John Gruber’s M1 Mac Review ⇥ daringfireball.net

John Gruber:

Conversely, when niceness hits — or, as in the case of these M1 Macs, exceeds — its mark, there’s no quantifiable number to prove it. You just know it when you see, feel, and hear it. (Or in the case of the M1 Macs’ cooling systems, don’t hear it.) Apple knows this. The most telling moment during the M1 keynote was in Craig Federighi’s segment, about 14 minutes in — the bit that launched a thousand memes. Talking about the fact that MacOS 11 Big Sur is Apple’s first version of MacOS ever designed hand-in-hand to run on hardware designed from the ground up by Apple, Federighi’s example was … how fast M1 Macs wake up.

Not compiling code. Not encoding video. Not executing complex ML models.

Waking from sleep.

It’s not like “my Mac wakes up too slow” is a common complaint. This isn’t fixing a problem — it’s making something that has long already been nice on Macs even nicer. This is the Apple way. The Macintosh way.

Gruber writes skilfully on a variety of topics, but he is at his best writing about the Mac in detail. There are few others who are able to capture the unique qualities of a product’s niceness so well. This piece is already a classic.