Is Apple About To Chase Itself Into A Corner With Their New Chips?
It’s either that, or we’re about to see 100-hour battery life on a laptop!
History. History is where the answers are. I keep saying this and will do so until I retire in a remote village in the mountains of India or Japan. Apple has been known for many things, both good and bad, but there is definitely one thing they have been consistent about for the last 15 or so years — their numbers. Every single Apple event brings us new numbers on the screen. Faster chips, faster SSD, faster memory, more ports, faster ports, more pixels on the screen, more light in those pixels, longer lasting batteries… and this last one is the one that made me think.
In the last 3 years, Apple has consistently upped the battery-life on most of their products, and especially so on the Macs, which opens up two avenues:
- In just a couple of years they will plateau and find themselves in a corner impossible to get out of. Lack of better battery tech will render worse battery life as they keep adding CPU cores, which they absolutely and inevitably will.
- Apple is not telling us something. Either they know their SOCs will be much, much more power efficient and M1 editions are barely scratching the surface, or they know of some outstanding battery tech even Elon Musk is unaware of.
If history is anything to go by…
The first proposition, while seems unlikely at first, it did happen before, and not just once but three times. First when Apple bought NEXT, then later when Steve started the Apple — Intel collaboration, and recently, when Tim decided to sever that same relationship. The PowerPC CPU which interestingly enough was based on RISC design reached its finite capabilities — aka plateaued — only to be replaced by Intel’s CISC design processors. That however resulted in yet another seemingly inevitable end of life, when Apple came out with their M1 architecture, returning to RISC once more.
What’s a clear pattern in this story is that Apple always had an aversion to high power consumption. The PowerPC, especially towards the end of its life at Apple, became notoriously power-hungry, and Intel over time, to keep itself relevant in the market, started making the same mistake, throwing more power at the problem to crank up clock-speed and core-count. To be fair, AMD did the same thing. They are using CISC design too, after all. The sole reason why they’re less relevant in this particular story is because they were never in partnership with Apple.
If history is to repeat itself, which it often does, one could make a valid argument that M1 and the M architecture altogether is just another Apple phase until something better comes along.
The potential ace up the sleeve…
The second proposition discounts historical probability. The traditional Intel and AMD model was and still is more GHz and cores through more power. But that race isn’t winning the game any more. It’s a nanometers race now, and this is the one Apple is seemingly in. For all intents and purposes, as long as modern physics allows, the sky is the limit for how small a transistor can become. If apple is looking at 3 nm processes as their basis for M3 SOCs for 2022 and 2023, based on their planned 18 month lifecycle for M architectures, who’s to say 2 nm and 1 nm solutions aren’t in store for the remainder of the decade?
If we consider that the current M1 SOC is built on the 5 nm process, and is capable of running in an entire system for 22–24 hours on a single charge, one could predict that a 1 nm chip could comfortably run 100 hours on that same charge and battery! That would essentially mean 2.5 work-weeks!
Imagine a world where you charge your pro laptop just twice a month!
The more I think about it, the more realistic it sounds. Truth of the matter is, for most tasks the current M1 Pro and Max are already an overkill and even Apple’s marketing team calls it insane. Reviews confirm everywhere that the Max is an absolute overkill for 99% of professionals. In fact, this was also true even with the Intel CPUs. Until 2018, I was using a 2012 Retina model for software development and light photo-editing, and never once I felt the CPU to be a bottleneck. Based on that same logic, if eight years from now we have 1 nm chips offering the same speed as my current M1 Pro, then it will still be more than enough processing-power for everything I do today and plan to do eight years from now.
Now, to be entirely realistic, I think Apple, and frankly the general PC industry will try to compromise. I don’t see processor speeds stagnating. It’s bad marketing. I definitely don’t see Apple holding keynotes where the main event is just double battery-life, more RAM and faster SSDs — though I would be perfectly OK with that! I do, however, see 50-hour and longer battery-life in the future of Apple MacBooks paired with even faster and more capable SOCs, and I, for one, can’t wait to see that happen!
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Attila Vago — Sr. Software Engineer building amazing ed-tech software. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!