I am no Apple fanatic. I'm a die-hard Linux user and open source proponent. I wouldn't touch the M1 with a thirty-nine and a half foot pole.
But with all that said... I kind of like articles like these. I enjoy seeing people happy with good tech because I like good tech. It pleases me that there are people getting this much enjoyment out of innovative and (I'll admit it) quite impressive hardware. So rock on, Apple fans. But when there's a Linux computer that is even a bit better, I hope you can tolerate me shouting from the rooftops, because you bet I will be!
I feel the same and hope that moment will come in about 1.5y zen4 5nm ddr5 64gb ecc 2tb nvme linux laptop ..without having to trade my body parts to buy it :)
Right now it,s an xmg which is a seller of clevo probably i will remain with that because I can change parts without voiding warranty , my reseller leave me add rm and hdd of my choice after the sale, i can buy without hdd and ram.. aalso have swappable battery and even if touchpad may not be apple quality i usually use mouse or trackball , but with the next I'll take a look at what Lenovo, hp dell etc will offer by that time , about linux compatibility and drivers.. I'm quite sure is improving every year.. except for macbooks ;)
Are you seriously comparing a gaming XMG Clevo laptop (I looked up the Clevo NH57ADS) that has been designed for the gaming crowd, that requires a 230W external power supply in a maxed out configuration, that is nearly 3x heavier and 3x thicker than a 13" MacBook Air ultraportable, more than 2.5x heavier and 2x thicker than a 13" MacBook Pro? I could not quickly find stats on the battery life for the latest and greatest Clevo NH57ADS, but – since they use a desktop CPU in it – I do not expect it to be that great.
If I were to apply your logic, I could then declare that my POWER9 2U blade is a portable device ahem laptop (technically, I can carry it around as well as keep the blade on my laps, yes) that surpasses any other known laptop in terms of hardware configurability, and Linux compatibility will be even greater, too.
I hope you get to experience that! My worst computer recently has been a Thinkpad running Linux, basic things like suspending the laptop when it closes just never work properly.
But I'm sure the year of Linux on the desktop will come one day.
I have been using Linux for a little over 20 years. I remarked a the start it did not sleep when it closed. My current laptop is also Linux and it still does not always sleep when I close it. I need to get up to speed on BSD or something.
The biggest culprit for suspend issues are GPU drivers. Unfortunately, all the options suck.
Both nVidia and the AMD have buggy Linux drivers, especially regarding suspend issues.
After experiencing suspend issues with the closed-source nVidia drivers, I bought an all AMD laptop (Dell G5 SE), only to deal with even buggier open-source AMD drivers.
The Intel drivers just work, but Intel integrated GPUs are painfully slow, and using the integrated GPU makes the CPU run noticeably hotter.
That said, AMD drivers are getting more stable over time, and buying AMD is probably our best chance of improving the driver situation long-term.
I'm not experienced with thinkpad but I do have some laptops and desktop and in all of those suspension and hibernation works, require swap but even with zfs raid over luks layer with zil on pcie mounted optane on old ubuntu 18.04 things worked.. but i agree that on some hardware linux sometimes need patience :( hope that will change.. but probably to change linux need more love from desktop users ..
Technically you’re correct, your comment just begs the question: if it’s so easy to fix why hasn’t it been done?
The answer is probably because to make things like sleep on lid close work, you’re probably going to need to know more about the hardware than manufacturers are going to make public.
Microsoft don't let you access perf_event, which immediately makes it useless for me for example.
It's not really fragmentation as much as there not being being a billion dollar company making the stack actually work in the first place - if Apple decided to rebase onto Linux for some reason there's nothing stopping them getting everything shipshape just that it takes a lot of time and money. The vast majority of Linux boxes distro's are probably pareto distributed so 20-80 to make up a random number. The stack isn't that sparse.
If Linux decided to switch to a different license, like say a BSD-style that would allow Apple to do the things they want to do commercially, then Apple might consider that option.
However, the probability that Linux will switch to a license that is sufficiently Apple-friendly is precisely as likely as Apple switching the core of their OS over to Linux.
In other words, approximately 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000%.
Apple will never bother again with GPL software, while Google would rather migrate everyone to Fuchsia if they could, IBM is focused on making Linux a good citizen for cloud and mainframe computing, Oracle just wants to make it run their database stack, so that leaves out Microsoft, in what concerns billion dollar companies that would care to do that.
I'm definitely watching the space. Similar to how auto manufacturers are now all pivoting hard to electric following the insane tear of Tesla, I hope that this lights a fire under other computer hardware manufacturers.
And the signs are there. Windows already has an arm64 build out, and Linux of course has dozens of projects working great on ARM.
The software is largely ready, and the industry tends to copy Apple, for better or for worse. In this case, I'd say for the better.
I'm reluctant to buy it because of ports, and tiny amount of drive space. Waiting for the 14 inch, hoping for more ports, larger base hard drive, and new design for similar cost of upgrading the air.
Running code out of readonly mapped SSD pages is pretty compelling. I know each cell only has a finite charge that decays very slowly, can you read the same page forever without ever rewriting it and incurring wear?
I'm trying to find out how much faster than a typical PCIe4 nvme SSD, which I have on my desktop. I'm not finding anything useful. Do you haave an idea?
The 256 is too small for me, I edit videos sometimes. $200+ to upgrade the internal drive. I'm hoping the 14 inch will come with a larger internal drive, and more upgrades.
Samsung has quite cheap high speed external SSDs the T5 is like $150 for the 1TB drives now.
USB type C Gen 2 10gig is fast enough for most video editing especially any editing you could do on a device like the M1.
Personally if I was editing videos I would be using an external storage device both due to the capacity and the fact that my data is then portable.
With the full disk encryption on the M1 I wouldn’t be storing anything other than your scratch pad unless you can guarantee a 24/7 backup as you go scheme anyhow since any failure would like be irrecoverable.
I was just about to reply the same. I own a handful of Samsung T5 and T7 SSD drives (the new T7 being twice as fast, but also more expensive) and they are great. 1-2TB is sufficient as the internal HD for me (aka make no representation of other’s needs) and everything else goes on my NAS or when remote a SSD HD like the T5/T7. When I need extreme performance (aka video editing usually), I’ve got a Samsung X5 which uses TB3 and NVMe to get nearly 3GB/s speeds. If they weren’t so expensive, I’d use only the X5s, but instead have a mix of T5/T7/X5 for various purposes.
And potentially if you edit videos even portable SSDs aren’t enough.
Raw 8K RED footage at 75 FPS which is what you would be recording at if you master at 4K 60* is about 120GB a minute that’s over 7TB an hour.
No reasonable internal drive could support that and you’ll be looking at a high speed NAS or an NVME JBOD/DAS solution to support that.
*The extra frames and pixels are really important for final mastering as you need extra bits to do image stabilization, cropping, color grading and sharpening correctly it also makes more complex post processing work easier to perform even things like rotoscoping are much easier to do when your objects are twice the size and you have much less pixel bleed between what you want to roto and the rest of the frame.
Laptop upgradbility is a game of luck and a guessing game, in general. Laptops are, by design, a finished product, and it is a lucky happenstance, if it (and what) can be upgraded for a variety of reasons.
My 2008 Sony Vaio VGN-Z17GN laptop is, technically, upgradable. But, the chipset does not support more than 4Gb of RAM, and I already have 4Gb installed. So I do not have the RAM upgrade option. I replaced a HDD with a SDD years back, and it was a fairly risky enterprise with a high chance of the laptop incurring a permanent damage due to how the Vaio keyboard is wired up with the mainboard. The laptop is still very much usable even for moderate development activities since it has been running Linux for years.
Other laptops have their own quirks or limitations of sorts. Now, a few random picks amongst contemporary laptops (Lenovo and Acer):
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5: 8 Gb (i5-10210U CPU) or 16 Gb (i7-10510U CPU) of soldered on RAM and 512 Gb Opal2 NVMe (no information on the SSD upgradability). The 16Gb RAM / 512 Gb configuration is AU$1,100+ more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad X390 Yoga: i7-8565U CPU, 8Gb of soldered on RAM, 256 Gb NVMe (no information on the SSD upgradability). It is AU$400+ more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad P1: i7-8750H, 1x 16GB SO-DIMM DDR4-2666 non-ECC (no information of the max amount RAM supported), 512GB NVMe SSD (no information on the SSD upgradability). It is AU$1,000 more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold: i5-L16G7, 8Gb of soldered on RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD (no information on the SSD upgradability), AU$5,799. It is AU$4,000 (four thousand) more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699). This is 3.411 times more expensive than the M1 laptop.
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: AMD Ryzen™ PRO 4750U CPU, 16GB soldered on DDR4-3200, 512 Gb Opal2 NVMe ((no information on the SSD upgradability). It is nearly AU$500 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Acer TravelMate P614, Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, AU$2,299: no information on RAM and SSD upgrade options. The laptop is AU$600 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Acer Swift 3, AMD Ryzen 7-4700U, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, AU$1,999: no information on RAM and SSD upgrade options. The laptop is AU$300 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Other Acer laptops are less capable, use Pentium or Core i3 CPU's, slower SSD's and are cheaper than M1 laptops; some are twice as cheaper. They are marketed as «student» laptops.
Out of 7 PC laptops above, only one has upgradable RAM, and it is a guessing game whether the SSD can or can't be upgraded. Every PC laptop above is also more expensive than the latest, stats wise comparable, 13" MacBook Pro M1. A few of those are significantly more expensive.
Yes, there are cheaper options, and, yes, some laptops can be upgraded easily or more easily, but that is not the primary market for laptop makers. Wholesale purchasers (corporates) and average consumers do not typically ask whether or not they can later upgrade their laptop.
Also, if one wants an ultraporatble or a compact laptop, they had better accept the fact that RAM and/or SSD will be soldered on, and they won't be able to upgrade them, be it an Apple or a commodity PC laptop. It is a commonplace now.
Thanks for the list of all such laptops to avoid, along with Apple macbooks.
Soldered ram, soldered SSD, unremovable batteries etc. all are designed with planned Obsolescence in mind. We should all boycott such products to protect our RIGHT TO REPAIR.
I have the same Anker hub too, but I found that it gets a bit hot when I plug in an external 4K display. Tested on an Intel based Mac and on the new M1.
If it's this good according to folks already, I cant wait to see what gen2 looks like. Not a big apple fan but I'll be closely looking at the next generation of these in a year or so.
The most interesting thing about this to me was the bit at the end about Windows and Games. I've heard of Windows emulation on Mac before but this is the first time I've heard of Parallels.
> Now you can download Steam and basically install anything and it will probably work. Microsoft really did some amazing magic in getting both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 programs running on arm64.
The author makes it sound like you can run basically all Windows software on Mac without issues with Parallel, including more demanding software like games you'd find on Steam.
Does anyone here have experience with Parallels? How does performance compare? My assumption with this kind of emulation was always that performance would typically suffer too much for it to be worth it.
I have Parallels and my experience on my intel MBP is gaming is not very good on it. It's mostly graphics support that is lacking I believe. I'm not sure how M1/arm support would make it work better but I sure hope so.
Anything that touches the GPU is notably flaky over parallels (or any hypervisor for that matter), otherwise it's more or less seamless. I always had Windows open on my Mac before I abandoned them during the 2016-2020 dark ages.
I prefer browser based options such as shells.com where you can actually just access Windows or Linux on a virtual cloud computer. Much easier than messing with Parallels...
Parallels has been around for a while... I used it to play the homeworld franchise years ago but more recently I have used bootcamp. Not sure about performance on M1 tho.
I love my M1 MBP, but I use my 16" MBP more day to day. The larger screen seems to be more important to me than the noisiness and shorter battery life. Definitely looking forward to bigger arm macs.
The 16" MBP is terrible with an external monitor (or at least mine is with my external monitor). Fans spin up like crazy and the case gets hot enough to fry an egg on. It's the one terrible weakness of an otherwise great machine.
I’ve had this experience and seen many others mention it too. I always make a point when I have time to mention how I’ve solved it.
If you haven’t already, try plugging the power in on the right side, and the display/any other peripherals on the left. It sounds crazy, but this has been the solution for tons of people. Apparently the heat generated by power input (even at a steady full charge) is enough to spike the sensors near the components on the left side.
I haven’t experienced any downsides to this change other than having to spend a few minutes rearranging stuff on my desk.
That seems crazy but plausible. Explains why so many people complain about it while my office and home never had issues, it's all laid out so you plug in the power on the right.
It apparently affects all of the USB-C models with ports on both sides, it’s kind of surprising to me that the workaround isn’t more well-known, and even more surprising that it’s gone so many generations without a fix (although honestly I have no idea how involved the fix would be, and it’s probably moot with Mx around the corner).
1. Plug it all in right side and see how it goes. The important part is that power needs to be on the right, the point of plugging other stuff on the left is just to distribute heat/load.
2. If that doesn’t help/causes other issues, are you willing to separate power delivery and plug in two cables? I know it’s annoying when the spec supports single-cable everything, but in the scheme of things it’s not a terrible trade off to have a more usable machine.
I wish we could narrow down why some have this experience and others don’t. I’ve connected 8 external monitors (all at once) to three different 16” MBP and still couldn’t produce a similar issue as some have with just one.
Yeah this this has been abysmal for me. It does this even if you use it with the main display closed (clamshell mode)
Makes my 2018 "Pro" machine feel like an 8 year old device struggling to keep up with very basic tasks because of thermal throttling (and this is even after getting the fans cleaned by Apple recently)
Clamshell mode is generally worse for thermals. Even though you’re not dedicating power to the internal screen, you’re trapping more heat in the case. Other than that, take a look at my sibling comment for a potential solution.
Yeah, its a known limit of the Intel CPU. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that any external monitor essentially requires pushing through the dGPU and therefore your system will be consuming ~100W minimum, no matter the load.
Had the same issue. I sold my 16" MBP and moved to the 13" M1 MBP. Performance is comparable (if not slightly better) and the fans almost never go on unless I'm compiling code and maxing out all cores.
I have an external monitor with my 16" MBP and it works great. I haven't experienced any of the issues you mention. I have one of the Apple monitors though. It might be an issue with non-Apple monitors.
Yeah! I got a 13” mbp because I thought it would travel better, but after getting a 16” for work, I ended up getting the 16” for myself. The bigger screen is just so much more comfortable if I’m out and about.
Same. I used to have a Macbook Air 13" and a friend convinced me to switch a Macbook Pro 15" for the screen size. Now I couldn't see myself coming back to 13".
tldr; I got a Macbook Pro M1 for $975 in mint-condition at a Best Buy and already put the return label on it.
While Geekbench showed great results, actual usage of the machine and headaches ensued were contrasting.
To put it bluntly - M1 machines are currently unstable. There are numerous Bluetooth issues [1], formatting issues [2], Wifi 6 issues [3], VPN issues [4], firewall issues [5], and shocking security issues in general with Big Sur and Apple's silicon [6].
I'm a power user and this is way too experimental for actual use. At the least get the 16 GB variant if you want to get anything done and not experience freeze/lockup (but for that much money you're better off with Librem 14" or System76 w/AMD Threadripper).
its very frustrating trying to battle the people who
a) have never used an arm laptop
b) think legacy apps run well
c) think benchmarks are cool
its beyond impossible to dissuade someone from making the mistake of buying apples first gen chromebook without properly researching what they did to neuter macos to accomplish this.
basically every other reply here is too busy not realising A and singing praises to C
Actually, I do own a MBA/M1 and it is certainly not similar to a Chromebook. (It just happened that the energy management of my old MBA became bricked by an OS update, so I had to jump the train for a first generation device, against all considerations.) Hardware-wise, I'm positively surprised.
Regarding the real issue, Big Sur, it's in its infancy and you can't fall back to OSX, which might be the real show stopper for some. Personally, I've been using Apple systems for 30 years now, and I've always been disappointed by every major revision since Snow Leopard. However, Big Sur, against all odds, isn't actually as bad as I expected (being the zoo of micro modes that it is). Some stability and maintenance issues are to be expected from a brand new OS, and Big Sur isn't the Black Swan invalidating the general advice to never aspire to early adopting an entirely new platform, if your primary goal is stability. I would certainly advice against an upgrade at this early stage for a production machine, if you can do with a previous revision. That said, my personal verdict on Big Sur is still pending. Let's see…
And, I can't see where any of the changes, which are related to the issues listed above, are related to the M1 architecture. Rather, you may point at the T2, which isn't exactly new, but has been gaining some in importance, and the general perspective on OS security, as exhibited by Big Sur.
PS: Some real criticism of the hardware (however, not related to the M1 architecture): Lack of ports (my old MBA had USB on either side and a card reader in about the same form factor!), no MagSafe, somewhat hollow audio (probably related to repurposing the old shell, now using space formerly occupied by fans as overly bass heavy resonance chambers.) An overall more flimsy feel of the shell and keyboard (again, as compared to an older predecessor.)
PPS: This is my 3rd ARM device and it certainly is a game changer.
After upgrading to Big Sur, I have experiences a general degradation of performance, graphical glitches and serious Bluetooth problems (failing to connect to Apple mouse and keyboard).
The fundamental problem seems to be that with proprietary consumer hardware/software- only the initial version is reviewed and after that the vendor can push software full of bugs with no consequences.
You must be new to Macs. I'm still on the MBP 2015 and it's "the best computer I've ever owned". Everything since then has technically upgraded parts, but the regressions (touchbar, butterfly keyboard mishaps, etc.) are not worth the upgrade.
I just switched from a 2015 MBP to the current 16" MBP and it is an amazing computer and a significant upgrade towards the 2015 one. The keyboard is nice, the screen much better, great sound and speed. I also like the touchbar. So the 16" is an easy buy. Though of course, you now might want to wait for an ARM based one.
My 15" 2015 MBP was the best bang-for-the-buck Mac I've owned. Got it used (to avoid getting a butterfly keyboard MBP), almost max CPU, max RAM, swapped in an NVMe SSD and a semi-permanent microSD card.
I love my 16" MBP but wasn't blown away by the upgrade. Touchbar is meh and mostly in my way. Speakers are a big win. Keyboard is a tossup but at least I avoided the butterfly era. Everything else is just noticeably better but not a "wow" better. My biggest annoyance is fan noise when attached to a monitor. Running at native panel resolution seems to help.
I LOVE my 13" 2015 MBP and only stopped using it because of keyboard errors. With that said, I believe the new Macbook Air and Macbook Pro have the Magic Keyboard which I think is essentially the same as the 2015 Macbook Pro keyboard and more up-to-date (though maybe not upgradeable).
I recently bought a Zephyrus G14 which I think is one of the closer equivalents to a 13" MBP for Windows with a powerful GPU.
Generally this is surprising because the user bought the "Air" model instead of his usual "pro" model which is much more expensive. The impressive part here is that the air outperforms last years pro (according to the author) which is 3x the price.
this is what people meant prior to the m1 coming out with "macs are a horrible deal"
they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.
Those ARM Chromebooks are/were the slowest computers on the market. There is nothing with an ARM CPU that "flies" except the new Macs. Using the same benchmark (Geekbench 5) the M1 has a single-core score of ~1700 and contemporaneous ARM competitors like the Lenovo Yoga 5C and the Surface Pro X get 700-750. The other ARM CPUs have equivalent performance to bottom-of-the-line mobile Intel processors from 2012. Apple M1 has the equivalent of Intel processors from some point in the future.
I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc
m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market
It's clear that you don't have enough experience with computers other than that one to support the statements you are making. I'm glad it is adequate for your purposes but to say that "it flies" is absurd. The Chromebook Duet scores 27 in the javascript benchmark Speedometer 2, while the MacBook Air scores 234. It is nine times faster. Looking at the single-thread geekbench 5 score, the Duet gets a score of 263, about half the performance of the dual-core Pentium CPU from 2008, a part which AnandTech once reviewed as part of a joke article. There's a supportable argument that the Chromebook Duet is the slowest laptop on the market today, without exception.
> they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market
Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.
I have tried arm computers such as raspberry pi and they are slow. The linux arm projects seem to target just the cheapest price, m1 seems more like bang for buck. I hope linux hardware develops towards that.
the duet, the laptop I actually use is $300 which apple does not have a competing product with, its fair to claim in my head that even now its 3x more than what I am paying.
as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels
some older intel chips are good and faithful (apple wasnt the ones passing the savings on to you like HP) they prefered to both give you outdated intel chips but also ask you $3500 for the honor
Not always. I'm somewhat disappointed with my 2020 16" MBP that I bought after owning a 2015 MBP for 5 years. This one is faster for sure, but also noisier, gets hot often for no good reason (even with the lid closed for the whole day!), takes 7-8 seconds to wake my Eizo monitor, while the previous one would take only a second to do the same.
To be honest and quite unexpectedly the 16" MBP is not the best Mac I ever owned, despite the hype. The display is amazing, the speakers are incredible for a laptop, I'm also glad the T arrow keys are back, but everything else is a disappointment.
Strange, I did exactly the same switch recently and consider the 16" MBP a significant upgrade from my old machine. It even stays completely silent most of the day while the old one would constantly spin the fans.
It is a an upgrade in some ways, no doubt. When Apple said the 16" MBP has the best ever laptop display they were right - it's hard to go back to the previous models after this one.
Something just feels a bit wrong about this machine. Running trivial Swift code in Playground can get it so hot that it becomes uncomfortable to rest it on the lap for example.
Do I need a processor that powerful? I'm not so sure if the price is the unsettling fan noise and being practically constantly warm. And no, there's no 3rd party software that could cause it, it's all Apple apps.
I went from a 2017 MBP 15" to a 16" 2019 MBP late last year and the keyboard is clearly a big selling point but lets not forget how much better the audio is either. It's under played in most reviews but it's a night and day difference. I feel like I'm in a home theater every time I use it.
Ya, but before improvements were much more noticeable, and now they are much more incremental. They might be nice to have if you even notice them, but they don't really change the experience that much. And that isn't really surprising, when a technology is immature it will grow quickly, and when it matures, it will grow much more slowly.
The recent MacBook Pro's are IMO not superior to the experience of using the first Retina MBP's. I'd rather have that model of MBP's, only with performance increases and without the Touch Bar.
This is the predictable HN response I envisioned after reading the title.
You'd start to have a point if they were only talking about raw performance. But they aren't.
Also, raw performance alone doesn't make things better. My Windows PC almost has the best parts on the market yet things don't always feel faster. The UI even feels slower than my previous one. It's my latest PC, but it's not the best computer I've owned.
I don't know what your experience buying computers has been, but my 2012 MBA was the best I'd ever owned. The 2015 MBP was worse, the 2018 MBP I owned was worse than that. The Thinkpad X1 carbon I bought after that was the best I've ever owned, and every time I see my wife struggling with her Macbook I'm glad I finally ditched that rubbish.
Sorry I wrote MBA, I meant MBP - it had the terrible keyboard, I also went for a low end CPU and it really felt worse than my 2011 where I max'd out the CPU.
> They get better every year, why is this still surprising?
If my pre-butterfly keys MacBook stopped working some time between 2015 and 2019, and I had to get a replacement, I wouldn't consider the MacBooks produced during that era to be "better".
Uh the dell xps 13 I bought in 2016 definitely refutes this experience. That machines touchpad singularly ruined the experience. It’d ghost swipe in strange ways. It was very user hostile. Also there’s the long stagnation of performance during the previous decade.
But generally I agree with you. I just think it’s important to remember it’s not all been a monotonic function of good.
also people have been absolutely IGNORING the massive speed gains and battery life of say an ARM chromebook or surface pro X
apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...
apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...
Those sneaky bastards – making their products perform better by introducing new features*! Whatever next?
EDIT: Or assuming you like to watch media on a range of devices at home, and share your media with your family and friends, maybe the ability to transcode h264 or h265 content also matters to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK3xVXAd6_o
TL;DW: Plex Transcoder running through Rosetta2 doesn't even break a sweat.
A chromebook is a toy and a surface pro X is a terrible computer. Apple wasn't the first to transition to ARM, but they were the first to do it right. If they added things to the hardware to enable this, so what?
they ended up shipping the m1 macs running essentially SafariOS so... I guess they wanted to join the ranks of "toys" people can actually use to have all their modern apps run well on (webapps)
idk if you've noticed the transitions going basically as well as it went for other brands minus being able to... point to higher geekbench scores when emulating x64???
never did I think I'd see the day when apple is trying its best to rush literally chromeos but based on bsd out the door at the last second because catalyst barely runs any apps in a useful way
idk if you are at all familiar with arm computers but they have been out for a while, mainly running things like ChromeOS or for microsoft EdgeOS or "Windows 10 S"
the strategy revolves around using web performance on arm to overshadown the general lack of optimized arm apps. as apples release of the M1 has shown, no apps are really optimized yet even 1 month after launch for an APPLE product...
thats where the SafariOS explanations makes more sense, they essentially just have safari, and a similar but equally broken app store ported from the iPad but with most devs chosing to opt out of supporting safariOS... weird how they mocked google and then pulled a google
Except the M1 Macs with Big Sur ship with Rosetta2, which mitigates a _lot_ of the issues associated with the architectural transition. Most consumers will not notice a difference.
You can't just ignore that and then make the disingenuous claim that it's anything like the Windows ARM situation, especially given the fact that Apple is throwing their entire weight behind the transition which will (eventually) result in most major applications being natively compatible. I'd be curious if anyone thinks that this transition is going to fail somehow
Note that macOS does NOT ship with Rosetta 2. You have to install it afterwards. What's worse, upgrading macOS removes it, so you have to install it after each upgrade (same as with Command Line Tools)
No, the version of macOS on M1 Macs is the exact same version as on Intel Macs. They don't run absolutely every piece of software that Intel Macs do, but it's pretty damn close. It's certainly not even in the same category as something like ChromeOS and ARM Windows.
It sounds like you may be pre-judging the M1 Macs based on your past experiences with ARM desktops/laptops. I strongly suggest that you put those experiences aside when looking at these, because Apple has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure that the experience is as close to the previous iteration as possible, with the benefit of the extra performance and battery life the M1 gives. It's really nothing whatsoever like the comparison between Intel and ARM Windows, or Windows and ChromeOS.
Come on, you can run a linux distribution on a non-apple hardware and not even worry if any of those software will run on it. Plus any of the 40 other top TIOBE tools.
I've used a Linux laptop before and it was always so painful to get basic things working, like it being able to suspend when you close the lid. Packaging is usually better, if you don't want any nice GUI programs (like iaWriter) or games
Linux laptops are massively YMMV. Some work almost perfectly out of the box while others are plagued with quirks that never seem to get fixed.
Point in case I have a circa 2008 Dell workstation laptop that runs Linux pretty well, except for some reason its volume buttons (which, as far as I can tell, send standard key codes) only work as expected under some distros running some desktop environments. It's oddly spotty for such a basic function, and last I checked there was no surefire fix for it, just an endless list of "try this".
I think we really need a break from people submitting more M1 Mac unboxing articles, unless there's significant original technical content. This is turning into fanboyism.
The MacBook’s past few years in the wilderness gave a lot of Mac users some real uncertainty about the future of their preferred platform. To see not just a return to form but an epochal step forward is something of a unique moment - there’s both relief and excitement.
Sure, but it's also a device that makes up less than .1% of the desktop market share. For most HN users, reading about the M1 Mac is like peoplewatching from your office window: it's a cool upgrade for consumers, but ARM is such a major departure from the rest of the industry that it verges on disinteresting. Hell, reviews of the Surface Pro X told much the story: the device was fast on native software, but it's idiosyncrasies were what killed it in the end. Most reviewers gave it a 6 or 7 and then tossed it back on the shelf, where it probably still is today. The M1 had another year in development, and now a slightly larger portion of the desktop market share can use it as a daily driver. The people who amplify those voices are not doing anyone any favors, especially if we're trying to keep an objectively interesting news site well-stocked.
chrome first (safari)
play store apps (catalyst for ios apps)
linux apps (unix apps homebrew)
a lot of folks arent familiar with how identical these software stacks have become over the last few years. especially with apples quality control dropping so steeply to allowing Catalyst apps to be something they mention on stage despite their sorry state as somehow more broken than android apps on chromeos
The excitement about the M1 computers is not about the software, but about the new CPU design, which is faster than any other laptop processor by most measures I've seen. Chromebooks have no equivalent.
Hardware is most impressive indeed, but software as well, in particular Rosetta 2, the translation works well. Also the hypervisor works well, Parallels desktop flies with arm versions of Ubuntu and Windows.
This article was somewhat substantiative from a technical (hacker) dev setup point of view, but also a little scanty. Homebrew, Go, and Parallels use on Apple Silicon have all been brought up before.
I do agree that there's enough articles covering the same review feedback. The M1 machines seem to be universally lauded, there's plenty of buzz out there, I'm not sure what the downside is there besides certain software not being able to run on them yet. Personally I'm willing to wait a year to see what the second gen machines will look like, but that's based on my own preferences and curiosity.
For me, getting strong signal on the consumer sentiment of new Apple products helps me make trading decisions and is super useful. I welcome this content, fanboy or not. How are these submissions impacting you negatively?
beyond ridiculous conspiracy, apple just took the ARM pill finally and release a "real os" running on arm and every closeted anti-ipad and anti-chromeos user finally breathed a sigh of relief that "real computers" can be good again, finally
Since getting my M1, I can now barely tolerate using my 2019 high-spec'ed iMac. Nearly all interactions with the UI appear to be instantaneous. I can't describe what a positive experience that is. It's cognitively very rewarding to use.
I also picked up the M1 Macbook Air, and I'm shocked at how well it performs without a fan. I had an Intel 13-inch Macbook Pro before this, and simply running, for example, a high-viewer Twitch stream with chat open in the background would heat the chassis to ridiculous levels, and blast the fan constantly. On my M1, not only is there no fan, but the unit is completely cool to the touch with all of the same applications running. I'm impressed to say the least.
I was issued the 16" last gen Intel MacBook pro at last job (new job I'm back on whatever I want) and it was a seriously underwhelming experience for 3K's worth of hardware, screen was good, touchpad was sublime -everything else was crap.
Battery life was mediocre (worse still if you actually use it), it got ridiculously hot under load, the fans where really loud and pitched at a frequency it was hard to ignore - I'd have put it down to a bad unit but everyone else with the same model had the same issues.
It was fine but for double good thinkpad money it wasn't fine enough.
I was glad to hand it back, new place doesn't care what I run so I'm back on Fedora on a fast desktop and I'm happy again, I still have a work issued macbook pro but it sits on a shelf behind me until I need to test something.
The most mind-blowing part of the 16-inch MacBook Pros are really the speakers, which are really nice for laptop speakers. However, that's also quite sad that it's the highlight.
Been using MacBooks since 2014 for hobby development/work
I bought a new macbook pro m1 in December. Returned 2 days later after realizing that it only supports one external monitor and even found articles stating that ultra wide monitors were not supported on initial release. "Just use display link adaptor?" No thanks I don't want a 150$ adaptor that may or may not work with my current setup. Even with display link I've heard of displays flickering on initial startup or not starting at all in clamshell.
People saying the MacBook pro 16" might solve the issue but tbh I think this is apples way of pigeonholing users to either their desktop version or their laptop.
> People saying the MacBook pro 16" might solve the issue but tbh I think this is apples way of pigeonholing users to either their desktop version or their laptop.
This is their first generation M1 and they haven't rolled it out across their entire line (which they have said they intend to do). Today marks the second month since they were released (10 Nov 2020). They haven't yet released something in the same class as the MacBook Pro 16", which it sounds like you'd prefer. Give it a year before assuming malicious intent.
surely this is the case for any new computer anyone buys technically speaking. If you go out now and buy a new computer it replaces one less good and at that point in time is the best computer you have ever owned...
This has not been true in the past - Apple hit a peak in the early 2010s. It then had ups and downs - Retina was a good step, but the CPU bumps have been lame, the Touchbar has been an active step backwards, the port situation has got progressively worse and the keyboard have been terrible. Some models like the Air just got no progression for years on end.
Life in the Apple eco-system isn't like life in the normal computer eco-system, there's very little competition once you're committed to the OS.
Yeah, right - if you choose to ignore the following:
You can't upgrade the RAM, you can't upgrade the SSD, it doesn't have replaceable battery and you are forced to run a crippled OS on it (macOS Big Sur deliberately cripples VPN and firewall on it so that select Apple softwares can bypass them, allowing Apple better access and control over your data and softwares).
(And if you don't care about any of the above, then sure, give in.)
I'd rather have more closely integrated hardware for a laptop. It's more efficient and leads to a smaller, more powerful device.
I have a powerful desktop that I pay for incremental upgrades and it works great. I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, but have been before, and either way my goal is to have high quality ultrabook that serves as thin client to desktop/the cloud.
Everyone has a different workflow that works for them, but I'm fortunate enough that upgrading an ultrabook every few years isn't a big deal.
Spot on. With desktops "loose fitting" software isn't as much of an issue, because there one has an appreciable margin in computing muscle and no concern for things like power efficiency, but with laptops lack of integration degrades the resulting product quite a lot. Software alone can be what makes a laptop good or bad.
For someone seeking "the best of both worlds" in terms of integration, power efficiency, and upgradability/overall flexibility, that can sometimes be found in 2-3 generation old (where all of the hardware is solidly supported) high-end business laptops running some flavor of Linux, but knowing which models of laptop are the "good ones" as well as setting up Linux to run optimally on them takes a level of involvement and energy that not everybody is up for.
Not just "Little Snitch", all Firewalls that had their own kernel extensions. With macOS Big Sur, Apple started insisting that thry have built specific API's for firewall softwares, and every firewall app had to use only that, and their custom kernel extensions won't be allowed. But Apple's API are ofcourse designed to allow it bypass their whitelisted softwares.
It bypasses firewalls, or network blockers using the new APIs...not sure how the vpn thing got started because that was never part of the original claims.
As an owner of a 2015 Macbook Pro, I'm pretty okay with that. Haven't upgraded anything the past 6 years.
Honestly I'd like an SSD and RAM upgrade but it's not that big of a deal. It costs money, too, and there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't improve with it like the CPU and battery which are key. And secondarily, any improvements to formfactor, screen, webcam, keyboard etc, although that's not as significant nowadays.
I'd rather just sell it for a few hundred bucks now that I'm 6y in, and get a replacement machine with twice the battery and a much better CPU. I think even without resale value $1200 or so machine cost me like $16 a month and I think I use it about 300 hours a month, or about 5 cent per hour. It's quite negligible part of my hourly/monthly wage. With resale value it's probably even 25-30% less, maybe 3.5 cents per hour.
If I were to have spent money on upgrades, it'd be a bit cheaper than a full replacement - resale value, but at best it'd get me to 2 or 2.5 cents per hour. But I'd miss out on improved CPU, battery etc.
Not being able to upgrade parts isn't that big of a deal to me. Back in the day it was, as within 2-3 years I felt I saw noticeable better experiences on the market with new parts. But today I'm quite fine purchasing an experience and having it last the next 5-6 years, before I upgrade. At which point I want a full upgrade, rather than only a few parts.
I can think of exactly one time in my life I have upgraded anything on a laptop, and that was probably more than a decade ago. Back when they still came with 4200rpm 2.5" hard drives, and I put a newer drive in a then 5 year old Dell because I needed it to last another few years.
I did have a battery go bad in my MacBook Pro about 8 year ago, and it was replaced by Apple free of charge even though it was WAY out of warranty and I didn't have Applecare. Service like that alone is enough to keep me as a customer.
Most of the rest of the time by the time I am ready to start upgrading components, I am just wanting a newer, faster machine in general. I am not saying these things are not important - the are obviously important _to you_. But Apple has figured, correctly in my opinion, they are are not important to a _lot_ of people, or at the very least are not deal breakers. And more often than not I find myself in the latter camp.
yeah but Apple downsides are particularly infuriating cus they're not the result of technical limitations.. The downsides are intentional on Apples part. They didnt try to engineer the most useful computer, they intentionally crippled various things in their OS for shady business reasons.
Even if the intended meaning is that it does (in the title) say "best" not favourite, which is ultimately, if not exactly, a reasonably quantitative question.
I’m pretty sure normally when people express “____ is the best _____ I’ve ever owned”, they’re implicitly saying it’s the best “for my needs and preferences”. Absent brain trauma or serious delusion, I would assume the person speaking is better able to quantify that than any outside observer.
What about paying the OEM markup for the RAM they install? god knows if I paid Lenovo for maxing out the RAM specs instead of just pay it from newegg at the like I'd be in the poor house!
My maxed out 2015 13" Macbook Pro runs as strong as ever. I paid more up front and have had no regrets since, and no need to upgrade any of the internals.
I mostly keep it plugged in and have a charger for each room in the apartment.
I've replaced the battery in a 2013 Macbook pro. It is very similar to the 2015. If I don't buy a newer laptop when the time comes, I'll gladly pay the Apple store to replace the battery for me.
I mean, you're not wrong, but all of the above apply to normal intel macbooks as well, so I seriously doubt it's going to scare off any typical apple buyers.
I only use Apple for my work laptop and phone since I'm already being spied on and they will upgrade me when I need it. It's perfect for that case. At home I've got an xps15 with linux and a phone with LineageOS. Would never apple for personal stuff.
Using a computer and extending a computer are two different problems. If I'm test driving a car, I'm not judging it for how serviceable the tires are. However, I'd factor that in for a purchase.
How would you like it if you had to spend an arm and leg to repair a car that wasn't built to be repaired? Soldered RAM or SSD means on macbooks mean just that for a computer too.
My wife has a 2012 MBP, which is usable because I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and added an SSD.
I had limited experience and use of macOS, but didn't like it much.
I bought the Air last month under duress, because I was going to a place that's 10°C warmer than my home, and my laptop's GPU passes the idle quiet threshold. I have tinnitus, so the laptop fan noise becomes unbearable.
I'm enjoying using the Mac, I mainly develop in Rust, so the experience has been mostly good. I've had a few hard crashes of other software that restarted the machine, that's fine though.
I still mainly remote into my beefy Windows desktop in the other room, but I haven't needed to turn on my work laptop as Microsoft also updated Office to work on Arm64.
I didn't know about Parallels, I'll try it out, as sometimes I can't remote into my desktop conveniently.
> My wife has a 2012 MBP, which is usable because I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and added an SSD.
More or less same story with my previous Mid 2009 13'' MBP. The only reason why it has survived this long is because I've been able to add RAM, replace an SSD, replace the battery twice and replace a faulty touchpad too. Sadly this is no longer possible and modern Apple laptops are increasingly harder to repair.
Yea, Apple has great build quality. I have a 2013 HP Envy 17 that's also survived because of the ability to replace (keyboard, battery 2x, SSD). Its chassis has unfortunately started collapsing, but I want to fix it and donate it to a relative.
I hope these newer Macs that have everything soldered together, at least last 4-5 years. I'm going to try get a Mac as my next work device, maybe 2 years from now, so my wife can use my current one in future.
I have bought an M1, and so far I am slightly disappointed. Intel macbook pro was quite fine, too. Firefox is still occasionally slow. No significant improvements in compilation speed (well, homebrew still relies on Rosetta 2). Instant wakeup is cool, but not a life-changing improvement. Etc.
For some reason, the link doesn't work for me (on mobile, domain not found).
My own take, owning one, and only mentioning things I've never or rarely seen mentioned:
- unibody with no openings for ventilation is kind of mindblowing for a machine that can build Firefox in 20 minutes and 30 seconds. Which also means it won't accumulate dust inside, assuming the keyboard is hermetic.
- it actually feels pretty heavy for its size.
- the edges are very sharp. Too sharp. Not cutting sharp, but uncomfortably sharp.
- it's cold to the touch (except after using the cpu for a while).
- leaving it unplugged and sleeping (lid closed) consumes more battery than on a MBP late 2013.
Would always be nice, for sure, but for Deep Learning I use a big cheap box with loads of RAM and the 16GB in my M1 MBP with the 1TB SSD seems plenty good so far. I don't have use cases yet where I notice a problem (other than yeah, overhead of having to do DL jobs on a different machine).
What causes you to hit the limits? I don't do any video editing, so I could see that being a slowdown for that use case.
Being able to locally run the integration tests for my work on my 32GB thinkpad has been a godsend during the 'rona times. If I only had 16 (or even 24) I'd have to carefully consider whether I should close Firefox to run them.
These tests spin up a bunch of containers and run certain components with instrumented runtimes that take up gobs of RAM, so having a fat laptop is very useful.
I'd like to see how much gaming Apple Silicon can support. So I'm very curious to see what next year's M1X/M2 machines will bring. Of course, we're also at the dawn of widespread cloud gaming so perhaps this consideration will also be moot.
I have the MacBook Air 2018 (13-inch, 1.6 GHz i5, 16 GB memory) and it gets pretty slow for my dev side-projects, the battery is good but definitely not as good as my iPad pro (but much better than my macbook pro), and my keyboard has been acting, I got a replacement, and now it's acting again... Without the keyboard issue, and the slowness, it'd really be perfect.
You're talking about software here. You'd have the same experience on almost any macbook. In fact, for the things you're describing you'd probably have a better experience with a non M1 machine. There's only one line that is related to the actual M1 MacBook Air hardware.
Have you tried other machines as well, such as a ThinkPad? Have you ever used Linux?
Bought one for my kid, been testing it out and it’s so good that I’m tempted to buy one myself - much better than any of the recent mbpro’s I’ve had. Super responsive while staying cool on the lap, completely silent and all day battery life.
Can’t wait for mbpros with miniled display and more arm cores later this year.
Regardless of what computer that is, having what you think it is the best computer you ever had is such a great sensation, at least for me that I spend at lease 9 hours a day in front of it.
In my case it's a Dell XPS, but it doesn't matter.
I just built my first PC about a month ago and am still in that phase. Went from a 2013 laptop with integrated GPU to having a much nicer discrete GPU and the difference still blows me away on the daily :)
The laptops only support 1 external monitor unless you do some hacky stuff, they only have two ports, and still have mediocre webcams, and you’re forced to use Big Sur which still needs a bit of work. Also while the vast majority of software runs great on the M1, there are a few very niche things that still don’t.
But I wouldn’t call these “issues”, as anyone who reads the spec sheet can know them before purchase.
That’s it, really. These computers are astonishingly good.
It's all about the battery life. It had become miserable lately. I wasn't going to upgrade for any gimmicks but 2X battery life (or thereabouts) is a game changer
Copied from a different comment of mine: £999 is a lot of PC. The processor in the M1 air is about 20% faster than the one in my laptop (£550 IIRC), but to spec an M1 out with the same amount of storage and RAM brings it to £1999.
I should stress that my now slightly ageing laptop is much thicker than an Air, but it's also used to play modern games so that balances out.
Personally, for the price of an Air I could actually use I'd just get something cheap and a big PC setup.
It sounds like the things you care about are raw performance per £, and other factors are not important.
If that’s what you are looking for then the Air is not for you, but it doesn’t mean it’s expensive. It just means you don’t need the things it offers for the money.
If you do care about battery life, then the M1 Air is cheaper than the only comparable alternative - the M1 MacBook Pro.
Actually not too bad - not good, but good enough for it to last long enough to write up lab data for 5 hours or so which is all I needed it to do. It's pretty diabolical in Linux, but I think that's partly my fault because I've not bothered to fettle with the power (not an unreasonable requirement given that the rest of the distro has been fiddled with)
"Delusion" may be too strong a word here, but "ignorance" is almost certainly not.
Though to be sure, "PC" means "personal computer" and for this individual it might be the exact best experience they could have running Windows. It just isn't for a great deal of other people because they value different things.
I value GPU power, installing Steam, Battle.net (with maxed out settings), ~15" screens and a few other things that make my HP Omen 15 the best Windows laptop I've ever owned. And I value selecting and assembling my own components, performance value, tricked out RGB lighting and large high resolution external monitors, so my custom desktop is the best Windows desktop I've ever owned.
But I certainly don't get the mobility or battery life of an M1 Macbook. So if you value those things highly enough, you may get a better Windows PC experience on one.
Huh? Windows with WSL is such a bad experience that running Windows apps on Mac OS is far superior to me, even with Wine. I also think it's the best Linux machine. It's not very hard to do.
Can we stop with the ridiculous condescension ("delusional") towards opinions we disagree with and make no effort to interpret charitably?
When you say it is "the best Linux machine" with a straight face, I am sure it is hard not to invite such condescension! The M1 can barely run Linux on it, if at all.
Just a guess on my part, but he may have meant "unix" and is using "Linux" incorrectly. Mac OS is a unix system. Linux has become so common that I have heard many people say Linux when they mean the more general term unix. Let's assume the best instead of the worst.
£999 is a lot of PC. The processor in the M1 air is about 20% faster than the one in my laptop (£550 IIRC), but to spec an M1 out with the same amount of storage and RAM brings it to £1999.
Running Windows in a VM has long been more satisfactory in certain ways than running it on real hardware (for example, applying updates in a VM takes seconds instead of hours because the VM doesn't drop your block caches when it reboots). I can see why the author could be pleased with the outcome.
New computer is better than old computer. Shocking.
The M1 is a good chip. It is great that we have ARM cores that can go toe-to-toe with Zen 3. It is hardly a revolution and it would not be trivial to scale it to a workstation or server design.
It is telling to see someone acting like the competition is still Intel. Intel has been playing catchup since Q1 of 2017. Their server parts in particular are woefully outdated.
Toe to toe? It starches every Ryzen chip in single core performance, and every mobile Ryzen under 45 watts TDP in multicore despite only having 4 performance cores and 15 Watts TDP.
You are correct only about Ryzens based on the old Zen 2.
Any new Ryzen 5xxx based on Zen 3 is faster in single-thread than the best Apple M1.
In general-purpose benchmarks, like Geekbench 5, the maximum Apple M1 score is 1752, while Ryzen 5xxx score between 1800 and 1876.
In computational benchmarks, where the IPC is limited by some execution resources reaching 100% utilization, so the higher average IPC of Apple M1 does matter much less, Apple M1 is even slower compared to Ryzens. For example Ryzen 7 5800X is 22% faster than Apple M1 in gmpbench (the benchmark was run for both CPUs after tuning specific to Apple M1 and tuning specific to Zen 3 were added to libgmp, so it is a comparison of apples with apples).
The 5800x is a 105 watt part(!!!), still gets starched by the M1 in single core, and is only about 40% faster in multicore despite using all that power to drive double the performance core count.
But by all means, go off to cherry pick more niche benchmarks...
I did not cherry pick any benchmarks, I have picked the only 2 benchmarks that have been published for both Apple M1 and for Zen 3, and that were also freely available, so I could also run them on my own computer, to verify that the published benchmark results are correct.
They are not niche benchmarks. Geekbench 5 covers many common application domains and its only flaw is that the GB5 tests are very short so they finish before the CPU overheats and slows down, so this benchmark is much more favorable for Apple M1 than for a desktop CPU.
Even if GB5 is advantageous for M1, it still shows that Zen 3 is faster.
gmpbench tests a fundamental feature of any CPU, its ability to compute operations with large numbers. That may not matter for you but it is definitely one of the important criteria for measuring the single-thread speed of a processor, so when Apple M1 scores 6422 and a Ryzen 7 5800X (not the fastest Ryzen) scores 7816, there is no doubt about which starches which.
Moreover, the multi-thread results that I have seen for Geekbench 5, which very strongly favors Apple M1 (because in a real application M1 would overheat soon and it would slow down) show a 60% higher speed for 5800X, not of 40%, e.g. 12339 for 5800X vs. 7716 for Apple M1.
If you want to live with the illusion that Apple M1 is faster in single-thread execution than Zen 3, even if all the real numbers from benchmark results contradict you, that is your privilege.
The 3990X is the most powerful desktop part on the market. It gets merely a 1.4x speedup over the 5950X despite having four times the core count. (Granted, the 5950X core is somewhat better).
Geekbench isn't terribly useful at the best of times. It's particularly bad when comparing across architectures and operating systems. And, as should be clear, its multithreaded test does not scale linearly with core count. You should never take the ratio between two scores to mean the ratio between performance, especially when comparing multithreaded scores with different core counts.
>Toe to toe? It starches every Ryzen chip in single core performance
It most certainly does not. It trades blows, winning on some benchmarks and losing others. It seems a bit ahead on floating-point workloads and a bit behind on integer workloads.
It does simply outperform every Intel design. That's great, but not enough to make it the fastest core in the world. It, to no one's surprise, falls behind the parts with higher core counts.
Caveats:
1. These benchmarks are preliminary. We are, by necessity, comparing across operating systems and architectures.
2. Comparing single-threaded performance between a SMT system and one without SMT is a little misleading, since a non-SMT core is worse than an SMT core even if the single-threaded performance is similar.
3. I have no clue how to handle the big.LITTLE architecture. I've never used a machine with heterogeneous cores and have never written any software for it. It is certainly a benefit to efficiency. It probably improves performance on highly-threaded workloads, but I am not sure.
I find myself annoyed by these discussions. I love new hardware! I find this chip very impressive! It is the best chip in the world in performance-per-watt! It is clearly the best mobile chip on the market! It has a lot of interesting accelerators! Please stop forcing me to be the naysayer.
Apple M1 is definitely faster than any other CPU whose power consumption is reduced at the same value.
At identical power consumptions, an Apple M1 core is faster by about 30% to 40% than an Intel Tiger Lake or an AMD Zen 3.
All older Intel/AMD CPUs are even much slower.
Nevertheless, the power consumptions of Intel and AMD CPUs can be raised to much higher levels and above 20 W per core, which is probably a little more than 3 times what an Apple M1 core consumes, they match the Apple M1 performance and at a higher power (i.e. in the current desktop Zen 3 and in the soon to be introduced Intel Rocket Lake and Intel Tiger Lake H) they surpass the speed of Apple M1.
So in single-thread execution, AMD Zen 3 is already faster and the Intel CPUs that are expected for end of March will also be faster, but only at much higher power consumptions (3 to 4 times more per core in single-thread).
Nonetheless, in desktops and large laptops those power consumptions do not matter.
As I said, toe to toe. The M1 and the 5950X are both clearly ahead of the Intel parts and they trade first and second place between them. On the aggregate graph (the last one on the page), you can see that the 5950x is ahead on integer workloads while the M1 is ahead on floating point. You will notice this is exactly what I said.
>using up to seven times more power.
Power efficiency is where the M1 definitely wins. It is among the best on the planet for single-threaded performance and definitely the best for efficiency.
Your 7x figure, however, is not accurate. You are comparing TDP. That is the wrong number. TDP is calculated differently by each manufacturer. It relates to how big a CPU cooler you will need to ensure the CPU never throttles to avoid overheating, not to how long your battery will last.
Take a look at the following, in particular the big black-and-green-and-red charts in the middle of the page:
(Those are desktop parts. I'd obviously like to compare mobile ones, but I am not familiar with AMD's mobile lineup and there are no Zen 3 mobile parts. They'll still help make my point.)
Note that the power draw at idle (where the CPU will spend most of its time) is 10-20 watts for all these CPUs. This would be lower for mobile Ryzen parts, of course. This is the big advantage of the M1: with its big.LITTLE architecture, it will be able to shut down the big cores entirely and use vastly less power than any x86 part at idle.
Note that the power draw at 100% usage is higher than the stated TDP. The CPU can draw more power than it says on the box if the system detects it has adequate thermal headroom. It will also draw less power, even at 100% usage, if it starts getting too hot or if the user chooses to lower the TDP.
Note that the power consumption varies with the number of cores that are active, but that this relationship is nothing close to linear. A CPU can hit its peak power at a small fraction of maximum load, but performance will continue to scale all the way to maximum load. The big chips are more efficient than the small ones when both are fully loaded.
You can't just say "a chip with N times the TDP draws N times more power". The two parts will draw different amounts of power and have different efficiency tradeoffs depending on how they are used.
What, then, is the correct metric? I don't know of a single number that tells the whole story. I can tell you that the M1 is efficient both at idle and under load. I will make no effort to quantify how efficient it is other than to say TDP is irrelevant.
Yep, a machine owned by the user. They're free to install whatever software they want on it, including the OS. Now, it happens that Linux and other free OSes don't support the hardware yet, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they can be ported.
But our devs already work on top-of-the-line hardware. If anything, this will bridge the gap for users if they can expect the same performance out of a $1k MacBook that you'd previously expect out of a $3k MacBook.
In my experience, most of them don't. I would be surprised if even 10% of web devs do real performance testing on other hardware (i.e. with actual measurements).
It's not limited to Google either. Try ordering food on a web app on your phone, etc.
For example I just loaded doordash.com in Chrome's mobile view, and it made 110 requests and consists of 7.7 MB of resources. It took 1.12 secs to load on a core i7 desktop connected to a wired network. How long do you think it will take on a phone with a slower CPU over a wireless network? For a web page that shows pictures of food.
FWIW I worked at Google for over a decade, and this was a problem that got worse over the entire decade. People talked about making the network slow to fix this systemic problem, but it never happened (at least while I was there). You also have to test on different networks, although admittedly the M1 doesn't make your network faster so that problem won't be exacerbated.
I still stand by the original statement; the M1 will make the web slower, assuming it's adopted by a bigger fraction of web devs than consumers (which seems very likely).
...and is probably one of the least libre* computer I've seen in the 21th century, too.
Before that, Linux can't run on MacBooks, and after a few years of development it's just barely working, now this thing.
This is never going to be Desktop Linux compatible. Even Linus claimed he would like to but the effort is tremendous.
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I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux.. I have fairly fond memories of the 11" Macbook Air (I think 4,1) that I used about a decade ago (but moved away from because it took Apple too long to fix the screen - and by the time they did, I'd moved on to better laptops, and Apple had moved on to make Linux less convenient).
Apple may run Linux in their cloud, but their laptops don't ;(
I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help.
Linus
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Maybe you can run just some more productivity apps by sacrificing your freedom to be kept captive by Apple. But this also means your machine isn't entirely yours.
*: used liberal here. I don't know what's the exactly word to use but it turns out there are people so sensitive to politics and thought the otherwise.
I do. I have a Yoga 530. While the motherboard is highly integrated I can at least replace my own RAM, my own NVME drive and my own OS. You can't do all these with a MacBook.
You can argue that the NVME drive is somewhat able to upgrade, but even that there will be some cautions ahead.
Ignoring that it's completely up to apple whether this exists in a years time, reverse engineering an entire SOC is really fucking hard. ARM isn't like x86, you basically can't assume anything. The GPU may be completely off limits for years, for example, unless they somehow (this isn't impossible) make a blob out of Apple's actual drivers.
Except the interface which has been designed for touch interfaces without having any touch capability on the Mac, for the sake of "design unity" bullshit. You can't have M1 without macOS Big Sur.
Not only on macOS, but generally the entire web is mobile-first and desktop-last philosophy.
I like Big Sur. Everything works just as well with the mouse as before. They made many quality of life improvements to the touch bar, and didn't mess with the other things.
No, it’s a rant with little to no factual support and an entire lack of perspective.
Again, there is no evidence any Big Sur UI changes were to support touch screens. Bigger button areas make computers easier to use, just as bigger tap areas make mobile devices easier to use.
But with all that said... I kind of like articles like these. I enjoy seeing people happy with good tech because I like good tech. It pleases me that there are people getting this much enjoyment out of innovative and (I'll admit it) quite impressive hardware. So rock on, Apple fans. But when there's a Linux computer that is even a bit better, I hope you can tolerate me shouting from the rooftops, because you bet I will be!