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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#661

Post by aseipp »

skohan wrote: post #617
oblio wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it doesn't seem to happen in practice so it's either hard or there are no incentives to do it, or both. But that's the reality we live in.

Yeah fine, you're not wrong, but it's still worthwhile to understand why it's the reality we live in verses just taking a defeatist attitude. If it's just a matter of one engineer taking a couple weekends to change the situation, that's surely worth interrogating.

It's mostly a matter of corporate/government politics more than technology. And those politics are not going to change unless serious political action (read: lawmaking) forces it to be so. It's in a similar vein as "right to repair" or whatever.

At the end of the day, if you don't have a datasheet and the vendor gives you the finger, you're always going to be running a rat race against them, struggling to support 10 year old hardware with free alternatives, and they'll always win because they control the playing field. Further analysis of this phenomena ("what is the root cause of this attitude, and why does our society allow it?") would require actually criticizing and analyzing software development in the grander context of workforce politics over the past, say, 40 to 50 years. Spoiler alert: doing this will probably make you depressed.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#662

Post by mlindner »

izacus wrote: post #612
ogre_codes wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, the "walled garden" is intended for the underlying hardware. I don't think that is what he was saying at all. Regardless. There is nothing preventing Linux (or Windows) from booting on Mac M1 hardware. People almost certainly will have Linux running on Mac hardware before too long. It's just a slog getting it working well. Not a walled garden in any traditional sense, just difficult to implement.

> There is nothing preventing Linux (or Windows) from booting on Mac M1 hardware. Except the iOS-like secure boot verification and complete lack of any kind of documentation or drivers for the hardware. Details!

People will reverse engineer them, given time. And the secure boot verification can be shut off.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#663

Post by jmnicolas »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #523

One of the things I've noticed recently, and especially since the CPU space started finally moving again is how much of a divide there now is between the computer literate, and the computer illiterate. It probably creates a social divide at least that which existed when the majority of people couldn't read or write, and is just as "not OK". Example of this in the first paragraph of this article: > For everyday users…

Modern life is just complicated: there's so much things to know. Computers are just a small part of it.

As an example, I'm (mostly) car illiterate, I just don't have the time and energy to commit to something that do what I want and works 99.99% of the time.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#665

Post by BigJ1211 »

m463 wrote: post #645
headmelted wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely. I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. The machines have always commanded a premium for things that enthusiasts don’t see value in (I.e. anything beyond numeric spec sheet values), so most critics completely miss the point of them. There’s a valid argument to be made that they’re also marked up to higher margins than rivals even beyond the above, but I’m not sure i…

> I don’t know that the “Apple tax” moniker is really fair anymore, either. I think it's still accurate and honestly that's apple's business model. I think the resale value for a student macbook doesn't really matter. It still costs the student - while they are poor - as much as 4x what other students pay for their laptop. Many students are paying $250 for their laptop.

I threw out a laptop I had from 2008 that was at the time top-of-the-line 3000$. I bought it in the US when I was there on vacation. This was when the dollar was at such a low that I got the device for at the time the equivalent of something like 1200€.

I couldn't sell that device for half of that a year and a half later. I got a newer laptop in 2016, again very specced out for a laptop. About 1800€, couldn't sell it for 800€ 2 years later. I still use that last one because I didn't want to sell it so far under what the market value should be.

If you try to sell anything Apple related that isn't more than 5 years old you won't have that problem at all. You can get a good value for the device and sell it without too much of a hassle.

Even if you're a student you would likely be better off buying the cheapest macbook you can find (refurbished or second hand if needed). If you don't like the OS you can just install Windows or a Linux distro on it.

Are you sure about that 250$ number? Because I don't think that's a very realistic number.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#666

Post by mlindner »

lazyjones wrote: post #571
yurishimo wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, WoW will run on just about anything... I remember playing it on an Acer (or maybe Lenovo?) netbook back in 2009/10. Checked it out from school right before Christmas break so I would have a computer at home for a month. In the article here they show Minecraft running at native res and 60 fps. No small feat nowadays considering draw distances that are popular now.

It doesn't run on my 2015 iMac 27" with anything near even medium settings... That's with a Radeon R9 M380, 24GB memory, 3.2 GHz i5. So I find it hard to believe that it will run with max settings / 60 fps on the new MBP, despite the lower native screen resolution.

People are exaggerating a little bit, but this is the low end machine with 8GB RAM and only 7 GPU cores. So you can see it's pretty good in worst case. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQoGPLO8zBI

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#667

Post by m463 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #589
michaelmrose wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000 16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00 28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4GB of storage $14,699 MSRP on a 2020 Toyota Corolla $19,600 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core 3.7 GHz Socket sTRX4 $2,629.90 Cost of the same basic GPU about $219 Cost of complete system equivalent to the almost car priced mac about 4200. 9k-15k isn't "a lot"…

Exactly this, I was fine with the Mac Pro until 2012, it was a little more expensive than PCs but not much outrageously so (maybe 30% more, that's a tax I was fine paying given the OS and that it was quite a well built machine). The new Mac Pro is 3-4x the price of a machine built around AMD having equivalent performances. I'm building a Threadripper for exactly this reason. Most of the issue is Intel vs AMD and the…

Yes, it is not a commodity machine, but it sort of goes beyond expensive to almost insulting.

If it was 1/2 the price I think it could fairly be called premium priced.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#668

Post by nbzso »

jolux wrote: post #320
nbzso wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, as a consumer I completely agree, this is firs iteration we will see better (may be). As a UI/UX designer I am hardwired to think in layers of interaction (created ergonomically by mouse pointer), flow and graphical representation. Look in broad term has an emotional impact and is a sum of lot of elements (lines, colors, whitespaces, iconography, animation etc.). But when we are speaking about interface - functi…

I don’t see much breakdown of the desktop paradigm from a usability perspective. Targets are larger and things are rounded off, but is that really as catastrophic as you suggest? I don’t have formal design training but I find it fascinating.

I know I am biased, my view is personal opinion only. In this personal opinion I see a lot of things I don't agree with, but I am old in a sense that I have seen better from Apple and automatically expect more (which is unrealistic at this point in time). In this personal and biased view Desktop Computing is optimisation for interaction real estate, when I work on big screen I expect "more space" for window management and the idea of larger target is some kind of funky experiment with visible goal: to merge desktop and mobile interaction and I don't see it usable at all. This approach is "Design for Design's Sake" (we don't touch MacOS, we use cursor interaction). It heavily reminds me of auto industries approach to replace every physical controller with touch interaction (because its cheap and people like their smartphones).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#669

Post by diggan »

victor106 wrote: post #109

> A task like editing 8K RAW RED video file that might have taken a $5000 machine before can now be done on a $699 Mac Mini M1 or a fan-less MacBook Air that costs $999 That’s insanely great. Maybe I am exaggerating but Apple’s M1 might be the best innovation in the tech industry in the past 5 years.

Since you've been able to edit high-res (haven't tried 8K but 4K and 6K been working fine) footage on commodity hardware (that costs way less than $5000) for... years, via editing software that supports operations via GPU (like DaVinci Resolve), you still think it's the best innovation in the tech industry? Add to it that the M1 is proprietary, only developed for one OS and one company, it feels less like innovation for the industry and more like Apple-specific innovation.

Also, the argument that only $5000 could edit high-res footage is false even without the invention of GPU editing. Proxy clips been around for as long as I've done video editing, even though the experience is worse, it's been possible to edit at reduced resolutions for a long time.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#670

Post by detaro »

niea_11 wrote: post #656
michaelmrose wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A machine that wont outperform the new mini $6000 16 cores 32GB of ram least powerful gpu on the list 2GB of storage $8,799.00 28 cores 48GB of ram same gpu 4GB of storage $14,699 MSRP on a 2020 Toyota Corolla $19,600 AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-Core 3.7 GHz Socket sTRX4 $2,629.90 Cost of the same basic GPU about $219 Cost of complete system equivalent to the almost car priced mac about 4200. 9k-15k isn't "a lot"…

I don't use apple products but I think the high price of a workstation is not something specific to Apple. From a discussion I had with a friend recently, I found that Precision workstations from Dell or Z workstations from HP have similar prices for similar performances (sometime prices can reach 40k or 70k dollars). When comparing Mac Pro to an enthusiast pc build, yes the mac pro is "overpriced", but the mac pro i…

It's not just "enthusiast PC builds". You can buy plenty of PCs in that middle category of high-but-not-extreme performance without the certifications, Quadros and vendor markup that a full-on "workstation" model has. And they're perfectly fine choices for many professional use cases.

For that market, the Mac Pro is overpriced (the high-end Dell/HP workstations are too), and Apple doesn't make anything more suited for it. That's the criticism. That the Mac Pro is acceptably priced compared to the Dell/HP workstations doesn't matter if that's not what you need.

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