Apple plans ‘regular cadence’ of Mac updates, thanks to Apple Silicon

TechCrunch‘s Matthew Panzarino has interviewed Apple’s vice president of Platform Architecture and Hardware Technologies, Tim Millet, and VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Bob Borchers, about the impact of the M chips in Macs so far, how they see Apple Silicon developing over time, with a bit about gaming, too.
M2 Max features 67 billion transistors, 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96GB of fast, low-latency unified memory.
Matthew Panzarino for TechCrunch:

The work that Apple did with the M1 wasn’t focused on pure peak performance, says Millet. From the beginning, there was this idea that they’d be able to reset user expectations around what kind of performance you should be able to get out of a portable computer, and for how long. The focus on performance per watt paid off (as noted in my early review of Apple’s first M1 chip), in that people could run major compute tasks on laptops untethered from power for hours. No compromises.
And with M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.
“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.”
Borchers says that Apple is feeling like the Apple silicon gaming story is getting more solid release by release.
“With Capcom bringing Resident Evil across, and other titles starting to come along, I think the AAA community is starting to wake up and understand the opportunity,” he says. “Because what we have now, with our portfolio of M-series Macs, is a set of incredibly performant machines and a growing audience of people who have these incredibly performant systems that can all be addressed with a single code base that is developing over time.
“And we’re adding new APIs in and expanding Metal in Metal 3, etc. And then if you think about the ability to extend that down into iPad, and iPhone as well, I think there’s tremendous opportunity.”
One rationale for shipping M2 is also that Apple wanted to establish the line in a regular cadence. It was important, Millet says, to make sure people didn’t see the M1 as a “one and done.”
As far as the “when Macs” question goes, Millet and Borchers are both in the “when possible, ship” camp. Coming out of a period pre-M1, when many in the Mac ecosystem felt that it was being underinvested in, it’s clear that Apple wants to send a message that this is not the case and they never want that to become a meme again.

MacDailyNews Take: A “regular cadence” for Mac releases! Nirvana. The nightmare Intel years are indeed soon behind us. Mac users rejoice!
There’s a ton more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.

The post Apple plans ‘regular cadence’ of Mac updates, thanks to Apple Silicon appeared first on MacDailyNews.