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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#401

Post by 6d65 »

bayindirh wrote: post #370
6d65 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with regards the closed platform. I switched to Linux for my development machine for a few years now. And, using something else than i3(or any other tilling window managers) seems like a step down. I like instant switching between workspaces, splits, no animations. And I'll be looking for a good laptop next year, when everything returns back to normal, and I might have to travel. And will put Linux o…

I live a double life: Apple for laptops and Linux for desktops (and I'm mostly a Desktop user who manages a lot of Linux servers). Both platforms have their pluses and minuses. I like to carry ideas between them for my development and environments. Found this extremely fruitful for me over the years. We ordered a bunch of M1 airs for portability and power efficiency. Will see how it goes. I personally love both Linux…

Yep. Mac's look like a comfortable unixy environment. Preinstalled zsh, a fast terminal emulator (item), gnu utils. I'm sure I could make it work as a dev machine.

I have to admit that m1 macbook air battery life is compelling. A long time ago I was thinking about a perfect laptop that would be very light and have a 20+ hours of battery life. This comes close. Even though I have never used a laptop more than 5 hours on battery. And that happens a couple of times a year.

Hope you'll enjoy your m1 air.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#402

Post by criddell »

romanoderoma wrote: post #351
criddell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

64 GB? From where? I just looked at Dell and an XPS desktop with 16 GB of RAM starts at $650. You aren't going to be able to add two GPUs and a monitor for $350. At HP you can get to 32 GB for $650 but again you still need to buy GPUs and a monitor.

64GB of ram cost A lot of studios sell their old GPU (as in a generation ago) for cheap If you stay out of vertical integrated supply chains you can buy the best your budget allows If you are saying that you cannot assemble a laptop of the same quality of an Apple one, I agree If you are saying that Apple laptops are what people want because they consume 20 watt full load, I disagree The market of the good enough pro…

I'm not saying any of those things. I'm saying a $1000 laptop from Apple is a pretty good value for a lot of people and I'm not sure you can do a lot better at that price point. When you include things like having an Apple store across town where you can go when things break, it pulls even further ahead.

The best that money can buy changes when you put the actual budget. Today, Apple may be the best that $1000 can buy.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#403

Post by matwood »

jakeva wrote: post #343
btilly wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have demonstrated exactly why I don't care how fast the M1 runs, I'm not buying Apple hardware. Not until I start hearing that they have done something about their long quality slide. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25238688 for the last time that I expressed this opinion on HN.

Comments like these always make me wonder if I'm the only person in the world still delighted by Apple products. I mean I alone can not be responsible for their sales volume. And then I start to wonder if I should be more critical of Apple, so I fire up my Windows machine and think silently "No, this is still a worse experience". So I fire up my Ubuntu and have the same reaction. I just don't understand the vitriol s…

> Comments like these always make me wonder if I'm the only person in the world still delighted by Apple products. I mean I alone can not be responsible for their sales volume.

I agree with you, but I've admittedly never used macOS migration assistant because I find it easier to just copy over a few directories and get to work.

Even when I've had Apple products fail, I've had great experiences with support in and out of warranty. And the little touches how devices interop and the like are a delight.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#404

Post by sneak »

klelatti wrote: post #385

The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true, but: - Apple has a material (and apparently perceptible) performance advantage against the majority of the laptop market - which will do wonders both for their and Arm's brand. - The M1 has killed the idea (which I've heard a lot) that you can't get performance out…

> The discussion seems to have settled down to "M1 is great! But you'll soon be able to get a Zen 3 CPU that's just as good." Which may or may not be true

Even if it is, I doubt there will be a Zen 3 laptop out that has the screen, keyboard, trackpad, and case quality of the MBAir. Even if it were slower, literally no one is building machines of that physical quality.

Some are attempting to compete, like the Dell XPS, but they're still falling short. They're high quality laptops, yes, but people who think they're "just as good" need to take a better look at the current MBAir - and this has 0% to do with the chip. Nobody is making laptops this nice.

I'm actually thinking about picking up an Intel MBAir (the one that just got discontinued) as it's likely the single best Linux-able laptop (no longer) on the market, even if it needs to do an opaque, closed-source, online activation each time you wipe the disk (to reactivate the T2).

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#405

Post by ogre_codes »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #397
ogre_codes wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both of these took considerably longer to get mainline support that your average x86 hardware needs. Not sure what you are thinking here. It's taken 25 years so far and we still have tons of x86 hardware which isn't supported well in Linux. There is a reason Dell ships a specific laptop for developers with Linux pre-installed.

> There is a reason Dell ships a specific laptop for developers with Linux pre-installed. And yet, even Windows DELL laptops are more likely to run mainline Linux than any average ARM SoC, even including the ones targeted at developers. I am no fan of x86, but trading what we have now for an M1 is a net loss in terms of our ability to install anything we want as users, no question.

Consider for a moment how many independent developers rely on x86 based Linux systems versus ARM. x86 isn't open, Linux's support for it is a symptom of Intel's monopoly.

> And yet, even Windows DELL laptops are more likely to run mainline Linux than any average ARM SoC, even including the ones targeted at developers.

This is more about inertia and developer resources than openness. The more developers you have on ARM, the faster device and software support will come.

> I am no fan of x86, but trading what we have now for an M1 is a net loss in terms of our ability to install anything we want as users, no question.

You've changed the question here. We were speaking about ARM in general, not the M1.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#406

Post by Rapzid »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #65

I feel like the M1 hype is getting out of hand. Apple bought up TSMC’s entire 5nm manufacturing capacity so of course it’s going to pack more transistors and use less power than AMD’s 7nm TSMC process or Intel’s 10nm process (which is effectively similar to 7nm TSMC). The M1 is a great and well-refined design but when compared to AMD’s similarly priced 4750U in multi core benchmarks, the performance per watt is bette…

AMDs current gen 4800h/u is still competitive with the air cooled M1(mac mini) in both perf and performance.

M1 has better single core perf, but the AMD 4800 edges it out in multi-core perf on Geekbench(apparently) and smokes it in multi-core Cinebench.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-apple_m1-1804 https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu-amd_ryzen_7_4800u-1142

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#407

Post by sroussey »

I'll wait, unfortunately.

I need docker today.

I need my imagePROGRAF printer drivers for photography today.

I need Luminar AI plugin for Photoshop today.

Etc.

But I am excited to pay for v2 of a MacBook Pro 14. So maybe 18 months. It will be a long wait... :/

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#408

Post by r00fus »

Hamuko wrote: post #392
outworlder wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system It doesn't matter. Sure, that might mean that an Apple system is not for you. But the crux of the matter is: Apple did something truly revolutionary. How is the rest of the market going to respond? Specifically, how are Intel, AMD and Microsoft going to respond? Microsoft, at least, has Windows running on ARM, but it doesn't have Rosetta. Intel and AMD have nothing remotely…

Has Intel really had any response even for Ryzen?

Their response was probably more along the line of previous "advertising campaigns" [1] (ie, payola) for the big PC manufacturers to avoid using AMD for their high margin items.

They can't do that with Apple.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/07/dells...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#409

Post by JoshTko »

j-pb wrote: post #311

My new M1 Macbook Air arrived today. The excitement was quickly replaced by sober frustration. Yes apple did a remarkable job with the M1, no they've still lost their mojo when it comes to high quality software. I've spend the last 3 hours trying the wipe and reinstall the thing, because their non-virgin-os migration assistant is simply unreliable. So far, I've had issues where the fused Data/OS drive would just spli…

I got a M1 Mac mini and had zero issues migrating from a 6 year old macbook pro.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#410

Post by whywhywhywhy »

jb1991 wrote: post #244
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The justification that 16GB is "enough" from the Apple blogger clique like Gruber is ridiculous. Even if it is "enough" it's still what my MacBook Pro I bought 6 years ago shipped with for several hundred dollars less than this one. Why are we giving Apple a pass on RAM being stuck at 8GB and SSD being stuck at 128GB (only very recently bumping to 256) for almost a decade. Not to mention some of us get stuck on 8GB 1…

For the vast majority of users (who are not developers or doing production video work, etc), 16 GB is plenty. That's why.

"Pro" machine isn't for the "vast majority of users" it's for people who are developers and do video production work.
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