Senior Apple Executives Discuss How the M1 Chip Came to Exist

Soon after Apple’s ‘One More Thing’ digital event earlier this week, marketing chief Greg ‘Joz’ Joswiak, software boss Craig Federighi, and hardware engineering leader John Ternus spoke with The Independent to explain how the company made its ground-breaking new M1 chip.

Below are some interesting excerpts from their talk with the publication:

“We overshot,” says Federighi. “You have these projects where, sometimes you have a goal and you’re like, ‘well, we got close, that was fine’.

“We started getting back our battery life numbers, and we’re like, ‘You’re kidding. I thought we had people that knew how to estimate these things’.”

Ternus says that as momentum built, it became more clear that the chip was doing things they hadn’t expected. “This was just building momentum within the teams who were so passionate and excited about this product that they just wanted to keep pushing, keep optimising: ‘How much better can we make it? How much better we can make it?’”

“I think M1 makes a lot of sense for a Mac chip,” says Joz. “’A’ was started for the phone chips at Apple, and since then we’ve tried to use letters that make sense: the chips for our headphones use H, you start to feel the trend there. We’re brilliant marketers that way.”

You can catch the lengthy discussion in its entirety at the source page.