Live data from Hacker News

Apple M5 chip

apple.com

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple M5 chip

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so explicitly want direct hardware access? i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.

I develop a game that easily runs on much weaker hardware and runs fine in a VM, I would say most simple 3D & 2D games would work fine in a VM on modern hardware.

However, these days it's possible pass-through hardware to your VM so I would be able to pass through a 2nd GPU to MacOS...if it would let me run it as a guest.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#622
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same tasks ive been last couple of years. I have a work provided M2 Pro with 32GB of RAM. After the Tahoe upgrade it feels like one of the sluggish PCs at the house. It is the only one that I can see the mouse teleporting sometimes when I move it fast. This is after disabling transparency in Accessibility settings mind you, it was even worse before.

my tinfoil-hat theory is that on each OS iteration Apple adds a new feature that leverages the latest chips hardware acceleration features and for older chips they do software-only implementations. they ship-of-thesseus the crap out of their OS but replacing with parts that need these new hardware features that run slow on older chips due to software-only implementations. I got the first generation iPad Pro, which is…

Plus they don't let you downgrade to previous iOS versions on iPhones and iPads (unless you've been smart to save SHSH blobs and all that) so the only option to revert to a smooth version now is to download a sketchy jailbreak.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

for games, how would you test in a VM, when games so explicitly want direct hardware access? i am obviously misunderstanding something, i mean.

on linux, KVM provides passthrough for GPUs and other hardware, so the VM "steals" the passed through resources from the host and provides near-native performance.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#624
post #231
post #204

The big win would be a linux capable device. I don't have any interest in mac os x but the apple m parts always seem amazing. In theory this would be where qualcomm would come in and provide something but in practice they seem to be stuck in qualcomm land where only lawyers matter and actual users and developers can get stuffed.

I have a pretty good time on Asahi Fedora (macbook air M1). It supposedly also supports M2 but no higher. And it's a PITA to install (needs to be started within macosx, using scripts, with the partitions already in a good state)

The issue is that it's hacky, and in that case I'd rather go with a Intel or AMD x86 system with more or less out of the box Linux support. What we're looking for is a performant ARM system where Linux is a first class citizen.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m trying to find any reason I can that my M1 Max needs replacement; it’s hard. How do you justify it?

Same. I have an M1 Max Studio and it's just laughing at the little workloads I throw at it (pro photo editing, music production, software dev, generally all at the same time). It just never sweats AT ALL - it feels like a decade from obsolescence based on what I'm doing now. It would have to be an order of magnitude faster for me to even notice at this point.

Obsolescence comes when Apple conveniently "optimizes" a new architecture in the OS for a new chip... that conveniently, ironically, somehow severely de-optimizes things for the old chips... and suddenly that shiny new OS feels slow and sluggish and clunky and "damn I need to upgrade my computer!." They'll whitewash it not as planned obsolescence but optimization for new products. Doesn't have to be that way, shouldn't be that way, but its incredibly profitable.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#626
post #434
post #392

M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4, which was 5x more powerful than M3, which was 4x more powerful than M2, which was 4x more powerful than M1, which itself was 6x faster than an equivalent Intel processor. Great! Looking at my Macbook though, I can say with utmost certainty that it isn't 4000x faster than the Intel one I had 5 years ago. So, where is the disconnect here? Why is actual user experience not able to keep…

I’m not sure I see the disconnect. At our company we used to buy everyone MacBook Pros by default. After the M-series chip, the MBPs are just too powerful and no longer necessary for the average white collar worker (they seem like “actual” pro machines, now) to the point where we now order MacBook Airs for new employees. I feel like until recently, you really needed a MBP to get a decent UX (even just using chrome).…

In 2021, we bought everyone M1 Pros with 32 gigs of ram. Historically, keeping a developer in a 4 year old laptop would have been crazy, but nobody is really calling for upgrades, like we did back when we got rid of the Intels.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#627

It's surprising to me macs aren't a more popular target for games. They're extremely capable machines and they're console-like in that there isn't very much variation in hardware, as opposed to traditional PC gaming. I would think that it's easier to develop a game for a MacBook than a Windows machine where you never know what hardware setup the user will have.

The main roadblock for porting the games to Mac has never been the hardware, but Apple themselves. Their entire attitude is that they can do whatever they please with their platforms, and expect the developers to adjust to the changes, no matter how breaking. It’s a constant support treadmill, fixing the stuff that Apple broke in your previously perfectly functioning product after every update. If said fixing is even…

Gamedevs have not forgotten that Apple attempted to get Unreal Engine banned from all their platforms, thus rug pulling every game built on top of it.

It was only the intervention of Microsoft that managed to save Apple from their own tantrum.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#628

The M5 MacBook Pro still gets the Broadcom WiFi chip but the M5 iPad Pros get the N1 and C1X (Sweet). All in all, apple is doing some incredible things with hardware. Software teams at apple really need to get their act together. The M1 itself is so powerful that nobody really needs to upgrade that for most things most people do on their computers. Tahoe however makes my M1 Air feel sluggish doing the exact same task…

My M1 Air got very sluggish after upgrading to Tahoe but then it started behaving normally after a couple of days. Hopefully, you'll experience the same soon.

[deleted]

Re: Apple M5 chip

#629
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's the modern Apple, I think that's just Apple. I remember using iTunes when fixing the name of an album was a modal blocking function that had to write to each and every MP3, one by one, in the slowest write I have ever experienced in updating file metadata. Give me a magnetised needle and a steady hand and I could have done it faster. A long time ago they had some pretty cool design guides, and the…

Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Notes, Calendar, Contacts, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Freeform, just from a "quality" standpoint, I'd rank any of those applications as competitive for the "highest quality" app in their category (an admittedly difficult thing to measure). In aggregate, those applications would make Apple the most effective company in the world at making high-quality GUI applications. Curious if I'…

Do you regularly use the alternatives to these programs? Admittedly I'm not cut out to judge the office suite, but the consensus in the music world seems to be that Logic Pro is awful. It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live. Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition. Don't even get me started on the number of pros I see willingly use Xcode...

It's not exactly clear to me what niche Apple occupies in this market. It doesn't feel like "native Mac UI" is a must-have feature for DAWs or IDEs alike, but maybe that's just my perspective.

Re: Apple M5 chip

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I’ve seen, Apple is to blame here as they usually make it harder to target their platform and don’t really try to cooperate with the rest of the industry. As a game developer, I have to literally purchase Apple hardware to test rather than being able to conveniently download a VM

I'm not a subject matter expert, but I do find it a little odd to read the second half of that. I'd expect, beyond development/debugging, there's certainly a phase of testing that requires hardware that matches your target system? Like, I get if you develop for consoles, you probably use some kind of emulation on your development workstation, which is probably running Windows. Especially for consoles like XBOX One or…

Basically you are correct, MacOS has to be treated like a console in that way. Except you get all the downsides of that development workflow with none of the upsides. The consoles provide excellent debugging and other tools for targeting their platform, can't say the same for MacOS.

For testing, I can do a large amount of testing in a VM for my game. Maybe not 100% and not full user testing but nothing beats running on the native hardware and alpha/beta with real users.

Also, since I can pass through hardware to my VM I can get quite good performance by passing through a physical GPU for example. This is possible and quite straightforward to do on a Linux host. I'm not sure if it's possible using Parallels.

Post reply on HN