M1 Macs Review
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sixcolors.com
Battery life is the key takeaway for me. Performance is fine but I'm used to a powerful desktop so it's not blowing me away but the battery life definitely is blowing me away.
To run things under rosetta there's an arch command: e.g. arch -x86_64 brew install xxx - the arch preference is inherited by sub processes. I'm kind of amazed how well intel binaries run here. I can't tell the difference in usage and it just works, even games like Cuphead from steam seem fine.
I now wonder, does that mean that MB Air has no moving parts inside it at all?
Then the MacBook Air will have a 14" as well, before a 12" MacBook Air is introduced at a lower price range, possibly at $799.
That would be great. But it could make more difficult to sell an iPadPro (starting at $799) with a MagicKeyboard (starting at $300) as an alternative to a laptop.
In addition, does that mean that the Air has no air vents? Is it a completely sealed unit, like an iPhone?
It's too cold in Chicago to test, but I would love to see if the MacBook Air can work while outside in direct hot sun - it's the only reason I'm considering the MBP.
I'm not optimistic. An unused iPhone 7 will go into an overheating error state if left in direct sunlight on a British summer's day. I don't know how newer models cope.
"The two machines are equivalently fast in a sprint, but the MacBook Pro will win a distance race. But Apple doesn’t call it a “fan”. They call it an “active cooling system”. That sounds like a marketing euphemism, but it’s not fair to call this a “fan”. It is something else altogether, and nothing at all like the cooling systems in any previous Mac laptop.
I’ve never once heard it in an entire week.
Never. Not once. Not a whisper.
I presume it has engaged at times when I’ve taxed the system. Again, the Cinebench multi-core CPU benchmark taxes every available CPU core for 10 minutes. But if the active cooling system has kicked in, I never heard it. I’ve never felt any air moving out of the vents, either. This is nothing at all like the fans on Intel-based MacBooks, which, if you’re not familiar, you can definitely hear, to say the least."
One of my mild annoyances with the iPhone 12 is that there's no white option. I have a white iPhone 10, and it's essential equipment for me as a convertible driver -- on a sufficiently sunny day, the phone will overheat on the center console screen-up, even when it's powered off! But with the white side up, it's fine even on sunny days breaking 110 degF.
The only way around this I could see for laptops and tablets in the sun would be a return to transflective displays or other non-black options... which would also be a huge boost to battery life in well-lit conditions. But none of these techs seem to have comparable image quality, and there are some inherent challenges (potentially addressable, but challenges) with color balance etc.
But there is a white iPhone 12? I have one myself. Or is not white enough/too matte or something?
The aluminum sides + white back look really great, too!
There is for the iPhone 12 non pro and mini [0].
The pro comes in what looks like a fairly light silver.
Disclaimer: I haven't seen those in real life, I'm going by the apple store website.
[0] https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4982/as-images.apple...
I used to have one of those massive 17" MacBooks (Best keyboard ever), and it used to heat up enough to turn my thighs red. Back then, Apple avoided calling them "laptops," perhaps for this reason.
Then I moved to Chicago, and found it was a wonderful machine for using outside on my balcony in cold weather because it would keep at least half of me toasty. If I started to get chilly, I'd fire up Virtual PC and snuggle in.
Virtual PC. Man, how can this nit a real story!
It helps increase my mood, and productivity.
There’s a lot of things wrong with Teams.
I sincerely believe they botched it on purpose to be able to present increadible performance improvements compared to previous generations.
Apple silicon is amazing, of course. But the older machines were downright bad at cooling.
If you do anything that's heavy on I/O (packaging jar files in my case), this laptop is faster than my big desktop, the I/O is crazy fast actually.
Memory pressure has been low so far - my biggest fear opting for the base model but looks like i'll be fine - i spun up bunch of dev processes and was fine.
I seem to remember watching a real time video transcoding demo, or something like that, on an iPad Pro and the dev demoing it saying it was the I/O that made it possible. Desktop machines with much faster processors would choke due to bandwidth limitations, but Apple can custom tune every aspect of the iPad architecture and aren't limited to standard, generic interfaces between components.
The original 5k iMacs were a similar case in some ways. It was only possible in an all-in-one design, because there wasn't a standard video connection at the time that was capable of the throughput.
Tt's got a rather fast NVME SSD, 2.7GB/s reads and 2.2GB/s writes (Intel version was 1.3 and 1). Don't know if the IOPS & latency improved, but it wouldn't surprise me much.
The permanently soldered in SSD that has a finite amount of writes.
Saving $200 on RAM up front could get wiped out if you kill your SSD prematurely with constant, heavy swapping.
Here I see the fast SSD speed as a negative - making it painless to do something inherently dangerous towards the lifespan of your SSD.
The SSDs from the previous gen are rated for something like 40Gb writes per day for 40 years i think.
I’d guess the battery will fail first, then the keyboard or screen hinge, then the logic board. But thats a pure guess.
I reckon the biggest risk is that all in one logic board, anything fails and you lose your HDD.
Obsolete, who defines that?
I'm typing this on a MBP 2015. Still works perfectly fine (I did have screen replaced under warranty). Battery is replaceable on this machine, its sitting at ~85% capacity with 500 cycles. Apple hardware tends to have good resale value, too.
Performance-wise, hardware tends to last longer and longer. Repairability-wise, yeah, that's a can of worms of a discussion.
I had the same on Windows + a SSD. Docker with some Sqlite applictions apparently did crazy writes. SSD went from 100% to 80% in like half a year time or so, when I noticed it. That SSD is still alive, but I had to adapt.
Every additional 'Level' in the flash decreases the overall life cycle. Mind you, oftentimes drive controllers are fancier, often doing things like treating one of the sections as a less dense flash type to improve write cycles, and keep/move longer held data into the regions treated as QLC.
But, that means that some heavy write patters will indeed wind up worse on a modern drive than the better MLC/TLC models.
By the time I left they were shipping appliances with SSDs that were predicted to have lifespans longer than the longest hardware support you could buy from the vendor (longest hardware support contract - seven years). Hundreds of thousands of writes per second, every second, for 7+ years, uninterrupted.
Surely, they won't keep using the same aging technology. At least I hope not.
This is when running a decently sized Rails monolith w/ PostgreSQL & Redis, so a fairly typical modern Rails setup.
It's seriously impressive.
Though recently I switched back to VIM so perhaps this won't be an issue anymore.
iStat or similar can do a notification if a process is taking high CPU usage for a while.
Servers have their own solutions like monitoring daemons that sends out an alert if CPU usage had been too high for a while.
Sorry but is this crazy to need the fan to sense the performance!
I’m in a similar boat as you - running bunch of node services, pg, etc. but I’m also developing for iOS. Xcode kills my current MacBook because I’m constantly rebuilding.
>After a single build of WebKit, the M1 MacBook Pro had a massive 91% of its battery left. I tried multiple tests here and I could have easily run a full build of WebKit 8-9 times on one charge of the M1 MacBook’s battery.
In comparison, I could have gotten through about 3 on the [Intel] 16” and the 13” [Intel] 2020 model only had one go in it.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
As noted on HN and elsewhere, Intel’s struggle has been in manufacturing. They minimized risk (“got lazy”) when Moore’s Law reigned and their fabs were 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else, but have since squeezed every last architectural drop out of 14nm. Put Tiger Lake on TSMC 5nm and a lot of M1’s lead goes away.
The M1 is a damned fine chip and I’d like to own one. But the recent hero worship is a bit awkward to read as Apple is generally following an accepted playbook in the End Times of Moore’s law. 1. Save power by creating accelerated logic blocks without locking yourself out of algorithmic improvements. 2. Execute flawlessly. A chip respin costs 3-4 months and who knows how much money, so you need to go to production with the A0 silicon you powered up. 3. Know your software-only workloads. At best, all mathy code can be shoved down SIMD pipelines for high IPC. At worst, you’re dealing with a bunch of branchy integer code. The M1 has solved for both with vector extensions and a massive reorder buffer and register file.
It’s a great chip and Apple got there first. They’ll be rewarded with sales and increased market share, and developers will have one architecture to wrench on for all platforms.
You would be right to say that Intel couldn’t make the M1. It’s not because Intel’s fabs are struggling or Apple has found tricks no one else in the world knows about. It’s because Apple controls the entire software stack and therefore knows what they need on the chip. Intel caters to the entire market (one the M1 just noticeably shrunk) with myriad integrators, workloads, and users, and each has different concerns and priorities making accelerated algorithm blocks useless to some and not-fast-enough for others.
This is an important point. It applies up and down the stack for everything Apple does.
The people who suggest breaking up Apple are correct that it would destroy them, by forcing them to use inefficient generic components at every level.
If we want competition against Apple, the way to get there is not by hobbling them with the inefficiency of the old paradigm.
It’s by the rest of the industry figuring out how to collaborate on delivering similar gains without vertical integration.
This is one of the smartest things I've seen on HN in a long time. This is exactly what has to happen if the other companies don't want Apple to eat their lunch.
It’s entirely another to decide to be able to invest years in optimizing reference counting in collaboration with the compiler team committing to ARC.
Vendors are already complaining to Qualcomm about expensive packages due to 5G. They want it cheaper, at the same time people are suggesting Qualcomm's CPU goes faster. You can only have one of them.
I do think it’s a positive situation to wish, but the idea that it would arise simply as a result of breaking up Apple needs some serious explanation.
Repairability leading to less waste is also a seems like an unlikely consequence of making devices less integrated. Apple’s device lifetimes are much greater than any of their competitors.
I personally strongly value software freedom, and do not think we can afford to let the current situation persist for all time, but it pains me to see things like right to repair be tied in with the problems of the software ecology. One seems like Luddism, and the other seems like a bedrock of a sane digital future, two things that don’t mix well.
One step which would seem to serve both of these goals, would be to require all devices that fit some general category of ‘general purpose computer’ to permit alternative operating systems to be installed.
But that has absolutely zero to do with breaking up Apple. If we need rights, let’s actually say what they are.
Breaking companies up doesn’t create rights.
The null hypothesis for what would happen if you break up Apple is that Android would simply dominate, with no improvements over its current locked down state, which is admittedly slightly more free than Apple, but in no way resembles the utopia you describe.
We’d probably get Facebook and Amazon forks of Android gaining more traction this time around, but offering none of what you and I want in terms of freedom.
I haven't actually heard too many people calling for Apple to be broken up (most of what I hear is around increased regulation) but when I do hear breakups being talked about, it's more along the line of removing their value-adds like TV+ and Music+ and App Store. Those are the things where you could make an argument that they're hurting competition, not the coupling of their OS and CPU.
Is anyone else doing this though? It might be the theoretical playbook, but if others aren't doing this in practice then Apple are worthy of credit for pulling it off.
1 - accelerators for specific things aren't new, and lots of processors have an H264 accelerator, but Apple seems to be pushing this a bit further than others. Even low power vs high power cores doesn't seem to be something others are doing much of. 2 - I don't know enough about. 3 - Apple has put a ton of FP units on this seemingly for JS performance, anyone else could be doing that, it's not a big spoiler to know that people run a lot of JS now, and yet the M1 has more FP units than any other consumer CPU. This knowledge about the software workloads seems to be beyond what others are working on.
It seems to be more than just the 5nm process, not least because the A14 generation is the first 5nm chip but Apple's chips have been well respected back to 7 and 10nm for similar reasons.
Caveat, very much a layman on this, but it seems like Apple are executing that playbook significantly better than others.
Yes, but from a different perspective. For example the recent M&A between lots of Fabless companies are precisely because of that. Sharing cost and allowing different IPs to work together.
What is missing is someone doing the Software. If it was Microsoft, they would have done at least done something. It wouldn't be good, but they would at least be "trying" to compete. Google just doesn't care.
The other key point is that Apple can pick and mix from the technologies they use - they've unbundled Intel - choosing the best that they can find for their needs whether in-house or externally.
You say this like it's easy or routine. At the bleeding edge, execution is 99% the hard part.
They make NUC hardware[1] and Intel Clear Linux[2].
They could tune that stack for a new purpose designed chip... if they wanted to, but it seems unlikely.
1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits...
You need ALL the pieces of a puzzle to compete.
Even when I'm on a Mac almost everything I do is either in browser or in a terminal.
As you point out Apple's per core performance is impressive, but their ability to customize their hardware to optimize very specific compute tasks like the nsobject release example or floating for Javascript will be a lot harder to convince off the self/least common denominator parts like x86 processors have traditionally been.
I also think we are at the beginning of seeing the influence of "accelerators" such as the ML and neural engine cores. Accelerators beyond the CPU are nothing new - that's what a graphics card is, after all. What's interesting is these are on the same SOC with the CPU cores.
What if Apple decides even for the higher end Mac's to integrate RAM into or closely couple with the SOC? What if they decide on their own memory controller that lets you address all the memory chips at once. What potential could that have for performance? Maybe not enough to offset the cost/complexity. But if it did turn out to be on the right side of the cost/benefit equation now instead of having to convince multiple parties it's a good idea, at worst Apple just has to convince a few internal divisions to work together.
That is the long term power I see with Apple Silicon. Not raw specs or Moores Law - but unfettered access to the full Art of the Possible.
The improvement in retaining and releasing NSObjects is mostly due to Arm's weaker memory model. And javascript specific instructions like FJCVTZS are available for anyone designing Arm cores. Also, IIRC, FJCVTZS was added to more closely match the way x86 handles floating point numbers because that is what Javascript was designed to target.
But if it did turn out to be on the right side of the cost/benefit equation now instead of having to convince multiple parties it's a good idea, at worst Apple just has to convince a few internal divisions to work together.
The problem is that Apple does what they want at their discretion. You need them, but that don't need you. Whereas hardware manufactures are usually quite sensitive to customer needs. We've already seen how this plays out with Apple's professional software products like Shake or Final Cut.
Not to downplay Apple's accomplishment, after all nobody expected them to be this competitive. But people are getting caught up in the hype.
> It’s not because [...] Apple has found tricks no one else in the world knows about.
I don't think anyone would disagree with either statement. The point is Intel can't get TL on a small node, and not for lack of trying. They eventually will, of course, but there is an organizational sickness at Intel that has crippled them.
The the M1 is Zen3 5600X performance in an ultra-portable form factor. Whether that's revolutionary or not particularly noteworthy depends on the individual use case. If you're don't care that much about power/heat/fan-noise, it's neat but not (yet) world shattering. Bit if you live your life on a small laptop, it may well be.
According to rumors, we'll see Apple's 8 Firestorm + 4 Icestorm CPU within a quarter or two in the 16-inch MacBook (current M1 is 4 Firestorm + 4 Icestorm, where Firestorm is the high-performance core). That will perform somewhere between a 5800X and 5900X (or some recent 16-core Xeon that nobody remembers the name/number of). Again, revolutionary or meh depends on use case.
Linux native is not in the cards but it won't matter, it will work fine virtualized with hardly any performance penalty (for ARM64 linux). If for some reason you insist on native linux, it's time to recognize that Apple hardware is not for you.
Personally I run my server workload on servers far away and let other people deal with infra (particularly, power, networking and physical security). But it's probably great for heavy media creators on the go.
Sorry I'm not in the loop.. but why is that? Does the hardware somehow preclude it?
There was a breakdown from an official Apple page how to boot alternative systems on an M1.
Link please.
That work doesn't seem to be complete yet however in the latest beta.
Choose one of the following security options:
Full Security: Ensures that only your current OS, or signed operating system software currently trusted by Apple, can run. This mode requires a network connection at software installation time.
Reduced Security: Allows any version of signed operating system software ever trusted by Apple to run.
Permissive Security: Does not enforce any requirements on the bootable operating system.
Note: The Permissive Security option appears only when System Integrity Protection (SIP) is disabled. To disable SIP, start up your Mac in macOS Recovery, open Terminal, then run the command csrutil disable.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...
Note on those Macs that the security settings are boot volume specific, so that you can have a volume with all security off for fun, and still have a completely secure macOS install selectable via dual-boot.
How would one run a graphical Linux distro virtualized and by which software?
We can already do this on Intel Macs, Windows PCs, etc. Graphics are not a problem.
Heck, we could since forever also run graphical macOS and Windows on virtualization apps...
The ARM/Apple Silicon version not sure if it's ready, might need work to even run cli.
It would be a huge amount of work to add ARM support to VirtualBox. I would be surprised if Oracle were interested in making that investment.
In any case, we have Fusion and Parallels, and Fusion is now free for personal use iirc.
The internals of VirtualBox are very x86-specific. It was not written with the idea of supporting non-x86 CPU architectures. I think trying to add ARM support would be a lot of work and redesign. VirtualBox used to support software-based virtualisation, which has something in common with CPU emulation – it is kind of emulating x86 on x86, and even uses some of QEMU's code for dynamic recompilation. But, that software-based virtualisation was only ever 32bit, it exploited obscure features of the x86 architecture (execution in ring 1), and in the latest release of VirtualBox has been removed entirely.
(I worked for Oracle for almost ten years. Never at the level at which decisions like this were made. But still, I feel like I do have some feel for what kinds of decisions Oracle's leadership are likely to make. They could always surprise me, though.)
And so, all the people that would provide support for their family and friends due to using the same hardware split paths. And now those Apple users have to go to Apple for support. A double win for the corporation.
All 10 of them?
The subset of people that (a) had Apple laptops, (b) run Linux on them, (c) provided support for family, is probably irrelevant...
>And now those Apple users have to go to Apple for support. A double win for the corporation.
Yes, what a big lucrative market: relatives of people who run Linux on their Macs that dependent on them for support
/s
Technical people moving away from using Apple's new properietary hardware that literally can't boot any OS but Mac OS will mean they can't help their friends and family as easily due to lack of familiarity.
Many technical people seem jumping into Apple's new hardware, and reviews are all raving for M1.
Don't confuse FOSS people / ideologues with "most technical people". The technical people that are big in numbers and give support need to be merely computer savvy people, not hardcore devs or people who'd rather run Linux.
>that literally can't boot any OS but Mac OS
That's wrong. It can boot any OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25145119
Well, also without x86 baggage, and with tons of SOC co-preccessors added, and a unified memory.
If you mean "smartphones and tablets", ok. But this is a laptop, not a mobile phone, and it's new development there.
If you mean "laptops" then, no, they didn't have unified memory, much less have it be "pretty normal".
This reserved pool of memory was even hard-set at boot time, and usually the size of it was determined based on the amount of total memory (for example at one point MacBooks with 4GiB of memory allocated 1GiB for memory, ones with 8GiB allocated 2GiB).
What it sounds like Apple has done here is heavily blur those lines. One example would be to load a texture into a memory location, make a change with the CPU, then let the GPU do some modifications, check something with the CPU, then apply it to some shape and display it. On current systems that would mean multiple copy operations of that texture back and forth between segments of memory (across the PCI bus on a dedicated card). Here that might all be done with no copies at all (just handoffs).
This is not the case, as expanded in sibling threads.
Shared memory means the CPU and the GPU share physical memory in different address space, so 512MB RAM with 64MB shared means the CPU gets 448MB and the GPU gets 64, and data has to be copied from one chunk to the other.
Unified memory means both CPU and GPU not only share physical memory but share the address space, all memory is accessible to both at the same time. This means that e.g. you can create commands or load data in memory on the CPU then just tell the GPU "your stuff is here" with no copy needed anywhere, and likewise the other way around.
With iGPUs, it is pretty standard to be able to map "CPU memory" into the GPU's address space and access it directly, without copies.
See section 5.7 here: https://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/public/us/en/...
I don't think Apple has provided enough information to say if the M1 "unified memory" is actually novel or not. Automatic mirroring between CPU and GPU page tables would be pretty novel, but I don't think there's any info currently available to suggest that happens.
Consoles have used unified memory since last generation I think?
AMD APU have supported unified memory since kaveri I think, and Intel iGP have supported limited version of data sharing for a while, but I don't think one can call UMA "pretty normal".
It has nothing to do with ARM or Apple. I left the comparison as a reference point for people who follow desktop PC performance and may not be as well aware of Apple's.
I’m interested to see how Apple can make this scale, can you get a Mx laptop with 64 Gb? Or will that has to be soc external memory for the process to scale?
Memory is already external to the SoC on the M1; it's on the same package but it's not a single chip.
64GB will come for future laptops. And Apple can scale with a single package beyond 64GB too, very high performance solutions included. See the A100 80GB from NVIDIA with 2TB/sec of memory bandwidth, with RAM as part of the package, just not in the same die.
It comparatively is. Thunderbolt is basically a PCI-E Gen 3 x4 slot but over a (very) short cable. Commonly more like an x2 link since getting the x4 speeds is difficult. Commonly 2 thunderbolt ports also share a single controller, so it's a 40Gb/sec combined maximum not per-port (either port can saturate, but you can't hit 80Gb/s total). It's unclear what the M1's controller actually is here, if it's dedicated lanes per port or just bifurcation.
But lets say the M1 is full on 2 TB3 controllers, for a combined 80Gb/s over those 2 ports. That's still not much. By comparison the 5600x has 24 PCIe Gen 4 lanes on it. That's 380 Gb/s of bandwidth off of the CPU. These are all things Apple would need to heavily beef up when they make the Apple Silicon variants of the larger class products. You can't do a Mac Pro replacement with 80 Gb/s of I/O. That'd be a joke. Apple obviously will scale up the I/O, but that costs power, too. It won't be free.
For those Ryzen parts, the thing that hikes power use a lot is having a separate northbridge in the same package instead of an SoC, with the vast majority of that additional power use being due to that.
This changes the security mode to Permissive Security. Permissive Security uses the same "global" digital signature for macOS as the above Reduced Security option, in order to allow running software which is not the latest version. Thus anything other than the latest software therefore may have security vulnerabilities. At a high level, Permissive Security allows configuration options to be set to not require all software to be digitally signed. This can allow users who are not part of the Apple Developer program to still be able to introduce their own software into their system. Additionally, especially dangerous security downgrades may be restricted to Permissive Security, and only available via CLI tools for power users rather than GUIs. Passing this option will explicitly recreate the LocalPolicy from scratch, (i.e. it does not preserve any existing security policy options) and only the options specified via this tool will exist in the output local policy.
It sounds like Apple left the boot loader unlocked on these systems, just not by default.
It’s astonishing. I just hope they someday put in a good GPU. Something comparable to an Nvidia 3060 would be great.
I’d love to see Apple go HAM with their ARM chips in an iMac Pro or some such. Give me 12 firestorm cores and bump the GPU cores from 8 to 64.
The GPU in the M1 is perfectly good for the power targets it's trying to hit.
Either fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, Apple is unlikely to be able to do with the GPU what they did with the CPU. That is, there's no legacy in either Nvidia nor AMD's GPUs that Apple can cut out to get wins. And similarly, neither Nvidia nor AMD slowed down their progress or is suffering from fab issues like Intel did & is on the CPU side of things.
I don't doubt Apple can hit an RTX 3060 level of performance, but they'll get there with roughly similar to RTX 3060 level of power draw. Which means it ain't fitting in a MacBook Air or MBP 13", either. And judging by the existing MBP 16" cooling solution, not really going to go well in that chassis.
Apple will probably continue to offer shitty GPUs in their MacBooks. That’s fine and maybe even a smart business choice.
But it means mac continues to suck for games. Which is unfortunate imho.
I think we can all agree it would be very interesting to see how much GPU power they can stuff in an iMac Pro and desktop class Mac Pro. If it doesn’t make business sense then so be it.
Realistically I’m hoping in 5 years that Nvidia releases a high-end integrated SoC. Tegra on Switch is fine. Keep it going.
Can't remember any other times they have really talked about gaming performance.
Gaming is mostly DirectX anyway or consoles with their custom APIs.
The 3060ti is a 200w gpu, which is 40x the power draw of the gpu in the m1, but it is only 5x the performance. Gpu’s might not scale linearly, but it may very well be the case that apple will blow us away when they ship their high end gpu’s.
Who gives a shit about the desktop 1050 Ti here? The M1 comes close but can't match a 1650 Mobile, and the 1650 mobile is both faster than a 1050 Ti and uses less power. Almost like the 1050 Ti was never the pinnacle of anything but being cheap? Then again, the 1050 Ti doesn't use 75w, either ( https://www.techpowerup.com/review/palit-geforce-gtx-1050-ti... ), just like the M1's isn't "less than 5W" ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste... - more like ~10-15w for just the GPU)
The M1's good enough it doesn't need nonsensical comparisons with fake numbers to exaggerate things further. Let it be what it is, which is a good integrated GPU not that dissimilar to other recent integrated GPUs
EDIT: Although if you do care about power efficiency, sites like techpowerup have you covered: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6800-xt/36.... performance / watt graphs.
Efficiency is cool. (heh) But if I need X then a highly efficient X/5 still doesn’t deliver X.
I doubt Apple will ever sacrifice their overly thin MacBook ergonomics for power. But I’m hoping they max out their desktop form factor.
And the 13". We'll probably have something even better for the 16" too.
The iMac Pro's relatively slow 2666MHz RAM can't be saved by the also relatively small (these days) cache in the Xeon-W it uses.
Today's desktops are as good as servers from 5 years ago. Today's laptops are as good as desktops 5 years ago. Today's phones are as good as laptops 5 years ago.
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The Apple M1 makes a leap with a huge L1 cache, very wide execution, at a very low clock rate (2.8 GHz for power-efficiency).
But when you pair such a leap with a 7-year technology jump, yeah, things look quite silly.
To be clear though, it doesn't matter in the end if the _result_ is more productivity. But it is worth noting that under the hood, the comparison is not entirely apples to apples.
Yes I have seen claims from people along the lines of 'x86 code has more optimization paths in mainstream compilers for historic and other reasons'. Not sure about that, certainly can't imagine such a significant difference.
Plus ARM64 is not really RISC in a meaningful way - it'll still be executing microcode under the hood.
Macos ships with some interpreters pre-installed as part of BigSur, including Ruby, Python and Perl. And most source distributions should just compile, but my guess is that it will be buggy given the arch + os combination is novel.
Firefox (beta) and Chrome/Chromium apparently are available too.
If Docker isn’t ready by the time 16” M1s come around, I’ll probably just resort to cloud instances for a while.
(on the team)
[0] https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixos/release-20.09-aarch64
Everything at the Unix level Apple ships is already a universal binary, including Ruby, Python, etc. For example, zsh (and bash) run natively on the M1:
file /bin/zsh
/bin/zsh: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit
executable x86_64] [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/bin/zsh (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/zsh (for architecture arm64e): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64eI've owned a few "gaming" laptops, but until the M1 MBA I haven't had one that run games for more than an hour while on battery power, and even then it sounded like a jet taking off.
Software support is another, though Rosetta works surprisingly well, the general lack of Mac support in games combined with the removal of 32-bit support in Catalina mean, you're not exactly spoiled for choice.
I have not tried Civ 6 late game benchmarks yet tho ;)
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
It's a fantastic experience, but in no way has having this laptop for the last 6 months "redefined how I think about a laptop." It still does all the same things a laptop does, it still has all the same limitations a laptop has (like the physically small screen vs. other common gaming choices - be it desktop monitors or TVs). The M1 in the MBA doesn't really change any of that. Especially since the loss of bootcamp & eGPU means the MBA is a rather terrible gaming experience unless something drastically changes between game devs, Apple, and MacOS. The extra battery life is definitely welcome, but it's not game changing revolutionary, either. For some it may now be enough to go all day without charging, which is a key milestone, but many people were already there with the existing set of ultrabooks, too. Beyond that, eh? Kinda like a phone that can last 2 days. Cool trick, but it wouldn't change anything about my day to day life unless there happens to be a power outage overnight.
It also has an AMD 4900HS which while not an M1 is a fantastic processor.
Per anandtech the M1 comes kinda-close sometimes to the 1650 mobile: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
It's then soundly wrecked by the 1660 Ti mobile, and the 2060 MaxQ is then faster yet still. They obviously also take a lot more power at peak, but that's also going to be a huge difference in the actual gaming experience, too.
There are people already running 32-bit windows apps through Wine on the M1. When there is a will there is a way.
Before people jump on this, I mean that for example the previous Intel MB Pro with i5 would cost like $1,500, which is far more than almost any windows laptop running the same specs.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a310046...
I'm not a car enthusiast, but the supra is the first car that came to my mind when I read the parent comment because I saw a lot of youtube videos with supras from the 90s (modified and) producing a lot of power.
Like this one [1], I think the car in the video is a 1999 model and stock it produces at most 325hp (info from wikipedia).
The Supra wasn't produced for many years and was recently re-released with this BMW partnership. Many old school Supra fans feel its strayed pretty far from its past and don't regard it well.
The car industry is full of comparisons like this. Luxury is a different scale than performance. You can have either or both. Macs exist higher on the luxury scale than most windows laptops and they offer models across the performance scale. Quite like BMW.
I always found this strange, when looking at personal computers – or, in fact, most anything in life. As if what can not be checked or compared on a feature list has no meaning. Do people really feel this way about the world or is it just a way to deal with insecurity about what is important?
The most confusing thing about this is, that, to me, the human experience is pretty much the opposite: The soft parts beat the feature list every time. The better design wins.
Also, the value of each soft factor will differ from person to person. Good design highly relates to personal needs.
And Apple especially can sometimes be too stubborn to acknowledge people’s personal differences or an established industry standard.
What do you mean by these?
Fn+backspace works as a shortcut, but they’re on completely different ends of the keyboard so you need 2 hands. Ctrl+D also sometimes works but is inconsistent across applications.
Also, unlike all other vendors, Apple places the fn key on the far end of the keyboard, instead of the much more used ctrl which is now in the middle. When typing I find it much easier to quickly hit the furthest key than the middle one so I often hit the wrong one.
- Portables in the Mac world do lack a delete key (the delete-forwards key, that is) on the built-in keyboard, but that's more of a space-constraint than anything else. Mac keyboards in general do not lack the delete key; he usual full-size keyboard certainly has a delete key.
- Keyboards are a personal thing, and it's very easy to plug in any normal USB keyboard, and then get all the benefits of the [delete] key as usual. There's nothing else to do, just plug in your favourite keyboard..
[Mine came this morning: https://i.imgur.com/at1mGiT.jpg]
It's a matter of habit, and super easy to configure from the keyboard preferences in macOs. The trade-off is that ctrl is almost exclusively used for unix-y thing, and all the usual GUI-y things use Cmd. Using a shell is just painful for me in anything other than macOS for that reason alone.
Incidentally, because of the pervasive support for readline shortcuts in all text inputs, del is just ctrl-D.
On Linux at least you can use Ctrl-Shift-x, Ctrl-Shift-c and Ctrl-Shift-v for cut, copy and paste in the terminal. So again it's just a case of getting use to the shortcut differences.
On macOS Del can also be found on fn-Backspace and I often remap the right Alt key to Ctrl.
It's pretty easy to adapt to either with a little time.
With the right hardware, I've really enjoyed installing and using Linux, while I struggle when drivers for networking have to be procured - I'm not experienced enough in that area to figure it out (or rather, I'm not motivated enough.)
For me, Windows and macOS alike just work and while I've had more issues with Windows, it's because I've used it 100x more often and thoroughly; a price I pay for the ease of getting into games. (I am not speaking about right now, a moment in time, but the decades through which I gamed.)
In my career, I was largely a developer of Microsoft-focused technologies, and the support for tools was always sufficient or better.
Anyway, to my point, the parts of the software and experience that would pain me would be the things I couldn't control, and the things that were meddled with. I avoided pre-configured laptops if I could, and if I couldn't, I would do a clean install of the OS immediately. With desktops, I could select the best performance/experience/price (including reliability, features, etc) compromise for each compatible component, assemble it myself, and have not only a perfectly customized kit suited to my personal tastes and needs, but also the experience of learning and building on my own.
Now all of that is irrelevant if your preference is either just very strongly what comes from Apple, or you're only looking at complete systems and comparing them. Since I can be ambivalent about OS, except for gaming, and the experience was quite good (for me, not for everyone, obviously), I could pick a Windows-compatible laptop that gave me the best "features for the price", or rather, great hardware for the price without too much software meddling (or meddling I could remove.)
Now, does it sound like I don't consider the experience, or that I'm buying hardware because of insecurity? It certainly does not seem so from my perspective. To say a "feature list has no meaning" is to claim that the features do not contribute to the experience, but that isn't accurate. Of course you have to understand how an experience is derived from a feature, or that feature list can't be used to aid in your decision-making process.
In my experience if you want the level of physical build quality of a macbook, you end up in the price range of a macbook.
Windows vs macos vs linux, that is personal preference. I use all three and they all serve their roles well. I do find that windows and linux require more configuration and maintenance, but YMMV.
Apple sold the old MacBook air (2015 one?) untill 2018 ? And charged like 1000$ for it ? Have you used that crap ? My wife has it and I was laughing my ass off at how terrible the device was - the viewing angles on the screen were better on 400$ HP devices.
Apple keyboards have long been subpar, they have no touchscreen or 2in1 offering which is a perfect form factor for my mobile computing (iPad pro is nice but iOS only that's a deal breaker for almost any professional).
And the beloved macos was super rough in Catalina.
I need to develop for iOS occasionally so I'm forced to use a Mac or swap arround, but I'm sorry - Apple laptops were a bad deal for a long time from most perspectives - I would personally get an X1 over any previous MBP.
M1 and pricing change that for the first time in a long long time - I would recommend this laptop to anyone buying a device in this category.
And thats not including thermal throttling, the bullshit Apple pulls with background OS stuff like checking executable hashes online, being restricted to what software you can run, and so on.
A Dell XPS13 with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,349[1].
An Apple MacBook Air with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,249[2].
The XPS13 is great, I have one myself with Linux on. They're definitely in the same price range as the Apple laptops though.
I think the other points you've raised have been addressed else where.
There's no restriction on what software you run. You can even replace the OS with Linux if you like by configuring the security.
The hash key transmission seems to be used for malware detection, is optional and Apple have committed to not keeping logs of it when people do use it.
1. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-13-touc...
Even with current M1 Macs, outside of the battery life, you have sub 2k laptops that blow the M1 out of the water
I think, for a light weight laptop I’d rather take the single core bump of the air over the marginal gain for multicore of the Asus. That’s just me though.
Geekbench 5:
Asus: 1218 sc, 8031 mc [1]
MacBook Air: 1726 sc, 7417 mc [2]
MacBook is stunningly smooth, while under heavy CPU load you hit CMD+Space and Spotlight is there. Under my Dell with no CPU load at all, I hit the windows key - and nothing happens.
What really keeps me at Apple is this overall smoothness. Under Windows/Intel you can pick one spec that is impressive, but as you said, it is the overall experience.
As for being worth it, wait till the next gen mobile chips in 2021. I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.
That's probably not going to happen any time soon.
If the $999 M1-based MacBook Air is already outperforming almost every Intel laptop that's been shipping (including Apple's), there's little chance Intel or AMD are going to surpass that.
Even if they get close to performance, they're not going to have the same battery life. From Matthew Panzarino's review on Techcrunch on the M1 MacBook Pro [1]:
"In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone."
It's important to remember: this is Apple's low-end chip for entry-level/consumer level hardware, yet it's more than competitive with a $5000 iMac Pro.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
This combined with the fact that Arm-based Windows PCs have mostly used mobile chips not optimized for the desktop use-case and form factor, is why the new Arm-based Macbooks leave any Arm-based Windows PCs in the dust in terms of performance.
Other vendors are using generic chips that were not tuned for the OS.
x86 emulation works by compiling blocks of x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions with optimizations to improve performance. A service caches these translated blocks of code to reduce the overhead of instruction translation and allow for optimization when the code runs again.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jwhite/2020/11/18/okay-im-o...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that potential future is already here. Mac mini is a server and off-the-shelf rack mounts are easy to find. [0]
[0] For example: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmacmini.html
It's probably not fair for me to say I'm not convinced yet anyway, as I'm still developing on a Linux desktop and got rid of my laptop during lockdowns as there wasn't a need for it. If that need comes back though, these laptops look like they could be some really nice options (which would be a first for ARM laptops).
Remember, it's not emulation; Rosetta translates the x86 binary into ARM code and runs it. That's why there's a small pause when launching x86 apps—it translates the app on the fly.
BUT I have been using it (right now) for almost 2 hours reading reddit and whatnot, I went form 100% to 96%. On my current mbp (2019, i9, 16gb) 2 hours would kill 50% of my battery.
I don't care if compile time takes 2x. I can take my laptop with me at 8am and come back at 10pm and know I won't need a charger. It is amazing
But even so, 2 hours of my usage, in pretty much every mbp I owned (and I had a few) always depleted minimum 25% of battery. (maybe the websites I use are more draining that simple static ones?) And we are talking about 4% now with this one. No matter how you dice it, it is still a big difference.
quick edit: it has been 2.5 hours right now since I unplugged it. Browsing Reddit and Hacker News, Whatsapp and Slack applications. 5% of the battery has been used!
As soon as the last kinks are ironed out for M1 there's no reason imo to use the Intel Macs ever again.
Now that it happen it is more like a natural progression.
While Apple will always have the edge in terms of optimization since they have to only design for specific hardware, the difference won't be massive, and you won't be locked into the ecosystem.
(Although for the next few years, I expect PC vendors will just use Snapdragons or Rockchips as a base.)
Yes, the M1 is a product of a company with complete control over software and now hardware, including in this case the SOC that combines RAM and CPU. This is unheard of in a mass-marketed personal computer; I'm not sure this has ever happened before. Commodore used the 6502 CPU from subsidiary MOS Technology in its computers from 1977 onward, but I don't think MOS ever produced RAM, and certainly not integrated into the CPU like this. TI used its own CPU in the 99/4A, but not sure if TI ever produced RAM and, again, there was no RAM/CPU integration like M1.
I've wanted a gaming laptop (or better put, a laptop that I can also game on) for years but couldn't stand the crappy quality of ASUS/MSI/Lenovo in sub-2k price range. As I said in another comment, I can't believe it's going to be a MacBook :)
"What's an IBM?"
https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
https://images.macrumors.com/t/xjpsPEkXCCuNsW90kwPvVl0xfC0=/...
Percent battery remaining after compiling WebKit. 16" MacBookPro 2019: 61%, 13" MacBook Pro: 24%. M1 mini: 91%, M1 Air: 91%.
From: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/17/apple-silicon-m1-compil...
> non-benchmark, real-world workloads compared
Many (most) benchmarks are designed to reflect real-world workloads.
Things like the five times faster ARC retain/release cycle or the dedicated objc_msgSend branch predictor are a big deal when your software stack hits these hotspots constantly. The SPEC sample workloads won't.
That you are even interested in this shows how great the m1 chip performs, but as a comparison This is pretty useless.
Disabling GPU acceleration may fix this issue.
Does this mean I can `docker run` using a remote (x86_84) docker host in the meantime?
While gaming is not an issue to all users the Mac world needs to shake this concept of just get a console or windows gaming machine. There should not be an excuse to have two or machines on separate platforms.
As for gaming, I don't it's a hardware issue. It's software support. Microsoft now also owns a lot of gaming studio for xbox exclusivesz those will never come to the Mac. Also big gaming companies are now working with likes of microsoft, amazon, Google on cloud gaming. That seems like the way forward for making AAA games run everywhere. I doubt these companies will spin up another team to support these games on the Mac platform. It sucks that m1 is actually really good gaming processor.
The only concern I have is this: it is my understanding that the arm7 instruction set differs slightly from vendor. Is that true? I’m thinking of what problems I might run into with shipping apps destined for AWS Gravitron.
At some point full x86 virtualization will need to exist on this platform and when that happens you'll be able to run an x86 virtual machine on your mac to back the underlying Docker engine. This is what is happening right now with Hypervisor.framework on a Mac, for instance.
If you develop a lot of ARM for sure run it all in ARM configuration but if you are a dev deploying to the current status quo you would want to continue working with x86 images if possible.
(and with new video cards, and new consoles, there are too many things vying for my money right now anyway)
Says Full Screen Video works on some apps (MLB) but not HBO.
What about other APIs like Filesystem and Notifications?
Responsive apps to resize window?
Any bigger write ups on this? To me, a single App Store across desktop/tablet/mobile has the most potential for developers from this chip change and it seems generally skipped over by almost all reviews.
Most, if not all; the reviews I have read so far have been 100% focused on the hardware itself. I honestly had to dig deep to even find the information I wanted about Rosetta emulation performance.
For some reason, 80% of the articles out there are about benchmarks, when we're also looking at the single biggest new release of MacOS in arguably nearly 20 years. I get that it's a big hardware transition, but who cares if the software is not up to snuff? Both are equally important.
Catalyst is of huge interest to me, too; especially as an iOS developer.
Any good articles / links on this, HN? :)
It’s likely why Apple wanted this so bad. The cost savings from Intel is one thing but the additional money earned through apps will be insane.
The technical innovation has only marginal value for me and I would love the same soc on a rpi like device, for home servers. Time will tell.
Now, as a Linux guy, I’ll just wait until innovation turns commodity, having no interest in macOS whatsoever.
You may have a long wait.
Apple has been killing Qualcomm and the other ARM licensees in performance for years. Apple shipped the first 64-bit ARM processor at least a year before Qualcomm could do it.
It took 10-years of designing their own ARM SoCs to get to the point of being able to produce the M1.
Apple showed Debian running in a VM on a prototype 6 months ago, so we know that's coming. There's a decent chance Linux running in a VM (or native Docker when that comes) will be much faster than Linux running on similarly priced Intel/AMD hardware.
We can only hope so. I would love to run Linux on my iPad (which is not m1 of course). I would be sad to use macOS though. That’s all early thoughts.
If the Docker issue is resolve, I'll likely jump on a M1 MBP when they're available.
On iOS they don't.
And with this new direction of macOS & ARM, it's not out of the question the same will happen on the desktop.
EDIT: why the downvotes? Seriously - what's wrong with what I said ... I'm genuinely curious.
Probably because currently MacOS just has a slightly more nagging version of Window's UAC when it comes to unsigned software.
Saying that they will disable it holds about the same amount of weight as saying Microsoft will make Windows Win10 S mode only. Is it possible? Maybe, but neither company is going to shoot themselves in the foot like that in the current market.
If not, everything should run through Rosetta 2. Apple did eventually pull the original Rosetta, so who knows how long they will keep the feature, but in the short term I can't imagine it being a problem.
The original Rosetta was only useful for legacy Mac software though; this one will continue to be useful for new x86 software that gets written. I think it will last a lot longer.
MLB here - we stay as true to native Apple HLS as possible including open-source HLS.js where possible. .tv games are a little more complex but we're big fans of Apple's frameworks
TouchBar might be useful for others but is beyond useless to me.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...
Apple will finally enter the game console market, with such a leap in CPU and GPU, that its premium-pricing will be value-for-money.
The higher price will be acceptable to consumers, via monthly plans (as for iphones) - it will be locked down, so the App store will be the only way to use it.
Technologically, they have great SP, they just need great MP. Same for GPU. They can do it.
Games: ARM-based machines are certainly capable - consider the AAA ports to the Switch. They can port again. iPhone GPUs have been more powerful than its 500GFLOPS (undocked) for a while. They also have many games - and developers - on the App store.
https://youtu.be/sV7CLgTMXio?t=344
It's aggressively okay. I wouldn't have any issues with this, but it is a bit disappointing, especially considering how important WFH has become recently.
To me the M1 thing fills me with dread.
To me I just see problems for the IT team. I already know our corporate VPN doesn't run on Big Sur. I have no hope for the monitoring app, or the Antivirus.
Apple is such a pain for corporate IT
However I have a bunch of users who suddenly upped and left the office in April and still needed access to in house resources, fileshares, intranet, reporting services. Things we haven't finished moving to the cloud. Perhaps you can tell me how else I should do that overnight without a VPN?
Everyone elses job looks so easy doesn't it
> It slowly became clear that one day Apple’s processors would come for Intel.
Yeah, that became clear sometime back in 2005... but what does that have to do with the matter at hand?!