531–540 of 1001 posts
To be honest I'm a bit skeptical about performance here.
I'm going to assume the Air is under clocked to prevent over heating.
Anyway, considering I've had my mac mini for about 8 years, I jumped at buying this. Looking forward to getting some 4k !
I'm very curious to see some real benchmarks. I have no doubt that they've achieved state of the art efficiency using 5nm, but I have a harder time believing that they can outperform the highest end of AMD and Intel's mobile offerings by so much (especially without active cooling). Their completely unit-less graph axes are really something...
Apple's A series chips have been decimating the competition in phones for years now, what makes you think they can't do the same in this space?
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I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
I got one of the MBP with the touchbar this year after holding out for many years (changed jobs so had to change laptop). Man it is so much hard to do the volume changes, and there has so far for me been zero benefit.
It's possible to set the default touch bar display to only ever show the expanded control strip (System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard > Touch Bar shows: Expanded Control Strip). In that mode you tap volume up and down instead of using a volume slider.
Again, I know you're looking for physical keys (aren't we all) but it's better than nothing.
I've been using the MacBook Pro 16 (with a physical esc key plus a touch bar) and I think it's a pretty good compromise between me who wants physical keys and apple who wants to push the touch bar.
The other thing that kept happening to me: I would accidentally tap the brightness button when reaching for ESC. For that, you can "Customize Control Strip..." and remove individual buttons, so that there's a big gap on the touch bar near the ESC key so that stray taps near ESC don't change the brightness.
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I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
I got one of the MBP with the touchbar this year after holding out for many years (changed jobs so had to change laptop). Man it is so much hard to do the volume changes, and there has so far for me been zero benefit.
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If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro. https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
Pro has one extra GPU core as well.
Completely unconfirmed speculation incoming: There's a solid chance that the logic board is exactly the same on all of the Macs announced today and the only difference is the cooling solution. If you play around with the Apple Store configurator, the specs are all suspiciously similar between every new Mac. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch https://w…
So I guess Windows won't run on M1, so none of my Windows software/Steam games will work either. Will software developers start dropping support for Mac now that they'd need to maintain an ARM version as well? It's not clear how long Apple will support emulation with Rosetta before cutting it off. What's the Linux landscape look like for this chip? It's great that there's performance and battery life improvements, bu…
Windows has an arm build, so I wouldn't count it out entirely. Edit: Never-mind, it looks like they are not porting bootcamp.
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Personal opinion, no insider info I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users. Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.
You skipped the keynote parts where they say faster 2x, 4x, 8x... and they say faster than every other laptop CPU and faster than 98% of laptops/PCs in their class sold last year? They said it several times. But I agree... let's wait for the benchmarks (btw. iPads already overturns nearly all laptop CPUs)
What happens when Apple deprecates support in macOS for these machines in 7 somewhat years? Is there an upgrade path to install Linux on them like you currently can with Intel-based Macs? Or are these SoCs like every other ARM SoC that requires a custom kernel and bootloader to get Linux running on them?
You can turn off boot security.
The other part is most ARM SoCs don't have an enumerable bus, and thus require customized kernels to run Linux. As a result, they almost always require explicit Linux support from the vendor.
There are millions of ARM devices out there that will never run Linux, or will only ever support an old and outdated fork of Linux, and will never have mainline support in the kernel.
Are we going to see that vendor support for Linux from Apple? Or will these Macs end up like iPhones and iPads where no one will be able to get Linux to support them?
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I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
As someone using a hackintosh considering a real Macbook, what's so wrong about it?
The main exception being things like controlling a progress bar (mouse works fine for me, though it's a neat demo), or changing system brightness/volume with a flick or drag (which is the one thing I find truly better... but I'd happily trade it back for a fn toggle and F keys). But that's so rarely useful.