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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#361

Post by coldtea »

skissane wrote: post #267
coldtea wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's up to Oracle. If MS also starts pushing Windows for ARM (as they seem intenting to do), I think they might make an VirtualBox offering for ARM.

In any case, we have Fusion and Parallels, and Fusion is now free for personal use iirc.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#362

Post by coldtea »

superkuh wrote: post #325
coldtea wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the people that would provide support for their family and friends due to using the same hardware split paths All 10 of them? The subset of people that (a) had Apple laptops, (b) run Linux on them, (c) provided support for family, is probably irrelevant... > And now those Apple users have to go to Apple for support. A double win for the corporation. Yes, what a big lucrative market: relatives of people who run…

>The subset of people that (a) had Apple laptops, (b) run Linux on them, ... Yes, what a big lucrative market: relatives of people who run Linux on their Macs t... Technical people moving away from using Apple's new properietary hardware that literally can't boot any OS but Mac OS will mean they can't help their friends and family as easily due to lack of familiarity.

>Technical people moving away from using Apple's new properietary hardware

Many technical people seem jumping into Apple's new hardware, and reviews are all raving for M1.

Don't confuse FOSS people / ideologues with "most technical people". The technical people that are big in numbers and give support need to be merely computer savvy people, not hardcore devs or people who'd rather run Linux.

>that literally can't boot any OS but Mac OS

That's wrong. It can boot any OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25145119

Re: M1 Macs Review

#363

Post by _the_inflator »

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.

I have both, MacBook Air 2019 and Dell XPS 13 2018.

MacBook is stunningly smooth, while under heavy CPU load you hit CMD+Space and Spotlight is there. Under my Dell with no CPU load at all, I hit the windows key - and nothing happens.

What really keeps me at Apple is this overall smoothness. Under Windows/Intel you can pick one spec that is impressive, but as you said, it is the overall experience.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#364

Post by vishnugupta »

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.

Would you mind sharing the RAM size on iMac Pro? I'm seriously considering buying Mac mini however its max 16GB of RAM is putting me off; fwiw I'm currently on MacBook Pro 2018 (2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4). So any feedback around memory usage/size is very welcome! Thanks!

Re: M1 Macs Review

#365

Post by panda88888 »

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.

I like the idea. An app that roars louder the higher the cpu load.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#366

Post by torginus »

officeplant wrote: post #271
alimbada wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of gaming are we talking about?

Blizzard already released ARM64 builds of WoW. More than likely D3 and Starcraft 2 as well. They were already fantastic supporters of the metal API so I imagine it was an easy transition for them.

khmOverwatchkhm

Re: M1 Macs Review

#367

Post by jakemauer »

rasz wrote: post #346
mlindner wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then how is M1 beating _desktop_ top end AMD chips in single core performance? Ignoring Intel here.

It isnt. In Cinebench its up there behind middle of the road Ryzen 5600X in single core, and ~two times slower in multi.

Right but that chip is a 65 watt part. The m1 is what, 10-15? I think that’s pretty amazing.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#368

Post by CraigJPerry »

Fnoord wrote: post #324
CraigJPerry wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think. I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess. I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.

> Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? Obsolete, who defines that? I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too. Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longe…

I'd say a 2005 PowerPC iBook is obsolete. I'd also say a 2009 intel macbook is obsolete but the truth is, add an SSD into that and it's probably still fine under linux so maybe 2009 isn't obsolete for some users just yet (although i think apple no longer support that hardware). 2015 is modern, intel performance just hasn't changed that much since 2015.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#369

Post by skissane »

coldtea wrote: post #361
skissane wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's up to Oracle. If MS also starts pushing Windows for ARM (as they seem intenting to do), I think they might make an VirtualBox offering for ARM. In any case, we have Fusion and Parallels, and Fusion is now free for personal use iirc.

VirtualBox is an acquired product. Originally developed by the German company Innotek, who were bought by Sun, and in turn bought by Oracle. It is useful enough to Oracle for them to keep it alive, but I'm not sure if Oracle would have ever started a project like VirtualBox themselves.

The internals of VirtualBox are very x86-specific. It was not written with the idea of supporting non-x86 CPU architectures. I think trying to add ARM support would be a lot of work and redesign. VirtualBox used to support software-based virtualisation, which has something in common with CPU emulation – it is kind of emulating x86 on x86, and even uses some of QEMU's code for dynamic recompilation. But, that software-based virtualisation was only ever 32bit, it exploited obscure features of the x86 architecture (execution in ring 1), and in the latest release of VirtualBox has been removed entirely.

(I worked for Oracle for almost ten years. Never at the level at which decisions like this were made. But still, I feel like I do have some feel for what kinds of decisions Oracle's leadership are likely to make. They could always surprise me, though.)

Re: M1 Macs Review

#370

Post by cjrp »

drewolbrich wrote: post #203
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.

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.

Oh I have, thanks. It's just that running my dev. environment plus Teams and all of the other "necessary" accoutrements ends up using a fair chunk of CPU.
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