721–730 of 782 posts
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Probably the biggest reason is the fan. Allows for increased sustained performance as benchmarks have shown with M1.
That’s a fair point. And I guess Apple wouldn’t keep selling them if people weren’t buying.
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It's hard to imagine needing this honestly. I'm typing this on an M1 air, and even on this chip it's so snappy and quick even on things like larger compilation jobs. I'm not on the super-power-user end, but imo the price/performance for the air, as well as the form factor seems to be a sweet spot.
I always see people say things like this, but I have an almost fully specced out m1 max and the system grinds to a halt for a few seconds when I do basic tasks like join a zoom meeting from my web browser. Like the mouse will lag, if I’m listening to music it will start to skip or freeze, etc.
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Keep in mind that the air with the ram and storage of the 14 gets pretty close in price.
I guess, depending on what you mean by "pretty close". M2 MacBook Air 13" with 8-core GPU (10-core would be $80 more) * 16GB RAM, 512GB storage: $1599 * 16GB RAM, 1TB storage: $1799 M1 14" MacBook Pro with 14-core GPU * 16GB RAM, 512GB storage: $1999 * 16GB RAM, 1TB storage: $2199 So $400 cheaper, ~20%
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Why is that a downside? Magsafe was one of the best things about the older, early-2010's Macbooks.
Magsafe is fine; having to travel with a separate charging block is terrible. The USB-C consolidation has been awesome for people like me who travel frequently- my phone, external battery, M1 Air, headphones, Nintendo Switch... all charge over USB-C, so I only have to travel with a single charger. It's wonderful
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I'm not convinced that Apple's advantage is due to ARM vs x86. I think it has more to do with Apple's exclusive rights to TSMC's most advanced proccess. After all Apple is also beating Qualcomm's ARM Android CPUs.
The ISA does not matter in a CPU design. But the process node is also not the main reason. What matters is only microarchitecture. And Apple has by far the most performant microarchitecture design of all CPUs.
- Variable instruction sizes make the front-end more complex and limits the decoding width;
- Delayslot makes superscalar front-end more complex;
- Page size limits VIPT L1 cache size;
- Dedicated SIMD/FP architectural registers allow dedicated SIMD/FP physical register files;
...
The choice and design of the ISA is extremely important, it's hard to argue that the ARM ISA has no impact on M1&M2 performance.
But the ISA choice is obviously not enough to explain the whole performance of the M1&M2. Likewise, the manufacturing process cannot fully explain the performance of the M1&M2.
The Apple microarchitecture is by far the most performant and efficient of all high-end superscalar CPU.
But be careful with simplistic explanations, the microarchitecture is always constrained by the ISA/architecture, and the x86 ISA has some flaws that can affect the microarchitecture (least on the power consumption).
Why does the 13" Pro have a 720p camera and the Air have a 1080p? Seriously, why is Apple still putting in 720p cameras? This has to be a mistake, right? Edit: Also the pro is missing the magsafe charger. Are they phasing out the 13" pro? Pro: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ Air: https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/
To clarify, you’re talking about the 13” Pro only. But yeah, total mystery to me why they’re still selling it. It made sense in 2020 on the cusp of the Intel/Silicon transition, but now that we already have the redesigned 14”, don’t really understand what they’re doing here. Who would buy one of these? The Touch Bar is an evolutionary dead-end, and the design of the new 14” and 16” Pros seemed specifically targeted a…
13” is the perfect size of laptop IMO, the battery life is insane, the performance is great, the screen is good enough for me (I don’t care about higher refresh rates etc)
If the M2 is just more of the same but faster, yes please. Why fix something that isn’t broken?
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My M1 isn't even full of cat hair like my x86 MBP, because it never needs to run its fan. The x86 MBP was stuck in a vicious cycle of getting overheated, running the fan all the time at high speed, sucking up enormous amounts of cat hair, and jamming up the motherboard and cooling vents: the hotter it got, the faster the fans ran, the more cat hair it sucked up, the worse the cooling and more snuggly warm the insides…
That should be the Wikipedia definition of a positive feedback loop
It's very interesting to think the processor releases were holding back the Mac for so long. They are on the cusp on turning Macs into annual upgrades - with meaningful performance upgrades tied to the OS, just like they've done for a decade with the A series / iOS releases. This is firing on all cylinders. The organizational structure and performance is a marvel for this.
> It's very interesting to think the processor releases were holding back the Mac for so long. Apple also made a huge leap forward with their cooling designs. Making the laptop thicker and investing in proper cooling design made a huge difference. My M1 laptop is significantly quieter than my old Intel laptop at the same power consumption level. It’s not even close. Apple’s last generation chassis and cooling solutio…
Indeed. Turns out there is some utility in function over form. God I hated Ive's bizarre need to shave with the damn thing.
All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.
I like the XPS 13 line myself. The 93xx line lasted all night when I forgot to shut the lid one evening (9+ hours) with Fedora (after running `powertop` and doing its tweaks). But I'm also a "weirdo" who doesn't like Apple-made hardware (the trackpad, touchbar, keyboard, mouse, etc. are all inferior IMO), so maybe you're looking for something different there.
All i want is a laptop with similar build quality, battery life, and Ubuntu.