What about the M1 Macs?

Whenever I end up updating my blog less frequently, or seem to avoid talking about the tech subject du jour, I’m sure to find some message or email asking me or teasing me about exactly that. According to recent feedback, people were surprised by my silence regarding the new M1 Macs with the first Apple Silicon chip.

There’s nothing sinister about my silence. As I’ve said repeatedly over Twitter, I’ve simply been very busy with my daily job in the past three months or so, and I haven’t had the time to sit down and write about this subject. I started to read and watch reviews from people who actually had review units of the new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, and therefore had something concrete to say. And in so doing, I realised that, at the end of the day, there’s not much to add to what has already been said — the blessing and the curse when you finally have time to talk about a subject that isn’t really du jour anymore.

Pretty much all reviewers have reported the amazing mixture of stunning sheer performance and greatly-improved power efficiency, making the new MacBooks largely silent, never getting hot under pressure, and with absurdly long battery life. Performance has also been notable software-wise, as many Intel apps translated by Rosetta 2 apparently run faster on an Apple Silicon Mac than on Intel Macs. These facts alone have filled me with enough excitement to consider purchasing an M1 Mac sooner rather than later.

More interestingly, I think it’s also time to look back at what I expected, mused, and feared about the current Mac transition a year or two ago, when everyone was engaged in speculation roughly before the release of Mac OS Catalina. Searching previous entries on this subject in my blog, some key words appear to be dread, apprehension, anxiety, then a mix of quiet optimism and worry.

In my numerous observations back in 2018, 2019, and earlier this year, the apprehension regarding the Intel-to-ARM transition was never really about the hardware. I anticipated (like many other pundits) that the new ARM-based Macs would display an incredible combination of sheer performance and power efficiency. What made me nervous was primarily how Apple would manage the transition; the time they would grant users and developers to adapt; how quickly they would burn bridges with their Intel past, so to speak; if and how much they would provide backward compatibility software-wise, and so forth.

But the WWDC 2020 made me quietly optimistic, and the November ‘M1’ event reinforced that optimism. Apple still seems to care about the Mac, after all, and seems to be handling the architecture transition just as smoothly as the PowerPC-to-Intel one.

I still have some concerns, though. Two, mainly.

One — Many commentators, talking about Apple Silicon, appear to be relieved by the fact that Apple has finally been able to get rid of Intel CPUs and that Apple isn’t constrained anymore by Intel’s chip development roadmap. Finally Apple has complete control over their hardware. Like what’s been happening for years on the iPhone and iPad’s fronts, Apple is able at last to design everything at the hardware level, inside and out. And I agree with this sentiment, to some extent. Apple’s innovation in SoC design is undeniable, and these first entry-level M1 Macs are just the beginning of what Apple can do.

But the flipside of total hardware control is, well, that Apple is even more free to shape the Mac platform to their taste, needs, and whims. Which means that if they want to release Macs that are user-inaccessible black boxes inside, they can. And many people won’t even protest because oooh, these Macs are powerful, they last hours and hours on a single charge, and they’re very secure! I know that in late 2020 wanting a personal computer with user-upgradable and user-replaceable parts sounds quaint and very old-school. But if an internal SSD fails, or if I want bigger internal storage down the road, it ought to be possible for me to replace the SSD or to swap it with a bigger one, instead of having to bring the Mac to have its entire motherboard changed by Apple at a cost that, out of warranty, would certainly be prohibitive.

Two — Hardware/software integration. It should be a no-brainer at this point. With Apple Silicon Macs and Apple designing and coding their own operating system, we should be in integration heaven, back to the good old PowerPC days and even better. And yet, when I look at the advances of Apple’s hardware division and the products of Apple’s software division, the results seem to come from two different companies. In After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac, I wrote:

I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

After spending five months using beta after beta after official releases of Big Sur on a 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, Big Sur’s interface feels exactly like that — easy on the eyes, but punctuated by arbitrary design decisions that make it clunkier, less usable and less friendly in different areas. It shows that the system has been rethought with the how-it-looks before the how-it-works. The Mac today feels powerful like never before. Mac OS feels at its most dumbed-down.

So, what about the M1 Macs? They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, software quality, and so forth. Who cares that a pill tastes bitter, if it makes you feel good, right?