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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#671

Post by hans1729 »

huangbong wrote: post #654
Tepix wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we even talking about 8k video? It's something that almost noone needs and even fewer people have to edit. My guess is most people are still happy with editing their FHD videos. Something that works well on a five year old laptop.

4 years ago “why do we care about 4K” 8 years ago “why do we care about 1080p” etc...

We'll see about that (with respect to pixel density and efficiency). I'm typing this on a 4k xps 15, and while the display is great, the battery cost is extreme. There would be no meaningful advantage in an 8k-display of the same form factor, so there is far, far less incentive for manufacturers to race to 8k.

there will be 8k tvs, sure, but lets be real - the step to 1080p was massive, the step to 4k already couldn't fit in those shoes.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#672

Post by grishka »

plorntus wrote: post #241
grishka wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing more of what ? As a user, I'd rather wait a month for a proper native app than get an electron pile of crap in a week.

While theres no way for me to have a source for this but I would hazard a guess and say most apps that use Electron simply would not exist without it. Maybe someone would fill the void if they had the idea, money and knowhow to build a native app on whatever platform you use but probably unlikely. Basically, no way you'd just be waiting an extra month for your native version.

So let it be. If there's a niche waiting to be filled, there are bound to be multiple attempts at that. The world would've been a better place without electron.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#673

Post by bserge »

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…

The divide has always been there, it's just that "computer illiterate" people massively outnumber the literate ones and as such, are getting more attention.

It's kind of like saying there's a huge divide between "house literate" people, who know how everything in their home is built and how to fix it, and "house illiterate" people who just want to come home, turn on the lights, use the shower, the oven and the bed.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#674

Post by amelius »

fomine3 wrote: post #396
wsc981 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing swapping happens quicker, perhaps due to the unified memory architecture. With quicker swapping you’d be less likely to notice a delay. That said I’d still be very hesitant buying a 8 GB M1 Mac. When my iMac only had 8 GB it was a real pain to use. Increasing my iMac’s memory to 24 GB made it usable.

Bottleneck for swap in/out must be SSD, not memory. Also its SSD isn't fast compared to other NVMe SSDs in both throughput and IOPS. Possibly latency is great thanks to integrated SSD controller onto M1 but I don't think it changes the game.

Is a SSD suitable for swap, given its limited number of write cycles?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#676

Post by aseipp »

oblio wrote: post #635
skohan wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I highly doubt this. Another example would be Nvidia, where after 20 years open source drivers are still worse than closed source ones.

Eh, Nvidia shares a lot of the blame on that one though, because the signed firmware they use post-Fermi can't be legally redistributed in any way, and is embedded in the proprietary graphics driver blobs, so it can't be extracted. That firmware is required to adjust GPU clocks, which start off very low. So the choice isn't "Good proprietary drivers" vs "Less featured open drivers", it's "proprietary drivers" vs "drivers that are legally forbidden from running above 0.5% their advertised clock speed, no matter if it's otherwise fully featured".[1] In contrast, AMD and Intel have open drivers in Mesa that work very well and fully supported and AMD allows its signed VBIOS to be redistributed, so it's clearly not just a matter of chip complexity, but the position of the vendor as well.

In that vein I agree with your original point, though: I suspect we'll probably never see Linux on the M1 in anything but the most superficial form that lacks all the really good stuff. You might get the 8 core CPU, SSD/RAM, some peripherials. But no Neural Engine, no GPU, video decoders or image processors, power management, security features in the T2 like attested boot or encrypted key storage, etc. The only way that'll ever change is if Apple makes it happen.

[1] For reference, the open source Nouveau driver for Fermi cards, nvc0, is the 4th most well supported Mesa driver in terms of features implemented (almost 90% of all features, surpassed only by radeonsi and i915). So it's not like there's no interest in FOSS Nvidia drivers... https://mesamatrix.net/

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#677

Post by studius »

Hamuko wrote: post #614
foldr wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the iMac and iMac Pro range. The Mac Pro is clearly demarcated as a "money is no object" product.

I'd be much more interested in the iMac if it wasn't built inside a monitor.

The M1 was released on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini.

Buying an iMac now would seem to be a poor decision.

From what I'm seeing in some of the comments, people are so lost in the history of the past years of Apple being the pooch ridden from behind on performance, that they can't get their heads out of their arses to see how awesome this is.

I am sitting here right now wondering if I should invest more of my savings directly in Apple stock, at least temporarily to ride their sales wave, or if I should buy a Mac mini and a nice wide curved monitor with a mechanical keyboard from WASD and be f'ing awesome all of a sudden.

The only reason I'm not hitting the buy button is that all of that isn't $135. There's no reason for that amount, but if it said $135, I'd have already paid for it and been drinking beer to celebrate the happiest purchases I ever made.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#678

Post by ajuc »

Twisell wrote: post #651
kllrnohj wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely changed the scope of what's being discussed, though. Retain/release being faster would just surface as regular performance improvements. It won't change anything at all about how an existing application manages memory. It's possible that apps have been completely overhauled for a baseline M1 experience. Extremely, extraordinarily unlikely that anything remotely of the sort has happened, though. And…

From the original article: Third, Marcel Weiher explains Apple’s obsession about keeping memory consumption under control from his time at Apple as well as the benefits of reference counting: >where Apple might have been “focused” on performance for the last 15 years or so, they have been completely anal about memory consumption. When I was there, we were fixing 32 byte memory leaks. Leaks that happened once. So not…

Aren't most big desktop apps like office on PC still written in C++? Same with almost all AAA games. And the operating system itself.

Browsers are written in C++ and javascript has full-blown GC.

I don't see how refcounting gives you advantage over manual memory management for most users.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#679

Post by dspillett »

BigJ1211 wrote: post #665
m463 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

For note taking, word processing, basic image editing, web browsing, video playing, etc, you can easily get a capable enough laptop for that price.

This is not comparing like-for-like in terms of what the machines can do, of course. Apple's range doesn't even remotely try to cover that part of the market so a direct comparison is unfair if you are considering absolute price/capability of the devices irrespective of the user's requirements, but for work that doesn't involve significant computation that bargain-basement unit may adequately do everything many people need it to do (assuming they don't plan to also use it for modern gaming in non-working hours).

> If you try to sell anything Apple related that isn't more than 5 years old you won't have that problem at all.

Most people don't consider the resale value of a machine when they buy it. For that to be a fair comparison you have to factor in the chance of it being in good condition after a couple of year's use (this will vary a lot from person to person) and the cost of any upgrades & repairs needed in that time (again more expensive for Apple products by my understanding).

And if you buy a $500 laptop and hand it down or bin it, then you are still better off (assuming you don't need a powerful machine) than if you dropped $3,000 for an iDevice and later sold it for $2,000.

> what the market value should* be.*

"Market value" is decided by what the market will bare, not what we want to be able to sell things for, and new & second hand are often very different markets.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#680

Post by arvinsim »

BigJ1211 wrote: post #665
m463 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think it is realistic. It's easy to think people have money to spend on $999 laptop when you are living in a first world country. 90% of the world probably couldn't afford that.
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