The pandemic really did hit us all hard. However, there is no match to how much the business sector suffered. Many companies had to revamp their operations and their vision. This included many big companies including Apple. To make changes to day-to-day operations is quite challenging especially for big companies. Many new ways had to be introduced to cater for the ‘new normal’ concept. The biggest one being the culture of working from home. Therefore, Apple had to come up with new measures to inspect the M1 units before they were officially launched.
Despite all the changes Apple had to incorporate during the Covid 19 pandemic, the engineers sure did a great job with the final product. In his latest interview, Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, discussed the challenges Apple had to face and how they overcame these. The Wall Street Journal report shares Srouji’s point of view on the challenges faced as more than a thousand engineers came together while being in different regions.
“What I learned in life: You think through all of the things you can control and then you have to be flexible and adaptive and strong enough to navigate when things don’t go to plan. Covid was one for example,” Srouji said.
The M1 validation began as soon as countries around the globe started shutting down in major country wide lockdowns. This meant that many engineers had to take the risk and be present on site to so they could carefully inspect the chips, transistors and other components. This unfortunately couldn’t happen due to the pandemic. Hence, Apple came up with a different strategy that wouldn’t require engineers to interact physically. Cameras were set up throughout the labs which helped engineers to inspect each and every chip from their remote locations. Privacy was another issue that was quite a challenge; at this stage Apple couldn’t possibly risk any leaks related to the M1’s progress.
We really applaud Apple’s ability to overcome the challenges. None of us can tell that the M1 was prepared during such a challenging time and still doesn’t lack anything. The end product that reached the consumers was spotlessly perfect and it outdid many other chips in terms of performance.