I don't get it. If we have same CPU on MacbookAir and MacbookPro - why would I get more expensive "Pro"? Can someone explain how is Pro faster than Air with same CPU? Also, the "Windows Guy" bit is a bit lame IMO. I have two MacBooks and one custom built PC. The PC is faster than both MacBooks combined.
Discrete GPU
Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#502"Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction MacBook Air systems with Apple M1 chip and 8-core GPU, as well as production 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air systems, all configured with 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD. Tested with prerelease Final Cut Pro 10.5 using a 55-second clip with 4K Apple ProRes RAW media, at 4096x2160 resolution and 59.94 frames per second, transcoded to Apple ProRes 42…
I think it's a good CPU, but I don't think it'll be a great CPU. Judging by how heavily they leaned on the efficiency, I am pretty sure that it will be just good enough to not be noticeable to most Mac users.
Can't wait to see actual benchmarks, these are interesting times.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#503230€ for 8GB to 16GB RAM. (and RAM is shared between CPU and GPU)
230€ for 512 to 1TB SSD.
They sure know how to milk their customers.
So while the starting price seems surprisingly low, an acceptably specced 13 pro comes in at 2139€. And that's without knowing how the GPU will hold up.
The presentation is brilliant marketing though and so much better than the competition. As long as you disable your brain for claims like "Universal Apps are the fastest and most powerful apps you can get!", and never mentioning specifics like the chips the benchmark actually compared with or what that game is that runs faster under emulation than native.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#504Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you compare the M1 Air and Pro, the only difference seems to be the addition of the Touchbar, 10% better battery life, and a "studio" speaker/mic on the Pro. https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/ I assume the addition of a fan on the Pro gives it better performance under load, but there doesn't seem to be a hugely compelling reason to not just get the Air.
I'm confused of their new pricing scheme / spec tiers for Macbook Pros. There's no more core i7 for Macbook 13. You have to go to Macbook 16. I'd rather get a Dell XPS or other Core i7/Ryzen 7 ultrabooks. So now, spec-wise, Macbook Air and Macbook Pro are too close.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#506No 32GB options on any of the models announced today is a shame. Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today M1 looks impressive, hopefully it scales as well to higher TDPs. Pretty much what I expected today with all the low power models getting updated. With no fan I expect the Air will throttle the CPU quickly when using the high performance cores. Calling it an "8-core CPU" is a little cheeky IMHO…
Honestly, people who don't use their computers as Facebook machines or have very specific things they want to do with the ML engine should probably stay away from Arm Macs for a couple years. There's bound to be plenty of software that doesn't work or doesn't work well, Docker will have ~limited usefulness until more and more people publish Arm images, etc. Plus I'm waiting for the typical Apple move of screwing early adopters by announcing that next year's model is 3x as fast, $200 cheaper, etc.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#507Will it run things like R, Julia, Postgres, Docker (which I can work with reasonably well on my late 2013 MBP) and will we see any of the speed improvements or will some of the packages that work fairly well on the Intel-based models just not work?
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#508Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is the pros are going to be the tock to the consumer tick in the Apple silicon upgrade cycle. It takes months before pros are comfortable upgrading MacOS to begin with, and it will probably be a year or two before they're comfortable that pro software vendors have flushed out their bugs on the new architecture. Basically I'm guessing that no one who wants more than 16GB on their professional machine was goin…
Since about 2-3 years back, the film professionals I hang around with are all starting to dump Apple hardware in favor of PC workstations now, as they are tired of paying large amounts of money for something that can be had cheaper and with less restrictions. Especially when it comes to price vs quality for displays and hard drives that Apple sells. I think today's presentation is just confirming what we've known for…
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#510Max 16GB of RAM on these new machines is really not that great to be honest. The mini supported up to 64GB before.
And macOS doesn't support Linux-style compressed RAM either, at least as far as I know. [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/...