The benchmark that's blown me away most so far: Marco Arment on Accidental Tech Podcast says the new Macbook Air is significantly faster to compile Overcast (a pretty big iOS app) than his 10 core $6000+ iMac Pro with 64GB RAM and a 160W CPU. https://overcast.fm/+R7DWXqqm0/1:08:11
M1 Macs Review
91–100 of 391 posts
Re: M1 Macs Review
#92Reviews (including this one) all say webcam sucks pretty bad though. Why Apple chose to release a laptop with a subpar webcam in 2020 is a mystery to me. This isn't even hard or expensive. Spend a couple dollars more on that webcam, Apple, don't be so greedy.
Can't it be because MacBook lids are absurdly thin? How thick are the lids of comparable machines (the XPS etc.)?
Ding ding ding
Re: M1 Macs Review
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we’re talking about hardware ergonomics the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again. I also hate the difference in cmd, alt and ctrl keys from other keyboards.
To be clear, my comment did not relate to either Apple or MacBooks in particular. Also, the value of each soft factor will differ from person to person. Good design highly relates to personal needs.
Yes I understand that and I guess I’m a bit salty. But part of my point is that you can make really great hardware and software of great quality, but one or two unfortunate choices can soil the whole thing for someone.
And Apple especially can sometimes be too stubborn to acknowledge people’s personal differences or an established industry standard.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.
I really want the air for when I work outside in the summer. I worked from an iPad quite often with the magic keyboard, and it started throttling and sometimes overheated to the point of failure while outside in the sun. It's too cold in Chicago to test, but I would love to see if the MacBook Air can work while outside in direct hot sun - it's the only reason I'm considering the MBP.
If you're using the computer outdoors its best to get the MBP for the brighter screen.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#95[deleted]
Re: M1 Macs Review
#96After 6 years away from being "all in" on Apple, yesterday my base spec MacBook Air M1 arrived. Battery life is the key takeaway for me. Performance is fine but I'm used to a powerful desktop so it's not blowing me away but the battery life definitely is blowing me away. To run things under rosetta there's an arch command: e.g. arch -x86_64 brew install xxx - the arch preference is inherited by sub processes. I'm kin…
Do you mind sharing what battery life you are seeing for your real life workloads? And also an idea of what those work loads are?
It arrived with 69% charge, by this morning 11am i had reached 21%. I left the screen brightness on the default setting and usage was a mix of installing software (mostly I/O i suppose), a lot of safari, around 4 hours of Citrix remote desktop, around 90 minutes of zoom, some light gaming last night to see if it works.
If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than my big desktop, the I/O is crazy fast actually.
Memory pressure has been low so far - my biggest fear opting for the base model but looks like i'll be fine - i spun up bunch of dev processes and was fine.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Linux native is not in the cards but it won't matter, it will work fine virtualized with hardly any performance penalty. If for some reason you insist on native linux, it's time to recognize that Apple hardware is not for you. How would one run a graphical Linux distro virtualized and by which software?
Parallels and VMWare Fusion would run it. Virtualbox as well. We can already do this on Intel Macs, Windows PCs, etc. Graphics are not a problem. Heck, we could since forever also run graphical macOS and Windows on virtualization apps...
Is it enabled in VirtualBox by default?
Re: M1 Macs Review
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are looking at, tho, is not the pure hardware perspective, but the pure hardware numbers perspective, which excludes ergonomics, design, build quality and hardware/software integration as well as stuff like speakers and screens which might not be comparable because no other vendor does them exactly alike. I always found this strange, when looking at personal computers – or, in fact, most anything in life. As…
If we’re talking about hardware ergonomics the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again. I also hate the difference in cmd, alt and ctrl keys from other keyboards.
> the lack of a del key and placement of the fn key alone make me never buy a macbook again
What do you mean by these?
Re: M1 Macs Review
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Linux native is not in the cards" Sorry I'm not in the loop.. but why is that? Does the hardware somehow preclude it?
The locked bootloader will only run Apple signed operating systems (a la Chromebook, without the Chromebook Developer mode escape hatch). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23640746
You can still disable secure boot just fine, just run “csrutil disable” from recovery and the option magically appears.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...
Re: M1 Macs Review
#100I just bought a MacBook Air. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this redefines how we think about a laptop. Whereas previously a laptop was something that spent the bulk of its time plugged in, and only capable of short bursts of number-crunching/gaming due to thermal and battery limitations, I can literally get a good few hours of gaming untethered on this machine. And this is a base-level MacBook Air, I…
I wondered about that, doesn't it get hot and throttle performance?