>It is even the best Windows PC The delusion is very strong here.
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN and please omit name-calling.
The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
171–180 of 348 posts
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#172I think we really need a break from people submitting more M1 Mac unboxing articles, unless there's significant original technical content. This is turning into fanboyism.
It's just... really good. It's an uncanny feeling that many haven't had for a while
its really not...
I would advise you to try something outside of apple once the m1 dies on ya (in like a decade)
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#173This post says how unpredictable it is. Come on, you can run a linux distribution on a non-apple hardware and not even worry if any of those software will run on it. Plus any of the 40 other top TIOBE tools.
I've used a Linux laptop before and it was always so painful to get basic things working, like it being able to suspend when you close the lid. Packaging is usually better, if you don't want any nice GUI programs (like iaWriter) or games
Linux laptops are massively YMMV. Some work almost perfectly out of the box while others are plagued with quirks that never seem to get fixed.
Point in case I have a circa 2008 Dell workstation laptop that runs Linux pretty well, except for some reason its volume buttons (which, as far as I can tell, send standard key codes) only work as expected under some distros running some desktop environments. It's oddly spotty for such a basic function, and last I checked there was no surefire fix for it, just an endless list of "try this".
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#174New computer is better than old computer. Shocking. The M1 is a good chip. It is great that we have ARM cores that can go toe-to-toe with Zen 3. It is hardly a revolution and it would not be trivial to scale it to a workstation or server design. It is telling to see someone acting like the competition is still Intel. Intel has been playing catchup since Q1 of 2017. Their server parts in particular are woefully outdat…
Toe to toe? It starches every Ryzen chip in single core performance, and every mobile Ryzen under 45 watts TDP in multicore despite only having 4 performance cores and 15 Watts TDP.
>Toe to toe? It starches every Ryzen chip in single core performance
It most certainly does not. It trades blows, winning on some benchmarks and losing others. It seems a bit ahead on floating-point workloads and a bit behind on integer workloads.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
It does simply outperform every Intel design. That's great, but not enough to make it the fastest core in the world. It, to no one's surprise, falls behind the parts with higher core counts.
Caveats:
1. These benchmarks are preliminary. We are, by necessity, comparing across operating systems and architectures.
2. Comparing single-threaded performance between a SMT system and one without SMT is a little misleading, since a non-SMT core is worse than an SMT core even if the single-threaded performance is similar.
3. I have no clue how to handle the big.LITTLE architecture. I've never used a machine with heterogeneous cores and have never written any software for it. It is certainly a benefit to efficiency. It probably improves performance on highly-threaded workloads, but I am not sure.
I find myself annoyed by these discussions. I love new hardware! I find this chip very impressive! It is the best chip in the world in performance-per-watt! It is clearly the best mobile chip on the market! It has a lot of interesting accelerators! Please stop forcing me to be the naysayer.
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#175Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not always. I'm somewhat disappointed with my 2020 16" MBP that I bought after owning a 2015 MBP for 5 years. This one is faster for sure, but also noisier, gets hot often for no good reason (even with the lid closed for the whole day!), takes 7-8 seconds to wake my Eizo monitor, while the previous one would take only a second to do the same. To be honest and quite unexpectedly the 16" MBP is not the best Mac I ever…
Strange, I did exactly the same switch recently and consider the 16" MBP a significant upgrade from my old machine. It even stays completely silent most of the day while the old one would constantly spin the fans.
It is a an upgrade in some ways, no doubt. When Apple said the 16" MBP has the best ever laptop display they were right - it's hard to go back to the previous models after this one.
Something just feels a bit wrong about this machine. Running trivial Swift code in Playground can get it so hot that it becomes uncomfortable to rest it on the lap for example.
Do I need a processor that powerful? I'm not so sure if the price is the unsettling fan noise and being practically constantly warm. And no, there's no 3rd party software that could cause it, it's all Apple apps.
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can I play ten year old games? Based on peak performance at least I would assume yes. Honestly I'd be a little bit worried if you couldn't considering just how expensive they are.
Expensive compared to what?
Copied from a different comment of mine: £999 is a lot of PC. The processor in the M1 air is about 20% faster than the one in my laptop (£550 IIRC), but to spec an M1 out with the same amount of storage and RAM brings it to £1999.
I should stress that my now slightly ageing laptop is much thicker than an Air, but it's also used to play modern games so that balances out.
Personally, for the price of an Air I could actually use I'd just get something cheap and a big PC setup.
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have tried arm computers such as raspberry pi and they are slow. The linux arm projects seem to target just the cheapest price, m1 seems more like bang for buck. I hope linux hardware develops towards that.
raspberry pi's werent even 64bit until the latest revision and are meant to be dirt cheap the arm chromebooks like the lenovo duet absolutely murder the iPad pro or even the new iPad Air in terms of actually being a useful OS for devs
I don’t know whether that’s true, but that’s quite a change of subject from “macs are priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market”.
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#179I think we really need a break from people submitting more M1 Mac unboxing articles, unless there's significant original technical content. This is turning into fanboyism.
The voting system reflects HN sentiment, which generally isn't particularly pro Apple, so the implication is that M1 is quite special.
Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
#180I'm reluctant to buy it because of ports, and tiny amount of drive space. Waiting for the 14 inch, hoping for more ports, larger base hard drive, and new design for similar cost of upgrading the air.
Agreed. It’s tempting given how old my current MBP is, but I priced out a 16” MBP last year to budget for, and the 2TB drive, 32GB RAM, and 16” of screen size (especially since Big Sur is Big Sur) are too many compromises to make to jump on the M1 Macs today.