341–350 of 767 posts
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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.
I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's battery life or touchpad :-)
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These gains are just through improvements in processors. Now, combine that with parallel leaps for battery tech... It's also good that battery tech hasn't jumped too far ahead already - the constraint has helped in the development in these mobile chips. The display panel is still the biggest energy draw on my laptop. There's a lot of chance for improvement there too. A 2 day battery in 5 years isn't that crazy.
Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.
I need to recharge my own wetware at least once a day. So there is a nearly guaranteed several hour idle period where I'm not using any technology and where laptops and phones can be recharging too.
I don't see much end user value in not taking advantage of that.
It's like if you parked your car literally at a gas station every night anyway. Would you really care about a fuel tank that could let you drive for more than 24 hours?
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That conclusion is quite misleading, in my opinion. They write "outperforms the core performance" and the keyword here is "core". What they mean is that if one had a single-core Zen3 and a single-core M1, then the M1 would win some and lose some. But in the real world, most Zen3 CPUs will have 2x or more cores, thus they'll be 2x to 4x faster. So what they mean to say is that they praise Apple for having amazing per-…
They’ll be 2-4x faster in some multicore tasks. CPU benchmarks specifically break out single core performance as a separate metric, because as of 2020 a lot of everyday work is single core bound (stuff like 3D graphic design, video editing or compiling large codebases not considered “everyday work”). Not to mention that even in multicore tasks, you don’t usually scale perfectly linearly due to overhead. And also, the…
If you throw in "everyday work" - then we have passed the need for new chips altogether.
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I wish apple or some company would make a computer stick that plugs into a usb c hub for power and peripherals. No battery and no buttons other than power. I don't see why it couldn't about the size of a wallet and offer at least as good thermals as a macbook air.
Similar products do exist, although they're not very good: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KKYZL66
HDMI doesn't have power and typically no peripherals like keyboard and mouse. To get that to work as I would want it would need multiple cables plugged into it.
I just want to stick my computer into a hub like a flash stick and have it boot up.
Dave2D found the air to be on par with the Pro, at least for tasks that took under ~8.5 minutes. It only really throttled after that point, according to him.
Here's one data point: a WebKit compile took 25min on the Air vs 20min on the Mini/Pro. That 25min is still a bit faster than the Intel 16-inch Pro, which took 27min and waaay faster than Intel 13-inch Pro at 46min. The crazy thing is that both M1 MacBooks still had 91% battery left after the compile, vs 61% on the 16-inch Pro and 24% on the 13-inch Intel Pro. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macb…
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?
I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.
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...
Dave2D found the air to be on par with the Pro, at least for tasks that took under ~8.5 minutes. It only really throttled after that point, according to him.
Here's one data point: a WebKit compile took 25min on the Air vs 20min on the Mini/Pro. That 25min is still a bit faster than the Intel 16-inch Pro, which took 27min and waaay faster than Intel 13-inch Pro at 46min. The crazy thing is that both M1 MacBooks still had 91% battery left after the compile, vs 61% on the 16-inch Pro and 24% on the 13-inch Intel Pro. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macb…
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Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.
This is really the 12th generation of Apple's own chips, though - and the third of this particular design, if I recall correctly.
If so... then Intel's latest chip generations should be traced back to 8088 in 1979.
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I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux. Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything else you can buy for the same amount of money. They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC keynote nearly 6 months ago.
Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM and 2…
1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life.
2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1.
3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor.
4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too.
5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features.
We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated.
We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.