[tumblewit]

I feel like the only complaint of the 2016 MBP was keyboard and ports. The M chips are literally a lottery at this point. Apple making their own chips is probably a rare thing in any business where the maker of a product eventually makes the most complicated part of the product themselves from scratch which only a handful of other people in the industry have managed in 2 decades. Yes iPhone chips were designed by Apple for quite some time but a general purpose computer is a lot more different than a heavily controlled App Store only device.

[stouset]

The first M1 laptop was released in 2020. It's been met with more or less universal praise: performance is impressive, performance per watt is mind-boggling, and the overwhelming majority of popular programs and applications have either been ported to Apple Silicon by now or work adequately in Rosetta 2.

It's almost as if you meant to post this comment a year ago.

[TillE]

And you can be pretty sure that the M1 Pro/Max will be great because it's mostly just more CPU cores, more GPU cores, and maybe a few extra features.

You could probably work out its likely benchmark results on paper within some small margin of error.

[dsabanin]

Lottery? M1 MacBook is the best computer I’ve ever had, and I’ve been around.. It is limited only by RAM and GPU, and now with M1 Pro and Max that limitation is lifted too.

Apple knocked it out of the park, that much is clear by now.

[qbasic_forever]

They aren't making a chip from scratch though--they've licensed an ISA and built a derivative design customized to their needs. This isn't to knock the work Apple has done--it's not trivial and clearly not everyone else is able or willing to do it. But going from absolute zero and inventing an entire new ISA, all of the tooling for it, etc. is an order of magnitude more work for both Apple and all of its developers. They made a smart move to use ARM's ISA and liberal licensing that allows them to build on top of it and make exactly the hardware they need.

[spijdar]

This isn't a direct response per se, but your comments made me think of some relevant background.

Apple has been deeply involved with ARM almost since the beginning. Allegedly, the acronym "ARM" was changed from "Acorn RISC Machine" to "Advanced RISC Machine" at the behest of Apple, and their engineers seem to have been involved soon after the first ARM chip was created for internal use in Acorn's computers, making modifications to the chip and ISA to make it suitable for the Newton, their combined efforts creating the first commercially released ARM chip, the ARM6.

More recently, Apple has done a lot of work with LLVM. They weren't the original authors, but they've effectively created a lot of their own tooling.

All this to say, while they did license ARM, and they did start with someone else's tooling, they were so deeply involved in the origin/growth of both I think you may be underselling their involvement/work. If they didn't already have such deep historical ties to ARM, I suspect they would have seriously considered making their own architecture.

[duskwuff]

As it so happens, Apple did consider making their own CPU architecture in the late 1980s:

https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture

[duskwuff]

> They aren't making a chip from scratch though

For all intents and purposes, they are. None of Apple's SoCs since the A6 (2012) have been based on ARM's Cortex-A cores; the CPU design is fully in-house at this point.

[runako]

> None of Apple's SoCs since the A6 (2012)

Yes, but the M1 is nothing like a new product. As you indicated, Apple's first custom SoC was released in 2010, 11 years ago. They have >10 years of experience shipping SoCs for Apple products. The M1 family can be viewed, to some extent, as an extension of the work on the Ax chips, which likely builds on their experience customizing chips for the iPod family.

[danaris]

But the M1 is not made from scratch.

As you say, they've been iterating on this design since 2012.

[Tagbert]

The ISA is roughly equivalent to an API. It specifies how to talk to the chip but does not define how it is implemented. Apple has done a lot of custom design of their chips to optimize them for use with Mac OS and Mac software. This is not just Apple copying a chip design.

[tumblewit]

Okay so let me be clear what I meant in the first line. I meant MBP users only wanted the ports to be fixed and keyboard since 2016. Getting the M chips that are this goods was a lottery winner for macOS users. I am saying this in a positive tone not negative (though I could have worded it wrong).

The second part is where I say that even if Apple has worked on ARM chips for their phones for quite some time tuning it, macs are still significant product and even if the chips are in house its still a gamble to completely shift a product from what was basically an x86 monopoly. What I meant is that the way Apple pulled it off is rare in the business.