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Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

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191–200 of 228 posts

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#191
post #155
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent the whole day on zoom on battery yesterday and still had 35% left to play with.

MBP 2019 with a sub-100 cycles battery burns almost half the battery over one hour Zoom call.

My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA.

Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps.

I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are).

If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem.

[EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#192
post #14

I see a myriad of comments that boil down to “duh”, but I think these comments are missing the point. Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new ARM macs outpaced by older models”. Had Apple not knocked M1 out of the park, this was a real possibility. Is it surprising that a well executed architecture change is now selling well? Not really. But the more interesting point is that the rest of the market a…

See Surface Pro X as an example of that alternate possibility.

Perhaps a bit ironically the M1 Macs arguably offer the best Windows on ARM experience.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#193
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth observing that a lot of IT departments aren't necessarily rushing into the M1, especially to the degree that there isn't a full range of laptops with the new architecture yet.

Do IT department ever rush? I think their ambition is to be slow, but steady. If you don’t want to change course often, you can’t react immediately to every thing that happens.

When they have to. Like when everyone went remote a year ago. But, to put it mildly, providing people with access to the newest Apple laptop does not constitute an emergency.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you vastly overestimate how much the average consumer thinks about or cares about OS updates. What you say is something that could affect the decision making process for highly technical people, but even then... we have no firm commitments from Apple on which platforms will get the longest support, so it's a gut-feeling decision, which isn't very technical. As you hint, the M1 could be treated as a pathfinder…

The original iPad was, in terms of compute specifications, a minimum viable product. The M1 Macs are not—they are the combination of a mature platform with a mature silicon chip. Given the sheer volume of M1 sales there’s no chance they’re going to be so prematurely deprecated as the original iPad was. At the very least I’d put money on the M1 not being deprecated before all Intel-powered Macs (present and future) ar…

I think the M1 will easily last for a few years - but we don't know what they have left in stock. Was the original iPad regarded as MVP when it came out?

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know if the silicon shortages will affect the M2 or what comes after? I wonder if they booked enough volume with TSMC to get to 4nm or whatever the next process shrink is or if they will be trying to shove M1s into everything.

AFAIK the silicon shortages (of high end nodes) are partly because Apple has all the capacity (which they have because they're swimming in cash and have high margins and thus have been able to outbid everyone else).

Good for us in the Apple ecosystem with money to spend. Bad for everyone else. Hmm.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone comment why the response times are faster? Is it entirely a question of which CPU is used or does it have to do with something else?

Apple is now able to codesign the software and hardware top to bottom. I have no inside knowledge but using one of these things it's basically obvious what's going on. They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. So I think they've been really aggressive about making the interactions low friction. It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses,…

> They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library.

They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. Not sure if this was ever true for someone who used a Mac before. Going to a Dell or Lenovo feels like a huge downgrade. Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. Also the track pad and other screen on the Mac is so much better. Even if some Windows lapt…

> Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. This is completely wrong. For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter than a MacBook Air at 2.8 pounds. It also offers 32GB of ram, does not have a glued-in battery, does not use glass and the keyboard is much less likely to fail. I am tempted by the M1, b…

> For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter than a MacBook Air at 2.8 pounds. It also offers 32GB of ram, does not have a glued-in battery

.. and yet if feels heavier, looks shittier, is less durable, full of Lenovo spyware and overall still much worse quality. I have had so many Lenovo laptops in my life that I can say for sure that there is nothing good that comes out of this company.

It's like buying a Wilkinson razor with 5 blades, plastic covering and which weights only a few grams in total. Yes, on paper it's lighter, has more blades and has super easily replaceable parts and is also much cheaper, but if you buy a thiers issard carbon steal cut-throat straight razor you will only have one blade, it will be much heavier and more expensive but you will still have the best shave in your life with zero irritation and not look like a cheap red faced pig afterwards. That's the difference between Lenovo and Apple in computer hardware.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#199
post #197

Anyone have comments on the difference between Apple’s M and A processors? Why did they go with the M in the iPad and not the A like the iPhone?

The branding is arbitrary. If you want to read the tea leaves, it seems to indicate that Apple is going to incorporate more Mac-like elements into the iPad Pro, which from its inception has had some users struggling to make full use of it's power.

The ad they showed it with involved Tim Cook "stealing" the M1 from the Macbook and putting it in an iPad. So if you want to predict, perhaps there will be some big software news at WWDC.

But that's just speculation. There's nothing really different from what the M1 is and what people expected the "A14X" to be.

Re: Apple Now Selling More M1 Macs Than Intel-Based Models, Says Tim Cook

#200
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is now able to codesign the software and hardware top to bottom. I have no inside knowledge but using one of these things it's basically obvious what's going on. They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. So I think they've been really aggressive about making the interactions low friction. It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses,…

> They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?

They'd still be constrained by Intel/nVidia's expected API design and almost certainly some key code from them as well. With apple controlling the hardware too, they can make the interface work however they want. That introduces the possibility of making some radical simplifications or optimizations.
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