First M1 battery tests lasted so long, Apple thought indicator was buggy

The Apple executive says that, to the amusement of engineers, staffers didn't believe the first battery life results from the M1 processor.

"When we saw that first system and then you sat there and played with it for a few hours and the battery didn't move, we thought 'Oh man, that's a bug, the battery indicator is broken,'" Bob Borchers, VP of worldwide product marketing for Apple,told Tom's Guide.

"And then Tim [Milet]'s laughing in the background, 'Nope, that's the way it's supposed to be,'" he continued, "and it was pretty phenomenal."

Milet is Apple's vice president of platform architecture, and in the same interview explained why dramatic performance improvement was essential.

"If somebody else could build a chip that was actually going to deliver better performance inside that enclosure, what's the point? Why would we switch?," he said. "And so for my chip architects, that was the target."

Even before embarking on its Apple Silicon plans, however, Milet says that the emulation software Rosetta 2 had to come first.

"We started a small project years before we started transitioning to Silicon to try to make sure that we could actually deliver the second generation of Rosetta in a way that allowed us to do this seamlessly," he continued. "And we believe that was a huge part of the transition story everything worked out of the box as expected."

Neither Milet nor Borchers would discuss details of the future of Apple Silicon. However, Milet acknowledged that gamers, for one, want yet more power.

"Of course, you can imagine the pride of some of the GPU folks and imagining, 'Hey, wouldn't it be great if it hits a broader set of those really intense gamers,'" he said."It's a natural place for us to be looking, to be working closely with our Metal team and our Developer team. We love the challenge."

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