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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#351

Post by talmr »

rsanheim wrote: post #140
CraigJPerry wrote: post #3

After 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…

Yeah so far the performance is very close to my 10 core iMac Pro I use for day to day development. This is on a MacBook Air with no fan, and so far I haven't felt the machine even get warm even when compiling _and_ also running tests or importing data in other processes. This is when running a decently sized Rails monolith w/ PostgreSQL & Redis, so a fairly typical modern Rails setup. It's seriously impressive.

Nice! Are you using x code as well?

I’m in a similar boat as you - running bunch of node services, pg, etc. but I’m also developing for iOS. Xcode kills my current MacBook because I’m constantly rebuilding.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#352

Post by ksec »

singhrac wrote: post #316
alwillis wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is... doesn't Samsung already do this with their Exynos chips? And even with Qualcomm, they must already build them with Android (even a particular phone) in mind, right? Yet somehow the A14 is faster than a Snapdragon 865. I think strategically if Exynos put pressure on Qualcomm in a nontrivial way (e.g. Samsung switched entirely, and started selling Exynos chips to their competitors) that would change the…

Samsung and Qualcomm have different priorities.

Vendors are already complaining to Qualcomm about expensive packages due to 5G. They want it cheaper, at the same time people are suggesting Qualcomm's CPU goes faster. You can only have one of them.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#353

Post by ksec »

danpalmer wrote: post #217
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.…

> But the recent hero worship is a bit awkward to read as Apple is generally following an accepted playbook in the End Times of Moore’s law. Is anyone else doing this though? It might be the theoretical playbook, but if others aren't doing this in practice then Apple are worthy of credit for pulling it off. 1 - accelerators for specific things aren't new, and lots of processors have an H264 accelerator, but Apple see…

>Is anyone else doing this though?

Yes, but from a different perspective. For example the recent M&A between lots of Fabless companies are precisely because of that. Sharing cost and allowing different IPs to work together.

What is missing is someone doing the Software. If it was Microsoft, they would have done at least done something. It wouldn't be good, but they would at least be "trying" to compete. Google just doesn't care.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#354

Post by ksec »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #311
kzrdude wrote: post #198

Steve Jobs would be proud. I imagine Apple didn't say anything like that, but I really think he would be stoked with this, especially a cooler computer (no fan) and a leg up all competitors.

I wouldn't be surprised if he planned this. Lisa Sue said she plans 10 years out in advance regularly, because building up hardware takes that long.

Nah, both Jim Keller and Gerard Williams said Steve wasn't interested. Which was definitely the right call at the time, remember that was in 2010.

Now that it happen it is more like a natural progression.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#355

Post by fulafel »

larkost wrote: post #305
fulafel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops with iGPUs are pretty normal, no? (And common on desktops too)

I don't know about the latest Intel integrated GPUs, but for the original ones it was not a unified memory arrangement. Rather the integrated GPU used a dedicated chunk of main memory. It was the same banks of memory, but was treated as separate. If you wanted a texture to appear on-screen, then it had to be moved from the normal pool of memory to the one reserved for the GPU. This reserved pool of memory was even ha…

> On current systems that would mean multiple copy operations of that texture back and forth between segments of memory

This is not the case, as expanded in sibling threads.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#356

Post by jzer0cool »

djs55 wrote: post #168
hart_russell wrote: post #12

I received an M1 mini 2 days ago. I noticed the Steam client seems to be a bit laggy in UI responsiveness, but besides that I have no complaints. I got it for use as a server, so I was a bit dismayed to hear that M1 Docker support has hit a roadblock, but hopeful that they figure it out soon.

Don't worry, we (at Docker) have been working on Apple Silicon support for a while. The command-line tools work under Rosetta 2 but the local VM inside Desktop will take a little bit longer to port. Just in case you haven't seen it there's some further info on Docker+M1 in the blog post: https://www.docker.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-chips-and-docke...

Just curious a mention or two the challenges getting this to work soon?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#357

Post by ngcc_hk »

divbzero wrote: post #326
mekster wrote: post #231

Earlier 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.

Just wait, we’ll soon have an app for that — the equivalent of fake engine sound for EVs.

Haha!!!

Sorry but is this crazy to need the fan to sense the performance!

Re: M1 Macs Review

#358

Post by ngcc_hk »

reaperducer wrote: post #204
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.

It's too cold in Chicago to test I used to have one of those massive 17" MacBooks (Best keyboard ever), and it used to heat up enough to turn my thighs red. Back then, Apple avoided calling them "laptops," perhaps for this reason. Then I moved to Chicago, and found it was a wonderful machine for using outside on my balcony in cold weather because it would keep at least half of me toasty. If I started to get chilly, I…

Have to stop reading this post. Too many real life case so close to heart but also funny.

Virtual PC. Man, how can this nit a real story!

Re: M1 Macs Review

#359

Post by Lio »

ActorNightly wrote: post #350
Lio wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dunno if you are serious or not, but the XPS is a big step above the Air in performance. Even with current M1 Macs, outside of the battery life, you have sub 2k laptops that blow the M1 out of the water https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/15333968

Not sure I’d call that “blowing out of the water”.

I think, for a light weight laptop I’d rather take the single core bump of the air over the marginal gain for multicore of the Asus. That’s just me though.

Geekbench 5:

Asus: 1218 sc, 8031 mc [1]

MacBook Air: 1726 sc, 7417 mc [2]

1. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4854331

2. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4856634

Re: M1 Macs Review

#360

Post by mattkevan »

lostlogin wrote: post #213
mattkevan wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way my car beeps to remind me I’ve left the lights on, my MacBook buzzes to remind me I’ve still got Microsoft Teams open.

There is something wrong with Teams. As well as it’s resource hogging, it tries to connect to all my SMB shares (even if they are disconnected) when I open the app. Why is it doing this?

> There is something wrong with Teams.

There’s a lot of things wrong with Teams.

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