381–390 of 917 posts
Wondering if some of the avid videogamers, in need for powerful GPUs, will consider Macbook Pros with M1 Pro or Max as a good option. AFAIK, some of the most popular videogames run on Mac too.
I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. For years I worked* on an Ubuntu desktop machine I built myself. Early this year I switched to a brand new M1 mini and this this is slower and less reliable than the thing I built myself that runs Ubuntu. My Ubuntu machine had a few little issues every no and then. My Mini has weird bugs all the time. e.g. Green Screen Crashes when I have…
Disclaimer, I don't have an M1 Mac, but I do have a buggy ubuntu desktop and used Macs my whole technical life. It seems that you're heavily in the minority with this. Even the weird bugs you mention are very unexpected. I've used a Mac for 15 years and never heard of an issue related to thumb drives. You may just have a lemon. See if you can just replace it (warranty, etc, not just spending more money).
- High-refresh displays cause strange green/purple artifacting
- Plugging in multiple displays just outright doesn't work
- Still a surprisingly long boot time compared to my x201 (almost a teenager now!)
- No user replaceable storage is a complete disservice when your OEM upgrades cost as much as Apple charges
- Idle temps can get a little uncomfortable when you're running several apps at once
...and the biggest one...
- A lot of software just isn't ready for ARM yet
Maybe I'm spoiled, coming from Arch Linux, but the software side of things on ARM still feels like they did in 2012 when my parents bought me a Raspberry Pi for Christmas. Sure it works, but compatibility and stability are still major sticking points for relatively common apps. Admittedly, Apple did a decent job of not breaking things any further, but without 32-bit library support it's going to be a hard pass from me. Plus, knowing that Rosetta will eventually be unsupported gives me flashbacks to watching my games library disappear after updating to Catalina.
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You need to consider the larger target group of professionals. It's really GPU capabilities that blow everything away. If you don't plan to use your MacBook Pro for video/photo editing or 3D modeling, then a M1 Pro with the same 10-core CPU and 16-core Neural Engine has all you need and costs less. Unless I'm missing something I don't think there much added benefit from the added GPU cores in your scenario, unless yo…
> GPU capabilities that blow everything away Compared to previous macs and igpus - an nvidia gpu will still run circles arounnd this thing
Nvidia very likely has leading top end performance still, but "running circles around this thing" is probably not a fair description. Apple certainly has a credible claim to destroy Ampere in terms of power per watt - just limiting themselves in the power envelope still. (It's worth noting that AMD's RDNA2 already edges out Ampere in performance per watt - that's not really Nvidia's strong suit in their current lineup).
[1]: https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro-14-and-16/a/images/overv... - which in the footnote is shown to compare the M1 Max to this laptop with mobile RTX 3080: https://us-store.msi.com/index.php?route=product/product&pro...
[2]: There's a lot of things wrong with in how vague Apple tends to be about performance, but their unmarked graphs have been okay for general ballpark estimates at least.
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It's very high bandwidth for a CPU, but not that great for a GPU (400GB/s vs 440GB/s in 3070 and 980GB/s in 3090).
>> ...not that great for a GPU ... * almost equals the highest laptop GPU available
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> Compared to previous macs and igpus - an nvidia gpu will still run circles arounnd this thing True, but the point here is that M1 is able to achieve outstanding performance per watt numbers compared to Nvidia or Intel.
Are you really rendering in a cafe that you need on the go GPU performance?
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Are you comparing the price of a chip to a laptop??
Yes. If I bought one of these it would never actually move so I don't actually mind the comparison all that much for my personal use case, obviously it isn't apples to oranges but my point is that this performance is not free.
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> Compared to previous macs and igpus - an nvidia gpu will still run circles arounnd this thing True, but the point here is that M1 is able to achieve outstanding performance per watt numbers compared to Nvidia or Intel.
Are you really rendering in a cafe that you need on the go GPU performance?
It’s not just about rendering any more.
I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. For years I worked* on an Ubuntu desktop machine I built myself. Early this year I switched to a brand new M1 mini and this this is slower and less reliable than the thing I built myself that runs Ubuntu. My Ubuntu machine had a few little issues every no and then. My Mini has weird bugs all the time. e.g. Green Screen Crashes when I have…
Your comparison makes no sense.
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I’m upgrading from an M1 Air (16GB) to a 14” Pro base model just for the display. Extra M1 pro performance is bonus but the M1 has already been amazing for development work past year.
Is it the resolution you've found limiting on the M1 Air? My eyesight is slowly getting worse so I'm assuming I'll have to run both at 200%. Which makes the Air a 1280x800 screen - something I last had on my 2009 13" MBP!
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> I just can't figure out what I'm missing on the "M1 is so fast" side of things. Two reasons: 1. M1 is a super fast laptop chip. It provides mid-range desktop performance in a laptop form factor with mostly fanless operation. No matter how you look at it, that's impressive. 2. Apple really dragged their feet on updating the old Intel Macs before the transition. People in the Mac world (excluding hackintosh) were stu…
The fact that this beats AMDs top laptop CPU is actually a huge deal. And that's before considering battery life and thermals. I'll never buy an Apple computer, but I can't help but be impressed with what they've achieved here.
However, it would be surprising if Apple's new 5nm chip didn't beat AMD's older 7nm chip at this point. Apple specifically bought out all of TSMC's 5nm capacity for themselves while AMD was stuck on 7nm (for now).
It will be interesting to see how AMD's new 6000 series mobile chips perform. According to rumors they might be launched in the next few months.
