I'm sorry, the transition to their own silicon, and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation? What would count? We're literally discussing the failures of an iconic chip design firm, so it's particularly ironic that you would overlook this.

You mean like IBM is innovating when they use their own silicon? This is just vertical integration at its best, I'm not sure that M1 is a 'tour de force', to me it's just another CPU that was tailored for a specific niche.

The first ARM, that was a tour de force. The 6809 was too, and of course the 4004. But most other CPUs to me are run of the mill and the M1 is in that sense to me nothing special though of course it will give Apple a bit of an edge, but when all is said and done it's just another ARM based SoC.

At best it is an optimization, the most interesting part of the M1 is the dedicated neural net, and I'm not sure if anybody has already done something with that that the main CPU could not have done.

Wow.

Intel is now chasing some design decisions within M1 with Intel Thread Director with different types of cores: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels...

How not M1 is not an Innovation? I'm not claiming M1 is the first CPU to do it, I don't know, but they may have executed it flawlessly. Great performance, great battery life and great silence. If you don't call it innovation, at least call it breakthrough.

>Intel is now chasing some design decisions within M1 with Intel Thread Director with different types of cores:

I have seen this being repeated again and again by DaringFireball, Gurman and many other places. It started with ARM bigLITTLE, not M1.

Nothing M1 did would have had an influence on what Intel is releasing now. The process of designing a chip takes years, a product that is releasing next week will have been functionally design complete a year ago.

IBM does a lot of research into basic chip technology and designs their own chips pushing forward with new architectures and features. Yes, of course they count. It boggles my mind that you think they wouldn't.

The M1 Laptop is currently in many factors miles ahead of its competition for the general consumer market, so calling it just tailored for a specific niche isn't really true.

> and the tour de force that is the M1 doesn't count as innovation?

Not really. You can't buy an M1. It's a part of a bigger product. Is the M1 impressive alone? Or is the MacBook and everything else including the M1 impressive?

And it's not the first chip Apple has done. It's just the first one for a small selection of computers. The M1 a tour de force? No.

The trajectory doesn’t seem comparable. Apple is the biggest company in the world, makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation), and is still growing at a fast pace. If this is bad, I want to hear what good looks like.

> makes the best products in nearly every category they’ve entered (with real improvements every generation)

I like Apple at its best, but I wouldn’t say they’re the best in every (or even nearly every) category they’ve entered.

Yes they have iPhones (top range, even if they have competition from top range Android alternatives), iPads (peerless), Apple Watches (dominant), iPods dominated the MP3 market back when that was a thing anyone cared about…

But they also make really weird mice (Magic Mouse 2: charger on the bottom; many models: one button; Mighty Mouse: scroll nipple; iMac: unergonomic puck), the Apple TV and HomePod are nothing special (the latter is a pity, given I don’t trust their Voice Assistant competitors), and the device power cables have been infamously fragile for a long time.

They're doing fine, but I don't see the 'real improvements' over the last couple of generations. The M1 may be such a development, time will tell.

Apple is becoming like Bentley (or similar higher-end car manufacturer), where the improvement is not in the feature but in the overall package. In other words, the package you get is the feature.

Some improvements like fit & finish, tolerances, endurance, so on are not visible on paper. Others like battery life and weight are visible on paper. When these combine with the xOS (where x={mac, i, iPad, tv}) ecosystem, whole thing becomes visible or palpable, one may say.

It's not an ubiquitous thing to have in technology space, and only possible with tight integration Apple provides, and strives to keep.

You can’t expect breakthrough products like the smartphone every few years. That was decades in the making culturally and technologically.

Doesn’t mean something bad is happening, yet.

Isn’t the M1 a significant innovation?

Let's wait a couple of years before making that call. It could be, it could be a short-lived edge.

No edge in technology lasts forever, and once a new design is out it's much easier for others to copy. The fact is M1 was a nasty shock to their competition and was the biggest single advance in desktop/laptop CPU performance and power efficiency in a long time. If that doesn't count as innovative, I suspect there's some shifting around of goal posts happening.