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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#221

Post by klelatti »

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.…

Agree 100% but some of the hero worship is a reaction I think to being told for a long time that 'Only Intel x86 chips are powerful enough' - which in part was put about by Intel marketing (Intel inside etc and some of the comments at the time the iPhone launched that consumers need an x86 to do real work) - and that ARM wouldn't scale up for desktops etc.

The other key point is that Apple can pick and mix from the technologies they use - they've unbundled Intel - choosing the best that they can find for their needs whether in-house or externally.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#222

Post by stu2b50 »

nanna wrote: post #193

A concern in my University department is that some of the FOSS/small scale software we teach on won't work on our students' shiny new M1 Macs. Should we be worried?

FOSS should be particularly fine, since the code is public, eventually someone will recompile it for ARM (if it's even written in a native language; languages with runtimes will work perfectly fine when the runtime is ported)

If not, everything should run through Rosetta 2. Apple did eventually pull the original Rosetta, so who knows how long they will keep the feature, but in the short term I can't imagine it being a problem.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#223

Post by ActorNightly »

tpush wrote: post #36
yhersk0vitz wrote: post #16

I feel like this may the first time that Macbooks might actually be worth their premium from a purely hardware perspective. Before people jump on this, I mean that for example the previous Intel MB Pro with i5 would cost like $1,500, which is far more than almost any windows laptop running the same specs.

Any Windows laptop with comparable display quality, SSD speeds, battery life etc. cost similar or more. And they still have trackpads that suck.

Now this is the case. Before, Dell XPSs were VERY good laptops with same performance for a cheaper price.

And thats not including thermal throttling, the bullshit Apple pulls with background OS stuff like checking executable hashes online, being restricted to what software you can run, and so on.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#224

Post by majormajor »

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.…

What workloads are you picturing that Apple isn't serving with Mac chips that Intel has to cater to? This has to be a much more general purpose device than an iPhone.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#226

Post by r00fus »

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.…

> 2. Execute flawlessly.

You say this like it's easy or routine. At the bleeding edge, execution is 99% the hard part.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#227

Post by ActorNightly »

kzrdude wrote: post #200
x87678r wrote: post #22

I'm blown away with how good they seem to work. I was about to buy a Lenovo x86 laptop on Black Friday but put it on hold. I presumed M1 was going to be like a Surface X. With Ryzen laptop chips slowly arriving too, next year should be a good one.

What hope do we have that M1-like chips are available soon in regular non-apple notebooks? I guess the chance is zero.

M1 isn't groundbreaking. RISK has been around for a while, and stuff like SoC with unified memory isn't new. Id say chances are pretty good.

While Apple will always have the edge in terms of optimization since they have to only design for specific hardware, the difference won't be massive, and you won't be locked into the ecosystem.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#228

Post by whalesalad »

nunez wrote: post #219

Once Docker works on ARM, I’m gonna make the switch. I was very very close to trading in my 2020 MBP and eating the loss, especially after seeing the insane WebKit compilation times and battery usage. I loathe the Touch Bar and am very excited about having a MBA that doesn’t suck. The only concern I have is this: it is my understanding that the arm7 instruction set differs slightly from vendor. Is that true? I’m thin…

Docker on mac runs in a VM anyway, so I would imagine you're still going to run it in x86 mode.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#229

Post by tpush »

addaon wrote: post #220
tpush wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Whoops! My mistake, thanks for that! I has been looking only at the Pro out of habit, but this might push me towards the non-Pro this generation.

If it helps, I'm perfectly contend with the non-pro iPhone 12.

The aluminum sides + white back look really great, too!

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