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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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

#921

Post by asoneth »

officeplant wrote: post #638
asoneth wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in my case, a 2012 MacBook Air. I hope they'll support Catalina for another three or four years or at which point it's more than a decade old and can finally mature into a laptop's final stage of life as a Linux machine.

They tend to support OS releases for three years. Catalina EOL is likely to be sometime in 2022.

I stand corrected. I'd attribute my false confidence to the fact that even the previous version (macOS 10.4 Mojave) is still supported. But now that I think about it that'll likely change at the Apple WWDC in June.

Still, decently satisfied with ~10 years of software support for a laptop.

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

#922

Post by Tagbert »

runeks wrote: post #406
eertami wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could've done this with the iPad already, but have not shown any indication that they will do so. I suspect Apple don't want you to use your phone as a laptop replacement, they want you to buy one of their laptops.

Also: how would you cool it? The passively cooled M1 MacBook Air throttles after 15 minutes of high CPU usage. So, perhaps a phone would throttle after a couple of minutes?

Even when the Air throttles, the performance hit is barely noticeable for interactive tasks. You really only see it on batch tasks where you can measure a discrete start and end times. Not saying that there isn’t throttling but it’s not that impactful in practice.

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

#923

Post by acdha »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #915
gls2ro wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is why I think your hypothesis is not true: people were buying new Macs also before M1, but it did not generated the same reactions. So newness is not the cause of this or at least it is not the only cause.

Good marketing definitely impacts user experience. How much it is impacting the perception of M1? I have no idea.

Did Apple not market new hardware for a decade prior to M1? I don’t think this is sufficient to explain the difference, especially given the supporting benchmarks.

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

#924

Post by simooooo »

maliker wrote: post #557
monkmartinez wrote: post #15

You get an M1 with the new iPad Pro as well! I hadn't thought of the situation as the article presents. When shown in that light, it made me pause to reflect. The M1 doesn't make sense when its in every darn product. The only differentiator is screen size, RAM, and OS? I will admit that I switched to Thinkpad and Win10 about two years ago when I had to return my butterfly for the 5th time. I am not looking back eithe…

I agree that the M1 doesn't look good for high performance computing right now or anything with poor ARM support. But strategically, I think Apple is in a good spot. For heavy computation these days, I always remote into another machine. With increased bandwidth and more efficient remote desktop protocols, I even do all my graphics-intensive 3d work remotely now. By focusing on low-power processors, Apple is making t…

How do you do the 3D stuff remotely?

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

#925

Post by webmobdev »

kube-system wrote: post #842
webmobdev wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, other manufacturers have been trying to ape Apple and solder RAM and other parts on the x86-64 platform too. Thankfully it hasn't yet fully spread to the desktop platforms - I can still build my own PC. I pin my hope on government regulations and right to repair to stem this - EU has already emphasised that they are serious about their "right to repair" legislation. I also like the attempt being made by indie e…

The right to repair has nothing to do with socketed components. You already have the right to own soldering equipment.

Technically, yes, the "right to repair" isn't specific to socketed components. But socketed components do make it easy to repair a device and is the obvious way forward to make devices easy to repair and reduce waste (in fact the EU actually funded a project to create a mobile phone with more reusable components - http://www.puzzlephone.com/ - and some startups are also trying to do the same with laptops - https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop ). As for soldering things on your own, today's modern electronic manufacturing techniques make it a very difficult task.

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

#926

Post by mrehler »

spurgu wrote: post #876
spurgu wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances). And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mod…

Meh. New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate. Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension. There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3... And I can't initiate a search…

Command+/ will fire up the status bar for Safari which shows you the URLS.

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

#927

Post by wdb »

spurgu wrote: post #876
spurgu wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances). And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mod…

Meh. New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate. Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension. There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3... And I can't initiate a search…

For your last issue you can see it when you display status bar.

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

#928

Post by CyberDildonics »

ianai wrote: post #667
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not the right part, the 5800U is the low power Ryzen competitor.

I don't see any reviews for laptops with that CPU. It's hard to compare against something no one can test.

Then why did you compare them?

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

#929

Post by astrange »

pjmlp wrote: post #913
astrange wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wallclock time isn't the only performance metric to care about. ObjC had a GC in the past and lost it in favor of ARC for a reason; it's a poor fit for iPhone-sized devices.

That was the marketing reason, the official reason was that fitting a GC into a language with C memory model wasn't never going to work, and there were plenty of crashes and memory corruptions coming out of that. So they made the only sensible decision, and just like Microsoft did with COM, they added support to the Objective-C compiler to automate retain / release messages in OS X Frameworks. Naturally being Apple,…

No, the performance issues are real. GC programs have more page demand and higher peak memory use, which is specifically what the iOS memory model (jetsam and memory compression) can't deal with well. They can have some wins due to compacting.

There is of course a GC language on iOS (JavaScript) but expensive webpages get killed quickly.

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

#930

Post by pjmlp »

astrange wrote: post #929
pjmlp wrote: post #913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the marketing reason, the official reason was that fitting a GC into a language with C memory model wasn't never going to work, and there were plenty of crashes and memory corruptions coming out of that. So they made the only sensible decision, and just like Microsoft did with COM, they added support to the Objective-C compiler to automate retain / release messages in OS X Frameworks. Naturally being Apple,…

No, the performance issues are real. GC programs have more page demand and higher peak memory use, which is specifically what the iOS memory model (jetsam and memory compression) can't deal with well. They can have some wins due to compacting. There is of course a GC language on iOS (JavaScript) but expensive webpages get killed quickly.

And yet Microsoft was able to do very good phones with GC languages with very good performance for 200 euros, maybe Apple should talk to their runtime engineers.
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