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Comment by s1k3s | Hacker News Reader

I want a no commentary, no sound, video of the M1 Mac usage. Like show me how it runs YouTube on Chrome for example. So tired of these reviews that don't show anything other than the opinion of some fellow that is either Apple-biased or doesn't cover my field of usage at all.

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What laptop are you on that struggles to play Youtube on Chrome?

Nothing struggles. But the Intel 2020 Air is noticeably slower than the refurbished 2012 Linux Mint (and 2015 Windows) that I own.

Disclaimer: I bought the Mac for building apps only.

The M1 macs are the fastest web browsing machines you can buy, by a huge margin. If that's your use case, there's no question what machine to get. The closest you can come with mobile x86 is to get the top-of-the-line 11th Gen Core i7, and the M1 beats that thing by almost 100% in browser benchmarks.

Yep, or alternatively an iPad Air with a magic keyboard.

(Ducks)

Not even wrong. There's hardly a difference between the latest iPad and the latest MacBook.

Interesting that the blame here seems to sit with Apple. Aren’t we asking why Google, who owns the browser, can’t make YouTube, a video player, that they own, work in that browser on 2020 hardware?

YouTube is a turd. I do everything I can to avoid using it. How they’ve screwed up a video player that badly boggles the mind.

Oh, I'm not blaming Apple for anything here. I actually love my Mac Air, for the things its really good at. I'm blaming the so-called YT influencers/content creators that lie to their audience.

Youtube is basically optimizing for their own costs over that of end users by using VP9, which uses less bandwidth but often is software-decoded. So the real answer is basically that they can, but it would cost them more.

(Of course, the YouTube frontend is also fairly bloated, which doesn't help. There isn't much of an excuse for that one).

My 2016 HP Elitebook G3 does.

model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6600U CPU @ 2.60GHz

It doesn't have hw acceleration for VC1, so youtube specifically has a lot of issues. I've been able to rectify it by using h264ify to force youtube to give me h264 but a normie isn't going to be able to figure that out.

I have 6100U and it seems fine...

I have the same processor in my ThinkPad T470s and it's terrible for anything video.

Even a browser (Chrome and Firefox) tab in the background with a few CSS animations causes it to be noticeably unresponsive in other applications.

It supports 4K output but my tests (backend TypeScript) are measurably slower when the display is at 4K vs 1440p.

What OS are you using? I run Linux so I'm wondering if it's that, but I've tried every different DE and Xorg Vs Wayland and different drivers, and they are all just as bad.

This might work for you, if you turn the sound off: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UxSI45eeAts

This kind of helps illustrate your point. It’s from the linked review titled “forget the performance the battery life will blow you away”

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/m1-dock.gi...

Not everything is going to cater to your needs. I was curious how homebrew works so this was interesting to me. Looks like I'm going to hold off for a bit.

The title of the article/link could be a bit more descriptive though.

Switch the sound off and try this for how performant it is -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKRDlkyILNY

Maybe not a real world use case, but in day to day use, it really does fly. Things I've noticed that are real world and noticeably quicker than my Intel MBP day to day - decompressing large archives (4gb+ ZIP files for instance), compressing folders with thousands of small files, opening very large XD & Photoshop files, etc. My MBP used to sound like jet engine when watching YouTube while doing multiple other things. I'm still yet to hear the fan spin up on this once.

What sort of usage are you looking at? I have a Mac mini M1 and MBA (Intel i7) that I can do some test on. Anecdata wise, my M1 runs noticeably faster than my MBA minus software incompatibility issues.

If you record your screen for 10 minutes while doing common stuff like mail, web browsing etc, you've already beaten 99% of the tech review YT channels out there in terms of competence on reviewing something.

I wish this was true :/ But it was breaking people's webpage where the page won't load (including myself) and the menu you would normally when you click the icon on the bar was white.

Is it the assumed bias or the lack of "coverage" that's most annoying? I see coverage but recognize the bias so I'm very genuinely curious what it is you're hoping for as far as reportage on bleeding edge Apple chips.

I've got a 16GB ram macbook pro M1 I can show you maybe? Plugged into a 27" 1440p monitor in clamshell mode demolishing even my hackintosh at basic tasks.

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