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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#731

Post by rbanffy »

m463 wrote: post #659
tolien wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because as the sibling comments point out, the price of a Mac Pro isn't just an "Apple Tax^WPremium" over a desktop machine but is an order of magnitude more expensive (assuming you don't care about workstation-class components, i.e. Xeon Ws, Radeon Pro GPUs and ECC RAM). There's an enormous price gap between a Mac Mini and the Mac Pro (especially when the Mini now has higher single-threaded performance than the base…

I've had a continuous string of Mac Pros from G3 to 2012 (MacPro 5,1) my main workhorse. I have continually updated and expanded it. The 2013 mac pro was a mess. pass. The latest mac pro... I think it wasn't just expensive, it was sort of sucker expensive.

> The latest mac pro... I think it wasn't just expensive, it was sort of sucker expensive

It's the kind of Mac that makes you get an iMac to put on your desk and a beefy Linux server-grade box you hide somewhere, but that does all your heavy lifting.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#732

Post by coldtea »

rini17 wrote: post #708
Heliosmaster wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.

Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.

I think the developers and power users that still use desktop machines/towers are either very cpu-power-hungry niche exception, or the more backwards ones, and thus least likely to influence/be imitated by anyone...

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#733

Post by rootlocus »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #600
spijdar wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A more apt analogy would be "for everyday users who just want to record their expenses, keep a journal, and sketch some drawings, paper and pencil have been perfectly fine for the last century". Understanding how computers work down to being able to describe L1 instruction caches and how prefetching works and why having an 8 instruction wide decoder pulling from a giant L1I cache isn't really relevant to empowering p…

>You seem to be insinuating that, used to, people were "more literate" and are becoming more ignorant. No, I'm saying the goalposts moved - a lot. The same way widespread reading and writing moved the goalposts back in the day. >How does not understanding how computers work limit people? It puts them in the class that considers computers to be magic, like not knowing how to read and write put people in a class that c…

Most people can use computers just fine which, by definition, is enough for them to be computer literate. Where's the problem?

How much do you need to know about how your car works to benefit from driving it?

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#734

Post by selykg »

matwood wrote: post #724
cwhiz wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making these comments for years. Every new macOS release. Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want. Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.

Agreed. At this point the argument is nearing joke/meme level.

It's popular to hate on Apple right now. Seems even Hacker News isn't immune to this trend.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#735

Post by seszett »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

Is there any hope that this will happen in a reasonable timeframe?

I'm very happy running Linux on my (rather old) MacBook Air, which is hardware-wise the best (not in performance but in comfort, durability, design) laptop I've used yet. I want to change because it's starting to show its limits now, but I haven't found yet something to replace it.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#736

Post by nercury »

It's quite clear how this "magic" is possible. Weather you like it or not, the future is a "product on a chip". That includes everything: CPU, GPU, RAM, SSD, and assembly instructions for vendor-specific things like NSObject. This puts everything physically close together (efficient), eliminates all the protocol compatibility overhead (efficient), removes all the standards the company can't control (efficient). The downside, of course, that this will be the ultimate vendor lock-in, which is hard to compete with, and can't be serviced by anyone else. The upside is that the alternatives will always remain relevant.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#737

Post by ukyrgf »

kube-system wrote: post #429
nycticorax wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.

You can get Win 10 Pro. I don’t remember my system having any of that junk preinstalled

You're correct that they aren't preinstalled, but once you connect to the internet they will be downloaded and installed automatically.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#738

Post by marcodave »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #549
fouric wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very vague. What exactly do you mean by "computer illiterate" - do you mean someone who isn't a power user, or someone who can't program?

people whose knowledge of computers stops at "browse the web, stream some Netflix, maybe edit some documents" Is the new "peoples whose knowledge of reading and writing stops at being able to sign their name".

do you know how your car/microwave/dishwasher/TV works, to the detail of the engine, the type of tires, and would you be able to repair/exchange/hack parts of it? I don't, and I really don't see the point of knowing to be able to do so, as my hobbies/curiosity lies somewhere else -- for some, computers are just another household appliance (and a particularly complex one)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#739

Post by speleding »

coldtea wrote: post #732
rini17 wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.

I think the developers and power users that still use desktop machines/towers are either very cpu-power-hungry niche exception, or the more backwards ones, and thus least likely to influence/be imitated by anyone...

I care to differ (as a developer on a desktop). The reason for developing on a desktop is that my productivity is much higher with 3 screens, one of which is a 40 inch, a full 101 key keyboard and a mouse.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#740

Post by reader_mode »

jmnicolas wrote: post #655
reader_mode wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect C# is not that much better being a managed and garbage collected language C# is better than JVM in that it has custom value types. Say you want to allocate an array of points in Java you basically have to allocate array[pointer] all pointing to tiny 8 byte objects (for eg. 32 bit float x and y coords) + the overhead of object header. If you use C# and structs it just allocates a flat array of floats with…

I had a C# project that was too slow and used too much RAM. I can attest that structs use less memory however IIRC they don't have methods so no GetHashCode() which made them way too slow to insert in a HashSet or Dictionary. In the end I used regular objects in a Dictionary. RAM usage was a bit higher than structs (not unbearably so) but speed improvement was massive.

>I can attest that structs use less memory however IIRC they don't have methods so no GetHashCode() which made them way too slow to insert in a HashSet or Dictionary

You can and should implement IEquatable on a struct, especially if you plan on placing them in a hashset - the default implementation will use reflection and will be slow but it's easy to override.

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