The great autonomy of the Mac M1 models seemed like a bug

It’s been nine months since Apple began a commercial switch to its own M1 processors. The chips, while they were still in development, their performance left the first to try them stunned.

Tim Millett, Apple’s Vice President of Platform Engineering, explains in a short interview with Tom’s guide, that the specific goal of his team was not just to work Intel with a home processor. We had to create a gap so as to justify the severance of relations with this partner. Ax processors have paved the way, and it’s still best done for the Mac, and we’ve seen this recently for the iPad Pro.

Bob Purchers, Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, recalls his first encounter with the Mac M1 and his astonishment at the autonomy on display: When you have that first device, play with it for several hours and the battery doesn’t move, you’re saying to yourself “Oh, it’s a glitch, the battery indicator isn’t working”. And his colleague Tim Millett laughs behind him: “No, that’s how you’re supposed to work“”.

• During our tests for MacBook Pro M1 And you MacBook Air M1 We noticed independence in the use of daily work, without depriving ourselves of anything, from 12:30 PM / 3:40 PM for the first and from 10:30 AM for the second. And at that time Rosetta was used more than today.

Last November, Craig Federighi was mentioned An anecdote similar to independent : « We started getting the first numbers on the drums and we were like, “Are you kidding? Aren’t you supposed to have people who can calculate these things?” In the end, the teams managed to go above and beyond what was initially conceivable, Federighi added: You have projects that, sometimes, you give yourself a goal and you say to yourself, “Okay, we’re almost done, it’s okay.In the case of this slide, engineers found themselves repeatedly pushing the sliders.

Before preparing for this hardware transition, the teams first decided to check if a new version of the Rosetta could be developed. Able to ensure a smooth transition for applications that will not quickly adapt to the M1: ” We started a small project a few years before moving to the slide […] And everything went well, as expected Since then we have been able to verify this, and there has been no software crash due to Rosetta.

Even Tim Millett suggests that the performance of Apple’s processors and that of its GPU could appeal to a hitherto indifferent audience with Macs: ” Wouldn’t it be great if we could reach more people among the most demanding players? At the moment, Apple has not cut off all its cards, especially those planned for large-sized laptops and later Mac Pro, which will receive new generations of processors. And then, by the way, it will be necessary to convince the game publishers …