121–130 of 201 posts
Its only disruption if it disrupts. No one cares other than existing Apple users so I guess the only disruption will be the year of really fast and efficient teething issues they will be dealing with. We have one at work, I'd highly recommend waiting another year before getting one if you want to be productive.
Only speaking for myself but I'm typing this on my first ever MacBook purchased because of the M1 it came with.
Its only disruption if it disrupts. No one cares other than existing Apple users so I guess the only disruption will be the year of really fast and efficient teething issues they will be dealing with. We have one at work, I'd highly recommend waiting another year before getting one if you want to be productive.
> No one cares other than existing Apple users Anyone in the market for an ultrabook will care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the M1 is more analogous to the release of the 64-bit A7 CPU. Which doesn’t diminish it’s importance at all. The A7 was the inflection point that had the competition scrambling [unsuccessfully] to catch up to Apple ever since.
It's also worth remembering that while it may have shifted the smartphone market (and certainly Apple tablets), competitors still exist, improving over time, remaining relevant. Would someone argue that Android is simply not an option as a smartphone for a very large portion of the smartphone market? No. And likewise, competitors to Apple's laptops and workstations are very much going to continue to be relevant, and…
Apple has captured 66% [1] of the profit in the cell phone industry. Other than Samsung in the US and other manufacturers in Asia, Apple has made the other companies a lot less relevant. When the iPhone shipped in 2007, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Motorola and others were the giants in the industry; I'd argue none of what's left of these companies is relevant today.
The same thing will happen with laptops; we already caught a glimpse of this in Japan, where Apple became the #1 selling desktop when the M1 Mac mini started shipping [2].
As the price/performance and performance/watt becomes more obvious, Apple will make inroads with new customers and markets.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-...
[2]: https://www.imore.com/apple-now-top-desktop-pc-maker-japan-t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a massive improvement for non gaming laptop users. Most laptops in 2020 overheat constantly and are slow and loud as a result. The non M1 macbooks are next to unusable because they will burn your legs just running safari. Now they have reached a higher level of performance without even having a fan. Not hard to see how this is pretty huge news. The M1 Macbook air seems like the best laptop for the average person…
Laptops ... overheat? and people put up with this? I'm earnestly surprised. (my only use for a laptop is as a remote terminal to an Actual Computer)
Its only disruption if it disrupts. No one cares other than existing Apple users so I guess the only disruption will be the year of really fast and efficient teething issues they will be dealing with. We have one at work, I'd highly recommend waiting another year before getting one if you want to be productive.
>No one cares other than existing Apple users Only speaking for myself but I'm typing this on my first ever MacBook purchased because of the M1 it came with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't just the "new thing" feeling, the smartphone form factor opened up new computing tasks that weren't really possible previously. The M1 is a quantitative, not qualitative improvement. That's why it won't be as memorable. The battery life is impressive, but it should be noted that you could have essentially the same experience with an older device by keeping the heavy computations on another machine -- remote…
> The M1 is a quantitative, not qualitative improvement. That's why it won't be as memorable. You're missing the forest for the trees. The quantitative improvements allow for advances in the qualitative experience. GP pointed out feeling impressed by coding all day and spending just 18% battery life. That's a qualitative experience. M1 (and chips like it that we'll see come up) will allow for a qualitative transforma…
Sure, the claim's been walked back from "as memorable as the iPhone" to "a step towards a broader change in portable computing." At this point I guess I agree with that level of importance.
Since these keep floating up, I'm already exhausted with this specific rebuttal to Morehead's review: > As pointed out in John Gruber’s hard takedown of Moorhead’s piece, most of the problems he encountered were software problems, not M1 hardware issues. Morehead's allegiances and work are relevant biases, as are Gruber's. But Morehead's review wasn't of the M1 processor or architecture as a technology. It was a revi…
> Morehead's allegiances and work are relevant biases, as are Gruber's. But Morehead's review wasn't of the M1 processor or architecture as a technology. It was a review of the 13" M1 MacBook Pro as an end-user device. Moorhead's review literally contains this sentence: > The new M1 processor is impressive, but far from perfect- it has many warts, that nearly nobody is discussing. He then proceeds to describe not war…
which is the result of the change in processor. There is, of course, an undertone of bias in the review against the M1.
It's like someone reviewing a tesla car and complain that it's difficult to charge because there's not enough chargers in the road networks and gas stations don't cater for electric vehicles. A valid complaint about the tesla car, but not caused directly by the quality/capability of the car itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also worth remembering that while it may have shifted the smartphone market (and certainly Apple tablets), competitors still exist, improving over time, remaining relevant. Would someone argue that Android is simply not an option as a smartphone for a very large portion of the smartphone market? No. And likewise, competitors to Apple's laptops and workstations are very much going to continue to be relevant, and…
It's also worth remembering that while it may have shifted the smartphone market (and certainly Apple tablets), competitors still exist, improving over time, remaining relevant. Apple has captured 66% [1] of the profit in the cell phone industry. Other than Samsung in the US and other manufacturers in Asia, Apple has made the other companies a lot less relevant. When the iPhone shipped in 2007, Windows Phone, Blackbe…
The discussion above was specifically about how the advance in performance of the A7[0] in 2013 changed things. Honestly I don't know the numbers for market or profit share in 2013 to compare to now, but for consumers the decisions are not wildly different, except for someone specifically comparing phones on CPU performance alone, and ignoring the other differences. Of course, some will also be affected by Apple's marketing of "the fastest smartphones" and that helps with selling phones.
To apply this to laptops is, in my opinion, much trickier. Now I can't speak for all consumers considering purchasing a laptop, but as technical as I am, performance/watt is not my number one consideration. It kind of is, indirectly, an important one. I don't want a hot, loud laptop, and I want some battery life. But things like playing demanding games, or compiling code with as many cores as I can throw at it are more important to me. That and price, being able to upgrade RAM and SSDs when the need arises, etc.
So I have a $950 laptop with a dedicated GPU, 8 cores, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVME SSD, and I can add RAM and another NVME SSD when the need arises. Of course, I only get about 4 hours of battery life, and I'd love more, but it isn't going to change my life much either way (it's freezing outside, I am almost always within range of an outlet!), and I can't give up all the other things that this laptop has that an M1 Macbook lacks, even if the performance/watt is much better.
I have seen so many articles on HN in front page about M1 over the past few weeks. Like a curious child I read all of them because somewhere in me I want to believe there exists a possibility of a giant leap for Desktop/Laptop. Having tried it myself, I should say this is going to be remembered just like the iPhone in 2007.
Benchmarks show that the M1 has better performance in only a few areas, and underperforms in others, and that's with Apple controlling literally every aspect of the hardware and software stack. It's great for an ARM system for a vertically oriented company, but it isn't sufficiently performative to be a significant threat to the competition. And that's before you consider all the non-technical crap Apple has thrown a…
I haven't seen a review where it has underperformed any other comparable device.
I've seen a lot of talk about how the Threadripper from AMD is faster… duh. Of course a 32- or 64-core processor that costs 2x-3x than a Mac mini and draws 280 watts is faster than an M1.
The M1 peaks at 20-24 watts and doesn't even require a fan in the MacBook Air.
It's graphic blows away all integrated graphics and is comparable to many discrete GPUs. On CPU benchmarks, it's faster than all but the latest Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, which are in laptops that run hotter, are louder and don't have 18-20 battery life doing real world things.
x86 applications generally just work and often run faster on an M1 Mac than they did on Intel Macs.
Considering the broad swaths of essential business software that is simply incompatible with Apple OS, that's not going to happen.
Depends on what business you're in. If you're in the content creation business, you're good to go [1].
Microsoft Office is already in beta for running natively on M1 and so much other business software is web-based or Electron apps (like Slack) and those work fine.
[1]: "Hollywood thinks new Mac mini 'could be huge' for video editors"—https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/hollywood-thinks-...
There are two milestones in this transition. Hardware and software. On a hardware and optimisation of SOC Apple has delivered significant result. Let see how software adoption part will happen and how third party non App Store apps will perform in this transition. Let's not forget lessons from the past. Hardware is vehicle for running software and iPhone and iPad apps are not desktop software alternative.