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Ode to the M1

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Re: Ode to the M1

#91

Post by StackOverlord »

tomr75 wrote: post #61
matsemann wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by the "still". How often would you expect to upgrade hardware? Keeping a computer for three years is completely normal for most people.

I upgrade every 2-3 years. Although current device is first macbook so maybe i'll break that (+ an M1)

I upgrade my macbook once per decade. I changed the battery, the ssd and the bluetooth card about 6 month ago (8 years into owning my second macbook). I need to change the screen (1 cm black strip on the left because of a shock) and the speakers are broken. Anyone has a tip for replacing the screen cheaply ? I spotted some going for 30$ on Aliexpress, it looked like the seller had a rather important stock.

Re: Ode to the M1

#92

Post by zer0zzz »

I recently bought a M1 Air for $750 (25% less than regular retail) from amazon as a vacation laptop. I was expecting it to have quite a bit of performance limitation but the machine is actually fantastic. I think it may be one of the best values in a computer I have experienced in quite a while.

This thing is so accessible in its affordability and performance that I think I am kinda over obsessing over if an application or service is mac-only.

Re: Ode to the M1

#93

Post by lawgimenez »

edu wrote: post #50
matsemann wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by the "still". How often would you expect to upgrade hardware? Keeping a computer for three years is completely normal for most people.

True… here I’m going wondering if it’s time to upgrade my 2017 MacBook Pro because a couple of keys started to fail and I’m having a hard time…

This year I upgraded from MBP 2015 to M2. I am still bothered by the notch on the M2.

Re: Ode to the M1

#94

Post by raverbashing »

jrockway wrote: post #56
presentation wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep hoping, because it won’t happen. Practically no consumers care except for other software engineers complaining loudly on HN, and meanwhile companies save millions by not handcrafting their CRUD apps in assembly.

The problem is having to target 5 operating systems. Extremely complicated web app runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. Carefully-crafted Native UI widgets only target one platform at a time. If you want to get rid of Electron, you personally have to volunteer to be responsible for 5x the work of anyone else, and accept bootcamp-graduate pay. Do you see why it's not happening?

Exactly this.

And HTML/CSS may have its quirks but I'll take it every day over fumbling with GTK or whatever

Re: Ode to the M1

#95

Post by raverbashing »

the_gipsy wrote: post #87
zarzavat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron is quite efficient. You get a modern GPU composited UI, and JavaScript is by far the most highly optimized scripting language out there. The problem with Electron is RAM, disk space, and download size, which is because every app needs to ship its own copy of Blink. This is a solvable problem, but nobody is incentivized to solve it.

If somebody just made Electron into a HTML/CSS/JavaScript engine capable of opening just the HTML/etc parts from, say, an HTTP server, and then shipped it to all users worldwide...

Heh

I wonder if anyone did that comparison, an Electron app vs Chrome + a local copy of node+express whatever running the backend

Re: Ode to the M1

#97

Post by makeitdouble »

wtallis wrote: post #52
makeitdouble wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world. Wasn't the whole OSX's new paradigm a switch to high level language and frameworks , with compositing window management to display super fancily rendered hello worlds ? Decrying cycle burning for the sake of high level abstractions feels like a complete rebutal of everything OSX/macos ecosystem stood fo…

> Wasn't the whole OSX's new paradigm a switch to high level language and frameworks , with compositing window management to display super fancily rendered hello worlds ? No, not really. You're making it sound like Classic MacOS applications were written in assembly, when it was mostly C++. Switching to Objective-C was more of a lateral move, not a clear step forward in time or level of abstraction. The Mac OS X grap…

Many Obj C libraries were a wrapping layer on top of the Carbon APIs and in terms of abstraction Obj C is also a level above C++. Passing everything as messages is an additional layer of indirection.

NextSTEP itself was a big change compared to X or Windows's GUI stack. NeXT machines were beefy and adjusted to high workloads so the user experience wasn't problematic, but it's still more resource use than the standard stacks of the time. I don't see it as a bad thing, but we should acknowledge resource economy wasn't a target of the neither NeXT nor Apple at that time.

> 12MB of RAM + 1.5MB VRAM

NeXT launched in 1988, basically around the times when "640k should be enough for everyone" was a meme. Even in 1996, 12MB of RAM was nothing to sneeze at. So, sure those are not enormous numbers, but they're far from the lower end of what was sold to consumers at the time.

> smartphone with 128MB of RAM

We should take a minute to note that 128Mb or RAM is not small for a phone at the time.

Otherwise, sure electron apps use a lot more than that, but the point was always to pay for powerful hardware and use it at full potential to run fancy apps. People loathe electron apps' bloat, but ease of development has also always been one of the core values. Better have apps that aren't fully optimized than no apps at all.

Re: Ode to the M1

#98

Post by kdrag0n »

krono wrote: post #83
kdrag0n wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, dev here — not sure what you mean. OrbStack currently ships an official build of Docker Engine 24.0.5, which is the latest version as of writing. Previous versions used Alpine Linux's build. I did intentionally delay the update from 23.x to 24.x by a few weeks while I waited for things to settle, because last time I updated from 22.x to 23.x shortly after release and some users were hit by bugs that hadn't been…

I stand corrected! Glad you were here to do so. My confusion must have come from mixed terminology being used by others than yourself on GitHub and in articles about your project I skimmed through when looking into it. The project might still not be for me regardless of its underpinning, although I will have to say that it's immediately obvious that you persue high standards and care a great deal about delivering a q…

Makes sense, no worries!

Re: Ode to the M1

#99

Post by dmz73 »

anonyfox wrote: post #38

Still running a M1 Air 13“, now into my third job since, and refusing to bother with company provided computers. Still feeling as great as 3 years ago… will only upgrade if the next gen is substantially better (read: not just %faster somewhere). Can comfortably develop on my lap for a full day if needed, only MS Teams draws power like crazy, but apart from that 8 hours+. Best computer I ever had I think.

The main problem with devices like Apple's Mx series laptops is that everything works fine...until it doesn't. This device is non-repairable and non-upgradeable as far as CPU, RAM and disk are concerned. Now people may claim that Apple hardware is superior to other manufacturers and that it will last longer. So far I have found that to be false, I have more old non-Apple hardware that is still working fine and few Apple devices that can no longer be used as Apple devices but at least I was able to replace failed hard drives on them. Similarly, people will claim that Apple's superior hardware is the reason for their inflated prices but I have also found that to be false...it is the Apple's perceived value that is driving those prices. Apple users will actually pay more for second hand devices that what they would for new Apple devices. I saw this just recently on ebay where I followed a few auctions and the ending price for 2nd hand Mx laptop was higher that what I would pay for newer model in the store. Madness.

Re: Ode to the M1

#100

Post by fxtentacle »

threeseed wrote: post #22
mrd3v0 wrote: post #17

> Software "engineers" > For every extra cycle an hardware engineer can squeeze out of silicon, you will find a programmer adding one hundred cycles to their program[6]. In other terms, I fear that once devs figure out how powerful the M1 is, they will throw more "features" at it. Can we please stop replicating the "growth" fallacy into software ecosystems? Haven't we learnt enough about how unsustainable and damagin…

The majority of users who own an M1 are never going to push it to 100% utilisation. So whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted assembler isn't going to make much of a difference to the end user experience. Electron and similar apps serve a legitimate purpose in the marketplace which is to allow developers to deliver a cross-platform app for the same cost as a single platform one.

From the fine article: "Remember when Photoshop opened in 1s on SSD?"

I do remember. And it now takes A LOT longer on insanely fast CPUs and SSDs. And I hate it every time I have to wait for it.

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