I hate the Touch Bar
Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
651–660 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they got it wrong. I would pay money to NOT have the touchbar.
I got one of the MBP with the touchbar this year after holding out for many years (changed jobs so had to change laptop). Man it is so much hard to do the volume changes, and there has so far for me been zero benefit.
I've been really happy with the following mod for the last couple years of TouchBar usage:
https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...
Fully customizable while being much better for muscle memory by giving you exactly what you want where you want it, gives you icon-shortcuts to script, and still allows you to have as much dynamic functionality / information as you like. So, for example, mine looks roughly like this:
- Fullscreen
- Bck/[play|pause]/Fwd
- CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG
- AirDrop
- ConfigMenu
- Emoticons
- (Un)Caffeinate
- (Dis)connectBluetoothHeadphones
- (Dis)connectMicrophone
- (Un)muteVol
- VolDown
- VolUp
- ScreenDim
- ScreenBright
- Date
- Time
- Weather
- Battery%
CURRENTLY_PLAYING_SONG playing shows the album cover, song name, and artist, but only shows up if there IS something playing. Same with AirDrop, which shows up only if there's something that I could AirDrop to, and then gives me a set of options of who to AirDrop to. The Emoticon menu opens an emoticon submenu on the TouchBar with most-recently-used first.
That all fits fine into the main touchbar, with other dynamic touchbars available modally (ie, holding CMD shows touchable icons of all the stuff in my Dock (my Dock is entirely turned off)), CTRL shows LOCK AIRPLAY DO_NOT_DISTURB FLUX KEYBOARD_DIM/BRIGHT, etc. ALT shows me various window snap locations.
Edit: BetterTouchTool also replaced a bunch of other tools for me. Gives you the same kind of tools for scripting eg Keyboard macros, Mouse macros, remote-control via iPhone/Watch etc with a lot of reasonable defaults.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#653End of year 2020, and still you can have a Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM at most. Why not 32 yet?
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
One search away and you can prove yourself wrong. In fact they have had it since 10.9.
Cool. I stopped using it in 10.6. Glad macOS has caught up.
Caught up with the 1990s when RAM and disk compression were popular on Macs and PCs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics
Interestingly enough Stac was apparently co-founded by Nvidia/Stanford's Bill Dally. The story of them being "sherlocked" by MS-DOS 6.0 and successfully suing Microsoft is interesting as well.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#655And just like that, within a year pretty much all of Apple's lineup will become the best available platform for AI inference, since each and every one of the new machines will have a TPU.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#656Out of curiosity, how many people are actually constrained by 16GB of RAM? What applications are you using it for that 16GB vs 32GB is actually a deal breaker for you? Thinking about your average end-users, like most of my family, 8 to 16GB is about all they need for their systems (and if software were better written they'd probably need less). So is this specific work like machine learning? Video and image processin…
For me its just Chrome. About 100-300 tabs at any given time.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I was confused at that implication. I don't think these are designed for training! (If they are or can be, I'm interested)
> (If they are or can be, I’m interested) Exactly. Currently I am training my models using Google Colab and then exporting the model to run on my MBP. Would be interesting if I could do it locally Another interesting thing is that ( if this is for training ) this will become the only accelerated version of Tensorflow for macOS as: - No CUDA drivers for latest macOS - AMD ROCHm only supports Linux runtime
I’m hoping the M1 can be used for prototyping with small data sets, then final training on Google Colab with complete data sets.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#658To put the 3.5x faster CPU into perspective.
I added various machines to my hash benchmarks. My MacAir with an i7 CPU is about 2x slower than a desktop CPU or AMD laptop cpu, and has about the same speed than my ordinary Cortex A53 phone. That's mostly the 2 vs 4 GHz difference.
Their latest A14 Chip is described here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... and it's with its 3Ghz entirely plausible that it is 3x faster than the MacAir or my current A53 phone.
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-air-4th-gener...
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#659I'm interested to see the benchmarks vs. comparable AMD systems. Some of the claims, like 2x performance increase on the MBP are impressive, but intel laptops have been absolutely trounced by AMD 4000-series laptops of late. Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
Anandtech posted some comparisons of the A14 against Zen 3 today, which may be an interesting comparison: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
Seems like the A14 is within 10-20% of the desktop 5950X in single threaded workloads. The M1 will probably close the gap with higher clock speeds. AMD will probably still be ahead on multithreaded workloads until Apple releases a chip with 8 high-performance cores.
Re: Apple unveils M1, its first system-on-a-chip for portable Mac computers
#660It’s pretty nice that the stats don’t list the CPU’s clock rate. We can finally enter an era of less misleading indicators of performance, in the sense of what the overall experience will be. That’s what really matters.
This press release has the vaguest, most misleading and content-free performance claims that have ever been printed.
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