Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
‘Apple’s microchips beating heart of our products’
NEW DELHI: In 2020, Apple sent ripples across the tech world when it announced it was bringing in its own microchips for computers, moving away from Intel. In the nearly three years since, the company’s move appears to have paid off, with many of its products such as the Macbook Air seeing leaps in energy efficiency and processing capacity.
For Bob Borchers, the vice president of Apple’s Worldwide Product Marketing division, these chips are the “beating heart of our products” and behind their birth was a journey that began a long time ago.
“The thing that’s particularly unique about us making the investment in Apple Silicon, is that it has allowed us to craft products more holistically,” he says in an interview to HT, in which he spoke about how the company sees its prospects in markets like India and the areas that require focus.
What began with the Apple M1 chips, which pushed performance benchmarks extensively, Apple’s own chips now power the entire iPad line-up, the Apple Watch, even the HomePod.
It has taken time for Intel and AMD, which power a majority of the Windows PC ecosystem, to respond, but newer iterations of the M series chips have given the company what seems to be an enduring advantage, at least for now.
Borchers says behind the gains is a thinking on fundamentals. “It comes back to that fundamental focus not on performance, which I would argue is maybe what others have done, but performance per watt,” says Borchers. “If you approach that ratio as kind of the key parameter of success, it really has you look at things very differently and think about trade-offs in different ways,” he adds.
Was such a leap forward in performance, battery life and use-cases not possible in a guidance-to-vendor sort of an environment, which was the case when Intel supplied Apple all its chips?
Borchers points out that chipmakers in such situations focus on several products, and not specifics. “You can turbocharge experiences when you have amazing purpose-built technologies that you can bring together,” he says. “They need to think about kind of the lowest common denominator,” he points out.
Apple has developed a standout chip called the M1 Ultra, which remains unmatched as the fastest computing device silicon. This was achieved by interconnecting two M1 Max chips, the most powerful chips in the ecosystem individually, a feat unheard-of till then. The result is a 20-core CPU, 64-core graphics, and 32-core Neural Engine for machine learning.
Another example of purposebuilt tech was on display at the 2023 India Art Fair earlier this month, where artists used the iPad Pro, Mac and iPhone to create digital art experiences, much beyond a traditional canvas. Augmented Reality and Lidar, or
Light Detection and Ranging, sensors were used by artists.
“Was that our goal? No, our goal was to put technology in the hands of artists so they could go imagine the future that we none of us we could think about,” says Borchers.
Borchers was part of the original iPhone team at Apple. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University, and a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Borchers has more than 30 patents granted or pending.
India as a market, continues to gain importance for Apple, CEO Tim Cook alluded to in quarterly earnings results. Borchers says proof of that focus is the fact that Apple’s entire product portfolio is available in India. The Apple India online store offers the ability to customise specifications of any Mac, before buying.
Borchers says customers in India are very concerned about battery life in mobile devices. “They want performance, they want value. There are some universal truths that I think are certainly at play here,” he points out.
There is always the question that buyers ask before a bigticket gadget purchase – how soon is a new version coming? While Apple follows an annual update cycle for the iPhone, also dictated by ecosystem pressures, it isn’t the case always – the focus is on meaningful improvements, Borchers says. “What we end up doing is focusing on refreshing products when we can make a meaningful improvement. We don’t do it just because up it’s been 12 months,” he adds.
It hasn’t been easy for Apple, to play the balancing act. The iPad Pro 12.9 was updated successively in 2021 and 2022, with the Apple M2 chip replacing the M1. However, the MacBook Air generational changes happened in 2020 and 2022. There was also a two -year gap between refresh cycles for the MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16.
Borchers talks about technologies such as Metal, which developers use, to be able to derive optimal performance.
“We’re going to continue to invest in technologies that make that better. We know developers are excited about being able to take advantage of it,” he says. More games are coming as native on the Mac platform, including Resident Evil Village, the World of Warcraft, and Star Trek: Legends are some highlights of a small, but growing list.