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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#111

Post by tpush »

addaon wrote: post #105
shmoogy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the challenges of using a large-screen device in the sun is that most screen technologies (including transmissive LCD and OLED, but excluding eInk and transflective LCDs) are inherently "black" -- they absorb light energy that hits them. Even when they're displaying a white screen, they're absorbing nearly all of the light hitting them, and then emitting their own energy. One of my mild annoyances with the iPh…

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option.

But there is a white iPhone 12? I have one myself. Or is not white enough/too matte or something?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#112

Post by stu2b50 »

_lbaq wrote: post #107
coldtea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

M1 lack virtualization instructions, right?

No

Re: M1 Macs Review

#113

Post by zepto »

BooneJS wrote: post #79

“New Intel chips were often delayed and offered only small improvements over previous generations.” As noted on HN and elsewhere, Intel’s struggle has been in manufacturing. They minimized risk (“got lazy”) when Moore’s Law reigned and their fabs were 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else, but have since squeezed every last architectural drop out of 14nm. Put Tiger Lake on TSMC 5nm and a lot of M1’s lead goes away.…

“ You would be right to say that Intel couldn’t make the M1. It’s not because Intel’s fabs are struggling or Apple has found tricks no one else in the world knows about. It’s because Apple controls the entire software stack and therefore knows what they need on the chip. Intel caters to the entire market (one the M1 just noticeably shrunk) with myriad integrators, workloads, and users, and each has different concerns and priorities making accelerated algorithm blocks useless to some and not-fast-enough for others.”

This is an important point. It applies up and down the stack for everything Apple does.

The people who suggest breaking up Apple are correct that it would destroy them, by forcing them to use inefficient generic components at every level.

If we want competition against Apple, the way to get there is not by hobbling them with the inefficiency of the old paradigm.

It’s by the rest of the industry figuring out how to collaborate on delivering similar gains without vertical integration.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#114

Post by heelix »

snazz wrote: post #8
cjrp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a laptop's performance is on a par with a desktop's, and the fan's aren't going crazy, I'd call that a big win! My 2018 MB Pro has the fans running most of the time, and even then sometimes throttles back the CPU.

The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.

I'm pretty convinced my i9 mac does not have a fan either. A noise maker, yes... but the 2018 model just seems to have a loud audible indicator that docker started. :)

Re: M1 Macs Review

#115

Post by Droobfest »

mcphage wrote: post #98
Droobfest wrote: post #52

Earlier 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.

> 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?

Macbooks and Apple keyboards in general lack a physical del key (in ibm keyboard terms). They only have a backspace, which they label delete.

Fn+backspace works as a shortcut, but they’re on completely different ends of the keyboard so you need 2 hands. Ctrl+D also sometimes works but is inconsistent across applications.

Also, unlike all other vendors, Apple places the fn key on the far end of the keyboard, instead of the much more used ctrl which is now in the middle. When typing I find it much easier to quickly hit the furthest key than the middle one so I often hit the wrong one.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#116

Post by brundolf »

ojosilva wrote: post #17

Here's looking at getting one. But I wonder what's the currently compatibility status of the dev stack: node, git, go, java, nginx, databases (pg, mongo, maria...), editors (macvim, vscode...), iTerm, et al. And the brew family of installs, which was covered as part of yesterday's thread [1]. Macos ships with some interpreters pre-installed as part of BigSur, including Ruby, Python and Perl. And most source distribut…

What I've heard is that for the most part, even x86 apps run quite well. Exceptions include weird cases like Docker (virtualization) and web browsers (JavaScript JIT), but as you say Firefox/Chromium have native updates available and Docker is working on it. Docker has no ETA though, so if you depend on that regularly it might be a temporary blocker.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#117

Post by unix_fan »

coldtea wrote: post #88
em500 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually that's not the case. This post is misinformed (and 4 months old). There was a breakdown from an official Apple page how to boot alternative systems on an M1.

https://twitter.com/never_released/status/132739810298317619...

Re: M1 Macs Review

#118

Post by cowmoo728 »

cuillevel3 wrote: post #100
torginus wrote: post #76

I 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?

According to Dave2D's youtube review the Air will throttle after 8 minutes of full load. The Pro never throttles.

https://youtu.be/XQ6vX6nmboU

Re: M1 Macs Review

#119

Post by vladvasiliu »

addaon wrote: post #105
shmoogy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the challenges of using a large-screen device in the sun is that most screen technologies (including transmissive LCD and OLED, but excluding eInk and transflective LCDs) are inherently "black" -- they absorb light energy that hits them. Even when they're displaying a white screen, they're absorbing nearly all of the light hitting them, and then emitting their own energy. One of my mild annoyances with the iPh…

> One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option.

There is for the iPhone 12 non pro and mini [0].

The pro comes in what looks like a fairly light silver.

Disclaimer: I haven't seen those in real life, I'm going by the apple store website.

[0] https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4982/as-images.apple...

Re: M1 Macs Review

#120

Post by jk563 »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #96
sgillen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

8GB integrated memory spec?
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