Not just Electron apps. I've seen people on Twitter gushing about how seamless and flicker-free is switching between screens and resolutions on M1. And yet, there's literally no reason why it can't be done today, now, on the existing hardware.
Instant waking from sleep was one of the key points in M1's presentation. Something my 2007 model Macbook Pro could do. But then the subsequent releases of MacOS just couldn't do that. Despite significant increases in disk speed, and CPU speed, and RAM speed.
We are effecivey running supercomputers. And we can't seem to be able to do anything with them.
As instant as in the keynote video. IIRC around the time of Lion I started seeing a progress bar as it was coming out of sleep.
Now, especially if you require password you need to wait a second or so after it wakes up, because input is no longer immediately available. And then it takes some time to actually wake up and start the window server etc.
What exactly prevents them from doing just that? 3.2 GHz not enough to negotiate screen resolution? HDMI/DP link that M1 produces is some otherworldly HDMI/DP not available to anyone else?
I have an example right here, in front of me. I have a Dell monitor. My Macbook Pro is connected to it via Thunderbolt/USB-C->HDMI. My Windows box is connected to it via DP.
So, I'm on my Windows box, playing a game. I turn on my Macbook Pro, and it shows me a proper resolution on the laptop screen. The laptop sees that the display is on, and I see that many windows are missing because they are on the other screen. So, I switch my display from DP (coming from Windows) to HDMI (coming from my Macbook Pro).
The only thing that changes is the source input to the display.
And yet. Macbook takes up to 10 seconds to renegotiate the resoltion again. First it slowly disconnects from the display, screws up the resolution, brings all the windows to the laptop screen. Then it reconnects to the display, renegotiates the resolution and restores the windows as they are supposed to be.
Why? And what is so magical about the M1 CPU that it seemingly can do this in an instant? There's nothing magical: whoever implements all this crap simply doesn't care. And in a couple of years M1 (or M1 X Pro whatever) will forget how to to that just as MacOS forgot how it could instantly wake up from sleep 12 years ago.
- Did the protocols such as HDMI and DP change for M1? No.
- Did the Extended Display Identification Data [1] change? No.
That leaves two things:
- The OS that matches the extended data against what the user wants
If the OS is responsible, then there's nothing stopping others from doing what Big Sur does.
- graphics cards that actually pump out pixels and have their own support for possible resolutions
If graphics card is responsible, you're asking me to believe that M1 is driven by fairy pixel dust and has some magical powers that are absolutely impossible on any other hardware?
One can easily foresee this actually happening if chip designs start to diverge from the standard and the only common thing is that you can run a browser on it.
