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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple phones are faster both in subjective experience and objective benchmarks.

Snapdragon 8x5 CPUs have been fast enough for a while now, and you wouldn't notice a difference as long as you run a decent flavor of Android. However you can notice a faster screen refresh rate, and high end Android wins there. I wouldn't trade 90 (or 120hz) screens for a faster CPU.

But crucially, nowhere near as fast as iPhones: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-benchmarks-this-des...

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#72
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A browser isn't viable to me without ad blocking and 1Password. Firefox has issues currently on M1, as well - uBlock Origin won't load, for example. Thankfully, that particular issue is fixable by disabling javascript.options.wasm and javascript.options.wasm_trustedprincipals in about:config as a temporary solution. I fully expect these to be fixed, but it's clear it's gonna be a few weeks/months before everything ru…

He’s not saying permanently disable Adblock, but rather disable it to see if it’s responsible for the memory leak in question.

As far as I can tell, the issue is present without any extensions. I'm not willing to browse unprotected for several hours to 100% confirm, but it still grows with every tab.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#73

I don't care about any Apple products, but I really do hope that M1 will force all other manufacturers ship good ARM laptops. Or force Intel and AMD to pull a rabit out of their hat to match the performance/watt of ARM chips. I want long battery life, no fans and a lot of memory. Running Linux. If M1 is the catalyst to make it happen, then so be it.

> Or force Intel and AMD to pull a rabit out of their hat to match the performance/watt of ARM chips

I believe I read an article the other day that explained why the M1 was so fast and efficient and basically the design it came up with is impossible to do on Intel, for many reasons including the fact that Intel instructions are variable-length (which means they need to be completely parsed every time to find the end of the instruction) while M1 instructions are fixed-length (which means you don't need to parse it) due to the RISC design (finally a winner).

Methinks we are witnessing the death of the traditional Intel chip API as the bad design decisions made along the way come to a head.

Should make things interesting as now both Apple and Linux have a head start on ARM support.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that's true anymore. Overall experience feels better on android. Few things that make difference for me. 1. Notifications are leagues ahead of anything on iOS. 2. Little accessibility features like sound search, automatic caption, text selection from any screen/pictures, better integration with google assistant adds up. 3. Customizability. Yes, even now iPhone is super limited in the layout you can have…

You're not wrong, but things like a unified clipboard, continuity, the peace of mind which comes from knowing that there's a very small chance of malware coming in from the App Store, and (again my opinion) more polished indie apps like Ulysses, Things, Fantastical etc. keep the iPhone ahead in my book. I think notifications are perfectly fine on iPhones. I've not used android for 4 years now, but if their notificati…

No, notifications have changed a lot in the recent years. And you can get unified clipboard by installing app for your OS (windows or linux) through playstore. You should try a new pixel device to see the improvement.

Some apps are better on iOS but it's not a big difference because some apps are better on android as well. People care about different apps in the end.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#75

I don't understand the comparison to the iphone and android situation. As far as I can see, android phones are highly competitive with iphone on everything. The longest battery isn't on an iphone, the best camera isn't on an iphone, the latest screen tech isn't on an iphone, etc. etc. Coming to the M1 laptops, they beat comparable Windows laptops in every single metric. It's literally just a matter of looking at the…

> The longest battery isn't on an iphone, the best camera isn't on an iphone, the latest screen tech isn't on an iphone, etc. etc.

It is not on any single Android model either. Fragmentation is a thing.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#76
post #12

I'm not sure I see most of the disagreement here. As Gruber says, Moorhead is mostly complaining about software incompatibilities. But that's part of the total package--especially with Apple which is about selling the total experience. Personally I'll probably switch sooner rather than later especially given that I don't run a lot of native apps on my laptop. But it seems pretty reasonable to critique a new architect…

I had a suspicion upon reading Moorhead's review that he was trying to use familiar enterprise Windows software on the M1 instead of trying to use native apps: > So far, I have experienced application crashes in Microsoft Edge, Outlook, WinZip and Logitech Camera Control. I got installation errors with Adobe Reader XI, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, a Samsung SSD backup application, and Xbox 360 Controller for Mac. What Ma…

I have experienced many crashes of these on Wintel. What a surprise that they crash on M1 Macs!

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#77

I submitted the same exact link 8 hours earlier. This HN behavior is very frustrating. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285489

Timing of HN submissions seems to matter a lot. And a little luck.

Is there a timing infographic? Or luck chart, for that matter?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#78
post #31

Fast and hot and slow and cool is still valid. The M1 is as fast or faster as other CPU but could surely run faster. But then it's getting hot.

IDK how it actually went down at Apple HQ but I can imagine. They are so, so keen on sleek, quiet machines that it tops all other concerns. When the hardware engineers said "more performance is going to require a fan or two" the leadership said "nah, let's design and fab our own CPUs".

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about the other metrics you talk about, but iPhones _are_ the fastest. In general, I find iPhones better than Android for general use - but that's a subjective opinion. Apple provides the best overall package, even as the only thing they beat everyone else on is speed (to the best of my knowledge).

I don't know that's true anymore. Overall experience feels better on android. Few things that make difference for me. 1. Notifications are leagues ahead of anything on iOS. 2. Little accessibility features like sound search, automatic caption, text selection from any screen/pictures, better integration with google assistant adds up. 3. Customizability. Yes, even now iPhone is super limited in the layout you can have…

You're 100% right on notifications -- despite having borrowed a bunch of ideas from Android on how to handle notifications, iOS still doesn't get it completely right.

There was a point in time that I was pretty deep into the Android scene, but at this point in my life I just want my phone to work consistently and have great battery life.

After many years of using Android devices (including many Nexus / Pixel devices), I switched to an iPhone 11 Pro Max last year. I've been very happy with that switch, my phone always makes it through a day of use and I haven't ran into any of the quirks that I encountered on my Android devices on a regular basis.

I completely understand why you would prefer Android, but there are definitely people (including myself) that are happier with iPhones.

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