M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness • Hacker News Board

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#601

Post by Apocryphon » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:16 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #600

Apocryphon wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the iPhone and iPod, it's a revolutionary entrant from the consumer point of view in terms of user experience. And like the iPhone and iPod, from a technical point of view, it's merely a very competent iteration down a natural evolutionary pathway, in a preexisting product type.

And like the iPhone and iPod it has very real innovations (in engineering) that people always underplay because "No wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame!", or "we had smartphones before, I had some Ericsson/Nokia/MS gizmo, so what's evolutionary about the iPhone?".

You're right. At the end of the day, they're technically evolutionary, not revolutionary, which was the central conceit of this subthread. And there's nothing wrong with that. Technical evolution can lead to consumer revolutions.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#602

Post by theonemind » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

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…

Apple's better, but not nearly as good as they could be. Even MacOS doesn't follow their human interface guidelines. The butterfly keyboards really are sensitive to dirt, it's a problem. The touchbar is bad, it's really bad. MacOS does not have much of a lead over windows in terms of usability, and is much worse at multitasking (not at a technical level, at a UI level.) The obsession with thinness is a bit much, and they have pushed it to the point where they have compromised internal reliability and build quality and cut off ports and useful features for millimeters no one cares about. Their machines are now hot glued together and nigh unrepairable and unrecyclable, and so an environmental catastrophe as well.

They can do better. The M1 is an example of the kind of thing they're capable of pulling off from their position. It's much like Warren Buffett once said, Berkshire Hathaway, the company that made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, was the biggest mistake of his life--the opportunity cost was going into insurance, where he projects he could've made much more money.

They're the best, but a sorry disappointment compared to what they could be.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#603

Post by coldtea » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #588

coldtea wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would like the people downvoting you to explain why they think it's truly revolutionary. For one, it's the first PC chip with these kind of thermals and power combo. Second, it brings many new design decisions, from unified memory, to the SoC design, various coprocessors, etc, that have not been available in the form of laptop/desktop PCs. The last of this kind in the mass market would be something like the Amiga…

Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead. For very light loads, it does have a slightly better power performance than existing low power PC processors, but not by that much. A Ryzen LPP core is somewhere between the big and the s…

>Exactly how is it much better? It's not the first chip with a 15-25W TDP. When compared to other chips with such a TDP, it's incrementally faster in single core and it trades blows in multicore. It does this at a process node ahead.

Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors?

On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its own GPU design and co-processors, tons of work into making speed optimizations all around (from the buses to memory handling), and came with a new OS release, a port to the new architecture, a bridge layer for iOS apps, and a perfectly capable x86 translation layer.

Rosetta2 alone would be difficult to pull all for most of the industry (Microsoft failed at the same, and their ARM laptops are completely subpar to the M1 machines as well in many levels, despite costing the same or more).

>It's not the first PC chip to be an SOC, or to have unified memory, or to have many coprocessors.

Which mainstream PC chip in actual laptops/desktops people use has unified memory and doesn't use sockets/DIMMS?

>It's also been a decade that we know that instruction sets don't matter. All modern PC processors use a different instruction set and translate from x86.

That's a moot point, since they still carry all the x86 baggage in microcode, since tons of bad decisions leading to things like Spectra. ARM doesn't.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#604

Post by innagadadavida » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

jitl wrote: post #542

GekkePrutser wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair enough, I have occasionally read his blog over the years (mainly linked from other sites such as MacRumors). That's also how I saw how many scoops he's been given by them (because if they were actual leaks I'm sure he would have been cut off by now, knowing Apple's secrecy). But I don't remember him being this lyrical about Apple as he is here. However I used to be an Apple fan and Mac used to be my daily…

What lockdown is grating to you? I grew up on BSD multi-user systems and Apple things still look the same to me: crusty BSD with ancient coreutils in the terminal, nice rounded corners in the GUI. What is the iPad-ification? Just the code signing stuff? I guess you can't write to /System anymore these days? And there's something about app notarization, but it doesn't really affect any of my uses.

Almost all GNU user land tools and libraries work on BSD and you can install them fairly easily with brew. Unless you are doing Linux kernel development, there is little you’ll miss out on.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#605

Post by least » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

sushisource wrote: post #535

jeffkeen wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like using my linux desktop because I can set it up exactly how I want, and macOS just doesn't roll that way. I'm not trying to have an argument here, but I've never really understood what is the "exactly how you want" that Mac OS doesn't provide? Would you mind sharing some details? Is it just a matter of not being familiar with the places to change the defaults to something more to your liking, or is it actuall…

To some extent you're totally right. I can elaborate. Some of it are technical choices Apple has made that make things hard. I like tiling window managers. The best (only?) one for OSX now requires you to go disable SIP to use it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... -- this wouldn't be the case if Apple cared at all to support these sorts of use-cases, but they don't, so it suffers collate…

> Why can't I do this by clicking something in system prefs like when I open a downloaded app?

If you could change it in system preferences it'd defeat the entire point of SIP, which is to run the OS rootless. Your user isn't privileged enough to disable it which is why you need to boot into recovery mode in order to disable it. This feature isn't unique to MacOS, either [1].

And of course, if you don't like it, you can disable it once and never have to think about it again! At worst you're running with true root privileges, which isn't different from linux.

For what it's worth, Yabai's tiling actually works fine without disabling SIP. Your link enumerates the features that requires disabling SIP.

> But, my experience has often been that things I would be willing to invest to customize on macOS are simply not customizeable.

A lot of the time it's definitely more convoluted to customize MacOS though i am curious what sorts of things you are trying to customize that you couldn't.

> (as to the 'your time is money!' counterargument people sometimes make here - it takes me about 2 hours to build a PC and my linux box hasn't panicked or booted improperly once).

When people say "your time is money" with regards to using Linux, it's rarely about building a computer and generally has to do with using the OS itself.

> TLDR; You're probably right. Macs aren't a great choice if you're a power user (read: control freak) with your PC.

I think it's more that it's not a great choice if you don't want to invest the same amount of time you've invested in learning how to be a power user in a different operating system.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/securi...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#606

Post by nanagojo » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #519

shaggyfrog wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The threat was regarding emulation. Rosetta 2 isn't emulation, it's translation.

So why does Microsoft go the translation route instead of emulation?

They don't make their chips like Apple.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#607

Post by dmitshur » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

liminal wrote: post #279

Can someone please ELI5 why the M1 is so much faster than every other ARM chip?

Which other ARM chips are you comparing with? It’s not much faster than A14, Apple’s other ARM chip. Which in turn is around 20-30% faster than A13, etc. Apple has been making their ARM chips faster very gradually over the last 8 years. M1 is just the first one they’ve put in a computer and more people are paying attention to their speed.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#608

Post by sushisource » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

least wrote: post #605

sushisource wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent you're totally right. I can elaborate. Some of it are technical choices Apple has made that make things hard. I like tiling window managers. The best (only?) one for OSX now requires you to go disable SIP to use it: https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai/wiki/Disabling-System-I... -- this wouldn't be the case if Apple cared at all to support these sorts of use-cases, but they don't, so it suffers collate…

> Why can't I do this by clicking something in system prefs like when I open a downloaded app? If you could change it in system preferences it'd defeat the entire point of SIP, which is to run the OS rootless. Your user isn't privileged enough to disable it which is why you need to boot into recovery mode in order to disable it. This feature isn't unique to MacOS, either [1]. And of course, if you don't like it, you…

I think your last point is definitely valid. Best counterpoint I could make there is investing the time in linux is probably more widely valuable/applicable in terms of being able to apply it on the job.

I learned a bunch of linux stuff for fun, and it's helped me a lot in my job. I dunno if I could say the same about macOS.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#609

Post by vmladenov » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:28 AM UTC

sgerenser wrote: post #551

oldmanhorton wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft does have their own Rosetta, which has been able to run x86 apps for a long time and will be able to run x64 apps within the next few months in preview builds

Microsoft’s solution is emulation, not binary translation. This is a much slower approach than Rosetta. Hopefully this gives MS the kick in the pants it needs to step up their game though.

IIRC Microsoft did ahead-of-time binary translation to get PowerPC Xbox 360 games running on the Xbox One. Wonder if they’ll do the same here.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#610

Post by neogodless » Fri, Dec 04, 2020, 1:32 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #595

neogodless wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How quickly we forget... the 10-core i9 was being embarrassed by AMD's Zen 2 mobile processors this spring. https://www.notebookcheck.net/10-core-Intel-Core-i9-10900F-d... Looks like single core Zen 3 scores about 2100 on Geekbench 5. M1 scores about 1700. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/singlecore https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q... I'm confused why we feel like AMD Zen 3 has to "cat…

What I'm trying to say is you'll not see a laptop that resembles a Macbook - silent, slim, light, with day-long battery life and top performance, with Zen CPUs anytime soon. It's simply outside the performance envelope. 35W vs 10W is a huge difference, even before you account for the slow cores / fast cores architecture vs frequency boosting.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

> We noted that although Apple doesn’t really publish any TDP figure, we estimate that the M1 here in the Mac mini behaves like a 20-24W TDP chip

It also looks like the 15W AMD Ryzen 7 4800U trades blows with the 20W Apple Silicon M1.

On the other hand, I agree - OEMs are just barely starting to warm up to AMD (so "Macbook-like" laptops are rare, the Huawei Matebook is a blatant copy, but it's not the original) and the M1 is more power efficient, enabling amazing battery life in laptops. I didn't contest that idea.

I just think there's a classic reality distortion field happening when comparing the Apple Silicon M1 to "all other CPUs" that, for many, veers rather far from the truth.