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The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

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Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#291

Post by DennisAleynikov »

masswerk wrote: post #226
_5vzs wrote: post #59

tldr; I got a Macbook Pro M1 for $975 in mint-condition at a Best Buy and already put the return label on it. While Geekbench showed great results, actual usage of the machine and headaches ensued were contrasting. To put it bluntly - M1 machines are currently unstable. There are numerous Bluetooth issues [1], formatting issues [2], Wifi 6 issues [3], VPN issues [4], firewall issues [5], and shocking security issues…

To be fair, none of these issues seem to be related to the M1 hardware, but to some issues and choices made with Big Sur.

its very frustrating trying to battle the people who

a) have never used an arm laptop b) think legacy apps run well c) think benchmarks are cool

its beyond impossible to dissuade someone from making the mistake of buying apples first gen chromebook without properly researching what they did to neuter macos to accomplish this.

basically every other reply here is too busy not realising A and singing praises to C

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#292

Post by nevi-me »

thefz wrote: post #278
nevi-me wrote: post #250

My wife has a 2012 MBP, which is usable because I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and added an SSD. I had limited experience and use of macOS, but didn't like it much. I bought the Air last month under duress, because I was going to a place that's 10°C warmer than my home, and my laptop's GPU passes the idle quiet threshold. I have tinnitus, so the laptop fan noise becomes unbearable. I'm enjoying using the Mac, I mainly de…

> My wife has a 2012 MBP, which is usable because I upgraded the RAM to 16GB and added an SSD. More or less same story with my previous Mid 2009 13'' MBP. The only reason why it has survived this long is because I've been able to add RAM, replace an SSD, replace the battery twice and replace a faulty touchpad too. Sadly this is no longer possible and modern Apple laptops are increasingly harder to repair.

Yea, Apple has great build quality. I have a 2013 HP Envy 17 that's also survived because of the ability to replace (keyboard, battery 2x, SSD). Its chassis has unfortunately started collapsing, but I want to fix it and donate it to a relative.

I hope these newer Macs that have everything soldered together, at least last 4-5 years. I'm going to try get a Mac as my next work device, maybe 2 years from now, so my wife can use my current one in future.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#293

Post by nevi-me »

angulardragon03 wrote: post #268
nevi-me wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the RAM? I'm assuming that you got 16GB? I thought 8GB would be barely usable for me, but I've been pleasantly surprised. I still use my desktop for heavy enough work, but 8GB is manageable for now.

The SSD is so fast that swapping pages in and out of memory is barely noticeable until you are really cranking up the memory pressure.

I'm trying to find out how much faster than a typical PCIe4 nvme SSD, which I have on my desktop. I'm not finding anything useful. Do you haave an idea?

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#294

Post by aquir »

fvv wrote: post #271
aquir wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds awesome! Can you share what type of laptop are you using?

Right now it,s an xmg which is a seller of clevo probably i will remain with that because I can change parts without voiding warranty , my reseller leave me add rm and hdd of my choice after the sale, i can buy without hdd and ram.. aalso have swappable battery and even if touchpad may not be apple quality i usually use mouse or trackball , but with the next I'll take a look at what Lenovo, hp dell etc will offer by…

Thanks, I'll have a look!

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#295

Post by pjmlp »

mhh__ wrote: post #281
pjmlp wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't get better than this, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://chromeos.dev/en/linux Unless the fragmented desktop communities finally decide what the whole stack should be like, for users and desktop developers.

> It won't get better than this, Microsoft don't let you access perf_event, which immediately makes it useless for me for example. It's not really fragmentation as much as there not being being a billion dollar company making the stack actually work in the first place - if Apple decided to rebase onto Linux for some reason there's nothing stopping them getting everything shipshape just that it takes a lot of time and…

Apple will never bother again with GPL software, while Google would rather migrate everyone to Fuchsia if they could, IBM is focused on making Linux a good citizen for cloud and mainframe computing, Oracle just wants to make it run their database stack, so that leaves out Microsoft, in what concerns billion dollar companies that would care to do that.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#296

Post by mhh__ »

pjmlp wrote: post #295
mhh__ wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It won't get better than this, Microsoft don't let you access perf_event, which immediately makes it useless for me for example. It's not really fragmentation as much as there not being being a billion dollar company making the stack actually work in the first place - if Apple decided to rebase onto Linux for some reason there's nothing stopping them getting everything shipshape just that it takes a lot of time and…

Apple will never bother again with GPL software, while Google would rather migrate everyone to Fuchsia if they could, IBM is focused on making Linux a good citizen for cloud and mainframe computing, Oracle just wants to make it run their database stack, so that leaves out Microsoft, in what concerns billion dollar companies that would care to do that.

That has nothing to do with what I said.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#297

Post by adrian_b »

valuearb wrote: post #261
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

M1 is either first or very close to first in all the Anandtech benchmarks against CPUs using up to seven times more power.

Apple M1 is definitely faster than any other CPU whose power consumption is reduced at the same value.

At identical power consumptions, an Apple M1 core is faster by about 30% to 40% than an Intel Tiger Lake or an AMD Zen 3.

All older Intel/AMD CPUs are even much slower.

Nevertheless, the power consumptions of Intel and AMD CPUs can be raised to much higher levels and above 20 W per core, which is probably a little more than 3 times what an Apple M1 core consumes, they match the Apple M1 performance and at a higher power (i.e. in the current desktop Zen 3 and in the soon to be introduced Intel Rocket Lake and Intel Tiger Lake H) they surpass the speed of Apple M1.

So in single-thread execution, AMD Zen 3 is already faster and the Intel CPUs that are expected for end of March will also be faster, but only at much higher power consumptions (3 to 4 times more per core in single-thread).

Nonetheless, in desktops and large laptops those power consumptions do not matter.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#298

Post by dtech »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #152
threedots wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 16" MBP is terrible with an external monitor (or at least mine is with my external monitor). Fans spin up like crazy and the case gets hot enough to fry an egg on. It's the one terrible weakness of an otherwise great machine.

I’ve had this experience and seen many others mention it too. I always make a point when I have time to mention how I’ve solved it. If you haven’t already, try plugging the power in on the right side, and the display/any other peripherals on the left. It sounds crazy, but this has been the solution for tons of people. Apparently the heat generated by power input (even at a steady full charge) is enough to spike the s…

That seems crazy but plausible. Explains why so many people complain about it while my office and home never had issues, it's all laid out so you plug in the power on the right.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#299

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

valuearb wrote: post #256
adrian_b wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct only about Ryzens based on the old Zen 2. Any new Ryzen 5xxx based on Zen 3 is faster in single-thread than the best Apple M1. In general-purpose benchmarks, like Geekbench 5, the maximum Apple M1 score is 1752, while Ryzen 5xxx score between 1800 and 1876. In computational benchmarks, where the IPC is limited by some execution resources reaching 100% utilization, so the higher average IPC of Apple M1…

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-5800x The 5800x is a 105 watt part(!!!), still gets starched by the M1 in single core, and is only about 40% faster in multicore despite using all that power to drive double the performance core count. But by all means, go off to cherry pick more niche benchmarks...

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/5806255

The 5950X has double the core count of the 5800X but only manages a 1.6x improvement in multithreaded performance.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-threadrip...

The 3990X is the most powerful desktop part on the market. It gets merely a 1.4x speedup over the 5950X despite having four times the core count. (Granted, the 5950X core is somewhat better).

Geekbench isn't terribly useful at the best of times. It's particularly bad when comparing across architectures and operating systems. And, as should be clear, its multithreaded test does not scale linearly with core count. You should never take the ratio between two scores to mean the ratio between performance, especially when comparing multithreaded scores with different core counts.

Re: The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned

#300

Post by amelius »

messe wrote: post #6
amelius wrote: post #2

"owned"

Yep, a machine owned by the user. They're free to install whatever software they want on it, including the OS. Now, it happens that Linux and other free OSes don't support the hardware yet, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they can be ported. Is there a particular point you'd like to make?

> Now, it happens that Linux and other free OSes don't support the hardware yet, but that doesn't diminish the fact that they can be ported.

Is the specification of the M1 processor including the GPU part open then?

And can the laptop be repaired by the user?

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