I don't think it's arguable that the M1 wasn't a game changer though. M1 firmly established Apple's design prowess at the laptop/desktop class chip game. It was no longer arguable that mere phone chips weren't comparable to desktop class CPUs. That claim is dead. It also enabled performance and power efficiency levels years ahead of the competition, giving tangible immediate benefits to customers.
So revolutionary? It's a matter of opinion, but I think it was a watershed moment and permanently changed the technical landscape for CPUs running 'full blown' desktop class software.
It's weird to look at this in the context of Google and T-Mobile almost shipping the first Android devices with a $10 a month unlimited data only plan...
It sounds like you are conflating AArch64 with Apple. Apple had nothing to do with AArch64, it was developed by ARM in-house; Apple simply released the first AArch64-compatible core (outside of ARM's Cortex series).
Apple is able to do what they want because they have an architectural license; not a core license. It's the same reason Nvidia, Cavium, etc are able to design their own cores irrespective of the Cortex series. That's what an architectural license is for. While MediaTek, HiSilicon, etc are limited to using the Cortex SIP.
Then AppliedMicro had a hardware version to demo.
Apple simply had the first to market consumer product with one. Them buying up a good chunk of the fab space needed to produce them at the time probably contributed to that.
No, the M1 Air is just a substantially better product than the Intel variants. You can find dozens of HN threads where people explain exactly why.
Bullshit. It's fanboy revisionism.
You lose so much right now with an M1 and later you'll lose even more. Honestly, you'd have to be a fan boy to get behind this.
Enjoy the dystopian future you're creating.
Apple is the #1 most restrictive company in the world. "the ability to install Linux" with zero commits and support from Apple themselves, all reverse engineered. Meanwhile Intel and AMD both contribute to the Linux kernel.
How much kool aid do you have to drink to think that 'ability' is actually something you can say is a feature with Apple devices?
Come back when I can unlock the bootloader of an iDevice and we'll talk about the 'ability' to install Linux.
You really will not gain much credibility here on HN by throwing in some random, made-up ranking results. And I can guarantee that 99.99% didn't even read past that sentence /s
Apple: Prevents sideloading without a host MacOS computer.
Sideloading is temporary.
Blocks third party app stores.
Blocks any and all browsers using a non-Safari engine.
Not one iPad or iPhone has ever been bootloader unlockable.
They've locked out iMessage people from being able to port their number out of the service for YEARS.
Tell me what part of this screams openness.
Even the most restrictive devices are less restrictive than Apple's. If the "ability to install Linux" is the benchmark here, guess what... that's nearly every single fucking device in the world. Except the majority of Apple devices, of course.
Apple explicitly has gone out of their way to prevent this.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-T2...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/11/06/booti...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-must-be-done-to-bring-lin...
Apple does ZERO to allow people to use an OS outside of their sandboxes. With the Intel based systems, Bootcamp is still restricted and limits hardware access necessary to run Windows properly on their systems.
Yes. Apple is restrictive as fuck. As far as Technology companies go, yes, I'd put them up at the top.
Your turn with sources and citations.
And #1 restrictive tech company? Did Oracle disappear while I slept?
Apple does not.
https://lwn.net/Articles/867540/
Edit: I am not really talking about WebKit, Darwin, and the other projects they only developed for themselves.
But, you can also look at their GitHub repositories: Swift, llvm, cups are at least three open source packages they maintain.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Merciless-Apple-M1-Mac-mini-ta...
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-vs-amd-ryzen-...
The Ryzen 5900HX is more than 70% faster than the M1 in Cinebench Multicore... and 1% slower in single core.
You know. Real world shit.
Also. Max 16GB Ram for the M1. L Oh fuckin' L. Even my Celeron laptop could do more than that.
Try again.
Just because the machine hasn't changed in appearance (and sadly neither has it's so-so display), the chip difference alone makes it a whole different ballgame.
Meanwhile, through temporal prescience, the previous Intel based Macbooks were simultaneously revolutionary and merely tolerated before the M1 variants ever existed.
Don't you guys ever get tired of twisting your Apple apologeticism thought processes into a gordian knot all the time?
I submit if you need to qualify your use of the word "laptop" with fully eight adjectives or adjectival phrases to avoid ambiguity with pre-existing products, that it's probably not "revolutionary" by definition.
The M1 is a good CPU. It's incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions of the same product.
It is very notable in that it was produced in-house and not purchased from Intel. And that says important things about the business climate in which Apple finds itself. But that's not the same thing as "revolutionary" in a technological sense. It does what competing chips do, somewhat better.
I count five: It's the first "widely popular", "fully-functional", "powerful", "general purpose" ARM-based laptop ever being "produced on a massive, industrial scale"
My counterpoint: it's revolutionary because it's the first ARM-based laptop which doesn't have to make a ton of compromises to make it out the door.
It's got mass-market appeal ("widely popular", unlike the PineBook Pro).
It's not limited in functional scope ("fully functional", unlike Chromebooks).
It's not limited in computing power ("powerful", unlike any other ARM laptop).
It's not restricted to a subset of tasks ("general-purpose", unlike the iPad Pro when treated as a laptop).
It's being mass-produced for retail, i.e. it's not a limited-run or a prototype ("produced on a massive, industrial scale").
Every other attempt at an ARM laptop has made one or more of these compromises; the M1 Macbooks (and the M1 Mini) don't have any of these compromises, meaning that it's fit-for-purpose for the vast majority of laptop users (those for whom a Macbook would have sufficed before the M1 line).
I think being good and useful is pretty revolutionary; I haven't seen another ARM laptop offer that, and those are pretty important features.
This should not be understated. You could hand an M1 Mac to anyone and unless they were technical and understood what you were handing them, they would neither know nor need to know that it has an entirely different CPU architecture.
It's totally transparent. Not one application did I try did it do anything other than just run as I would have expected. Heck the vast majority of x86 Windows software I tried - either under Crossover (commercially supported version of WINE) or in the Windows 10 ARM beta under Parallels - worked just fine.
And very speedily too. It was not apparent that emulation was going on - at all.
It really is quite astonishing. As they say, seeing is believing - in this case using is believing. The overall feel of the system is just not something that's easily to articulate. It's not just about running a benchmark or application quickly; the whole thing is just more responsive.
The only reason I took my M1 Macbook Air back on the last day of the return window was it turns out to do everything I want if it just had more RAM. Which was NOT my starting position; the M1 ran so well that I ended up realizing it could do everything I wanted and more if I could get at least 32GB of RAM - 64GB would be perfect.
So I'm rather impatiently awaiting the next round. As soon as I can get more RAM I'm so getting another Apple Silicon laptop!
I suppose everything can be called incrementally better by some viewpoint but calling it incrementally better than the Intel CPUs used in earlier versions is wild to me. I specifically switched to my first ever Apple product because of how revolutionary the generational step was compared to what we've been getting on x86 laptops year to year and no equivalent x86 laptops of the year came close. Not only is it comparable to my overclocked desktop in tasks from 1-4 cores it does so without kicking on fans and the battery life is astounding while it does it. It even runs emulated x86 software faster than the native x86 version of the same year.
It's not until you get to the highest end desktop CPUs from Intel or AMD that you see competition with the M1 on a per core basis.
Keeping in mind this is Apple's lowest end, low power, mobile part. It wipes out all but the highest end desktop processors - not just on a core basis, but even a multicore basis - agin for all but the highest end.
Nope, I don't think revolutionary is hyperbole at all. It also makes me wring my hands with glee thinking about what a part designed for the desktop where higher power and cooling are readily available. Where adding more cores makes a lot of sense. How big of a gap is there going to be with that SOC?
The prospects of new hardware are once again exciting. CPUs have been stagnant for a LONG time now. I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to learn my i7-7700K was still not that far off from the latest CPUs - hardware unboxed had a great video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAX1lh985do
At best - on average a 30FPS between my lowly 7700K and the highest end parts? Yeah, newer parts have more cores - but most games are not well optimized for multiple cores. On one had I'm relieved - no need to spend money on upgrades since it just isn't worth it. On the other hand - it isn't worth it to upgrade! And what nerd doesn't like having the latest tech?
So yeah, it's nice to have someone pushing the boundaries and something to be truly excited about. Also stark contrasts like this tends to light a fire under others, if nothing else. Rising tides raising all boats and all that...
This isn't even remotely true. Computers are really good at doing more than one thing at a time. I find it mind-boggling that there is such a focus on the performance of a single core. This hasn't been all that relevant for the last 15 years. As for what this matters, the difference for single core isn't all that big regardless (one M1 core performs about the same as one 5980HS thread). When you want to know how powerful the computing power of a CPU is, how about comparing .. you know... what it can do?
And, what it can do when it is asked to do everything it can, I can reiterate that the M1 is nowhere near the competition. The 5980HS mobile CPU will get the same multi-threaded job done in half the time, which is a huge difference. Which is why discussion threads like these feel... chilling. Like as if I stepped in to a cult meeting, where we praise normalcy as revolutionary. It's not even close to the last generation of CPUs in terms of compute power. It just a step up from the Intel CPUs apple used in the previous MBPs.
And, it's not that the M1 is a bad CPU. It's actually pretty good for what it does, and it is exceptionally good at power efficiency. The 5nm and low thread count does contribute significantly to the power performance, so it will be interesting to to see how future M1 processors perform.
Imagine if the M2 doubled core count, and thus doubled multi-core performance compared to the M1. It would then be just as powerful as the current 5980HS. Another revolution no doubt.
I think that other manufacturers will look into their energy usage as well. That's quite revolutionary, because it seems to me that it has shown a proof of concept for which there's a lot of room to grow in. Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
My thinking is simplistic but I think someone with more understanding of it will tend to agree with my high level view and tell you exactly why this is revolutionary.
Note: I'm not giving Apple full credit here, I'm giving it half credit. The other half goes to the invention of ARM and RISC micro-architecture in general.
This was the whole marketing push behind projects like Intel Centrino - to drive even lower system power consumption by mandating certain combinations of certain parts that worked well together. Which continued with things like Intel Atheno & Evo.
Nothing Apple did with the M1 changed the game. It's the same game, it's the same race it's always been, they just are now in the lead of that race with their car. Which is impressive in its own right, but definitely not "revolutionary"
> Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
This goes the other way around. To improve efficiency you reduce the clock cycles and increase IPC instead. That was the M1's advancement over the status quo, a significant increase in IPC. Clock speeds didn't change - in fact, it regressed by a tremendous amount. This regression in clock speed is how the M1 consumes so little power by comparison.
The first lightbulb isn't revolutionary, it's a nifty toy invention that doesn't affect anything, much less cause a revolution like the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced lightbulbs did.
The first radio isn't revolutionary, the first practical efficient general purpose mass produced radios make the revolution.
The same for computers, the same for smartphones - iPhone was revolutionary because it impacted the world; while its competing predecessors that had almost the same tech did not and so were not revolutionary.
It's night and day. Readily noticeable by non-technical people. It's not just faster, it's snappier, more responsive and just has an all around different feel.
Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".
It also delivers incredible battery life, and runs a lot cooler so you don't have annoying fans or face throttling as much, if at all, under load. No more cases hot enough to burn skin.
If you think you understand the M1 just by looking at benchmarks or reviews, you are sadly mistaken. Use one of these machines for a couple of days and you will more than likely not want to give it up.
Heck there are developers ditching their iMac Pro's in favor of M1 Mac Mini's for everything but long compiles. When Apple releases desktop versions of their SOC things should get stupid spicy. And I'm very much looking forward to it.
Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation".
Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
But it's not true. ARM based Chromebooks have been on the market for years already and cornered educational markets and had massive consumer success overseas.
The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade, but the execution required to achieve it is definitely remarkable.
My M1 MBA is better than my 2020 Intel MBP (which cost over 2x) in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness.
And x86 will never catch up. That's why it's revolutionary - it has destabilized the existing regime.
True, AMD has a few tricks up their sleeve, and is a node behind Apple at TSMC, but on a purely technical level it's clear that Apple ahead of both AMD and Intel.
Now, power consumption may be the end all be all for some people. If your work tasks actually don't require a lot of computational power, then I can see it being much more valuable to have the flexibility of a cool laptop with a long battery life.
But, touting the M1 as revolutionary, because all that matters is power consumption, feels like a disconnect to me. I'm all for people liking stuff they like. But, I don't get what's revolutionary at all. I was interesting in hearing what people thought about it though.
> in almost all ways that matter: quieter, cooler, battery life, and incredible responsiveness.
This discussion also comes up again and again on HN on the M1. People say weird things like that the never experienced such a jump in computational power from one generation to the next. And what they tend to mean is from older apple hardware to newer hardware.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
(Available in a fanless ~$1k laptop, no less!)
Similarly on the Intel side they have the 11900 ranked higher than the 11900K. Which again, there's no way that's true since the 11900K is literally an 11900 with a higher power limit & higher turbo frequency. And then the 11900KF, which is just an 11900K but with the iGPU disabled, is then somehow a lot faster than both?
Actual binnings & achievable frequencies vary, of course, but these orderings aren't passing a sniff test, either.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2673, https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2637, and https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2687?vs=2787 are better comparison points here. The M1's single-core performance is of course very strong, but I'm not sure why you're surprised that it's "still" the fastest single-core CPU since these CPUs are all the same generation. There hasn't really been anything newer.
In any event, you'll notice M1 achieves an extremely competitive level of performance with a peak power of 22% of that used by the Ryzen 5950X and 10.5% of the 11900K. That's crazy!
In terms of efficiency there really is no comparison the M1 is a remarkable product.
We'll have to see how the M1X/M2 goes, but given what we've seen so far, we should see some stellar results from an M series chip designed for a workstation class laptop.
We'll see how they scale up, with the new MacBook Pros.
That isn't impressive, no. Power scales non-linearly with clock speeds (and thus performance across a particular CPU design). Compare a 3700x vs. a 3800x for example: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2665?vs=2613 - Huge increase in power draw, barely any performance increase.
You'd have to compare at equivalent power levels to draw a meaningful conclusion like that. Especially since the 5950X is paying power for things the M1 just doesn't have at all, like the large amount of PCI-E lanes. But otherwise for a wall-powered system quadrupling the power for doubling the performance is a quite straightforward "yes please!" tradeoff to be made. Often the gains are much smaller than that.
Of course the M1 also isn't designed to excel at heavily multithreaded workloads having "only" 4 big CPU cores, so it's an unfair fight in that direction as well.
M1 powers by far the best arm based laptop available today - all arm laptops hence forth will be compared to it. revolutionary.
Apple iterations on arm have been regular and consistent for a long time.
Macs suddenly switched to these ARM processors. That's the revolution, and the number is M1, but it's based on the gradually developed A series.
To have that freedom in a 3 lb laptop with virtually no performance compromises is incredible.
A revolution doesn't have to benefit you. This benefits Apple financially, any benefits you receive are secondary.
Before releasing it though, they worked up to it (in secret), 2.54 centimeters by 2.54 centimeters.
The m1's compute/watt will enable designers to change the dimensions of a laptop to be even smaller and compact. If the iphone's a15 starts to be near m1 compute-power, we could actually see the iPhone merge to become the device powering our monitors and keyboards. The new possibilities of such a revolutionary technology is endless!
I highly doubt that because it means Apple will sell zero macbooks and they don't want less sales.
Riding Wright's Law.
> I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone.
This was first obvious with Apple's move to 64-bit for mobile. And should be more obvious with the Apple Watch. While M1 is quite the competitive advantage, there's nothing on the horizon to compete with Apple's wearables; Apple dominates both the profits and marketshare.
I don't know what superlatives to use. Nor do I know how to summarize, much less describe, Apple's strategy. But it's working.
Apple focused on profitability. Capture the highest margin market segments, then ride the price curve down. This sucked all the oxygen out of the competition.
Similarly, Apple's monospony strategy repeatedly boxed out competitors.
Most infuriatingly, Apple laser focused on select differentiators and competitive advantages to the exclusion of many others. For example, thinness for thinness sake. At the expense of reliability and repairability. Why? Because they could and copying them was prohibitively expensive. Again, boxing out competitors.
--
Contrast and comparison sometimes helps understanding.
Two other examples of Apple's Druckeresque strategy are Tesla and SpaceX. Capture the profits, plow the capital back into R&D, relentlessly drive Wright's Law.
My hunch is the core strategic focus is on lowest cost of capital. What moat most protects the dominance of AWS, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX? I think, compared to their competitors, it's their lower cost of capital?
Duh, right?
So while I think it's fine to speculate and cheer. But it's hard to get excited by competitors who a) don't have cheaper capital and b) aren't driving Wright's law for crucial competitive technical advantage.
Toyota used to have these advantages. But somehow lost the narrative. I think the case studies will argue that Toyota missed two opportunities. First, they punted on owning their own digital hardware and software, whereas Tesla treated the car as an iPhone on wheels, a new platform. Second, most importantly, Tesla jumped into EVs at the very moment Li-ion became feasible, and decided to relentlessly drive Wright's Law for battery tech. The other manufacturers simply waited too long to jump in. Tesla's Li-ion flywheel (access to capital, scale, Wright's Law) will kick in within a few years, cementing their dominance.
Of course Tesla's story isn't finished. Like all hard driving efforts, balanced on a knife edge, Telsa could implode. But if they avoid a cash crunch, it's hard to imagine any EV competitor catching up. In that way, Apple's access to cheap capital is great deal more robust.
FWIW, I anticipate Starlink will become SpaceX's Apple style money printing machine. And once that revenue kicks in, the existing cell and cable carriers will be buried. The Mars mission and national defense parts of SpaceX's story are fun and legit. But unlike all their competitors, SpaceX will be self-sustaining on Starlink.
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Thanks for reading this far. I write to understand. And this narrative has been eluding me.
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PS- The outlines of next technical turf battles are pretty obvious.
Apple's next big challenge is baseband chips. They know this, of course. But for whatever reason, eliminating their dependence on Qualcomm is very hard. And whoever productizes the successor to 5G, whatever the satellite uplink chipset shapes up to be, will be sitting very pretty.
The Li-ion story wrt BEVs now seems pretty obvious. Everything from light trucks to skateboards will be almost fully BEV by around 2030. Tesla will produce about 1/10th of the world's batteries; and maybe a 1/10th of the Model 3 sized automobiles. And like Apple, they'll capture most of the profits.
The next frontier will be hydrogen. The hydrogen story today looks like Li-ion around 2005, +/- 3 years. Hydrogen's first use cases will be all the stuff BEV missed. Like trucks, transportation, utility scale energy storage. Someone like Toyota could survive long enough to see their hydrogen bet pay off. But I think it's more likely new entrants will access to cheap capital will prevail.
Any way.
Quite the contrary. Apple focuses on experience - and knows that if you deliver a kick ass experience, profit will naturally follow.
Apple also is one of the few tech companies that seems to be willing to say "no" and not be all things to all people. It's often misinterpreted as only targeting the profitable markets, as if that's a bad thing. Not pursuing unprofitable markets seems to be common sense to me - call me crazy!
Microsoft of the 80's and 90's focused on profitability and chasing relentless backwards compatibility; and it worked - for a while. Until you had the Windows division actively undermining other portions of the organization it saw as competition. Memes like this are no accident: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2011/07/03/org-charts-of-the-big...
Then the next wave of computing - mobile happened and they suddenly were on the outside looking in. Much like the likes of DEC, Prime and heck even SUN were when the PC revolution happened and dethroned mini's.
As for baseband chips - radio is freakishly unforgiving. Apple did buy Intels baseband modem operation lock stock and barrel, so in three to five years - who knows? They certainly are motivated and have the resources to make a solid go of it. And they have certainly proven they can expand their expertise rather competently when they are motivated to. I don't think the Swiss are as dismissive of the Apple watch as they initially were; some even admitting the band designs Apple came up with were an improvement. That you can take segments in and out of the metal segmented band with just your thumbnail is, dare I risk saying it, revolutionary. If you don't think so I have a Timex band the flummoxed experienced jewelers - lets see how you do with it.
When you think about it, the M1 perfectly encapsulates Apple under Tim Cook. It didn't come out of nowhere. They have slowly improved on their A-series in the iPhones the last decade and it accumulated into the M1. That's exactly how Apple is run today. Inch by inch.