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Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

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41–50 of 661 posts

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#41
post #8

Even earlier than expected. Perhaps my suspicion to skip M1 to go for M2 was completely right. It doesn't hurt to wait a little or perhaps skip the first gen versions due to the extremely early software support at the time, rather than getting last year's model (Nov 2020) and suffering from the workarounds and hacks to get your tools or software working on Apple Silicon. I won't have a wobbly software transition unli…

I've been extremely happy with my M1 Air. I waited until Golang and Docker were available (around Jan 2021), but I haven't suffered any workarounds or hacks.

To be honest, it has all been much smoother than I expected, but YMMV.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#42
post #6

If Apple is having this kind of success, it seems they should look to compete in the data center with this or the following generation of chips. I wonder if it is a good time to invest in Apple.

How would they be succesful in DC? Designing a product for consumers is very different than for servers. On top of that you add terrible server support for MacOS.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#43

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

I'm really hoping Alder Lake or a similar AMD product gets PC closer to M1+ performance and battery consumption. The M1 chip is amazing but I'm a tiling window manager man.

This will obviously not be comparable to a tiling window manager, but I've been pretty happy with Rectangle [1] on my mac. The keyboard mappings are pretty easy to configure and i've found it to work well even in multi monitor setups.

[1] https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#44
post #18
post #6

If Apple is having this kind of success, it seems they should look to compete in the data center with this or the following generation of chips. I wonder if it is a good time to invest in Apple.

What's in it for Apple? I'm not trying to be glib, here, but unless there were some Mac only server functionality, nobody would buy an Apple ARM powered datacentre machine.

What if Rosetta 2 was that Mac only server functionality? I don't know that they'd do it, but from M1 Mac reviews it sounds like M1 + Rosetta 2 will run at least some x86 code faster and more power efficiently than any competitor.

I don't know how feasible it is to scale that up to a datacenter though, and I expect MacOS licensing costs would wipe away any power efficiency gains. But I do wonder if they could hypothetically scale up and beat the best Intel/AMD have to offer just using Rosetta 2 to translate x86 code.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#46

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

No need to hate. Nowadays people in general do make necessity out of convenience and virtue out of necessity.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#47
post #8

Even earlier than expected. Perhaps my suspicion to skip M1 to go for M2 was completely right. It doesn't hurt to wait a little or perhaps skip the first gen versions due to the extremely early software support at the time, rather than getting last year's model (Nov 2020) and suffering from the workarounds and hacks to get your tools or software working on Apple Silicon. I won't have a wobbly software transition unli…

I have an M1 and I love it. Sure, there were some early issues like chrome crashing all the time and some packages not working but I haven't run into any issues as of late.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#48
post #18
post #6

If Apple is having this kind of success, it seems they should look to compete in the data center with this or the following generation of chips. I wonder if it is a good time to invest in Apple.

What's in it for Apple? I'm not trying to be glib, here, but unless there were some Mac only server functionality, nobody would buy an Apple ARM powered datacentre machine.

Eh, the Asahi linux people already have linux running on this chip.

What's in it for Apple is money and better economies of scale for chips. But I don't really think it fits Apple's MO so I doubt they'll do it.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#49

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

I almost went for the M1 but "1.0" kept me sane. I will definitely go for the M2.

Re: Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

#50
post #35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M2 seems very unlikely to me because that will create product misinformation easily. Imagine the following M1 -- 4 A14 cores M2 -- 8 A14 cores M3 -- 4 A15 cores That "third generation" sounds better, but is actually inferior to the second generation. X1 or M1x seem much more likely. It's the same reason why they made an A12x instead of calling it A13. They probably need 3 designs, but economies of scale begin to be a…

I always assumed the "M" in the M1 designation meant "mobile" and that higher-powered (in terms of processing, electricity, and heat dissipation) would be coming later and have a different letter designator. Either that or we'll get Air/Pro suffixes to the chip numbers (eg: M1 Pro, M2 Air...)

M for mobile could make sense given they've just put an M1 in an iPad Pro. I assumed it was Mac before that and we'd get an M1X or something for higher end models but that seems wrong now.
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