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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

221–230 of 942 posts

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#221
> Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation. It challenges OEMs to consider how they might spec higher-end systems if some of the higher price tag didn’t have to pay for a faster CPU.

I guess that’s the key paragraph.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there isn't a 5nm version of those... And laptop battery life is vastly different between these two.

Can you link a good test result that proves this? The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry either.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a value in that too - people know immediately that i7 is powerful, and everyone [that cares] already knows that processors are renewed frequently. Though yeah, perhaps something like 7i1, 7i2 would've been better. Apple solved this nicely (given the naming is confirmed) with M1X.

That's fine if you're buying new. Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance? When buying a used laptop or desktop, how much extra research do I need to do to figure out which processor I'm actually getting? There's been 13 years of i7's.

>>Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance?

Of course. I got a new laptop last year with a Core i5-10300H, and it easily beats my desktop i7-4790K, despite the same number of cores, in every workload.

UserBenchmark is your friend for this kind of thing really:

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/

I do have to say that nowadays buying an Intel CPU is a really bad idea though.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link a good test result that proves this? The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry either.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

This doesn't contain any comparison graphs relevant to my question, and couldn't, because it's from November. The Ryzen 5000 mobile chips came out this year.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#226
post #179

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh. I am a bit more extreme in that I am not buying any machine below 32GB given RAM is no longer upgradable, but even if my mom came and asked me about those iMacs, I'd tell her to not buy. It's a shame that Apple is so great at greenwashing and at the same time spits on every way they could help create truly sustainable products by just…

Reading this discussion thread makes one psychological quirk clear. People, even well informed professionals, are rarely comparing Apple to the best available alternative on the market (arguably Ryzen U line processors). They're comparing 2021 Apple products to their last experience with an alternative, which for many ppl stuck in Apple's ecosystem could very well be from 2010.

So what's Apple's end-game? Milking (predominately US) professional class in perpetuity. It's not like they're going to switch, especially if they perceive the alternative to be sluggish heavy bricks whose battery barely lasts 2 hours. For sales, perception is more important than reality.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a value in that too - people know immediately that i7 is powerful, and everyone [that cares] already knows that processors are renewed frequently. Though yeah, perhaps something like 7i1, 7i2 would've been better. Apple solved this nicely (given the naming is confirmed) with M1X.

That's fine if you're buying new. Is there an i5 that beats an older i7 in performance? When buying a used laptop or desktop, how much extra research do I need to do to figure out which processor I'm actually getting? There's been 13 years of i7's.

I can't ever imagine why manufactures of > don't use dates.

Product lines 1 - 10. Bigger is better.

A minimal number of qualifiers next to the numbers, ideally just 1 of them next to a product line number (Pro/Home/Hobby/Enterprise/whatever).

Date, month and year format if you really want flexibility.

OblioCorp Oblio 1 Home 2020.06. Oblio 10 Enterprise 2021.04.

How hard is that? Not that hard, from where I'm standing.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that 8GiB for $1700 machine is absurd, however, I feel compelled to point out that MacOS is significantly more aggressive with memory compression than other operating systems and they come with blazingly fast SSDs, allowing devices to get away with less available memory.

> blazingly fast SSDs So like, 2 times as fast as any other SSD? No? The comment reads like marketing spiel.

2.5GiB random RW per sec [1].

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16/apple-silicon-macbook-a...

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#229
post #188
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blazingly fast SSD is excruciatingly slow RAM.

I don't even bother reasoning with apple fans anymore. It's a losing game.

It's not even an argument, their comment is a fact that does not change nor contribute anything.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#230

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

So my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128…

That machine is using swap file a lot, in couple of years SSD will die.
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