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Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

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61–70 of 101 posts

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#61
post #26

“Apple’s insistence that reaching up to touch a laptop screen is too burdensome is just getting silly, especially when that is not a problem on the iPad and across the universe of Windows laptops, and most especially when these laptops can run iPhone and iPad apps natively.“ In a way Nilay is right - ultimately it makes no sense not to allow touch interaction. However Apple is also right in a different way. If apps a…

Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare. Try reaching your hand up to touch your monitor and hold it there for a minute. Now try pretending you’ll do this for an 8 hour workday. It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case.

Lots of options for interaction gives less repetitive movements.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#63
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Microsoft, much like most of the ecosystems around ARM, didn't build their own CPU. They got an off the shelf mobile chipset, customised it slightly, rebranded it and then chucked the whole shit heap of windows on top.

I have also heard that Microsoft put lower priority on the x86 emulation layer, because they felt like if it was really good, developers would have no incentive to make native compiles. While this sounds instinctively ridiculous to me, as of late I’ve become very cognizant of general laziness in our industry, so who knows…

That’s about right. I remember when they switched windows phone 7 from CE to NT with similar arrogance and everyone went pfft and walked away.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#64

Is any web developer planning to get the new Apple Silicon Macs? How's docker support (for ARM and x86 images)? Do the major IDEs work on Rosetta? What's support looking like for languages like GO, Rust now/in the near future?

I'm giving it another 6-10 months, and will probably pick up an actual "Pro" MacBook when they release one. All of what you mentioned should be supported by then as well.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#65
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare. Try reaching your hand up to touch your monitor and hold it there for a minute. Now try pretending you’ll do this for an 8 hour workday. It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case.

>It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case. This was true until just now. The use case is right at the end of OP's quote. These laptops now run iOS apps that are designed with touch as their primary or only interface. It is weird to include the functionality to run these apps but not the functionality to interact with them properly.

I think this is more of a nudge to Slack and Discord (and certain others) to make their Mac apps based on their iPad apps instead of Electron. And for some games to add keyboard support.

And once they do, others will follow. Except Google or Facebook, which will remain website-only because their whole businesses is based on ad networks across the web.

I don't think iOS apps that have poor UX on the Mac will be allowed in the Mac App Store long term.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#66
post #26

“Apple’s insistence that reaching up to touch a laptop screen is too burdensome is just getting silly, especially when that is not a problem on the iPad and across the universe of Windows laptops, and most especially when these laptops can run iPhone and iPad apps natively.“ In a way Nilay is right - ultimately it makes no sense not to allow touch interaction. However Apple is also right in a different way. If apps a…

Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare. Try reaching your hand up to touch your monitor and hold it there for a minute. Now try pretending you’ll do this for an 8 hour workday. It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case.

> Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare.

I think the opposite form factor would make more sense: an iPad Pro that runs macOS. You could have a laptop style dock but allow it to be used in tablet mode too.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#67
post #9

It's worth noting that while there are still quite a few caveats to the M1 MacBook Pro when looking at "pro workflows", this is only intended to replace the "low end" MacBook Pro which was already quite restricted. Given all the missing parts could require a fair bit more development (eGPU support is not something iPhones have needed so far after all), I expect we'll see these on the next generation of CPUs, along wi…

I don't think we'll see a Mac Pro for a long time, this will be the most difficult (and interesting) one to see move over to ARM.

Maybe... maybe not, it may not be efficient to make an specific processor for those machines, but with the actual performance of the M1, you just have to put 4, 8, or 16 M1 processors side by side and call it a day. The big beefy intel machines are sometimes dual processor, so it's nothing that it's not already invented.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#68

> We found one strange Rosetta bug in this test: we set Premiere to export at a 40mb/s bitrate, but in Rosetta across three M1 Macs, it would deliver… 20. When we set it to 80mb/s, it delivered 40. Sure. We told Adobe, and the company gently reminded us that running Creative Cloud apps in Rosetta 2 is unsupported. So... be careful out there. Rosetta 2 might be a bumpy ride, but nice to see that Creative Cloud tools e…

The native Apple Silicon version of Photoshop is already available in beta. Most professional apps (the ones that cost real money) will be available natively within a year.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#69
post #55

Is any web developer planning to get the new Apple Silicon Macs? How's docker support (for ARM and x86 images)? Do the major IDEs work on Rosetta? What's support looking like for languages like GO, Rust now/in the near future?

Docker images are meant to be built once and run everywhere–tested on your dev server, test environment and production. If you buy an ARM mac, it would be ideal to run ARM instances in the datacenter, but those are uncommon and expensive. I discourage people from building ARM images and then rebuilding intel images later in the software lifecycle.

For most people CI matching production should be enough. Even if there are issues with dev machines on a different architecture, I don't think that will be enough to stop people from grabbing the latest MBP when their next upgrade cycle appears.

Re: Apple MacBook Pro with M1 Review

#70
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only is most desktop software not well suited to touch interactions, touchscreens on laptops are also an ergonomic nightmare. Try reaching your hand up to touch your monitor and hold it there for a minute. Now try pretending you’ll do this for an 8 hour workday. It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case.

I agree with everything you just said except this conclusion: “It’s a useless feature in search of a use-case” Sometimes it’s going to be easier to pinch to zoom, for example, than do the same thing with a keyboard or mouse. Touch is no longer an expensive feature to add, so it makes sense to add it for certain use cases. Also imagine a Mac being used in a kiosk situation where an iPad isn’t big enough. I wouldn’t be…

You can pinch to zoom with a trackpad.

I too assume touch based Macs are coming at some point. But I expect them to live alongside conventional laptops for as long as people continue to buy them. Whenever I’ve tried different kind of convertibles they’ve felt like compromises. The tablet and the laptop seem like the best version of each.

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