M1 Macs: Truth and Truthiness

> without being neurotically verbose

Unfortunately, I know what you mean. I have a tendency toward verbosity that makes it feel that every time I write a post I'm crafting a treatise that might make the great statesmen of old blush (with the exception that I'm far too stupid to make it as interesting or entertaining).

And yes, intent is difficult to convey through text even if you're afforded a great deal of time and effort.

> you wanted to focus credit on the one thing about the A1 SOC

No, not at all. The ML cores and other, err, accessory CPUs they've added are incredibly fascinating. Mostly I was thinking of the ARM portion of the hardware.

Truthfully, I confess that part of my excitement lending itself to ARM is because I genuinely want to see more vendors follow Apple's footsteps and either a) craft their own designs or b) build out ARM-based platforms that will lead toward greater competition in the desktop/laptop markets (or both?). Fortunately, Apple's tendency toward setting market trends gives me some hope that we'll see noteworthy contributions that embarrass x86 and upend the idiotic convention that I think M1 has finally broken. Namely that you can have a chip that works on an incredibly tiny power budget or you can have performance. Apple's proven we can have both, and I think that's a good step forward. It excites me that we may actually see viable competition this decade, and if we do, I'll absolutely credit Apple with upending conventional wisdom and proving that our fixation on x86 for "performance" was myopic and unnecessary.

Maybe that explains my reasoning a bit more. At the expense of being unnecessarily verbose (though you may appreciate that). :)

Also, I owe you an apology. I wrote my reply out of some frustration last night. Regrettably I allowed myself to get sucked into a "discussion" with someone I didn't know was an antivaxxer until I realized their refusal to listen to an explanation of microbiology wasn't born out of lack of interest but rather suspicion. When I saw your post, I genuinely believe I unfairly took some of that frustration out on you. I'm truly sorry about that.

There's a difference between swapping or adding any of the many standardized components you want or installing pretty much any operating system you can think of on your PC, compared to enabling "developer mode" on an Oculus Quest.

The fact that so many people casually say how a platform is open or flexible because if you jump through enough hoops you get to make some minor modifications to your device, or applauding the openness of a system for allowing you to sideload standard apps is the reason manufacturers don't see a need to propagate the PC philosophy anymore. Too many users grew up with this new model so they don't see the loss.

None of the devices you mention are user serviceable in any way hardware-wise, the software is almost always locked onto the device and there's no easy, or even supported way of changing it. And if you do change it you just get a small variation of the same software. Your phone may get a slightly degooglified version of Android but it's unlikely you'll get it to run Ubuntu, Windows, or a FreeBSD without a massive investment in time and knowledge.

> But claiming that what’s available today from Apple is of great interest to the high performance market is jumping the gun.

I think that misses the point that most users (and most software developers in particular) use laptops. The M1 SOC pretty well kills everything CPU-wise, and does graphics as well as a GT 1050 discrete GPU. It also throws in AI silicon and RAM, and runs all of it in a 20W (or so) power budget.

Single-thread performance is quite comparable to a Threadripper.

It'll be interesting to see how things look when M1 style silicon is introduced for the 16" Macbook Pro (guessing 8 performance cores, 32 GB RAM), and the Mac Pro (guessing up to 32 performance cores, and at least 64 GB RAM used as cache for a potentially much larger main memory).

> There’s also the fact that cost (including peripherals and support) and software availability, not performance and efficiency, are what guide most PC purchases. The M1’s advantages are far less pronounced in those areas.

Actually as to cost, it's highly competitive in the premium laptop segment (like Dell XPS for instance).

Software availability is good, since it'll run almost all Intel Mac software, all M1 Mac software (soon to be ~everything), and all ARM-compatible Linux software (ARM Linux runs in a VM).

The only thing missing is Windows, and that may well be temporary.

I'd say if you're doing web, Mac or Linux software development the Apple Silicon Macs are the wave of the future! :-)

I'm not sure where "Over Here" might be, but I know in some places Macs are ridiculously expensive due to tariffs and whatnot. It's hard to account for regional differences.

Though I expect they will pick up share everywhere, just might go from 0.5% to 0.9%. I suspect everyone will benefit from the secondary effects.

Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. And in that case maybe the M1 IS for you, since I'd be willing to bet it outperforms your existing laptop. Assuming I've found the right computer, my existing (non-M1) Macbook Pro is beefier than your Lenovo, and it gets outperformed by the M1 too[1].

Just seems pretty disingenuous tbh. The argument that you need a seriously beefy threadripper machine to compile your code because you're an 800k LOC C++ developer falls a bit flat when you tell us later that you also compile code on your Lenovo Y700.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/5150606?baselin...