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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#261

Post by forrestthewoods »

kllrnohj wrote: post #150
forrestthewoods wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. It’s astonishing. I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. I’d love to see Apple go HAM with their ARM chips in an iMac Pro or some such. Give me 12 firestorm cores and bump the GPU cores from 8 to 64.

> I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great. The GPU in the M1 is perfectly good for the power targets it's trying to hit. Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Apple is unlikely to be able to do with the GPU what they did with the CPU. That is, there's no legacy in either Nvidia nor AMD's GPUs that Apple can cut out to get wins. An…

I’m a game developer. I want macOS to not suck for games. Apple and Nvidia have never gotten along for a variety of reasons.

Apple will probably continue to offer shitty GPUs in their MacBooks. That’s fine and maybe even a smart business choice.

But it means mac continues to suck for games. Which is unfortunate imho.

I think we can all agree it would be very interesting to see how much GPU power they can stuff in an iMac Pro and desktop class Mac Pro. If it doesn’t make business sense then so be it.

Realistically I’m hoping in 5 years that Nvidia releases a high-end integrated SoC. Tegra on Switch is fine. Keep it going.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#262

Post by crad »

Bought my wife the new M1 MBA as a replacement for her 3yo Macbook. She loves it. It's significantly faster for her applications, the keyboard is a return to one she likes, and she's not run into any issues with it thus far.

If the Docker issue is resolve, I'll likely jump on a M1 MBP when they're available.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#263

Post by Lio »

pdpi wrote: post #133
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.

> I also hate the difference in cmd, alt and ctrl keys from other keyboards. It's a matter of habit, and super easy to configure from the keyboard preferences in macOs. The trade-off is that ctrl is almost exclusively used for unix-y thing, and all the usual GUI-y things use Cmd. Using a shell is just painful for me in anything other than macOS for that reason alone. Incidentally, because of the pervasive support for…

> Using a shell is just painful for me in anything other than macOS for that reason alone.

On Linux at least you can use Ctrl-Shift-x, Ctrl-Shift-c and Ctrl-Shift-v for cut, copy and paste in the terminal. So again it's just a case of getting use to the shortcut differences.

On macOS Del can also be found on fn-Backspace and I often remap the right Alt key to Ctrl.

It's pretty easy to adapt to either with a little time.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#264

Post by mikechen233 »

Shivetya wrote: post #75

My question going forward is, how far can they extend the memory within the SOC architecture before the chip becomes too large to make this economical? I am also interested in their gGPU solution but am curious if they will be as diligent with driver updates as Nvidia and AMD are as one reason gaming is so strong on Windows is both providers quickly adjust for new games and issues. While gaming is not an issue to all…

The memory on m1 is nothing special. It's not part of the m1 die. M1 still have traditional memory controllers. It's just they built the logic die and the memory die in a single package for lower memory power. Increase package size is simple or if you really need big memory, do the traditional memory connection on a pcb.

As for gaming, I don't it's a hardware issue. It's software support. Microsoft now also owns a lot of gaming studio for xbox exclusivesz those will never come to the Mac. Also big gaming companies are now working with likes of microsoft, amazon, Google on cloud gaming. That seems like the way forward for making AAA games run everywhere. I doubt these companies will spin up another team to support these games on the Mac platform. It sucks that m1 is actually really good gaming processor.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#265

Post by EricE »

Joeri wrote: post #241
CraigJPerry wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder whether we need to reset expectations on memory amounts. From seeing the reviews where they launch every application installed on the 8gb air and it remains smooth I am suspecting that the unified memory and optimized storage interface means that for M1 macs 8 gb behaves like 16 gb on intel cpu’s.

Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD.

The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes.

Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping.

Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#266

Post by kingnothing »

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.

Or buy a white case?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#267

Post by skissane »

coldtea wrote: post #165
siraben wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it enabled in VirtualBox by default?

If you mean running GUIS, in the Intel version yes. The ARM/Apple Silicon version not sure if it's ready, might need work to even run cli.

Is there even ever going to be an ARM / Apple Silicon version?

It would be a huge amount of work to add ARM support to VirtualBox. I would be surprised if Oracle were interested in making that investment.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#268

Post by alwillis »

zepto wrote: post #113
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…

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

This is one of the smartest things I've seen on HN in a long time. This is exactly what has to happen if the other companies don't want Apple to eat their lunch.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#269

Post by Lio »

ActorNightly wrote: post #223
tpush wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you sure?

A Dell XPS13 with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,349[1].

An Apple MacBook Air with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,249[2].

The XPS13 is great, I have one myself with Linux on. They're definitely in the same price range as the Apple laptops though.

I think the other points you've raised have been addressed else where.

There's no restriction on what software you run. You can even replace the OS with Linux if you like by configuring the security.

The hash key transmission seems to be used for malware detection, is optional and Apple have committed to not keeping logs of it when people do use it.

1. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-touc...

2. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

Re: M1 Macs Review

#270

Post by EricE »

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.…

"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." Which is why even if Intel does manage to solve their process problems, they are not out of the woods yet.

As you point out Apple's per core performance is impressive, but their ability to customize their hardware to optimize very specific compute tasks like the nsobject release example or floating for Javascript will be a lot harder to convince off the self/least common denominator parts like x86 processors have traditionally been.

I also think we are at the beginning of seeing the influence of "accelerators" such as the ML and neural engine cores. Accelerators beyond the CPU are nothing new - that's what a graphics card is, after all. What's interesting is these are on the same SOC with the CPU cores.

What if Apple decides even for the higher end Mac's to integrate RAM into or closely couple with the SOC? What if they decide on their own memory controller that lets you address all the memory chips at once. What potential could that have for performance? Maybe not enough to offset the cost/complexity. But if it did turn out to be on the right side of the cost/benefit equation now instead of having to convince multiple parties it's a good idea, at worst Apple just has to convince a few internal divisions to work together.

That is the long term power I see with Apple Silicon. Not raw specs or Moores Law - but unfettered access to the full Art of the Possible.

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