In an extensive interview for the TechCrunchApple’s vice president of platform architecture, Tim Milletand vice president of product marketing, Bob Borcherscommented on the new chips of the company that equips Macsthe Intel transition, the future of gaming on the Mac and more.
Millet, who has been in the chip industry for 30 years and Apple for 17 years, revealed that they initially saw great potential in the iPad Pro. So they were excited by the “opportunity to make a big impact” and “deliver the absolute peak performance to machines that didn’t have fans”—thus, the M1 was born.
With the M2, the executive stated that they did not want to just improve a few percentage points, but to bring something significant and push the limits of technology to the maximum possible extent.
The M2 line really wanted to maintain that leadership position by pushing, again, the boundaries of technology. We don’t take a 20% raise and figure out how to spread it out over three years… we figure out how to make incremental gains. We took it all in one year; we just went with everything. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.
Even though the focus was on a chip, Borchers pointed out that “Apple is building products, not parts.” That is, the company values the final product and its integration with each small component, uniting “silicon, software and hardware” from the beginning of construction.
In the current lineup, only the Mac Pro still has an Intel chip. With the change, Apple increasingly distanced itself from the company, but Millet and Borchers stated that there was a “great partnership” between them.
Intel has been a great partner over the years we’ve been distributing Intel machines. They were very receptive; they were really inspired by the direction Apple pushed them. And I think our products have benefited from that interaction. Of course, our competitors’ products have also benefited from this interaction at times.
Executives also talked about gaming on the Mac. Apple is always looking to expand Metal — which is already in its third version — by adding new APIsApplication programming interfacesor application programming interfaces.”>1; So Borchers said he feels they’re improving this area “with every new release” of an M-series chip.
Millet commented that they wanted to endow Macs with “GPUsGraphics processing unitsor graphics processing units.”>2 very capable” even to encourage developers, who had long been wary of “making a big investment” in the Mac. This would apply from machines like the MacBook Air to the most powerful ones, like the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra.
With the M2 Max, for example, games can have 96GB of graphics memory available just for them — something developers aren’t used to. “I think they’re trying to figure this out because the possibilities are unusual,” Millet said.
Still, he conceded that turning Macs into gaming machines won’t be done “overnight”.
The story begins many years ago when we were imagining this transition. Gamers are a serious bunch. And I don’t think we’re going to fool anyone by saying that we’re going to make the Mac a great gaming platform overnight. Let’s take a long view on this.
Finally, Borchers ended the interview by talking about the new Mac mini with an M2 chip — which costs $100 less than the Mac mini with an M1 chip — and how the company wants to bring its systems to as many consumers as possible.
At the end of the day, our products are for people and we want to get our systems into as many hands as possible. We felt that building the Mac mini is a great way to unleash creativity, and frankly, we wanted to be able to get it into as many people’s hands as possible.
If you want to read the interview in full, it can be found here.
14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro Mac mini
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