Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

singhkays.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

811–820 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#811

Post by ampdepolymerase »

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #770
ericmay wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

There's a massive US centric bubble when it comes to Apple. iPhones and Macbooks are not in the majority, let alone universal, with software developers as whole, just in pockets

The five dollar latte crowd is willing to pay and consume. Walk into any café and good luck finding non-Apple machines. (Occasionally there will be a Surface or two, especially if you live in Seattle).

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#812

Post by DarkmSparks »

bserge wrote: post #783
DarkmSparks wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"housing illiteracy" was your example not mine. I was just suggesting a possible parallel with how great the divide is now compared with the days when the vast majority of the world was lucky to lay their hands on a Z80.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. It seems we're agreeing on there being a divide, except I think the current situation is just a natural result of widespread adoption. There's more people tinkering with dev boards and writing open source software, too, so it's not all bad.

Im saying I really started noticing the divide between the computer literate and the computer illiterate - that its actually becoming an issue in exactly the same ways general illiteracy became an issue as reading and writing became widespread.

With likely similar implications.

Which makes me sad.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#813

Post by ramosu »

I got tired of such reviews filled with so much bullshit..

These people forget about Pro users and still sees a laptop as an iPad with keyboard.

Pro users need the machine to -heavy- work, and rely on compatibility (software and hardware). Also, I work 90% of the time on my desk with the power adapter connected. So battery is far below in my priority list.

So far, MKHB was the only decent review I found. I suggest serious users to watch it.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#814

Post by ehvatum »

ericmay wrote: post #750
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.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

> The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

This has become steadily less true since about 2012, in my experience. I don’t know any full time developers still using an Apple laptop. The keyboard situation caused a lot of attrition. I finally stopped support for all Apple hardware at my company months ago, simply to get it out my headspace. Will Fusion360 again be completely broken by an Apple OS update? Am I going to have to invest time making our Qt and PyQt applications work, yet again, after an Apple update? Are Apple filesystem snapshots yet again going to prove totally defective? The answer is “no”, because we really need to focus on filling customer orders, do we’re done with Apple. ZFS snapshots function correctly. HP laptop keyboards work ok. Arch Linux and Windows 10 (with shutup10 and mass updates a few times per year) get the job done without getting in my face every god damned day.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#815

Post by _ph_ »

foldr wrote: post #602
nicolas_t wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

The iMac in many senses isn't a replacement for a proper desktop. You can't expand the disk storage, many iterations had no great graphics cards, this seems to be somewhat better now, but an upgrade means having to upgrade everything, including the screen. You can't even clean out the fans after some years.

Yes, I own an iMac, as this is the closest to a desktop machine Apple sells, but a replacement for what the Mac Pro used to be, it is not.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#816

Post by headmelted »

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 think the resale value for a student macbook doesn't really matter"

It's literally the only thing that matters if you're the seller.

If you have your choice of two items to sell 5 years from now, you ideally want to be selling the item that's worth substantially more to the buyer, rather than trying to sell something worthless.

Assuming there's nothing dishonest happening, it's really up to the market to price.

Thing is, the student buying the MacBook is probably going to be substantially better off that way too, in that it will likely retain proportionally more of it's value from that point too.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#817

Post by _ph_ »

studius wrote: post #677
Hamuko wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The new Mini is certainly impressive and suitable for many tasks, but not a replacement for a full desktop machine. Memory and storage are very limited, and the GPU, while great for the MacBook Air, is far from desktop performance. Also, for desktop, the ports selection is very limited.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#818

Post by sudosysgen »

ogre_codes wrote: post #569
sudosysgen wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPUs, unlike video decoders, are programmable and general in purpose. As for Zoom, YouTube, and Netflix, existing hardware is more than fine enough. No one is streaming 8K RAW for a conference call. Unless you're an editor, you won't see much of a benefit.

> As for Zoom, YouTube, and Netflix, existing hardware is more than fine enough. Didn't suggest these were jobs existing CPUs struggle with. I said the video encode/ decode makes the CPU much more efficient which increases battery life.

But existing CPUs already use accelerated decode for these tasks. They have been for years and years. Those hardware decode blocks just aren't powerful enough for 6K RAW video, but they are fine for YouTube, Netflix, and Zoom, and indeed it's already accelerated.

So there is literally no benefit.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#819

Post by headmelted »

nickjj wrote: post #745
BigJ1211 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I'm not a student but it's pretty close I think. I invested $350 into a Chromebook that runs native Linux[0] about 4 years ago and it's still going strong as a secondary machine I use when I'm away from my main workstation. It has a 13" 1080p IPS display, 4gb of memory, an SSD, a good keyboard and weighs 2.9 pounds. It's noth…

Right, except that when you stop using the Chromebook every day or move on to something better, will it have residual value or just go to landfill?

I love Chromebooks, don't get me wrong, but the problem I've come to realise over time is that many are specced and priced just about at a point where they'll quickly move into obsolescence not long after purchase - at which point the only thing keeping them out of the ground is your willingness to tolerate them after the updates have stopped.

The Mac will still be worth a good chunk of money to someone.

I have a Chromebook Flip here that I adored for several years that I couldn't give away now.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#820

Post by jason0597 »

deergomoo wrote: post #573
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.

> you're still going to be stuck using OSX One folk's bug is another folk's feature

By that logic, whenever I recommend a Thinkpad and I'm met with responses of "it doesn't have as good of a trackpad!", am I not allowed to say "use the keyboard shortcuts on Linux, they are better"?

I mean, one folk's bug is another folk's feature, right?

Relevant exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25164195

If I were to rearrange your response to fit the above exchange, it would be in the form of: "Learn to use MacOS instead. It's faster than using Linux and makes it much less important.". Couldn't I reply with "Why do you not want people to use MacOS?"

Post reply on HN