What Apple’s top brass are saying about the M1 Apple Silicon SoC

Curated insights into what they think about M1

Apple’s senior executives are steadily telling us a lot more about the M1 Apple Silicon SoC, what’s been happening and the effort that went into developing the powerful processor. Here’s some of the best bits.

On why they made M1

“Steve used to say that we make the whole widget. We’ve been making the whole widget for all of our products, from the iPhone, to the iPads, to the watch. This was the final element to making the whole widget on the Mac.” SVP Worldwide Product Marketing, Greg Joswiak to Om Malik.

On building the M1 chip

“We overshot. You have these projects where, sometimes you have a goal and you’re like, ‘well, we got close, that was fine… We started getting back our battery life numbers, and we’re like, ‘You’re kidding. I thought we had people that knew how to estimate these things’”

SVP Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, The Independent. He also revealed that the project was planned “years ago”.

On the design process

“When we design our chips, which are like three or four years ahead of time, Craig and I are sitting in the same room defining what we want to deliver, and then we work hand in hand. You cannot do this as an Intel or AMD or anyone else.” Srouiji to Om Malik.

“This was just building momentum within the teams who were so passionate and excited about this product that they just wanted to keep pushing, keep optimising: ‘How much better can we make it? How much better we can make it?’” Hardware Engineering leader John Ternus told The Independent

[Also read: Things you didn’t know about Apple Silicon Macs]

On speeds and feeds

“The specs that are typically bandied about in the industry have stopped being a good predictor of actual task-level performance for a long time.” Federighi to Om Malik.

“It’s not about the gigahertz and megahertz, but about what the customers are getting out of it…” The argument is that specs can’t represent how silicon, hardware and software can work together.” SVP Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji to Om Malik.

On first generation Apple products

“(We’ve) really perfected these sorts of transitions, we know exactly how to handle the tools to make it really easy for developers.”

“The ordering website was overwhelmed with Apple employees.. No one is worried about the V1 of this system,” Federighi told The Independent

A note about marketing

“I think M1 makes a lot of sense for a Mac chip… “’A’ was started for the phone chips at Apple, and since then we’ve tried to use letters that make sense: the chips for our headphones use H, you start to feel the trend there. We’re brilliant marketers that way.” Joswiak, The Independent

On user interfaces

“I’ve never felt more comfortable moving across our family of devices as a user, which I do hundreds of times a day than I do now, moving between iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. They all just feel of a family – there’s just less cognitive load to the switching process.” Federighi, The Independent.

Please share any other statements that may emerge as the transition t the M1 processor is a historic moment in many ways, and this information should be recorded across all journals of record.

PS: This was written on a M1-powered Mac mini.