Working on the same topics in private as you are working on at your company can be very problematic, which brings me to

Early stage capital is expensive partly because of principal risk — investors are likely to lose their investment because most startups go to zero. But it is also expensive because of duration risk — the winners can take a decade or more to achieve liquidity. Angel and seed investors tie up their money for years before they get it back. When the alternative to private market investing is public market investing, where money can be invested and returned within seconds, the number of investors who willingly lockup capital for years in early stage startups is small. That’s why they are called angel investors. Only an angel would do it.,There is nothing inherently superior about the x86 architecture which suggests it should stay ahead performance-wise for all future. Quite the contrary ARM has an ISA which is better suited to make a high performance architecture. Eventually this will be a numbers game. Both Intel and AMD will be facing an army of ARM makers, they cannot beat all of them in the long run. And typically the winner will be whoever can throw most cash at the problem.,It will be interesting to watch in the next weeks or months as benchmarks for the new Macs pop up. There will be a lot of surprised people. But don’t worry people will still dismiss Apple. They will complain about 16 GB RAM being too little for professionals and that the number for ports are too few (which annoys me too). Sure we would all like the option of more RAM and ports. But that does not change the exceptional advancement Apple has been making with Apple Silicon over the years.,The other markets AMD and Intel compete against ARM on will be handled by other companies such as Amazon making the Graviton 2 ARM chips or Ampere’s 80-core ARM-based 64-bit server processor.,Many will be happy to know that important applications for professionals such as Adobe Photoshop and MS Office has already been ported. Other professional tools such as Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher have also been ported.,But I still love the Mac experience, macOS and Mac software too much to switch to another system. I will just have to suck it up and have cute little Mac box with a bunch of cables sticking out of it.,Countless software companies already have both an iOS and a macOS version of their software. They naturally use a lot of code sharing. With SwiftUI they are getting close to merging the iOS and macOS world.,This is not a call that you should work longer and longer for your company, this is simply the suggestion to choose your side projects wisely. Consider the example that your position requires you to develop and evaluate different neural network parameterizations and you really enjoy to work on it. In my opinion the better choice to work on these topics is to find an even better neural network for the use case at your company instead of developing and solving a different use case with the same set of methods by yourself.,Apple has a clear edge here as they don’t need to spend money developing lots of architectures. They can focus on making chips for their limited selection of products. Apple has tons of money they can throw at a very limited set of of chip designs.,I see this as the key problem with the new ARM based Macs: Too few ports. It is not clear to me whether the harddrive can be changed. But these kinds of things seems to be what we have simply have had to put up with when it comes to Apple. Personally I still dream of a return to the old beatiful G4 towers.,These computers really appealed to professionals and hobbyists alike, as they were really easy to open and add things. I would still have loved the ability to add extra hard drives, specialized cards, internal DVD burners etc. But sadly Apple has never showed much love towards this segment of users.,My key issue with my Mac Pro is actually not performance, but rather the number of USB ports and non-standard SSD disk which is not that easy to replace, without a special kit.,EDIT: If you are more interested in this, I have a new article (unpolished) out discussing technical details of why the M1 is so fast as well as comparison to AMD. I may revise my view here as M1 seems to be far ahead of AMD as well.,Some people will cling to the fact that AMD still has a performance edge, but for how long? AMD had a much smaller gap to close to surpass Intel in performance. Apple had a much faster progression. The ARM world is simply moving a lot faster and x86 is living on borrowed time.,First of all, a corporate company is a great opportunity to grow as a data scientist. If you really love exactly what you are doing during your job, you maybe should simply extend your working hours. This will probably make a better impression in comparison to walking out of the office at exactly 5pm, go home and spend the evening with the same things you could have done equally if you stayed an hour longer at the office.