Another excellent Twitter thread about the M1 chip. This time, it is a comparison with the AMD Ryzen. From a thermal design power, the M1 chip is simply unique and unmatched. On a per-core basis, top of the line AMD Ryzen chip and Apple’s M1 chip are of equal performance. On top of that, the M1 chip is much more than a standard CPU. Oh, and it is only the beginning. Who thought 2020 was such a bad year.

There is a lot to like from this short video showing vivo’s OrigiOS in action. Expandable widgets, user-adjusted widget size, dynamic content, super clean animations, a few touches of skeuomorphism where it counts, dynamic icons, immediate feedback on touch, all those things which are lacking on iOS home screen could see the light if Apple choose to. Widgets 1.0 were long to come for us, iPhone and iPad users, but here they are. Yet, there is still so much untapped potential.

What are your thoughts?

In a blog post “Your Move, iPad”, by Becky Hansmeyer, the author asks “So if raw power isn’t enough, and new display tech isn’t enough, where does the iPad go from here? Will it be abandoned once more, lagging behind the Mac in terms of innovation, or will Apple continue to debut its latest tech in this form factor?”

In light of the massively successful M1-powered Macs, what can we infer for the future of the iPad Pro?

Apple doesn’t need to add touchscreen to their MacBook line if they unleash the iPad with a much more complete iPadOS experience. I think Apple missed the occasion with iPadOS 14 by not adding a more flexible widgets experience, by refusing to improve external display support and by not revisiting the multitasking interaction model. See? It’s not only a matter of adding 5G wireless support or LiDAR or a second USB-C port. These will only be as good as the software will allow them to be useful. The just begun new era for Mac with the M1 chip combined with Apple’s tight software integration should give us answers on why the iPad Pro future lies in the software.

Here is a super fascinating Twitter thread that I reproduce here. Find the original tweets here. It’s is about Apple Silicon wizardry. For techy people only!

“In case you were wondering: Apple’s replacement for Intel processors turns out to work really, really well. Some otherwise skeptical techies are calling it “black magic”. It runs Intel code extraordinarily well. The basic reason is that Arm and Intel architectures have converged. Yes, the instruction sets are different, but the underlying architectural issues have become very similar. The biggest hurdle was “memory-ordering”, the order in which two CPUs see modifications in memory by each other. It’s the biggest problem affecting Microsoft’s emulation of x86 on their Arm-based “Surface” laptops. So Apple simply cheated. They added Intel’s memory-ordering to their CPU. When running translated x86 code, they switch the mode of the CPU to conform to Intel’s memory ordering. With underlying architectural issues ironed out, running x86 code simply means translating those instructions to the Arm equivalent. This is very efficient and results in code that often runs at the same speed. Sometimes there isn’t a direct equivalent, so the translation results in slightly slower code, but benchmarks show x86 being consistently at least 70% of the speed. In any case, a surprising number of popular apps already run on it. Apple seeded developer systems a few months back, allowing people to get their code ready. Normally, that wouldn’t have been enough time. When you recompile code for a new architecture, it usually breaks. But as I said above: Arm and Intel architectures have converged enough that code is much less likely to break, making recompiling easier. Apple has made surprising choices. They’ve optimized JavaScript, with special JavaScript-specific instructions, double sized L1 caches, and probably other tricks I don’t know of. Thus, as you browse the web, their new laptop will seem faster and last longer on battery, because JavaScript, even though other benchmarks show it roughly the same speed as Intel/AMD. The older MacBook Air had a dual core CPU that ran at 3.8 GHz, but when in low-power mode, 1.2 GHz. Switching between fast and slow modes is how it conserves power for mobile. But it’s ultimately inefficient. The Intel CPU is designed to run at 5 GHz. Downclocking to 1 GHz saves power – but not as much as if you’d designed the processor to run at 1 GHz to begin with. Apple’s strategy is to use two processors: one designed to run fast above 3 GHz, and the other to run slow below 2 GHz. Apple calls this their “performance” and “efficiency” processors. Each optimized to be their best at their goal. When they need to conserve power, they turn off the “performance” processors and run code on their “efficiency” processors. They have 4x performance processors (twice that of their older Macs) plus 4x efficiency processors. All 8 can be active. When doing something that can use 8 processors, such as compiling code, it goes real REAL fast. 8 processors vs. 2 processors in their old notebooks make a difference. A big part of this story is that Intel is about 3 years behind on Moore’s Law. Apple Silicon uses the latest 5nm tech from TMSC, while Intel uses the older 10nm/7nm generation. Much of Intel’s product line uses the even older 14nm/10nm generation. None of this is actual “black magic”. It’s all pretty understandable. It’s just all the various things have been executed really well, leading to a combined result that is a great leap forward. Another “magic” trick is how their “Swift” programming language uses “reference counting” instead of the “garbage collection” in Android. They did something in their CPU to double the speed of reference counting. …even when translating x86 code, all that reference counting overhead (already more efficient than garbage collection) gets dropped in half. Yet another weird performance enhance to add to all the others.”

After Apple announced their M1-based Macs and people started to get their hands on them, reactions were enthusiatic and unanimous. At one point, I wanted to create an archive page that would have gathered the most interesting reactions, but it was too late and overwelming. Well, someone else did it. Here is a great blog post: “Apple Silicon M1: Black. Magic. Fuckery” gathering reactions to these new machines from Apple. There are many gems in there. Check it out! I really have the feeling that Apple is making history, again.

Apple this year is back with a long and… weird (?) Christmas ad. I must say that’s a quite different and ordinary one compared to previous years. It’s no longer about touching hearts but just having fun and selling you something. This doesn’t reasonate as much with me as it used to. Contrary to previous years, Apple is focusing on one product, the HomePod mini. Again, I prefer when they don’t try to sell us something this way. There is plenty of other companies who do just that. Please, Apple, no.

Following my read of this article published by Macworld, the propect of a Mac nano looks more than possible. It is inevitable. Apple’s focus this year was on the internals but I expect them to switch to the outside on the next iterative evolution of the Mac mini. Besides physical compatibility reasons, a much smaller Mac mini, close to the size of an Apple TV for example could be in store. One possible constrain is the number of ports Apple will have to squeeze on the back. If they keep the same number of ports, the newly redesigned Mac mini could be something in-between the current one and the Apple TV. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ll patiently wait for my own M1-based Mac mini to arrive in 28 days. Its external size won’t matter much to me.

According to an article published by SixColors, M1-based Macs offer a much different and improved boot and recovery options. Looking at the picture below, and I noticed the same while testing Big Sur, the icon for the boot disk is one showing an old mechanical HDD, not an electronic SSD. Was Apple feeling nostalgic when they designed this icon?

Read on Twitter today: “Notion widgets are only for iOS 14 for now. We’ll get there, Android 😓 Our mobile team is heads down on offline mode right now, but we learned a lot during development that we can use for an Android widget down the road. Thanks for your patience in the meantime 🙏” - Notion.

Widgets came to Android in 2008-2009. What am I missing here? How ironic is this? A lot if you ask me. I’m not calling out Notion, far from it. My observation is all about the fact that, despite Android having widgets for so many years, they were probably not as good, well designed and useful as there are now on iOS 14.

A lot has been written on Apple switch to their own processors already. But one side of the story is still lacking some insight. Apple is probably saving a lot of money by putting their own Apple silicon in each Mac they sell. According to this Medium article, Apple could save at least $2 billion a year with just three entry level MacBook sporting the M1 chip. We can only try to approximate the amount of money Apple is no longer paying to Intel. We can also start wondering the amount of money Apple has directly invested in developing the M1 chip and how fast they wil recoup their investments. My gut feeling says that it will be fast.