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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

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Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#171

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

dtech wrote: post #58
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #41

I'm not surprised it's doing well. Apple has deeper pockets than anyone else on the planet, and they have considerable experience doing this kind of thing –literally, decades . Say what you will about Apple; this is a strong point for them. But I'm still waiting for the M2 before I upgrade. I'm also interested in new form factors. Right now, they are still relying on the currently-tooled production line for their she…

I'd say Intel has the deepest pockets regarding CPU R&D, and yet they are being overtaken left and right.

There is a natural progression where companies go from engineering-driven to finance-driven. It's usually a death march.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#172

Post by acmecorps »

mikey_p wrote: post #149
vel0city wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest MacBook Air with an M1 chip is $1,000. The cheapest Mac Pro with an M1 chip is $1,300. I don't consider a $1,000+ laptop "entry level" or "low end". These are high-end machines.

You may not consider it such, but they are the entry level Apple machines at the lowest end of their product range.

You have the Mac Mini, which is way below $1k, but for mobile macOS? yes, $1k is the minimum

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#173

Post by rowanG077 »

mikey_p wrote: post #149
vel0city wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cheapest MacBook Air with an M1 chip is $1,000. The cheapest Mac Pro with an M1 chip is $1,300. I don't consider a $1,000+ laptop "entry level" or "low end". These are high-end machines.

You may not consider it such, but they are the entry level Apple machines at the lowest end of their product range.

That doesn't mean they are low end laptops. A rolls-royce is also not ever a low-end car. They are the cheapest products Apple offers. But they are still high-end.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#174

Post by my123 »

goatinaboat wrote: post #75

1) Can I run VirtualBox on M1 (yet)? 2) What is the overhead of doing so with Rosetta2 vs native on Intel? 3) What is the situation with VT-X?

1) VirtualBox is strictly x86_64 only, everywhere.

3) Arm virtual machines only. For now, Parallels has a preview that you can enroll to at https://www.parallels.com/blogs/parallels-desktop-apple-sili... or you might use https://github.com/kendfinger/virtual which uses the high level Virtualization.framework, for Linux VMs.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#175

Post by foldr »

qz2 wrote: post #135
tinus_hn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...

Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#176

Post by nsxwolf »

matvore wrote: post #80
GiorgioG wrote: post #38

I'm not buying into Apple's eventually-closed desktop computer systems - I don't care what the performance is. They've been slowly marching towards iOS's closed ecosystem model on the Mac and with an in-house CPU, they can effectively lock users out of alternate OS choices on their hardware. Buyer beware.

I get why this idea of becoming iOS-like is uncomfortable for a lot of people, but will they take away the POSIX-ness of the OS? What about all the people that spend all their time in Vim, TMUX, Emacs, and/or zsh? I think these people will continue to be pretty happy on macOS if they already are. In my experience, installing alternate OS's on Mac hardware has never been frictionless or satisfying anyway.

I don't see why they would do this. If they just want to sell iPads, they could do that tomorrow. Just release XCode for Linux and Windows so that devs can create iOS apps and call it a day.

Obviously they still intend for the Mac to remain a general purpose computer or they wouldn't be putting this much effort into it.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#177

Post by djrogers »

ghaff wrote: post #136
murukesh_s wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish they re-introduce the discontinued Macbook 12 inch with the same specs as air. It weighed only 970grams vs 1.29 kg for air. In fact air feels bulky compared to other light weight laptops like LG Gram, not to mention the design is outdated. Always wondered why Apple killed the smaller model. Perhaps they want to push the iPad pro so killed off the netbook line. The wannabe traveller inside me keep drooling at 12…

I'm definitely part of the target market (well, depending upon my mood) for a Based on the data I've seen so far, I'm not sure why they even did a with fan Pro variant. Even if the market for an 11-12" model is smaller I'm not sure why they didn't do that instead. I was sure that was going to be the reason they didn't refresh their 12" Intel system.

> Based on the data I've seen so far, I'm not sure why they even did a with fan Pro variant.

The ‘pro’ variant released was the low-end 13, aka the 2 port, formerly the ‘macbook escape’. The 13” line has been bifurcated since 2016, with this one firmly lower-spec’d and powered.

It’s very likely that the ‘4 port’, or high-end 13” pro will make more use of the active cooling, so it was likely worth it to develop the new laptop with it.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#178

Post by stu2b50 »

obblekk wrote: post #151

I’m really curious what Xcode and IntelliJ compile times look like for real world repos. It’s a single use case, but by far the most common one for me where I genuinely feel productivity slowed by my computer. Hopefully good news there as well.

Dave2D had xcode benchmarks and it seems like... It's faster than the iMac Pro, and even faster than his friends hackintosh. Might be the fastest, or almost the fastest, out of Apples entire lineup.

https://youtu.be/XQ6vX6nmboU at minute 3

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#179

Post by foldr »

rowanG077 wrote: post #148
jdlyga wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware unless I wanted to use MacOS.

The hardware is the only good part unfortunately. I would have clicked buy faster then the flash could if the M1 could run Linux.

Isn't this pretty much an impossible ask, though? The hardware is great largely because Apple have invested so much in developing a custom SoC. But as a result, you can't easily run a generic OS on it. It's not like Apple just need to bridge the Linux jumper on the motherboard. Supporting Linux would require Apple to maintain millions of additional lines of code, and either hold themselves hostage to decisions made by the Linux kernel team, or maintain their own fork of Linux (which, aside from being based on BSD, is essentially how we got to Mac OS in the first place!)

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#180

Post by alwillis »

oefrha wrote: post #140
314 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zen3 processor that they are comparing it to is the 5950x - the fastest desktop processor with a TDP of 105W. The entire system power of the M1 mini under load was 28W. What the article is pointing out is that the mobile low-power version of the M1 (as the mini is really just a laptop in a SFF box) is competitive with the top-end Zen3 chip; the benchmark gap is smaller than 2x. We don't know yet how far the M1 sc…

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air.

Not to mention 5950X alone without cooling ($799) costs almost as much as an entry level MacBook Air

The M1-based Mac mini starts at $699.

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