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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#421

Post by andor »

vetinari wrote: post #367
wmf wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstood what that means. Samsung is continuing to develop Exynos SoCs using stock Arm CPU cores and AMD GPU cores. This will require fewer people hence the layoff.

Exactly; they do not have their cores anymore, they are going to use ARM's Cortex. So their SoC will be always average at best, by definition. They won't be able to make anything exceptional.

HiSilicon's Kirin chips use Cortex microarchitecture and are very competitive. I didn't follow recent releases, but I remember that the Kirin 970 was way ahead of the Snapdragon and Exynos chips at the time, both in terms of performance and power efficiency.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#422

Post by JohnBooty »

_abox wrote: post #315
6d65 wrote: post #297

The author is bashing another author for not doing measurements, yet himself declares that m1 beats all the other CPUs, without providing any measurements. With regards to the M1, I'm grateful for a good competition. As this will likely push premium laptop manufactures (Razer, Dell) towards ryzen CPUs, as opposed to using them in cheaper models. Loosening the grip that intel has on them. With Zen3 on mobile, giving a…

Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill over the last few years. His article reads like an Apple keynote transcript, everything is magical and amazing, a marvel and mindbogglingly great. No wonder they throw him so many exclusives ;) Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system (no booting Linux or Windows at this time) and even under macOS you're having even less access to the system's internals than before. Also, A…

    Yeah John Gruber has really become a shill 
    over the last few years. 

    [...] 

    Yes M1 is great. But it's a closed system.
You can like Gruber or not, and that is your choice. I agree with him more often than not, but I certainly don't always agree.

However, while the "closed system" thing is a valid criticism of Apple, I strongly disagree that its omission from Gruber's article is a valid criticism of his writing.

Gruber writes for a specific and informed audience.

He is not writing articles for people who've never heard of Apple, or people who may not be aware that Apple runs a fairly closed ecosystem. He assumes that you know all of that.

Whatever you think about his writing as it exists today, imagine if he had to preface every single blog post with background information like that? Should the first 1,000 words of every post include a brief history of Apple and a discussion of open vs. closed ecosystems, and where Apple falls on that spectrum?

He knows that stuff. He knows that we know that stuff.

What's the last article (or speech, or email, whatever) you wrote? Surely, when deciding what to write and what not to write, you considered your audience and their level of context and domain knowledge, as well as the constraints of your medium?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#423

Post by klelatti »

sneak wrote: post #404
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 XP…

I bought a new 13' Intel MBP just before the announcement as I needed an x86 machine for development and was nervous it would be discontinued!

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#424

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

snazz wrote: post #266
Toutouxc wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you really pay that much extra for an Apple machine, especially for the M1 ones. I'm afraid that when/if fast ARM alternatives arrive, they will probably cost 80-100 % of what the MacBooks cost. So basically, if you can't afford a MacBook today, you won't be able to afford a comparable high-end ARM offering from, say, Dell.

One big difference is that MacBooks (and Apple products in general) retain their value far better than any other computer brand. If you're looking at the used market to save money, a Dell looks way cheaper because it's depreciated far more than the Apple machine.

I just but a New mac air after looking at the prices for used ones.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#425

Post by r00fus »

altcognito wrote: post #372

This Gruber character is something else. No, the rules of physics and heat generation have not been repealed. You would think the fact you can’t crank out 100% performance on a Mac book air for too long before it throttles would be evidence enough that heat dissipation was still the prevailing reality, but not so for Gruber!

The Air throttled is still faster than a majority of laptops out there. And fanless.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#426

Post by andor »

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 mean, how do you even manage to break curl...

Depending on where you tried to write to, you might need to grant "Full Disk Access" permission to your Terminal app.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#427

Post by viktorcode »

nix23 wrote: post #119
simias wrote: post #100

I've never owned a Mac and don't intend to own one but I'm very happy with this M1 move, mainly for the reasons highlighted in the introduction to the article: >M1 Macs embarrass all other PCs — all Intel-based Macs, including automobile-priced Mac Pros, and every single machine running Windows or Linux. Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. I think it's…

>Those machines are just standing around in their underwear now because the M1 stole all their pants. Not sure what shitty machine hes talking about, but my threadripper's are not impressed with some 4 core M1.

The fact that you have to compare a high-end CPU against the base level M1 to show it isn't the fastest underlines Gruber's point pretty well.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#428

Post by ogre_codes »

nix23 wrote: post #159
zionic wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper.

>Wait for an 8-core (or the rumored 12 core) variants. Those will embarrass your threadripper. It will not, my TR has 64 cores 128 Thread and you know whats the best thing? 128GB Ram...and imagine that..they aren't even soldered...and i even can exchange my GPU..or slap in 2 others. And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.

> And if apple ever brings out a M1 Workstation, i can probably buy 3 other Server/Workstations with that money.

Based on the MacBook Air/ Mac mini/ MacBook Pro pricing, I don't think this is the case.

Apple has delivered a significantly faster MacBook Air for the same price as the previous generation. Not only did they increase the CPU speed, they essentially doubled the performance of their the SSD while maintaining their base price.

Apple dropped the price of the base mini by $100 while delivering a significantly faster Mac mini.

I suspect whatever Apple delivers for their top end machines will be equal or lower price to their current Intel machines.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#429

Post by macintux »

twic wrote: post #420
macintux wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every I/O port Apple has ever used they dropped before the rest of the industry. PS/2, parallel, serial, USB-A... Of course optical drives; that was a big step. Apple is ruthless at pruning old tech.

When did Apple use PS/2 ports? It went D-sub -> ADB -> USB, as far as i remember.

You're right; I was accustomed over the years to point to PS/2 as an example of the PC world being slow to give up on an outdated port, and carelessly conflated that with Apple using it.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#430

Post by egsmi »

ianhowson wrote: post #418
egsmi wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 64GB of ram cost Not all RAM is equivalent. If one wants 64GB of the kind of RAM M1 uses, which is very high performance, it will cost more than 300 euros.

M1 is using standard LPDDRx. It's not "very high performance". It uses a different interconnect -- that's it. I guarantee that 64GB does not cost anything near EUR300. You might be thinking of HBM[2] which has a wider I/O path and costs more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25050625

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

which determined the M1's memory is LPDDR4X-4266 or LPDDR5-5500. If those memories are not high performance, what is?

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