MATT BOLTON… IS VERY EXCITED FOR MACS TO MOVE TO APPLE-MADE CHIPS, BUT HE ISN’T ENTIRELY SURE WHY… AND APPLE ISN’T TELLING HIM
The status quo is dead, long live the status quo? What would be better?
Ah, the wonderful possibility space of the unknown. When you know something is coming, but you don’t know anything about it, the number of ways it could surprise and delight you is infinite. Of course, so is the number of ways it could disappoint you, but I don’t tend to focus on that side, because it’s boring at best, and depressing at worst – Schrödinger’s lab would be a real bummer if it’s just people sitting around resigned to having to deal with a cat corpse.
Waiting for the inevitable Apple-made processors, I imagined 12-core MacBook Pros or a 12-inch MacBook successor as fast as an iMac, and other fun options. I didn’t really expect to exactly see those things right now of course, but that doesn’t matter – I was always looking forward to hearing more about what Apple is doing, why it’s doing it, and what it means for users in practice.
But the WWDC announcement didn’t tell me most of those things. Apple made the case for the need for the new silicon, mostly by demonstrating a gap in a little chart where a hypothetical chip that’s both high-performance and lowpower would sit. I mean, that’s the processor dream, so sure, let’s go. But while Apple made the case for a theoretical chip, it didn’t make the case for any actual new silicon. We effectively were given a demonstration built around promising us that a Mac system running an existing A12Z processor wouldn’t leave users dramatically worse off than they were before. Here’s a bunch of apps you can use already, running at an acceptable current speed, now on our processor! The status quo is dead, long live the status quo?
We were sorely missing a demonstration of what would be better after the move to Apple’s chips. They aim to be faster, they aim to be lower power, they can have neural coprocessors, they’ll let you run iPhone apps on your Mac… are you feeling thrilled by that?
When the Intel switch was announced, it came with the promise of multicore processors – an immediate and huge leap forward that the Mac had been in severe danger of being left behind from. Of course, that alone is a clear benefit, and told us of the exciting future that we were getting in exchange for the bother of universal apps and Rosetta at the time.
We needed to hear the equivalent here. I imagine the issue is that Apple doesn’t want to announce specific chips yet for whatever reason; maybe the new processors enable a whole different device type that isn’t ready to show, and that hardware itself will be the tangible benefit that brings out real reaction and excitement. But whatever happens next doesn’t change the fact that the announcement was… whelming. Not quite underwhelming, granted. Certainly not overwhelming. It is odd that one of the biggest shifts in Apple’s history leaves me with no strong feelings at all so far, but I suppose that leaves me with the fun of my possibility space for a little longer.
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is the editor for Apple and home tech at T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since his student days. He’s sceptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing”.