The great autonomy of the Mac M1 prototypes seemed a mistake

Nine months have passed since Apple began the commercial transition to its M1 processors. Chips, while still in development, whose performance stunned the first to try them..

Tim Milet, Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, explains, in a brief interview with Tom’s Guide, that the goal assigned to his team was not simply to do as well as Intel with a home processor. We had to create such a breach that it could justify cutting ties with this partner. The Ax processors had paved the way, there was a lot to do for the Mac, and we have seen this more recently to the benefit of the iPad Pro.

Bob Borchers, Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, recalls his first encounter with a Mac M1 and his amazement at the autonomy displayed: “ When you have that first machine, you play with it for several hours and the battery does not move, you say to yourself “Oh, this is a mistake, the battery indicator does not work”. And his colleague Tim Milet laughing behind him: “No, this is how it’s supposed to work.“».

• During our tests of the MacBook Pro M1 and the MacBook Air M1, we observed an autonomy in daily work use, without depriving ourselves of anything, of 12:30 / 15:40 for the first and 10:30 for the second. And at that time, Rosetta was used more than today.

Last November, Craig Federighi had reported an anecdote similar to The independent : « We started getting the first numbers for the drums and we thought, “Are you kidding me? Aren’t you supposed to have people who can calculate these things?” “In the end, the teams managed to go beyond what was initially conceivable, added Federighi:” You have projects where, sometimes, you set a goal for yourself and you say to yourself: “Well, we’re almost there, that’s fine.“” In the case of this chip, engineers found themselves pushing the sliders repeatedly.

Before preparing for this hardware transition, the teams first decided to see if they could develop a new version of Rosetta. Capable of ensuring a smooth transition for applications that would not quickly adapt to the M1: ” We started a small project a few years before the transition to the chip. […] and everything worked fine, as expected “Since then we have been able to verify it, there have been no software failures due to Rosetta.

Tim Millet even suggests that the performance of Apple’s processors, and that of its GPU, could appeal to an audience previously indifferent to Macs: ” Wouldn’t it be great if we reached more people among the most demanding players? “At the moment Apple has not cut all its cards and in particular those planned for its large format laptop and later the Mac Pro that will receive the new generations of processors. And then, incidentally, it will be necessary to convince the game editors …