The post Steve Jobs era of Apple has been hard on me.  I was such an Apple fanboi that I had friends who called me iRyan.  I used Macs to design and print the inserts and labels to make the first Nuclear Gopher albums when I was a teenager.  I bought the very first iMac the day it came out.  For years I blogged using a vintage Powerbook 170, the perfect portable writing machine.  I owned each of the first seven generations of iPhone and multiple iPods and iPads.  When they stopped making products that I found appealing, I didn’t really know what to do about it because I didn’t like the alternatives all that much either.  The iPhone went first, I moved to Android when they ditched the headphone jack and I still have no regrets on that score but, frankly, I despise smartphones in general so that wasn’t a very painful switch and I still prefer a phone with expandable storage and a corded headphone option and I will keep buying those as long as they are available.

The real problem was my beloved Mac and the fact that Apple let it languish as an afterthought for a decade starting around 2012.  Zero innovations.  Nothing.  They didn’t even try.  Touch UI?  Nope.  Convertible form factor?  Nope.  Reasonable minimums of RAM or SSD?  Not on your life and screw you for asking.  When they did make changes, they were generally for the worst, not the better.  Removing features and ports and wrecking perfectly good keyboards.  I’m not the only one who felt this way (https://www.wired.com/story/macbook-pro-ports-magsafe-design/). When the time came to replace my MacBook Pro as a daily driver, I looked around and found that a Lenovo Yoga was my best available option.  Thinner, lighter, faster, cheaper, better, and it even switched from laptop to tablet.  My first purchase of a Windows laptop in over 20 years.  I still love that machine.

When Apple announced the switch to making their own proprietary silicon I was a naysayer because it seemed to me that the strategy of Mac marginalization was reaching it’s ultimate end game.  The Mac would be a closed platform with a proprietary chip, limited to an App Store like the other Apple devices, not a proper computer for creative types but rather a “device” without the freedom that differentiates a proper computing platform from a device. I saw the transition to making their own chips from a cynical perspective and I.  Was.  Wrong.

The reason Apple went this direction wasn’t to sideline the Mac, it was to inject new life into it by giving it a performance lead that will be practically impossible for anybody else to catch up to any time soon.  I figured on Apple chips being roughly equivalent to Intel chips but proprietary.  It seemed to be the only way Apple could wring more money out of their ecosystem, find ways to profit more from their existing fanbase by closing the system off.  I just didn’t count on the fact that Apple had gotten so good at making high-performing low power chips that the Mac would become the market performance leader to an extent that it will shake the entire industry.

Apple didn’t just make a proprietary chip, they made one that outperforms everything else out there in terms of performance-per-watt.  The Apple M chips aren’t simply proprietary, they are spectacularly fast and they use very little power.  I am writing this on an M1 Pro Mac, it’s 9:36 PM, I have been using the machine since 8:00 this morning without plugging it in and it’s still got hours of battery life remaining.  That’s a genuinely new thing.  I’ve never spent an entire day working on a machine without plugging it in and still had power to spare.  And it’s not as if it’s like my e-book reader, low power consumption equaling low speed.  This is the fastest computer in the house by the GeekBench tests I ran.  I put this up against my Ryzen 7 powered gaming PC and it outperformed it easily.

At the end of it all, Apple was let down by Intel and that would have kept the Mac in the doldrums for many years to come.  Rather than attempt to innovate on color, form factor, etc. or risk cannibalizing iPad sales by incorporating touch into the Mac (the very things I wished that they would do), they chose to invest heavily in becoming the world’s leading chip maker via iPad and iPhone development, let the Mac collect dust over in the corner and then, when it was clear that they could make processors that were better than anything anybody else was making, move the Mac to the new architecture.  That was a long and, to me, annoying process as a Mac fan but suddenly the Mac is Back.

The new lineup of M3 Macs are the first machines in 10 years that have got my attention.  They are no longer constrained by meager RAM, they default to 1TB of internal storage (FINALLY), they have all the connections a person could want (MagSafe, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, no more dongles, it’s 2012 all over again…), they run forever without even needing to be plugged in, and they are the fastest laptops money can buy, period.  No, they don’t have touch but they also don’t have the stupid Touchbar.  No, they are not upgradeable but my 10 year old MBP tells me that I should be able to expect a seriously long useful life for a machine this powerful.  Yes, they are the exact same form factor they have been forever but so are televisions, maybe that’s just what a laptop should be, I dunno.  The convertible IS cooler but…  So, point is, they haven’t exactly re-invented the laptop, it’s more a reversion to what was working before they went off the rails but wayyyyyy more powerful.  If you want a laptop to do video editing, audio production, software development, and writing (the things I do on a regular basis), they are suddenly the best option again for the first time in a decade.  The keyboard doesn’t even suck anymore.  I did not see that coming but boy am I happy about it.

They are not limited to the App Store as I had feared either.  The M-Macs are the first actual professional grade machines Apple has made in so so so long…  I’m late coming to this confession not out of pride, no, I’m happy to be proven wrong, but because I had to use one for a while to see the difference.

I didn’t sit out the last 10 years of Apple machines.  I have been using them for work this whole time and I have continued to use my trusty 2012 MacBook Pro as well.  The laptop I was using when I left my last job was one of the final Intel-powered MBP laptops and it was…  fine.  I swapped out a Thinkpad for it and it, you know, worked and stuff.  Wasn’t noticeably faster or better, just ran macOS instead of Windows.  Yawn.  But a few weeks back I started using an M1 Pro for work and I’m like..  Ahhhhh.  I see.  The penny has dropped.  I am convert.

I’m slow sometimes.

As a software developer person I think it’s absolutely vital for Apple to have a pro level laptop again because they have the Vision Pro headset platform coming out and these are the machines that will be used by geeks like me to write software for that platform.  It wouldn’t have been possible with Yet Another Intel Laptop.  They needed something different and the ARM-powered M-chips are apparently the thing.

So, while I do actually love my foldable Yoga machine with the touchscreen and all that, I will be returning to the Mac as my daily driver.  Not yet, not today, but probably with the next revision.  The M4 or whatever.  I’m looking forward to it.  (I’m still sticking with Android though until they bring out an iPhone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack.)

As a side note…  The reason I think these machines will shake up the industry is not simply that they are very fast or that they use RISC processors.  That was true back when the PowerMacs roamed the earth.  Those were non-Intel compatible, RISC-based, and very fast for their time.  No, the reason is because of ARM.  The Apple M-chips are based on the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) chip architecture.  So are the iPhones, iPads, and also most of the devices you own including Chromebooks and all those Android phones.  It’s already the case that ARM chips power most of the mobile computing world, people just don’t think about it much.  ARM is an alternative chip instruction set to the Intel X86 instruction set and all you really need to know is that Intel is kinda screwed here.  The performance-per-watt of these Macs is suddenly causing everybody to want to move from Intel to ARM and thanks to years of mobile devices being based on ARM, there isn’t really anything stopping the transition.  Windows will be running on ARM-powered machines too and, presumably, the Apple head start in this space won’t last forever but it’s a helluva head start.  Windows machines with ARM chips will appear that will be just as fast and powerful as the Macs but it will take some time.  This is going to be one of those big sea changes in the industry that happen every now and then but it’s going to sneak up on people in general.  I don’t think a lot of people saw “everybody moving to ARM processors” on their computer industry bingo cards but the fact is that it just makes sense.  This is the way to make chips that are very very fast and very very power efficient and it’s technology that is proven and easy to license.  Anybody can make an ARM chip and almost everybody does.  Now Apple has shown just how powerful those chips can be and it will be hard to defend the old architecture when it’s last advantage, performance, is gone.

I’m just glad there is finally a Mac worthy of the lineage back on the market and it’s just in time for all the creative endeavors I have in mind with the return of Nuclear Gopher.  Awesome.