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M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

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Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#771

Post by vr46 »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #615

Patrick Moorhead is a stock analyst for the chip industry. In Wall Street terms, he is aligned with Intel others who are shaking in their boots right now. He's not going to say that the M1 is great until Intel/NVidia/etc. allow him to. These pundits know which side of his bread is buttered. He knows that his clients were caught off-guard by the M1 announcement. He needs to give his clients enough time to sell their I…

You know, I would have sworn that Dvorak used to write a Mac column for an American Macuser or Macworld when I was a student in the 1990s, waxing lyrical about the Mac.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#772

Post by simonh »

free2OSS wrote: post #287
simonh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's talking about the vast majority of PC chips sold today, who's power consumption / performance / thermal ratios just got marmalised. You're quite right, your machine and in fact everyone else's are still just as good as they were a few weeks ago. I got an Intel 5K iMac in the summer and I'm still very happy with it. I need to be able to run windows and Linux in VMs so M1 isn't for me right now. It's no for you ei…

I'm the other side. Vertical integration is a fast way to fall behind. This move is very Nintendo-like. Gimmick then don't even attempt to compete with the big dogs. The fanboys have their meat to chew on "it's not hot". And they will repeat it on command as Apple falls behind to a swath of competition. "It might be slow, but at least it doesn't warm my lap."

The third most valuable company on the planet's long term business model has been a "fast way to fall behind", and is not "even attempting to compete with the big dogs"?

Well, they just pantsed Microsoft at their own ARM laptop game (#2 most valuable) and the #1 big dog is, er, Saudi Aramco.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#773

Post by samoa42 »

the_af wrote: post #691
snazz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big difference is that MacBooks (and Apple products in general) retain their value far better than any other computer brand. If you're looking at the used market to save money, a Dell looks way cheaper because it's depreciated far more than the Apple machine.

To be honest, I've never ever resold a laptop. Ever. I end up giving old laptops to friends or family who can't afford a new one. So resale price is a non-issue to me.

resold once, neither the buyer nor me was happy with the deal. family and friends it is

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#774

Post by klelatti »

YesThatTom2 wrote: post #615

Patrick Moorhead is a stock analyst for the chip industry. In Wall Street terms, he is aligned with Intel others who are shaking in their boots right now. He's not going to say that the M1 is great until Intel/NVidia/etc. allow him to. These pundits know which side of his bread is buttered. He knows that his clients were caught off-guard by the M1 announcement. He needs to give his clients enough time to sell their I…

This is nearly right - I don't think he's a stock analyst but he clearly gets some work from Intel, Dell etc - so hardly an independent reviewer (not sure Gruber would claim to be either fwiw) although he's also written this on Arm over the last few days.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2020/12/02/30-y...

In any event he could have led with "Why you might want to wait" rather than "Why you might want to pass" given that most of the criticisms are likely to be fixed soon.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#775

Post by sod »

ricardobeat wrote: post #505
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #452

Gruber notes midway: "Perversely, developers, who by nature of their profession best understand exactly what an architecture transition like this entails, might be among the few professions who can’t yet move their primary computing to an Apple Silicon device by nature of the software tools they depend upon. (Some developers can move now, and — because Xcode running on the M1 compiles code so much faster than any Int…

This XCode benchmark disagrees: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark The only machine currently beating M1 for compile times is a 28-core Xeon CPU.

Yeah, it's like the transition to ssds. Everyone who didn't had one thought "whats the point" and anyone who made the switch never could go back. These m1 are so fast you can't believe it until you really threw your own workflow against it.

I do frontend stuff and most of the node.js ecosystem is single threaded. Webpack and npm installs are more than 2x as fast on this m1 as on any machine I ever owned. And all this while not even getting warm and battery lasting forever.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#776

Post by sod »

p1necone wrote: post #612

A lot of the arguments here seem to come from people thinking laptops are the only game in town. When someone makes unqualified claims about the m1 beating "all the other PC cpus" of course people are going to compare it to desktop chips. Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. People aren't saying that this isn't a very compelling CPU, t…

So on my macbook pro 8gb m1, everything node.js related (thats what I work with, node.js compiled to arm via `npm install v15`) is more then 2x as fast as on ryzen 3900x PC, and even faster as on my i7 16" 32gb 2018 macbook pro. Example: My angular project compiles in 65 seconds on the intel macbook - while fans screaming in terror. And in 30 seconds in the m1 macbook - not even getting warm.

So if Intel came with a new CPU that said all my workflows are now 120% faster and power consumption dropped 4x because of a breakthrough (and not 4% year over year like the last 10 years), would you believe it?

But because Apple did it, it is "blatantly untrue"?

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#777

Post by danaris »

chongli wrote: post #334
danaris wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I think that the willingness on the part of some, like Microsoft, to cater to that degree of hidebound thinking is actively harmful to us as a society, especially in terms of technology. The more we enable people who are unwilling to even try to learn that this particular option has moved from the Edit menu to the Format menu, or has removed the default toolbar icon (but you can add one), or has simply moved…

On the other hand, we have a lot software in the industry that changes regularly without any perceivable improvement. Google is known for relentlessly pruning whole products that people were happily using but they're also pretty aggressive about removing features from existing products. One big example of that is the removal of community captioning for YouTube videos. Call me hidebound but I am not happy at all with…

Sure; that's also a problem.

There is a balance to be struck, and between us, I think we've more or less bracketed it.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#778

Post by sod »

xvector wrote: post #613
p1necone wrote: post #612

A lot of the arguments here seem to come from people thinking laptops are the only game in town. When someone makes unqualified claims about the m1 beating "all the other PC cpus" of course people are going to compare it to desktop chips. Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. People aren't saying that this isn't a very compelling CPU, t…

> Even Apple themselves advertised it as the "worlds fastest CPU core" when they announced it, which is blatantly untrue. Is it? In Geekbench the M1 was outperforming the 5950X in single-core. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jspnhp/apple_new_m1_ch... EDIT: Looks like that post is comparing 2 different Geekbench versions. Newer Geekbench versions have optimizations for Zen 3, putting it back at the top.

The M1 changed the game. Measuring single core on an M1 may be counter productive. E.g. javascript runs on 2 to 3 cores at once even though it's single threaded. Thanks to running RISC instructions of a single process in parallel on multiple cores. Thats why javascript on the M1 is twice as fast as on Intel, even though the M1 just runs at 3Ghz.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#779

Post by nvarsj »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #530
nvarsj wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a silly argument. An M1 Mac embarrasses no one but prior Macbooks, as it only runs OS X. There is no useful comparison to Windows or Linux. It's as asinine as comparing a mobile phone performance to a desktop PC.

How are 2 laptops running different operating systems not comparable? The similarities of a Windows laptop and a Macbook far outweigh the differences.

Because the software I use that works on Linux or Windows doesn't exist or cannot be run on OS X. CUDA doesn't even support OS X anymore. If I can't run my OS/software of choice, it doesn't matter how great M1 is.

Re: M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

#780

Post by tootie »

machello13 wrote: post #220
tootie wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I have to imagine this is a joke or do you actually think the only advantage of the M1 is that you need 1 less fan in your machine?

Joke with a kernel of truth. I'm not saying they didn't do a great job with the M1. I'm just saying it's an unusual direction for their business to take unless it was initiated to serve their core strategy of delivering visually appealing devices with nice software.
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