feel like laptops are way more plugged in and non-mobile than ever now because of the covid pandemic and new world of working from home. Battery life means nothing since we're not moving around every day, and likely won't again in the same way as before. Saw a comment somewhere a few days ago that the M1 isn't really important to the laptop world but the server and phone ends of the spectrum in the bigger picture/longer term.
M1 Macs Review
331–340 of 391 posts
Re: M1 Macs Review
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of gaming are we talking about?
The M1 on Mac Mini has a GPU on par with a 1650 ($150) discrete desktop GPU. It's by far the strongest integrated GPU ever. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
On closer inspection the M1 seems to be about 85% of the 1650 and is closer to the RX 560 a $130 discrete GPU
Re: M1 Macs Review
#333Earlier 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.
If your MBP fans are running all the time, you may want to open it up and see if it's filled with dust and lint.
The process table as well.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ti…
The point is that it’s just annoying that the terminal is a special application that has its own shortcuts for everything. I could use shift-ins or ctrl-ins too — but I don’t want to. I want the terminal to behave like any other application.
Some terminals have the feature called "smart copy." You may like it.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#335It is funny to read the comments full of excitement. To me the M1 thing fills me with dread. To me I just see problems for the IT team. I already know our corporate VPN doesn't run on Big Sur. I have no hope for the monitoring app, or the Antivirus. Apple is such a pain for corporate IT
That seems like a corporate IT failure, not a failure of anything else. We just got an M1 Macbook Pro and nearly half of our machines are already updated to Big Sur and we haven't had any major issues. The only issue has been an old kext from Cisco that can't be approved anymore but it hasn't caused any major issues and Cisco has already let us know that there's an update to that incoming. In my experience, this transition has been way smoother so far (even with the limited input) than our changeover to Windows 10.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it mean you can no longer easily tell if a process has gone crazy and takes high CPU usage without a fan and you also can't even feel the slow down.
That is true in many situations, like a remote server. That's why we have top on the commandline, or iStat Menus. But I'm not sure if iStat Menus actually works on the new machines. https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/
Those are passive solutions. You'd be looking at them after you realize something doesn't look right.
iStat or similar can do a notification if a process is taking high CPU usage for a while.
Servers have their own solutions like monitoring daemons that sends out an alert if CPU usage had been too high for a while.
Re: M1 Macs Review
#337Earlier 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…
Do they still ship these Airs with 720p webcams from the 2000s? I have a 2020 Macbook Air that has a terrible webcam.
I recently discovered this app that makes your iPhone (or iPad) a webcam for your Mac—the difference between the shitty webcam Apple ships and this is eye-opening: https://reincubate.com/camo/
Re: M1 Macs Review
#338Once 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.
That would be fine since most of my targets will still be amd64 anyway
Re: M1 Macs Review
#339Once 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…
Armv8 instructions should be consistent between vendors. Gcc and llvm is very likely to produce standard armv8 code that is portable. At work we use intel chips to compile armv8 linux executables and librarys and run them on broadcom arm chips.
Nice. Thank you for the response!
Re: M1 Macs Review
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.
Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones). I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had…
Those early SSDs if I remember right had very low cycle limits, the limits now are over 10x better than they were then.