> on their first attempt at making their own processor.
They've been making their own chips for over a decade now. The M1 is not fundamentally different from the A series, and in fact seems to serve as a drop in replacement (in the iPad Pro line).
That being said, this is the first time they're confident enough in their own processor to rewrite their whole desktop software stack and market what are traditionally mobile-exclusive cpus as being superior to x86 in the personal computing space. And in all honesty, for good reason.
That being said, this is the first time they're confident enough in their own processor to rewrite their whole desktop
Pretty sure it wasn’t a matter of confidence, as Apple has been signaling making their own desktop processor for a while. There was an iPad launch a few years ago where Phil Schiller said that particular A-series processor had desktop-class performance like three different times.
Also, it’s the third time they’ve done a processor transition: 68K to PowerPC to Intel to ARM. There’s no doubt they’ve known for years they could do this if needed.
It wasn’t a rewrite; it was mostly a recompile, especially after Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps. iOS and macOS share many frameworks and APIs and that’s been running on ARM since 2007.
When Apple announced the switch to Intel in 2006, Jobs revealed they had Mac OS X running on Intel in the lab for years; there’s no doubt they’ve had macOS running on ARM for years as well.
Likely getting the logistics of software and hardware development to align at the scale Apple operates at is what took the time; not the lack of confidence.
This move was probably inevitable but it certainly didn’t help that Intel repeatedly missed deadlines and performance goals.
> There’s no doubt they’ve known for years they could do this if needed.
Honestly would not be surprised if it comes out at some point in the future that they launched the ARM-Mac project as soon as they'd successfully switched to Intel.
Honestly would not be surprised if it comes out at some point in the future that they launched the ARM-Mac project as soon as they'd successfully switched to Intel.
If not right after the switch to Intel, certainly when the A7 was on the drawing board, since it was the first mainstream 64-bit ARM processor.
They've been making their own chips for over a decade now. The M1 is not fundamentally different from the A series, and in fact seems to serve as a drop in replacement (in the iPad Pro line).
That being said, this is the first time they're confident enough in their own processor to rewrite their whole desktop software stack and market what are traditionally mobile-exclusive cpus as being superior to x86 in the personal computing space. And in all honesty, for good reason.