World of Warcraft 9.0.2 client runs natively on Apple Silicon

What does that mean? Bootcamp is just running windows on the machine. You're gaming on an Intel cpu and an AMD gpu. That doesn't change because Apple installed another OS on the system.

Sufficient or not is a weird way to put it.

I suppose that would depend on what you put inside that $3k mac. It's very easy to slap a price tag on something 'wrong' and then complain it doesn't do the right thing ;-)

A PC with $4k worth of PCIe storage but no video output or networking would be very expensive but not very good at games.

A Mac with a reasonable video card (say, an RX580 or better) and a general i5-level CPU would run Windows and most games just fine. Won't be a 144Hz 4k party, but 1440/1080 for recent games on decent settings and at least 60FPS will work. But that's not a lot of difference to any other computer...

Difference would be what you start off with. If you buy any $1000 laptop that only has a CPU-integrated GPU but does have Thunderbolt 3, you can add an eGPU for that GPU power that you need and you'd be good to go.

If you buy a cheaper laptop that happens to have some sort of 1050 in it, it would be cheaper, but it probably won't have Thunderbolt 3 and then you'd be stuck with a GPU that will be a bottleneck faster than your CPU.

The biggest problem I'd see is that most Macs don't come with dedicate GPUs, and when they do it's a midrange AMD or workstation type GPU, neither of which are great for games (regardless of what computer you stick those in). The higher tier AMD GPUs did come to later Macs, but at that point (the 5000 series) it wasn't really all that good. Too bad with the 6000 series we don't know if Apple will even add any third party GPU anymore. Also too bad that they got in a fight with nvidia over their crap QA years ago and never got back together. Could have been great...

My point is that a very old discrete GPU is capable of running League at very high settings, and therefore that the new M1 chip's capability to run League well doesn't prove much.

In a more relevant benchmark, it looks like the M1 is about 30% better than the GTX 1050 Ti, which was released in Oct 2016. So it's maybe two to three years behind the state of the art in low-power discrete GPUs? I wouldn't be worried about my discrete GPU business if I were AMD or Nvidia, at least not yet.

Some people forget the "I am a PC, I am a Mac" ads.

> some people forget that all computers that are stand-alone for a person to use are "Personal Computers"

If you call a Mac a PC, you'll only confuse your interlocutor. No-one ever refers to Macs as "PC", except to point out that "Macs are 'Personal Computers'".

"PC" comes from the "IBM PC" which was the first MS/Intel computer. Then clones arrived, also called "IBM PC Compatible" because they were compatible with the IBM PC. Then we ended up calling them simply PC, and that was in comparison to Macs, but also Atari, Amiga, Amstrad etc. computers.

Could you go into more detail about how it's idiosyncratic? I'd love to find more information on what it does wrong vs something like vulkan.

Yep, oddly enough they made the game engine themselves like they did with almost all of their other games; apparently this time they didn't make it cross-platform.

Pretty strange considering the other (arguably more complicated) engines were supported from day 1, even their unreleased FPS (Ghost?) was going to be launched like that.

Thanks for the suggestion but I've already tried that and many other reported possible fixes that didn't work in my case.

Rosetta seems to have a similar performance hit to Microsoft's solution (10-30% overhead compared to native, depending on the workload).

The difference is that Microsoft is locked into using Qualcomm chips, which just aren't very close to Apple's performance.

Basic example is how even the MS's very own Visual Studio is horrible slowbloat (won't even mention how ugly), compared to let'say IntelliJ editors on the same Windows that are noticeably faster.

6502 to 68k

Now that was a real disaster that made me leave the Apple ecosystem.

Yeah Microsoft is a like King John signing the Magna Carta to keep the thrown. Apple is like Louis XIV.

>(and when it's all about people they just fail -- Windows Phone anyone?)

Everyone I knew who had a windows phone seemed to love it. If MS were taking a run at it today it would likely succeed. The nail in the coffin was Google refusing to write a Youtube app for Windows Phone and THEN blocking the app that MS wrote themselves.

I'm still shocked the EU didn't tear them apart on that move. It's about as anti-competitive as it gets. Honestly I'm still sad they gave up, we could've used a third player, even if they were going to always be a minority player.

Maybe it’s time for them to split out NT and a home/office-light edition again

I wonder how would it work if they ripped out all the crufty apps and UI configuration tools and replaced them with simple (dumbed down) controls like Gnome or Apple do.

All the more advanced knobs made available via Powershell, also like Gnome or Apple. Indeed any professionally managed configuration isn’t maintained with point’n’click panels anyway...

That "X" would basically be what's running on the ARM surface and arguably the whole line of precursors back to CE could be described like that. They end up wildly unpopular because they have all the bells and whistles people begrudgingly accept to get the one feature they want (continuity) but lack this one that they accept the others for. Continuity isn't just for enterprise. Non-technical users abhor having to re-learn anything or give up the procedures they struggled so hard with adopting (there are probably still some who feel uneasy if they haven't run defrag for more than two months, despite of having switched to NTFS more than a decade ago) and gamers and the like have lots of niche hardware and software solutions that easily puts the unsupportedness of vintage enterprise software to shame. Continuity is a key feature.

What I think could work, and would eventually lead to the same situation as "Enterprise/X" would be the reverse: a "regular" Windows aiming to eventually build a Microsoft equivalent of the Apple walled garden and a "continuity subscription" that's more conservative than what Windows is now (trivial example: opt into Cortana instead of opt out, barely)

PS: I understand that you are talking about low level technological differences and I seem to be hung up with UX, but I believe that separating groups on the high level would be the only viable way to eventually follow different paths on the low level.

Is it though, or is it lacking the software investment that Apple made.

There are a good amount of chipsets that are now on 5nm processing. But only Apple made a full desktop OS to go with it.

My question is what is the play for Intel and AMD right now? Are they shitting their pants or is this something that was somewhat expected given the progression of Apple's chips and their announced plans? Do Intel/AMD understand how Apple managed to so outmaneuver them? Is the performance gain Apple has delivered an inherent advantage of ARM over x86, and if so, does that imply that we are going to be seeing a migration to ARM in the PC space in the coming decade?

I'm deeply fascinated by these questions. I'd love it if someone in the chip design industry who is knowledgeable about the situation would comment.

Apple isn’t selling to third parties, but I bet Google wants to. Google must be putting pressure on Qualcomm, and maybe Nvidia, to make something competitive. If they try, within a few years I’m sure someone can.

Imagine 3 years from now there are a bunch of Chromebooks selling at Chromebook prices, but offering intel performance. That would start to hurt Microsoft.

Users will see all their friends using Apple products getting much better battery life, and their friends not using Apple products getting much worse battery life.

Honestly, the typing experience for me of the Surface keyboard is perfectly fine... it's just that the form factor makes lap-use difficult. I didn't think it'd be a problem for me, but a year or two in, I felt regret there.

The Surface Book seems like a vast improvement in that regard... but it's extremely expensive, and relied on an overengineered latching mechanism. Dell made a really neat Book alternative, the Latitude 7285, which was really compelling, but by the time I was in the market, they'd abandoned that form factor already. :/

I don't know, I think the Surface pro keyboard is surprisingly good all things considered. I agree the trackpad doesn't feel great, but it is accurate and usable enough and the typing experience is certainly no worse than any other similarly sized laptop I've used and better than many. For a removable keyboard I think they've done a great job.

64 bit support should be coming soon [1]: With 64-bit emulation coming soon in Preview via the Windows Insider program, you'll be able to run 64-bit (x64) apps on Surface Pro X.

> Where's the ARM native version of Visual Studio?

Well, there is VSCode... [2]

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-app...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-new-vs-code-update-i...

Are we really sure ARM is where the advantage here is with Apple? Not the 5 nm process?

Let's be real, it's just on par with the Zen 3 in single threaded perf which is on a 7nm+ process. When Zen 4 comes it might be moot.

AMD's entire market cap is practically on par with Apple's cash on hand (so very different companies in terms of size/capability) yet they are equal in performance single threaded? Not only that, in practical terms the AMD chip is very desirable in many situations because it has twice the cores.

Fair point. Without moving the goal posts, I should have clarified that I was referring to Windows on x86, and have never owned a Windows ARM device. What I was trying to say is that, if you want compatibility with the broadest swath of software, you don't generally buy a Mac. This is not as true as it used to be, but it's still true.

I don't have a Surface Pro X and would never buy one, but it's an example of how ARM isn't necessarily the answer to the user's problem, because the user may well use his device for more than running Microsoft Office and browsing the internet.

A glimmer of hope from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-app... on Oct 1, 2020:

With 64-bit emulation coming soon in Preview via the Windows Insider program, you'll be able to run 64-bit (x64) apps on Surface Pro X.

I haven't used an M1 device. Frankly, outside of Apple no real-world user (in my universe, can't speak for yours) has long-term experience with it.

Do you always believe everything that a marketing department tells you?

Does all of your real-world experience with consumer products tend to line up with benchmarking software and short-term reviews based on a test drive?

Apple was routinely criticized for years for not doing more things. Why don’t they have more models? Why doesn’t their software have infrequently-used features X and Y? Why aren’t there a million levers and dials so I can customize my machine?

It’s because they were whole-assing one thing.

I haven’t been keeping track, but I think it’s true that the breadth of their product line is bigger or nearly as big as it has ever been, and certainly much bigger than 10 years ago. They got there organically over the last 20 years, instead of developing shovelware.