is that as we brought the pieces together, we're like, this is working better than we even thought it would."
Ternus added that as the development momentum built, the team realized that the chip was doing thing that they hadn't expected.
"We started getting back our battery life numbers, and we're like, You're kidding. I thought we had people that knew how to estimate these things," Federighi said.
As far as the branding of the M1 chip, Joswiak said the "M-series" "makes a lot of sense for a Mac chip." He added that the letter "A" was started as the first chips from Apple, but after that family of silicon, the company started using letters that made sense -- such as "H" for headphones.
When asked about how the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are differentiated, Federighi pointed out that the Pro model notebook has a cooling system, and explained that the more cooling these devices have, the faster they become.
On the note of the new Macs, Ternus said it didn't make much sense to "just go and change the design just for the sake of changing a design." Hence why the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini models appear roughly identical to their Intel counterparts.
"I think these systems do make a statement of like: Look, look at what's possible with M1 and with all our technologies. I think they're a tremendous foundation for for this transition, just to start with M1," Ternus said.
The actual switch to Apple Silicon from Intel was a process that was years in the making, Federighi said. But, of course, it's not the first architecture transition that Apple has made for its Macs.
"We've done this before," the Apple VP said. "We've watched others in the industry do it in the meantime, not so successfully. But we've, I believe, really perfected these sorts of transitions, we know exactly how to handle the tools to make it really easy for developers."
Federighi was also asked about rumors of a move to touchscreen for macOS, and he downplayed -- but didn't outright deny -- those rumors.
The Apple software chief explained that, despite its similarities to iOS and iPadOS, macOS Big Sur wasn't designed with touch in mind. Instead, it was created "in a way that felt most comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch."
"We're living with iPads, we're living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic - the sort of openness and airiness of the interface - the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch," Federighi said.
The full interview contains some more details and tidbits, and can be found here.
Comments
The CCA parts reduction will provide the industrial design team opportunities to rethink the form factor, and I’m sure they are doing so. We’ll likely see significant physical design changes before the two year transition period is complete.
In the case of these new M1 based machines I think the problem is that people don't understand how huge M1 is to the Mac, Apple and the industry as a whole. The results will speak for themselves, I'm just trying to hold off until benchmarks come in as the new Air is a very interesting machine.
Agree with the sentiment in all four of these posts. It wasn't lazy not to change the form factor and design. It's a deliberate choice to keep things familiar for THIS internal change, and then change up other things later once the dust has settled on this one, especially since some people will feel unsure and skeptical. It's a psychological thing, and Apple knows what they're doing with this stuff.
Additionally, an entirely new internal architecture opens a whole slew of cans of worms for things that could potentially go wrong. If anything does go wrong with these new M1 Macs, then they can have some confidence in what caused the fault - the chip change - instead of having to try to figure out which of the multitude of changes they made has caused the new fault. As much as I would have liked to see a new 14" reduced bezel form factor for the smaller MBP, and/or maybe a smaller MBA like the old 12" one, or whatever else, making those changes later, after the dust starts settling on the major internal change, makes a ton of sense.
On another note...
Not sure the technical viability of this, but if it's possible I wouldn't be surprised if the SSD gets baked into the chip in the future too. In fact with the RAM and so many different chips now included in this one SoC - and all the performance benefits that come from that - I'm actually a little surprised they haven't done this with the SSD already.
It makes sense to me. They're not going to stop soldering them to the logic board and make them socketed again. That ship has sailed. So if they're soldering it into the board, why not incorporate it into the chip, like the RAM, and resolve that last piece of latency as well?
Some have asked elsewhere: With SSD speeds getting closer and closer to RAM speeds lately, might we reach a point where RAM isn't needed at all? The differences between RAM and SSD are more than just speed and the ability or not to retain its state when powered down, so a computer relying on the SSD for RAM is not the answer, but there are people developing a kind of RAM that can retain its state when powered down. So I think there's a future with Macs with no SSD. So instead of a Mac with eg. 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, it's just 2TB of this "solid state RAM" (for want of a better term), built into the SoC, and outrageously small latency between all that and the CPU. The performance gains should be obvious of course.
Of course even when this tech is figured out, the price of this kind of thing will be off the charts at first, but it's only a matter of time. I wouldn't be surprised at all if this is a direction Apple is already looking to go and such things are being worked on in highly secret labs somewhere. And this might be partly why they're getting us used to soldered SSDs now.
Then again... if they can build an entire SoC (with CPU, GPU, this "solid state RAM", and whatever else all in it) that's socketed and make multiple derivatives of it, then maybe it'd be possible to "upgrade the RAM" by swapping out one SoC for another one that's the same but with more RAM, or whatever, but without having to sell and buy a whole new computer. Maybe that's a stretch for Apple, but who knows.