With the release of the latest M4 Macs, Apple Silicon CPUs are now officially on par with the fastest CPUs in the world - at an order of magnitude better energy efficiency. This milestone feels like the perfect time to reflect on why I made a big bet on local computing when I started Shapr3D. 👇 In 2016, I made a controversial decision: instead of building Shapr3D as a cloud app, I chose to make it a native app. This decision has proven incredibly successful. It has allowed us to work with some of the world’s largest enterprise companies, providing a private cloud solution (offering all the benefits of the cloud without enterprise IT blockers) and enabling a cost-efficient PLG go-to-market engine. But it wasn’t an easy decision back then. Who writes native apps anymore? The cloud-for-everything was touted as the future! It turns out, not entirely. At least, not for every application. In 2016, I was intrigued by the evolution of Apple’s ARM chips and made a big bet on their potential. Apple Silicon and the ARM chip revolution have changed the game, and now we are reaping the benefits of being a native app. While the Microsoft ecosystem is catching up, it’s now clear that local computing + cloud collaboration is the right approach for CAD. 1. Today, the undisputed king of computing (in single-core performance, the metric most critical for CAD) is the Apple M4 chip. Even the latest iPad (!) is 60% faster than the fastest single-core compute instance on AWS, and the M4 Macs provide the fastest single-core performance in the world. Today, you can buy the one of the world’s fastest computers for just $600, the price of an M4 Mac mini. 2. Cloud computing costs are prohibitively high for compute-heavy applications. The cloud works well for less computationally intensive applications (like CRM), but shifting as much computation as possible to the client side is the way forward, whether the client is a web client or a native app. A prime example is Figma, which has a thick web client doing substantial computation locally in the browser. This approach has major go-to-market implications as well: achieving sustainable unit economics with a PLG/freemium model is impossible when the cost per free user ranges from $5-20/month per engaged user. 3. Of course, you still need the customer benefits of the cloud. Collaboration, data management, versioning, sharing, and license management all need to happen in the cloud. But that doesn’t mean that all (geometry) computation has to happen there. 4. Back in 2016, one of the main arguments for “everything moving to the cloud” was that Intel CPUs were stagnating in performance and were energy inefficient. Well, Apple/ARM/TSMC solved this problem. We now have the world’s fastest CPUs in mobile devices, powered by batteries, with an actual 10-hour battery life. 5. Enterprise companies are still hesitant to store their manufacturing data in a third-party cloud. Our architecture has enabled us to build a private cloud solution that easily passes enterprise IT checks, allowing all customer data to be stored in their private cloud with virtually zero IT overhead and just a few hours of setup time. 6. Native apps are simply… better. They’re snappier, faster, smoother, and more responsive, with no back-and-forth latency to the cloud. They even work well when the network connection is poor. Long story short: I’m incredibly excited about Apple Silicon and ARM. We’re witnessing a 20-30% annual improvement in computational power, coupled with unparalleled energy efficiency. iPads now deliver workstation-grade computing power. There’s a supercomputer in your pocket. We truly live in the future. This evolution is a complete game-changer and a real opportunity to build next-gen applications that were previously unimaginable.