You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.
There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.
Vertical integration is certainly contrary to mainstream management philosophy these days. Today, the more dependencies you can work into your business plan, the smarter you seem. You’re an expert juggler, woo! That free API you were using got retired? Not your fault, who could have predicted?
To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.
If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.
My early 2011 MacBook Pro definitely isn't fast but it's usable for checking out a couple tabs worth of stuff on the sofa. My work 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro actually doesn't feel that fast considering how fucking expensive it is.
Try compiling stuff. There's definitely a difference in speed when I use Xcode on the 15" 2016 MBP, or the 16" 2019 MBP. It's got an additional four cores, and it's noticeable to me.
Not really. The main reason the M1 doesn't have good IO is that it's a beefed up ipad CPU. This was the first generation where they were putting the chips in systems that can use IO, so they probably are just behind on the design for those parts of the chip.
What do you mean the M1 doesn't have good IO? A 1 Tb Mini with all the SSD write lines benchmarked at Write: 2,983 MB/Sec Read: 2,710 MB/Sec That's as fast or faster than Intel Macs, and way higher than most PC SSDs.
Chip I/O as in having lots of memory channels and lots of PCIe lanes.
That said, Intel mobile CPUs don't have fantastic I/O either, this will matter more when Apple has to scale up to iMac Pro/Mac Pro territory.
"SSD performance" is a very high-level view of I/O, and depends more on the size and configuration of flash chips used than the CPU design.
My 2016 MacBook Pro has been an absolute pleasure to use. It's small, light, great battery life, plenty of performance, I consider it the second incarnation of my favorite laptop ever, the Titanium PowerBook G4. Except for the keyboard. Been replaced three times. It's defective by design. Such a letdown.
I have the opposite experience with my 2016 MacBook Pro. It feels really sluggish to me now. 2 cores is nowhere near enough, and the integrated graphics chip doesn’t feel fast enough for everyday tasks if you have external monitors connected. I’m on a video call in discord the machine lags so much it’s unusable. Xcode with swift is basically useless - it lags so much sometimes doing who knows what that it drops keyst…
Ah, I have a quad core with a discrete GPU. Might make all the difference.
On-site music and video production. You can rack it in a portable rack with your other racks of music equipment and it fits in the back of a van.
Well, if your portable rack happens to be way deeper than most audio racks…
If you're wheeling around five to six figures worth of audio production equipment often enough to want the rackmount Mac Pro, I think the cost of a new rack is almost a rounding error.
I’ve been playing games on an ultrawide since 2015 so I’m going to have to disagree hard with you. In the beginning ultrawide support was hit or miss but at this point I’d safely say 90-95% of games support ultrawide. There are also of plenty gaming specific ultrawide monitor options. I still have a second 16:9 monitor on the side because I do agree with your point of monitors being a separate entity. There are progr…
>In the beginning ultrawide support was hit or miss but at this point I’d safely say 90-95% of games support ultrawide. There's support, and then there's that support being so flawless that its the same quality of experience you would get with a standard aspect ratio. Each of us has our own standard of what's good enough. Its working out for you but the people I game with that were using ultra-wide monitors switched…
That’s a fair point because there are definitely certain developers, blizzard is can think of, where most games don’t support UW and they don’t seem to have an interest in it. Even still, in the games where there are issues it’s easy enough to switch to 16:9 and not miss out on anything by having the UW. I’m not sure what issues they were having that caused them to switch back from having one but I can’t imagine ever going away from one as the advantages of them are just so great. If you don’t mind me asking, what games do you specifically play and what issues did you read about?
At the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired. RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.
This is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is…
I don’t think the claim was that tooling could not handle these custom instructions; I think the claim was that nobody wants custom instructions in cross-platform software.
I would say that 90% of my pc resources are consumed to execute JavaScript code. If we need dedicated hardware to execute this more efficiently so be it. We do it anyway for so many other domains. Video, graphics, encryption etc.
There basically already is in the M1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... tl;dr it has really sick floating point double performance which directly translates to JS performance
and this is now called Electron trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'. Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.
Yep, see the success of the Nova editor.
Funnily enough, I dropped it after the trial expired because the plug-ins - which I belobe are written in JavaScript - were incredibly unstable.
Apple ships a 30w charger with the M1 air. I can't find any zen 3 shipping with less than a 65w charger. Mac mini uses like 25-27w at the wall. 15-25w TDP for the 5800u doesn't include RAM (it's LPDDR4 at 1.1v will use a lot more power than M1 LPDDR4x at 0.6v). 5800u also has a chipset that consumes a few watts. 5800u has some features that the M1 does not (these would likely increase M1 power usage), but still doesn…
Does the charger wattage mean anything? Couldn't it be that they are including a larger supply in order to charge faster?
No. Ryzen Laptops do consume a lot more power than the 15w the m1 consumes under load.