[kllrnohj]

Apple Silicon either followed Microsoft's direction (who pushed for ARM laptops a solid 8 years before M1) or just did a better iteration than Intel at the same time Intel was struggling.

Regardless of how you want to frame it, there clearly wasn't any grand innovative strategic vision in play there from Apple. It was just an incremental improvement to long established products with no shortage of equally significant and impressive increments improvements from others along the way.

[nine_k]

It's a bit like saying that an iPhone was not a big deal, phones were becoming smarter by the day, Apple just did a better iteration in 2007 than Nokia and Blackberry.

Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.

[kllrnohj]

iPhone was a new UI focused around capacitive touchscreens which at the time was itself an entirely new category.

What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.

So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?

Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.

[Jaygles]

I went from a 2016 intel MacBook Pro to an m1 and although the differences on paper looked like many other spec bumps, the actual experience felt like a paradigm shift.

It’s the first time I owned a laptop that lacked compromises. It was consistently snappy and fast at every task from a full to empty battery. And it did so without burning my lap or producing an incredibly annoying fan noise.

[kllrnohj]

Yes, it's an excellent laptop. But being good and being innovative are not the same thing. There's nothing innovative about the M1 lineup. It's better on the same axis that laptops have been improving at consistently.

As for loud fan and burning laps, though, do also keep in mind that Apple was particularly bad in the 2016 generation, which is why the M1 laptops got thicker.

[nine_k]

> What, exactly, did M1 change

For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory, which allows to run ML models on a Mac as if you have a large dedicated GPU. (Unified memory of course harks back to the 8-bit era; the key was to make it performant.)

[kllrnohj]

> For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory

Was already common and widespread with iGPUs in CPUs on x86, and was standard on all ARM mobile SoCs for a solid decade.

AMD in particular had already done a bunch here with their APUs including OpenCL support in 2012 and fully coherent shared address spaces with 2014's Kaveri

[pjmlp]

Pretty common in PC integrated GPUs, game consoles.

[astrange]

The change is that it no longer depends on Intel and AMD, and Intel in particular was basically incapable of doing anything at the time. So now they can improve on a yearly basis reliably.

Security is also much improved over the Intel laptops for various obscure and technical reasons.

[astrange]

There's nothing magic about "ARM" nor is it a single thing. ARMv8 is quite different from ARMv7 and was designed for the purpose of making desktop chips like the M1. But you can make something that good for any ISA if you design it well enough.

ARMv8/v9's main advantages over Intel are in security, not performance.

[cr125rider]

Rosetta 2 was the big innovation there. Not ARM in a mobile device.

[kllrnohj]

Surely you realized the "2" in Rosetta 2 isn't just quirky branding but because it's the second time they did that very thing? How was it a "big innovation"?

[ben_w]

Was that even innovative? I mean, this is the third time they've changed chip architecture, they've had some practice here.

The first time I wrote anything for Mac OS, it was with Metrowerks' Code Warrior whatever-the-student-edition-was-called, where the compiler only targeted the 68k series chips.

[spacedcowboy]

20 years ago, as a senior engineer, I was given a MacBook with an Arm processor inside it, and asked to evaluate it for Aperture. I gave it a “meh” review, and that was the last I heard about Mac on Arm for a while.

Apple might not have been publicly pushing Arm, but they very much were not following Microsoft’s direction. It just wasn’t good enough.