What you need to know
- Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, and Johny Srouji sat down for an interview about Apple silicon.
- The conversation covered its origin and the reasons why and why now.
As part of the company's campaign trail to talk about the new M1 processor, Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Greg Joswiak, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, and Johny Srouji, Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies all sat down virtually with Ars Technica for an interview.
When asked why Apple was switching to its own silicon for the Mac, and why now was the right time, Federighi talked about how important the Mac has always been to the company and the people who use it.
The Mac is the soul of Apple. I mean, the Mac is what brought many of us into computing. And the Mac is what brought many of us to Apple. And the Mac remains the tool that we all use to do our jobs, to do everything we do here at Apple. And so to have the opportunity... to apply everything we've learned to the systems that are at the core of how we live our lives is obviously a long-term ambition and a kind of dream come true.
While some thought that Apple's transition to Apple silicon may have been a result of Intel's lackluster performance in recent history, Greg Joswiak says that the M1 chip and its future family was more of an internal ambition.
"This is about what we could do, right? Not about what anybody else could or couldn't do ... Every company has an agenda ... The software company wishes the hardware companies would do this. The hardware companies wish the OS company would do this, but they have competing agendas. And that's not the case here. We had one agenda."
Srouji says that he and Federighi actually work very closely together from the inception of something like the M1 chip.
"During the pre-silicon, when we even designed the architecture or defined the features ... Craig and I sit in the same room and we say, 'OK, here's what we want to design. Here are the things that matter.'"
The interview is wide-ranging, covering the new unified-memory architecture and how Apple sees iPhone and iPad apps coming to the Mac. You can read the full interview at Ars Technica.
