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M1 Macs Review

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Re: M1 Macs Review

#321

Post by keyb0ardninja »

Droobfest wrote: post #93
jstummbillig wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, my comment did not relate to either Apple or MacBooks in particular. Also, the value of each soft factor will differ from person to person. Good design highly relates to personal needs.

Yes I understand that and I guess I’m a bit salty. But part of my point is that you can make really great hardware and software of great quality, but one or two unfortunate choices can soil the whole thing for someone. And Apple especially can sometimes be too stubborn to acknowledge people’s personal differences or an established industry standard.

Sometimes? Don't you mean always?

Re: M1 Macs Review

#322

Post by renewiltord »

So somewhere inside Apple there must have been a Skunkworks project to "put the iPad chip in a laptop" or something right? Someone has to have thought of it. I can't wait to read about the folklore entry for this ten years from now.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#323

Post by Fnoord »

r00fus wrote: post #303
EricE wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD. The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes. Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping. Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.

Have you ever actually worn out an SSD using personal workloads (ie, not on a server)? I haven't yet and I own machines/SSDs from 12 years ago - benchmarks are still roughly equivalent to what I had to start.

Yes, I have. My old ThinkPad R61 I added an OCZ SSD to. Not sure how much RAM it came with, but it was swapping a lot, I guess. Back then, SSDs had less of a lifespan than nowadays (even consumer-grade ones).

I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#324

Post by Fnoord »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #291
EricE wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that if your machine needs to swap because of low RAM you are now writing to your SSD. The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes. Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping. Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.

Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD? The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think. I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess. I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.

> Would these first gen ARM chips not be obsolete by a few years before wearing out the SSD?

Obsolete, who defines that?

I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too.

Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#325

Post by superkuh »

coldtea wrote: post #67
superkuh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If for some reason you insist on native linux, it's time to recognize that Apple hardware is not for you. And so, all the people that would provide support for their family and friends due to using the same hardware split paths. And now those Apple users have to go to Apple for support. A double win for the corporation.

> all the people that would provide support for their family and friends due to using the same hardware split paths All 10 of them? The subset of people that (a) had Apple laptops, (b) run Linux on them, (c) provided support for family, is probably irrelevant... > And now those Apple users have to go to Apple for support. A double win for the corporation. Yes, what a big lucrative market: relatives of people who run…

>The subset of people that (a) had Apple laptops, (b) run Linux on them, ... Yes, what a big lucrative market: relatives of people who run Linux on their Macs t...

Technical people moving away from using Apple's new properietary hardware that literally can't boot any OS but Mac OS will mean they can't help their friends and family as easily due to lack of familiarity.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#326

Post by divbzero »

mekster wrote: post #231
rsanheim wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so far the performance is very close to my 10 core iMac Pro I use for day to day development. This is on a MacBook Air with no fan, and so far I haven't felt the machine even get warm even when compiling _and_ also running tests or importing data in other processes. This is when running a decently sized Rails monolith w/ PostgreSQL & Redis, so a fairly typical modern Rails setup. It's seriously impressive.

Does it mean you can no longer easily tell if a process has gone crazy and takes high CPU usage without a fan and you also can't even feel the slow down.

Just wait, we’ll soon have an app for that — the equivalent of fake engine sound for EVs.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#327

Post by Veedrac »

em500 wrote: post #53

Copy-pasted the comment I left at another forum: The the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. Whether that's revolutionary or not particularly noteworthy depends on the individual use case. If you're don't care that much about power/heat/fan-noise, it's neat but not (yet) world shattering. Bit if you live your life on a small laptop, it may well be. According to rumors, we'll see Apple's 8 F…

> in the 16-inch MacBook

And the 13". We'll probably have something even better for the 16" too.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#328

Post by ksec »

rorykoehler wrote: post #300
kgwgk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And like the 2015-2019 MacBook.

I hope they do this form factor again with the new chips

I am thinking may be next year or the year after. The MacBook Pro will get new Design, at 16" and 14". ( I hope instead of going thinner they could stay within the current cooling TDP )

Then the MacBook Air will have a 14" as well, before a 12" MacBook Air is introduced at a lower price range, possibly at $799.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#329

Post by bjoli »

snazz wrote: post #8
cjrp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a laptop's performance is on a par with a desktop's, and the fan's aren't going crazy, I'd call that a big win! My 2018 MB Pro has the fans running most of the time, and even then sometimes throttles back the CPU.

The MacBook Air that GP mentioned doesn't even have a fan! That's certainly a nice benefit.

When the news of apple silicon broke, apples shitty cooling of their recent laptops made sense. The CPU of my wife's MacBook air throttles several times a day without much heavy work.

I sincerely believe they botched it on purpose to be able to present increadible performance improvements compared to previous generations.

Apple silicon is amazing, of course. But the older machines were downright bad at cooling.

Re: M1 Macs Review

#330

Post by mindajar »

jdminhbg wrote: post #252
stu2b50 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS should be particularly fine, since the code is public, eventually someone will recompile it for ARM (if it's even written in a native language; languages with runtimes will work perfectly fine when the runtime is ported) If not, everything should run through Rosetta 2. Apple did eventually pull the original Rosetta, so who knows how long they will keep the feature, but in the short term I can't imagine it being…

> Apple did eventually pull the original Rosetta, so who knows how long they will keep the feature, but in the short term I can't imagine it being a problem. The original Rosetta was only useful for legacy Mac software though; this one will continue to be useful for new x86 software that gets written. I think it will last a lot longer.

The original Rosetta was also a licensed technology that (presumably) cost Apple a pretty penny. If Rosetta 2 is all in-house tech, that probably bodes well for sticking around longer than the original.
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