Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

macrumors.com

431–440 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#431
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Mac has ~10% of the global market for end user machines. It doesn't now, never has, and never will own the market nor does it desire to sell cheap enough machines to do so. - Given that you can't add ram after the fact and 256GB is anemic the cheapest laptop that is a reasonable choice is $1400. - The cheapest desktop option is $6000 with an 8 core cpu or 8000 with a 16 core. - The average end user spends $700 on a…

> The cheapest desktop option is $6000 with an 8 core cpu or 8000 with a 16 core. And also with RAM and SSD idiotically soldered in so 2 years later you need to spend another $6000, while a couple weeks ago I spent a grand total of $400 to upgrade my 2TB SSD to 4TB.

fyi, RAM is not soldered (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210103) and there are unoccupied PCI slots to install SSDs in (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210408)

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#432
post #278

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

YouTube has grown by triple digits. Those video “content creators”, from those just messing around to the professional film makers, are a huge opportunity for Apple to secure mind share in. Billions of views on YouTube. Billions of videos too. I suspect the M1 powered Macs will be hugely successful and very useful for multiple types of users.

I don't see these being very useful for video editing with RAM maxing out at 16gb. Maybe 1080p, but not 4k.

(And the small storage, but that can be remedied with a NAS or other external storage, and then fast local scratch space only needs to be big enough for a couple of projects at a time)

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#433
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the grandparent comment, I would avoid this M1 Macbook since the developer ecosystem is still unsupported by it. Take this for example: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/4733 Docker still doesn't run on Apple Silicon Macs, so the migration path is already disrupted here.

You say “still” as if Apple silicon Macs are more than a day old.

Developers were able to start working on Apple Silicon software several months ago.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-announces-mac-t...

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy it in a Mac Mini, and an iMac eventually no doubt. The "laptop"/"desktop"-grade chip distinction is pretty arbitrary here.

> The "laptop"/"desktop"-grade chip distinction is pretty arbitrary here. This is the first of their CPUs. The iMac will almost certainly be running a higher end CPU which at the very least supports more RAM. It's likely the 16" MacBook Pro and the higher end 13" MacBook Pro will share a CPU with the iMac the same way the Mac mini and the MacBook Air share a CPU.

I think the holdup for the iMac is not the CPU, but rather Apple's discrete GPU which is not ready yet.

For replacing the Xeon-W in the Mac Pro and iMac Pro, they will also need a higher performing CPU, sure.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#435

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

> What percent of the working population are video editors?

Most of the working population could get away with using basically any computer - if you're marketing a computer as 'Pro' you're talking to a specific subset of that. (Or you're just banking on it working as aspirational marketing and don't actually care about professionals)

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#436
post #274

AMD's Zen 3 (Ryzen 5xxx series) are beating the Apple M1 in single core score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore As another datapoint Ian (of Anandtech) estimated that the M1 would need to be clocked at 3.25Ghz to match Zen 3, and these systems are showing a 3.2Ghz clock: https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1326516048309460992

Fake news. These are not Macs and are very overclocked PCs (Hackintosh).

Not sure why this is downvoted? The top score shows a 6.472GHz clock speed - clearly not stock.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4644694.gb5

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#437
post #335

This idea of “actual professionals” that always comes up in response to apple’s “Pro” moniker amuses me to no end. Everybody throws the term around and no two people have the same definition! What in the world is an actual professional? There are professional journalists that just need a browser and text editor. There are professional programmers working on huge code bases in compiled languages that do need a beefy m…

> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally , a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cas…

What are those Rolls Royce features needed by chauffeurs?

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#438
post #16

Their line from the video about being the highest performance chip in single core appears to be true. This is of course a synthetic benchmark but the single core result is very promising. Note that the single core and multi core scores exceed the top-of-the-line 16” MacBook Pro (9th generation 8-core i9 2.4 ghz). I actually made the call to sell my 16” for the new Air yesterday. It’s looking like a good call. Glad I’…

Replacing my 16" MBP (8 core i9 2.3ghz / 32GB RAM) with the new Air as well. All of that power (yes I know, it's not sustained) without a fan is incredible.

I want to do the same, but I like being able to do some gaming on my Windows partition (I opted for the 8GB dGPU as well).

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#439
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What in the world is an actual professional? I would say that generally , a "professional" user of pretty much any tool, is someone for whom the tool's quality is a constraint on their professional productivity. A professional paint user is an artist. A professional telescope user is an astronomer—or a sniper. A professional typewriter user is a stenographer. A professional shoe user is an athlete. In all these cas…

I'm a professional programmer... hardware constraints aren't exactly the limiting factor when i use vim all day.

It depends on the project. E.g. if you ever have to compile the linux kernel, or firefox you'll be wishing for a beefy cpu.

Re: Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

#440
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear, but here's some knowledgeable speculation: - All M1 models only have 1 Thunderbolt Controller, thus can only handle 2 Thunderbolt ports on all announced models so far. - All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K. - No M1 model supports >16GB of RAM or 10GB Ethernet. All of the above seem like bandwidth limitations to save cost that a future "M1X" or "M2" or "X1" would be extremely likely to f…

> - All M1 models only support 1 monitor, but up to 6K. Where did you find this? In the Macbook Pro 13 landing page I find the specs per Thunderbolt port which states the display capabilities for each while not restricting anywhere to just one monitor. So I'd would expect 1x monitor per Thunderbolt port leading to total 3 displays for the Pro ARM model: one internal and two external displays. I assume the restriction…

In the tech specs page, under "Video Support":

> Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:

>

> One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz

Source: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/

Post reply on HN