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Comment by jurmous | Hacker News Reader

But this chip will be the 14th iteration of the CPU and is already quite mature. The Apple GPU is already some years further after first release. The chip is also already 64bit. The main new thing is the Arm compilation of the OS and Rosetta layer and that can be updated with patch releases.

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I'm totally confident in their ability to pull off the ARM transition, but I think the fit-and-finish will be way better in the second- and third-gen products.

For another example, many people had first-gen Macbooks that would "moo" as the fan cycled on and off across a single-degree thermal boundary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEPzlIkBnGs

It was fixed in an update to the System Management Controller to change the fan behavior / thresholds: http://www.betalogue.com/2006/08/18/macbook-smc-firmware-upd...

edit: Almost forgot the build-quality issues with the first-gen Macbook Pros where the official service manual advised you to use one entire tube of thermal compound each for the CPU and GPU which obviously lead to overheating: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid... (images all missing)

I never thought I’d be spending the afternoon watching a YouTube video of a macbook “mooing” but here we are

It’s already 64 bit, but it’s still ARMv8. ARMv9 is just about to ship, and Apple will undoubtably want to transition to that as well.

There's still ARMv8.5 in the way ;)

And their first time creating Thunderbolt. Just as an example.

They will have to migrate to USB 4 now, since Thunderbolt is Intel tech

… which they helped design and were the first significant user of, and which Intel donated to the USB-IF royalty-free to encourage adoption. Apple announced that they were going to support it and they’re not the kind of company which would do that without having control over their product direction.

That's a bummer though, I was actually hoping they would be the first consumer brand to go all-in on USB4 - similarly to how they were the first to ditch the floppy drive, and in numerous other occasions

I wish they brought Thunderbolt to iPad Pro already, would mean the Macs would have gen 2 silicon for it.

Apple will support thunderbolt https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/07/macs-with-apple-sili...

Thunderbolt was a joint effort between Apple and Intel, years before it came out, called "Light Peak" then. The first Intel demo was on a Mac, and Apple first announced the Thunderbolt commercial name.

I don't doubt apple, I doubt the devs of the software I rely on will put forth effort right away.

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