Apple fused a high performance core to a platform which used to run a latency critical platform, the iPhone. Actually it happened over the years.

- They learned to design a phone platform.

- Then, shoehorned a modified version of macOS on top of it.

- Then, they started to iterate on performance. Added iPad. They increased the performance while keeping latency criticality of iOS platform. Trying to have performing CPU/GPU and trying to keep power consumption low paved the way, year over year.

This iteration over and over resulted in M1. A descendant of iPhone and iPad, but with unbelievable performance. They kept the best parts of every platform since they can design from the processor to the latest bit of the software.

At the end of the day, M1 is greater than sum of its parts. An M1 Air behaves a lot of like an iOS device in some parts. Connect to power, screen comes on, a big battery appears with "XY% charged" message and you hear iOS charging chime. It's funny, yet hints on the heritage.

Apple fused everything together. A unified ARM platform. Variety of OSes with the same roots. One optimization for all. With a big blow, they theoretically reduced the software work they have to do dramatically, so they can build magical software again with last effort and can transfer technologies from one to another virtually with no effort.

See: iPad Pro with M1. iMac with M1, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M1. They are the same device. Same performance. A slightly different OS on iPad. That's just it.

Apple is now able to codesign the software and hardware top to bottom. I have no inside knowledge but using one of these things it's basically obvious what's going on. They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. So I think they've been really aggressive about making the interactions low friction.

It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses, etc that we're used to are just gone. They've made the way the software and hardware interact a nearly perfectly smooth racetrack. They've done this to such a degree that it must have been a very overt high level goal.

> They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library.

They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?

They'd still be constrained by Intel/nVidia's expected API design and almost certainly some key code from them as well. With apple controlling the hardware too, they can make the interface work however they want. That introduces the possibility of making some radical simplifications or optimizations.