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2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

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Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#441

Post by jmagoon »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #276
qz2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.

I prefer for the class of device the Air fits into (travel, work laptop) to have a nicely curated nix machine with working drivers out of the box. Apple has continued to improve on this by making this product class faster, more battery efficient, and* cheaper.

There is a massive marketplace for tinkering on computers, from Arduinos to multi-GPU ML rigs. Trying to optimize for both classes of things seems like a foolish endeavor, especially when Linux users represent such a small fraction of the desktop market.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#442

Post by Wowfunhappy »

djxfade wrote: post #409
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Photoshop CS6 on both Sierra and High Sierra. It's ever-so-slightly more crash-prone than on older OS's, but totally usable. It launches on Mojave as well, so I'm pretty sure it works, but I haven't personally used it for any length of time. Catalina is what killed it. IMO, backwards compatibility in OSX/macOS was perfectly decent for a long time. Most software compiled for Intel that wasn't doing something…

In Catalina, Apple dropped 32 bit support. And in the same process dropped a lot of Frameworks that had been deprecated for ages. 64 bit software that didn't rely on deprecated Frameworks continue to function

Isn't that the meaning of breaking backwards compatibility?

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#443

Post by sixstringtheory »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #394
coldtea wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole concept of the machine is to be bought and optimized for running macOS.

I guess, but the "whole concept of the machine" that I'm typing this on was to run Windows... 7 (I think?); that's a completely artificial limitation, as shown by running Ubuntu on it years after the hardware went out of support.

I'm not sure what the problem is, then. You have a device that does what you (or the GP) want, which is to install any operating system, tinker, etc.

Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#444

Post by Siira »

molszanski wrote: post #240
runeks wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the Pro just turn on its fans after 8-9 minutes (to avoid throttling), thus giving the best of both worlds?

Best of both of worlds is: - active cooling - lack of a touchbar

The touchbar is pretty great if you program it yourself using, e.g., BetterTouchTool. I especially love the clipboard widget - works fantastic with VIM/EVIL.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#445

Post by nottorp »

vbezhenar wrote: post #204
HatchedLake721 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not very impressive a CPU at 7-8W power drain beats or just trails behind a desktop class $799 Ryzen 9 5950x at +49W consumption in single threaded performance?

Mac mini is a plugged computer. I don't care whether it drains 7W or 700W. Electricity is cheap. And the fact that it trails behind AMD on a better node means that its design is inferior or not fully uncapped.

Are you the kind that can't hear their computer fan because they wear headphones?

And/or the kind that keeps their laptop plugged in all the time?

Some people do care about cool, quiet and long battery life.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#446

Post by jmagoon »

bscphil wrote: post #370
tachyonbeam wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.

It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible research and engineering work goes into creating new hardware like this only for it to be locked into one particular company with very tight constraints on target audience, income bracket, and technical limitations. Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use this new silicon.

It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in the world with widely divergent target audiences, income brackets, and technical limitations.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#447

Post by terramex »

Wildgoose wrote: post #366
puranjay wrote: post #31

This might get me back into the Apple ecosystem. I'll still wait for the kinks to be ironed out in the first generation though.

Likewise - so long as they don't ditch the headphone jack on this as well.

This, but I also hope they understand that most studio headphones have cable attached on the left side and come back to pre-touchbar era jack placement. With new, miniaturised components there should be enough internal space on left side.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#448

Post by prewett »

reaperducer wrote: post #320
ogre_codes wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly.…

I think part of the aversion is that we're seeing a generation come into being that doesn't understand that Unix > Linux. The way that for Windows people Unix was "other" and bad and scary. Now we have legions of programmers who were brought up on Linux, and now think of Unix as "other."

Having had the fun experience of compiling a fairly heavy UI application on Unix, they all seem pretty "other" to me. Solaris didn't do anything weird, so it was maybe the only non-other. HP-UX had something really weird with linking and I feel like it was lacking some shell commands that were fairly standard. AIX did something strange with shared libraries and their error messages were decidedly non-standard, although they all had unique code at the beginning so at least it was easy to search for problems. I think AIX was the only one for which malloc(0) = 0, all the others at least produced a valid pointer. I can't remember what the problems with Irix were, I think it was just that by 2008 Irix was just old so getting an up to date compiler was troublesome. Linux was just as "other" compared to the rest, but it was increasingly full-featured. Solaris kept up for a while.

And admining them was definitely very different aside from the basic shell commands.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#449

Post by threeseed »

reaperducer wrote: post #362
xuki wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life.

Apple is the kind of company that will choose to slim down the laptop instead of making it 2 day battery life. Hopefully the Era of Ive is over. There are promising signs around, but I'm not ready to believe it yet.

Ive doesn't unilaterally decide how thin the laptop is.

It's a joint decision made by Hardware Engineering, Product Management, Design, Operations etc.

And frankly everyone wants thin laptops just with top tier performance which it looks like we will get.

Re: 2020 Mac Mini – Putting Apple Silicon M1 To The Test

#450

Post by masklinn »

heipei wrote: post #159
d3nj4l wrote: post #13

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.

I watched and read multiple reviews and Dave2D seems to be the only one who tried to quantify the throttling to some extent, all the others only had useless statements like "The Pro will probably be able to sustain unthrottled workloads for longer thanks to it's active cooling" - No shit, sherlock. For me the fact that it only throttles after 8-9 minutes (!) of heavy use is going to be the deciding factor that will a…

Somebody on twitter reported that during Rust compilation the Air started throttling a bit (20-30% hit) after 3-4mn. The Pro doesn't throttle.
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