Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control

The truth is somewhere in the middle, so while this article has some good points it is too colored by a strong dislike for all things Apple and borderline conspiratorial thinking.<p>I don’t think there is anything that suggests Apple is going to stop people from installing Apps outside their App Store. Rather it is about making sure it is easy for regular users to get Apps in a safe manner without malware and Trojan horses.<p>This isn’t just hype. We know for a fact that this is a much smaller problem on iOS than Android. I am happy that Android exists as a choice for users but let us not pretend there are no trade offs.<p>It is a bit too conspiratorial to think Apple control is all about some dictatorship fetish. It is a choice Apple makes to improve user experience at the expense of flexibility.

<p><pre><code> &gt; However, that marginal improvement hardly seems worth upsetting the entire Mac OS developer and consumer software ecosystem. </code></pre> Really? This entire article is really dismissive, but this line especially struck me. I&#x27;m not convinced the M1 chip is some strange alien tech bypassing the laws of physics, but it seems clearly superior at its specific niche (single processes with an emphasis on low power usage, using fewer cores but massive L1I and L1D caches with a shared L2 cache).<p>Architecturally it looks like they&#x27;re sacrificing expandability and raw multiprocessing power (like massively parallel database server multiprocessing) for a single minded focus on laptop chips. Why would it be surprising it&#x27;d excel in that domain?<p>The author also makes the confusing suggestion that M1 is a ploy to get developers to publish to the App Store because ... Xcode produces fat mach-o&#x27;s? Maybe I&#x27;m an idiot here, but all those third party apps are also made with xcode. Where is the correlation with the app store? Sure, apple has been pushing the app store, but how does &quot;apple silicon&quot; specifically push devs there?<p>If there&#x27;s anything apple has done to discourage 3rd party distribution, it&#x27;s through Gatekeeper and strictly requiring notorized executables. If they wanted to make non app store distribution even less appealing, they could only allow notorization through the app store, or change the default to &quot;only app store&quot; ... Oh wait, they did that. On Intel.<p>Apple has always had complete platform control. They&#x27;ve done a lot of crappy things -- but this article tries to dismiss the M1 for pretty absurd reasons IMO.

&gt; At some point in the not too distant future, old x86 applications will cease to run on Macs, as emulation support won’t run forever<p>One thing I can credit Android some, and Windows a lot (even 10 with all its manifold privacy and user-hostility problems) with is that they are backwards compatible.<p>exceptions to every rule, etc., but I can run all old versions of Android apps on an Android 11 phone, same for Windows programs going back to 1996 or so with few tweaks, and can squeeze that back to 1993 if I fuss and cuss and so on.<p>yes, this is arch to arch emulation, but the idea od taking that feature away in ~4 years vs Android&#x27;s best effort continued compatibility or Microsoft&#x27;s compatibility layers is a cost&#x2F;benefit that I apparently disagree with Apple decision makers on.

While the point of Apple Silicon is undoubtedly for Apple to have more control over their ecosystem, this article doesn&#x27;t make that point very well. For example:<p>&gt; However, there’s a clear nudge for developers to publish their recompiled apps to Apple’s store.<p>That doesn&#x27;t make any sense. Where is the &quot;nudge&quot; coming from? The article doesn&#x27;t make any argument for how that works, given that you can share universal binaries outside the App store. Apple Silicon isn&#x27;t changing anything that would &quot;not so gently nudge&quot; developers into the App Store.<p>Similarly, old apps only compiled for x86 being compatible in the future is... not really about control. PowerPC apps aren&#x27;t compatible with intel Macbooks; that&#x27;s just an inevitable outcome of switching the ISA. There&#x27;s nothing about platform control in that.

What is it about Apple that makes people’s brains turn off?<p>Apple silicon doesn’t change anything about Apple’s mac app store. Microsoft would need to release a native version of Windows, not Apple. He has a point with Rosetta 2, that it will very likely disappear (years from now), though that would affect software that isn’t being actively maintained (most of which failed to make the transition to x64 already). And suggesting a switch to AMD instead is just non-sense.<p>I guess writing stuff like this about Apple is cynical way to boost page views.

Apple has been screwed by CPU manufacturers 3 times already, or do you think they changed architectures because they were having great fun doing that?<p>In the past 3 years I&#x27;ve seen more and more people asking not for an Arm Mac, but for an AMD Mac. Because AMD is again cheaper and faster than Intel.<p>But it appears Apple can now afford to build their own CPUs that are better and lower power than either AMD or Intel. Not to mention PowerPC, which is still around in some form at IBM :)<p>It&#x27;s a no brainer for them. No one can screw them over now except themselves.

This is obviously about control.<p>Apple&#x27;s MO with every _smaller_ supplier has been:<p>1. Set up office down the road 2. Poach top engineers 3. Come up with some excuse to cancel use of supplier and integrate in house.<p>The media and fanboys are remarkably complicit, coming up with excuses for apple&#x27;s behaviour and giving very favourable coverage.<p>In this case, intel are too big for this trick to work and apple already have loads of ARM talent so it makes perfect sense to transition.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t rule out apple trying on the whole &#x27;we don&#x27;t need a license&#x27; thing any more with Nvidia but it&#x27;s probably unlikely given their size.<p>I worked at imagination technologies who was bankrupted by Apple doing this technique and whose GPUs are still used by them so I saw this and people&#x27;s remarkable lack of attention on the incredibly consistent pattern of control first hand.<p>While all of this is obviously true, I actually think it&#x27;s great that intel and AMD are receiving some serious ISA competition and it will net benefit non-apple consumers too long run.<p>Congrats to apple for pretty impressive technical work but I do wish more would see apple for the ruthless control freaks they are.<p>At the end of the day I think rather mundanely it&#x27;s really more about money than anything else.

Never owned an Apple product and generally don&#x27;t have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem.<p>But the M1 MacBook Air is perhaps the first Apple product that really caught my attention. A fan-less (without overheating issues) ultrabook with crazy batter life outperforming every comparable offering out there for $1,000. Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it. Which in my case is the keyboard. And general dislike of the ecosystem, but I already see it as completely locked down, this one being more so doesn&#x27;t change anything for me. If it had a trackpoint and a few more keys I would get it despite hating the platform.

I also think the marketing was genius. NOT labeling that graph they showed did exactly what they wanted. It was impressing the non tech people and the tech people ALL kept talking and talking about it - because it wasn&#x27;t labeled.<p>Apple&#x27;s marketing is brilliant. It really gets the kind of people who <i>think</i> they are too smart to be marketed to AND the normies, all in one message.

This article has decent points but is definitely just sort of coming from the perspective of being completely unfamiliar with the Mac platform.<p>Worrying about the App Store taking over on the Mac is misguided. The Mac has never forced the App Store on anyone and the Mac App Store doesn’t even seem to be particularly popular.<p>“Emulation” (it’s not emulation) is apparently this big problem, except that early M1 Macs show <i>faster</i> Rosetta performance with still-better battery life in many cases.<p>And yes, Rosetta won’t be around forever, but we have been here before. It wasn’t a problem going from PowerPC to Intel either. If the authors at Android authority ever used a Mac they’d already know this. Anecdotal, but I can’t think of a single pre-Intel program that was lost to the Intel transition that I was using at the time. All the developers checked the box and recompiled, and the dinosaurs like Adobe eventually trudged along.<p>For those of us who actually used Macs back in the PowerPC days and earlier, there <i>was no such thing as Hackintosh or Boot Camp</i>. The fact that those are going away is essentially inconsequential, especially now that the Mac platform is vastly more popular than it was in 2006.<p>Why would I want to run Windows on my Mac? It’s been a shitty experience anyway, because even in Intel-land the hardware has been heavily macOS optimized including things like fan and power control. The trackpad driver on Windows was always worse, for example. And again why would you want to run Windows when you spent all this money to not run Windows? It doesn’t make sense especially since so many programs (e.g. 1Password) have their best versions on Mac.

<i>Apple</i> is about platform control.<p><i>Apple Silicon</i> is about performance and efficiency.<p>A friendly, open-hardware Apple would have moved to their own chips too, though they&#x27;d have documented their GPU, and a walled-garden Apple without a competitive laptop chip would have locked the system down anyway, as, in fact, they were doing on Intel.

There&#x27;s a huge green quote: &quot;Apple has confirmed that Boot Camp support isn’t coming to Arm-based Macs.&quot;<p>And it comes right after the same sentence is uttered in the article... and is followed by &quot;unless&quot;.<p>All in all, pretty weird form of journalism.

It will be interesting to see how long Rosetta-2 will be supported. macOS 10.15 took away 32bit apps, which was a sizeable chunk so clearly Apple is willing to alienate some of its users in the name of progress and slimlining.

I don&#x27;t understand why exerting better control over hardware + software would mean we are being duped. A more cohesive experience provided by Apple can only be a win for them and their customers.

&gt; What Cupertino really wants more control. First over the development roadmap and inner working of its silicon. With in-house processors, Apple can drive integrated imaging, machine learning, and security features in the direction it wants.<p>This is the real point about control - not about forcing anyone to use the App store which may or may not happen but could have happened with Intel CPUs too - and its about building more capable machines. The speed is in part as a result of that control.<p>And I don&#x27;t think anyone is being duped.

Yes Apple is about platform control and monetization, and they&#x27;re pretty good at it. They want you to buy-in into their ecosystem and stay loyal; even developers of iOS and Mac OS apps have to open Apple dev accounts (and the process of rolling out an app on the App Store is ... byzantine). They keep off copycat and privacy-invading apps that way, and their customers love that aspect of their platform (I even use a cheap iPhone to get away from the mass surveillance devices called Android phones).<p>Apple&#x27;s Silicon is a great success AFAICT, when Intel has just stagnated for years now. I love Apple innovations like that, and I think Apple Silicon is in principal orthogonal to the lock-in aspect so far, apart from the fact that there won&#x27;t be alternative O&#x2F;S on Apple Silicon due to lack of drivers; now of course, Apple could soon extend the ARM ISA in proprietary ways.<p>However, as much as Apple produces shiny consumer laptops (despite their naming, I don&#x27;t consider MBPs as &quot;professional&quot; devices due to lack of options), I&#x27;m probably staying away from Mac OS, because professionally I need to run (mostly) F&#x2F;OSS apps such as compilers, databases, middlewares, VMs&#x2F;containers, and backend tool chains. I also believe their notarization thing will kill F&#x2F;OSS on Mac OS which makes it useless for me. And Apple has to take the piss here, as F&#x2F;OSS is what Mac OS (Mac OS X) is built on, and what made it even remotely acceptable in 2002&#x2F;3. If you&#x27;re a developer of non-Mac OS, non-iOS apps, expect Mac OS to stop being an option even more so than it is already.

Maybe it was Intel that had platform control all along.

Apple Silicon Macs aren&#x27;t any more locked down than x86 ones.<p>Hopefully, the GPU and such will be reverse engineered, that&#x27;s a lot of one-time effort that might take a year or more the first time but will be easier for future gens.

This article leaves two billion-dollar market opportunities on the table: Online testing and multiplayer gaming^.<p>Apple’s recent announcement of a web authentication API includes if your system is booted in fully secure mode^ an attestation that the OS is in secure mode, crypto-signed by the secure kernel whose own signature is by Apple.<p>This provides something that no desktop&#x2F;laptop today can provide: certainty that the user isn’t tampering with the operating system to try and cheat. The entire stack, from hardware to UI, is signed and verified to have integrity, and modifying any component of the stack will result in the “secure” attestation being withheld. So instead of having to deal with insane anti-cheating spyware and kernel extensions and system monitoring, testing software and multiplayer game modes can simply require you to be in secure mode to login.<p>This is available today, immediately, if anyone were to implement it. Of course no one has yet, because no one is thinking of the iOS and macOS platforms as <i>tamperproof</i> computing for the Internet world, and so Apple’s quiet announcement of this in a technical API footnote has gone unnoticed.<p>Apple will probably always let you shut off anti-tampering on macOS with reboots and terminal commands, and then you can tamper to your heart’s content, but they will never allow your system to attest that it’s in tamperproof mode to third-parties, and that crypto signature can’t be spoofed since the Secure Enclave is involved in generating it.<p>This ‘tamperproof’ market opportunity is worth billions of dollars, and Apple made it there first. I can’t wait to see what happens when all the industries that suffer <i>undetectable</i> tampering today realize this.<p>^ Multiplayer FPS developers have had little incentive to develop for Metal prior to now, but Apple Silicon has the capability to easily unseat 5950X&#x2F;GTX3090 as peak PC gaming performance for a tiny fraction of the cost and heat. Someday the Apple TV will get an Apple Silicon chip that can run FPS games using Metal at 4K&#x2F;60&#x2F;HDR, which should noticeably alter that cost-benefit equation.<p>^ I believe this is signed-sealed OS partition, SIP enabled, kernel extensions disabled; though I may have missed one or two bits.

If you look at Intel&#x27;s mediocre-at-best improvements over the last few years, it makes perfect sense that Apple want to move to their own silicon. They also could have moved to AMD, but they probably started thinking about this move before Ryzen happened, and given Apple already make great chips for iPads, it&#x27;s no great stretch to put them in MacBooks too.<p>Sure, it gives them more control, but they already had the ability to exercise platform control on x86. They could have disabled Boot Camp etc on the T2 chip Macs if they wanted to, it&#x27;s not about the CPU.

&lt;rant&gt;<p>Even if everything the article claims is true, the open-source &#x2F; libre software and hardware communities had at least 20 years to come up with a better model. So far, they have failed.<p>Is it such a crime for a corporation to try and prioritize their users&#x27; identities safety and produce a variant that tries to compromise between monopoly and convenience?<p>I fully recognize the possible dystopian futures here, mind you, and I am as distrustful towards corporations as most techies. But after being a commercial programmer for 19 years, I can&#x27;t seem to find other agents who did better than Microsoft and Apple in this area. We all know the memes about them and I&#x27;ll concede that 90% of them are true.<p>But could somebody -- or something -- else do better? So far the answer seems to be &quot;no&quot;, and that&#x27;s the reality we are living in. What does it say about us if we are denying it?<p>And don&#x27;t get me wrong. Give me the same (or little less) performance on a 100% libre hardware and software and I&#x27;ll switch tomorrow, even if a mere 13&quot; laptop with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD costs $5000. I will, I kid you not. But there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any choices that come close to Apple&#x27;s laptop ergonomics, quality of screens, and (mostly) integrated and polished experience. And don&#x27;t get me started with &quot;if you do this bucket list of 37 tasks then Brand+Model laptop is very close to a MacBook&quot;. Truth is, there is nothing like a MacBook. I wish there was, but especially with release of the M1, there really isn&#x27;t.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;

A website that&#x27;s got &quot;android&quot; in the site name is saying false things about Apple, what a surprise. There&#x27;s nothing in Apple M1 that is about platform control any more than x86 in Mac was about platform control. They could have locked down the x86 Mac and prevented you from installing other OSes trivially, but they didn&#x27;t. In fact they already allow you to install other OSes on Mac, if those OSes had support for the M1.

It is not ALL about platform control. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture gives us full day battery browsing&#x2F;video-playback using the efficient IceStorm cores as well as very competitive performance benchmark results using the FireStorm cores.<p>Apple&#x27;s System-on-a-Chip provides additional value-add (e.g. unified memory). Vertical integration of silicon does expand Apple’s walled garden but I’m not convinced this is the driving force.

Yeah and don&#x27;t be duped by the cost savings and reliability of SpaceX, they just want control.<p>Product development is about control in some form.<p>If Apple have genuinely just make a decades leap in performance then you just look at the trade offs.<p>I&#x27;m not sure why I&#x27;m still typing, the article is such child-like faux insightfulness.

In one of the older threads someone asked whether you&#x27;d eventually be able to run Linux on this, and someone responded that this would be annoying to do, since there aren&#x27;t any docs. Is that actually true? The Apple A SoCs don&#x27;t boot random kernels, so I would think the Apple M SoC does not, either, and requires bootloader&#x2F;kernel to be signed by Apple, just like iPhone firmware.

To be honest, do most people even know or care what CPU Apple is using for their Macs?<p>I’m assuming that people buy Macs for the software platform from Apple.<p>I have a few Macs, and I never had any intention to install Linux on it.<p>But admittedly I only used my Macs as a toy. I eventually gave up on it, since it didn’t do what I needed it to do.

If nVidia&#x2F;ARM manages to put out a chip that competes with Intel (doesn&#x27;t even have to be as fast as the M1) and have Windows on-board, it&#x27;s probably over for Intel<p>(Of course, unless they engage in some unfair competition, but I think the price difference will be so big it won&#x27;t matter)

&gt; Today, similar pricing and innovation issues have reared their head with Intel.<p>I’d also add difficulties with coordinating releases.<p>It will still be difficult, but should become easier.

Google Play Services is all about platform control.

There are other benefits to the architecture change. A strong motivation is that profit margins can be increased by using more efficient in CPU size&#x2F;speed, battery size, and amount of RAM to deliver the same performance compared to x86 Macs. Rather than pass these savings to consumers Apple can bank the difference. And the consumer wins with smaller&#x2F;lighter devices and longer battery life. Expect that macOS will continue by adding background processing limit permissions etc.

Yours dearly, the competition.

<i>¿Porque no los dos?</i>

Surprise, surprise - Apple wants to control the end-to-end computing experience on their Macs the way they do on their iDevices thus allowing them to differentiate themselves in a commodity market. Why wouldn&#x27;t they do that?

Always one guy who shouts about control and submission. Don&#x27;t like it don&#x27;t buy it?

It was a masterclass in duping really.<p>Step 1. Design the enclosure&#x2F;thermals for a much lower TDP ARM chip, causing the Intel chips to thermal throttle and run hot as possible burning your lap and roasting your palms for years<p>Step 2. Introduce the new powerful ARM chip which now runs much cooler and faster in the same enclosure<p>Step 3. Profit!<p>Worked on me, I just ordered mine

&gt;<i>Don’t be duped by performance, Apple’s M1 silicon is all about platform control</i><p>Yes. That&#x27;s the biggest benefit, and another reason I&#x27;m buying it (on top of great performance for my NLE apps). I want the Mac to be it&#x27;s own platform, and be under Apple&#x27;s control and vision. If it&#x27;s also made foul-proof and air-tight, so much the better.<p>I don&#x27;t want another lowest common denominator OS converging on the same point.<p>If I didn&#x27;t want platform control I&#x27;d buy some OEM device...<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean I approve of any and every restriction. But I&#x27;m ok with a &quot;walled garden&quot; -- better than an open garden full of junkies and garbage. Some of the best Japanese gardens and so on I&#x27;ve seen had walls around them...<p>Of course an open garden that&#x27;s beautifully maintained, respected by those in it, etc, would be even better, but that&#x27;s hardly the case in real life, so that&#x27;s where curation and walls come in.<p>To me this brings me to the Amiga and Atari and Acorn and other alternative platforms of my youth. I don&#x27;t want everything to be amd64 and Windows or the nth Linux distro.<p>In any case, Apple doesn&#x27;t force anyone&#x27;s hand, if anything they make it more difficult to buy their stuff (more expensive, targeting the expensive end of the market, only 10% market share at best, different OS and now different CPU than the rest of the market, etc).