The M1 MacBook Air is the best computer I've ever owned
bou.ke
bou.ke
But with all that said... I kind of like articles like these. I enjoy seeing people happy with good tech because I like good tech. It pleases me that there are people getting this much enjoyment out of innovative and (I'll admit it) quite impressive hardware. So rock on, Apple fans. But when there's a Linux computer that is even a bit better, I hope you can tolerate me shouting from the rooftops, because you bet I will be!
If I were to apply your logic, I could then declare that my POWER9 2U blade is a portable device ahem laptop (technically, I can carry it around as well as keep the blade on my laps, yes) that surpasses any other known laptop in terms of hardware configurability, and Linux compatibility will be even greater, too.
But I'm sure the year of Linux on the desktop will come one day.
The answer is probably because to make things like sleep on lid close work, you’re probably going to need to know more about the hardware than manufacturers are going to make public.
sudo nano /etc/systemd/logind.conf
Looking for HandleLidSwitch, options are lock, hibernate, poweroff (might be more that I am unaware of)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
Unless the fragmented desktop communities finally decide what the whole stack should be like, for users and desktop developers.
Microsoft don't let you access perf_event, which immediately makes it useless for me for example.
It's not really fragmentation as much as there not being being a billion dollar company making the stack actually work in the first place - if Apple decided to rebase onto Linux for some reason there's nothing stopping them getting everything shipshape just that it takes a lot of time and money. The vast majority of Linux boxes distro's are probably pareto distributed so 20-80 to make up a random number. The stack isn't that sparse.
And then I gave the list of the companies with very deep pockets that have any reason to ever bother having a Desktop Linux of some form.
However, the probability that Linux will switch to a license that is sufficiently Apple-friendly is precisely as likely as Apple switching the core of their OS over to Linux.
In other words, approximately 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000%.
Both nVidia and the AMD have buggy Linux drivers, especially regarding suspend issues.
After experiencing suspend issues with the closed-source nVidia drivers, I bought an all AMD laptop (Dell G5 SE), only to deal with even buggier open-source AMD drivers.
The Intel drivers just work, but Intel integrated GPUs are painfully slow, and using the integrated GPU makes the CPU run noticeably hotter.
That said, AMD drivers are getting more stable over time, and buying AMD is probably our best chance of improving the driver situation long-term.
And the signs are there. Windows already has an arm64 build out, and Linux of course has dozens of projects working great on ARM.
The software is largely ready, and the industry tends to copy Apple, for better or for worse. In this case, I'd say for the better.
How much space would you need? IIRC they go up to 2TB or maybe even 4TB.
My 2008 Sony Vaio VGN-Z17GN laptop is, technically, upgradable. But, the chipset does not support more than 4Gb of RAM, and I already have 4Gb installed. So I do not have the RAM upgrade option. I replaced a HDD with a SDD years back, and it was a fairly risky enterprise with a high chance of the laptop incurring a permanent damage due to how the Vaio keyboard is wired up with the mainboard. The laptop is still very much usable even for moderate development activities since it has been running Linux for years.
Other laptops have their own quirks or limitations of sorts. Now, a few random picks amongst contemporary laptops (Lenovo and Acer):
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5: 8 Gb (i5-10210U CPU) or 16 Gb (i7-10510U CPU) of soldered on RAM and 512 Gb Opal2 NVMe (no information on the SSD upgradability). The 16Gb RAM / 512 Gb configuration is AU$1,100+ more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad X390 Yoga: i7-8565U CPU, 8Gb of soldered on RAM, 256 Gb NVMe (no information on the SSD upgradability). It is AU$400+ more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad P1: i7-8750H, 1x 16GB SO-DIMM DDR4-2666 non-ECC (no information of the max amount RAM supported), 512GB NVMe SSD (no information on the SSD upgradability). It is AU$1,000 more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold: i5-L16G7, 8Gb of soldered on RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD (no information on the SSD upgradability), AU$5,799. It is AU$4,000 (four thousand) more expensive than the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699). This is 3.411 times more expensive than the M1 laptop.
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s: AMD Ryzen™ PRO 4750U CPU, 16GB soldered on DDR4-3200, 512 Gb Opal2 NVMe ((no information on the SSD upgradability). It is nearly AU$500 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Acer TravelMate P614, Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, AU$2,299: no information on RAM and SSD upgrade options. The laptop is AU$600 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Acer Swift 3, AMD Ryzen 7-4700U, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, AU$1,999: no information on RAM and SSD upgrade options. The laptop is AU$300 more expensive that the 16Gb / 512 Gb 13" Macbook Pro M1 (AU$1,699).
Other Acer laptops are less capable, use Pentium or Core i3 CPU's, slower SSD's and are cheaper than M1 laptops; some are twice as cheaper. They are marketed as «student» laptops.
Out of 7 PC laptops above, only one has upgradable RAM, and it is a guessing game whether the SSD can or can't be upgraded. Every PC laptop above is also more expensive than the latest, stats wise comparable, 13" MacBook Pro M1. A few of those are significantly more expensive.
Yes, there are cheaper options, and, yes, some laptops can be upgraded easily or more easily, but that is not the primary market for laptop makers. Wholesale purchasers (corporates) and average consumers do not typically ask whether or not they can later upgrade their laptop.
Also, if one wants an ultraporatble or a compact laptop, they had better accept the fact that RAM and/or SSD will be soldered on, and they won't be able to upgrade them, be it an Apple or a commodity PC laptop. It is a commonplace now.
Soldered ram, soldered SSD, unremovable batteries etc. all are designed with planned Obsolescence in mind. We should all boycott such products to protect our RIGHT TO REPAIR.
USB type C Gen 2 10gig is fast enough for most video editing especially any editing you could do on a device like the M1.
Personally if I was editing videos I would be using an external storage device both due to the capacity and the fact that my data is then portable.
With the full disk encryption on the M1 I wouldn’t be storing anything other than your scratch pad unless you can guarantee a 24/7 backup as you go scheme anyhow since any failure would like be irrecoverable.
Raw 8K RED footage at 75 FPS which is what you would be recording at if you master at 4K 60* is about 120GB a minute that’s over 7TB an hour.
No reasonable internal drive could support that and you’ll be looking at a high speed NAS or an NVME JBOD/DAS solution to support that.
*The extra frames and pixels are really important for final mastering as you need extra bits to do image stabilization, cropping, color grading and sharpening correctly it also makes more complex post processing work easier to perform even things like rotoscoping are much easier to do when your objects are twice the size and you have much less pixel bleed between what you want to roto and the rest of the frame.
I still use my desktop for heavy enough work, but 8GB is manageable for now.
> Now you can download Steam and basically install anything and it will probably work. Microsoft really did some amazing magic in getting both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 programs running on arm64.
The author makes it sound like you can run basically all Windows software on Mac without issues with Parallel, including more demanding software like games you'd find on Steam.
Does anyone here have experience with Parallels? How does performance compare? My assumption with this kind of emulation was always that performance would typically suffer too much for it to be worth it.
With M1 since the chip is quite a bit faster you get report saying it actually runs Windows Apps on a M1 Mac better than on x86 Windows.
Of course YMMV, and those Apps were not Gaming, which are mostly bottlenecked by the GPU and Drivers.
Makes my 2018 "Pro" machine feel like an 8 year old device struggling to keep up with very basic tasks because of thermal throttling (and this is even after getting the fans cleaned by Apple recently)
Mine is 3840x1600 (38") and MBP 15.4 (with discrete AMD graphics) and fans never spin up just because it is hooked on external screen.
If you haven’t already, try plugging the power in on the right side, and the display/any other peripherals on the left. It sounds crazy, but this has been the solution for tons of people. Apparently the heat generated by power input (even at a steady full charge) is enough to spike the sensors near the components on the left side.
I haven’t experienced any downsides to this change other than having to spend a few minutes rearranging stuff on my desk.
1. Plug it all in right side and see how it goes. The important part is that power needs to be on the right, the point of plugging other stuff on the left is just to distribute heat/load.
2. If that doesn’t help/causes other issues, are you willing to separate power delivery and plug in two cables? I know it’s annoying when the spec supports single-cable everything, but in the scheme of things it’s not a terrible trade off to have a more usable machine.
While Geekbench showed great results, actual usage of the machine and headaches ensued were contrasting.
To put it bluntly - M1 machines are currently unstable. There are numerous Bluetooth issues [1], formatting issues [2], Wifi 6 issues [3], VPN issues [4], firewall issues [5], and shocking security issues in general with Big Sur and Apple's silicon [6].
I'm a power user and this is way too experimental for actual use. At the least get the 16 GB variant if you want to get anything done and not experience freeze/lockup (but for that much money you're better off with Librem 14" or System76 w/AMD Threadripper).
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/kpu2hy/mouse_lag_when_...
[2]: https://mrmacintosh.com/reinstalling-big-sur-on-apple-silico...
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/jy3yc7/is_anyone_else_...
[4]: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2020/11/16/big-no-big-sur-mullva...
[5]: https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu/issues/208
[6]: https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware...
After upgrading to Big Sur, I have experiences a general degradation of performance, graphical glitches and serious Bluetooth problems (failing to connect to Apple mouse and keyboard).
The fundamental problem seems to be that with proprietary consumer hardware/software- only the initial version is reviewed and after that the vendor can push software full of bugs with no consequences.
For comparison's sake, we just rolled out ~100 of these in my department and the reception has been nothing less than stellar.
I don't think my workflow is flawed, here's what it produces: https://github.com/niftylettuce
My sample size of 100+ or yours of 1?
The other guy provided evidence.
a) have never used an arm laptop b) think legacy apps run well c) think benchmarks are cool
its beyond impossible to dissuade someone from making the mistake of buying apples first gen chromebook without properly researching what they did to neuter macos to accomplish this.
basically every other reply here is too busy not realising A and singing praises to C
Regarding the real issue, Big Sur, it's in its infancy and you can't fall back to OSX, which might be the real show stopper for some. Personally, I've been using Apple systems for 30 years now, and I've always been disappointed by every major revision since Snow Leopard. However, Big Sur, against all odds, isn't actually as bad as I expected (being the zoo of micro modes that it is). Some stability and maintenance issues are to be expected from a brand new OS, and Big Sur isn't the Black Swan invalidating the general advice to never aspire to early adopting an entirely new platform, if your primary goal is stability. I would certainly advice against an upgrade at this early stage for a production machine, if you can do with a previous revision. That said, my personal verdict on Big Sur is still pending. Let's see…
And, I can't see where any of the changes, which are related to the issues listed above, are related to the M1 architecture. Rather, you may point at the T2, which isn't exactly new, but has been gaining some in importance, and the general perspective on OS security, as exhibited by Big Sur.
PS: Some real criticism of the hardware (however, not related to the M1 architecture): Lack of ports (my old MBA had USB on either side and a card reader in about the same form factor!), no MagSafe, somewhat hollow audio (probably related to repurposing the old shell, now using space formerly occupied by fans as overly bass heavy resonance chambers.) An overall more flimsy feel of the shell and keyboard (again, as compared to an older predecessor.)
PPS: This is my 3rd ARM device and it certainly is a game changer.
So to actually be fair any criticism of the OS certainly applies to "the laptop", which would be a brick without the OS.
they used to be priced at roughly 3x markup compared to the market. they finally fixed their co-dependency with intel and suddenly wow the price gouging goes out the door because gasp the macbook air could have always been the pro it was just never possible with using old chips.
ANYTHING using arm absolutely FLIES
open your eyes people
the arm chromebooks like the lenovo duet absolutely murder the iPad pro or even the new iPad Air in terms of actually being a useful OS for devs
as an ex macbook pro main, I bought 3 of them over the course of last decade and a half and they have always had older intel brains than any xps or razer stealth I would try to cross shop with. after m1 apples price to performance ratio is at unreal levels
Were they though? With comparable displays and build quality, I think their laptops have been competitive with the upper end of the market for a while now, with maybe a 10-20% markup on that.
I was more mad at the general markup relative to similar intel chips in say a Dell or HP ultralight
I daily drive a lenovo duet and its absolutely the closest thing to perfection in the modern computing realm. Its a surface go but running arm and chromeos and it flies thru all of my webapps like Framer, Figma, Plectica, Notion, Photopea, Visual Studio Code, Blender etc
m1 is scary fast, but also x64 is dead and needs to be transitioned to the new age. Apple or not this is a major shift in the dev market
and not only in $800+ price
the duet is $300
also people have been absolutely IGNORING the massive speed gains and battery life of say an ARM chromebook or surface pro X
apparently only apple does good when they modify the ISA for x64 memory instructions to not have to be emulated so they can pretend rosetta is miles ahead of other virtualization when its hw based...
idk if you've noticed the transitions going basically as well as it went for other brands minus being able to... point to higher geekbench scores when emulating x64???
never did I think I'd see the day when apple is trying its best to rush literally chromeos but based on bsd out the door at the last second because catalyst barely runs any apps in a useful way
What on earth are you talking about
the strategy revolves around using web performance on arm to overshadown the general lack of optimized arm apps. as apples release of the M1 has shown, no apps are really optimized yet even 1 month after launch for an APPLE product...
thats where the SafariOS explanations makes more sense, they essentially just have safari, and a similar but equally broken app store ported from the iPad but with most devs chosing to opt out of supporting safariOS... weird how they mocked google and then pulled a google
You can't just ignore that and then make the disingenuous claim that it's anything like the Windows ARM situation, especially given the fact that Apple is throwing their entire weight behind the transition which will (eventually) result in most major applications being natively compatible. I'd be curious if anyone thinks that this transition is going to fail somehow
It sounds like you may be pre-judging the M1 Macs based on your past experiences with ARM desktops/laptops. I strongly suggest that you put those experiences aside when looking at these, because Apple has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure that the experience is as close to the previous iteration as possible, with the benefit of the extra performance and battery life the M1 gives. It's really nothing whatsoever like the comparison between Intel and ARM Windows, or Windows and ChromeOS.
Those sneaky bastards – making their products perform better by introducing new features*! Whatever next?
Assuming you're a developer, how about compile time + battery life remaining? From nearly 2 months ago, this isn't news anymore: https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1328700636926332928
EDIT: Or assuming you like to watch media on a range of devices at home, and share your media with your family and friends, maybe the ability to transcode h264 or h265 content also matters to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK3xVXAd6_o
TL;DW: Plex Transcoder running through Rosetta2 doesn't even break a sweat.
(My primary laptop is a 2014 MBA, and I previously owned ones from 2012 and 2015.)
Was it just the butterfly keys, or some other things too?
But generally I agree with you. I just think it’s important to remember it’s not all been a monotonic function of good.
If my pre-butterfly keys MacBook stopped working some time between 2015 and 2019, and I had to get a replacement, I wouldn't consider the MacBooks produced during that era to be "better".
That's why this is surprising.
I recently bought a Zephyrus G14 which I think is one of the closer equivalents to a 13" MBP for Windows with a powerful GPU.
The M1 is close but the keys aren’t as deep. It’s good, but the 2015 still felt better to type on.
I still dont understand why they try to shave off 0.3mm. As Battery improves the 16 MBP has plenty of space of a maximum 100Whr size battery.
I love my 16" MBP but wasn't blown away by the upgrade. Touchbar is meh and mostly in my way. Speakers are a big win. Keyboard is a tossup but at least I avoided the butterfly era. Everything else is just noticeably better but not a "wow" better. My biggest annoyance is fan noise when attached to a monitor. Running at native panel resolution seems to help.
I'm looking forward to the 16" class M1.
You'd start to have a point if they were only talking about raw performance. But they aren't.
Also, raw performance alone doesn't make things better. My Windows PC almost has the best parts on the market yet things don't always feel faster. The UI even feels slower than my previous one. It's my latest PC, but it's not the best computer I've owned.
For us Apple users, this stopped being true about 4 years back.
Now moving from 16:9 to 16:10 (or 3:2) is called an innovation ...
To be honest and quite unexpectedly the 16" MBP is not the best Mac I ever owned, despite the hype. The display is amazing, the speakers are incredible for a laptop, I'm also glad the T arrow keys are back, but everything else is a disappointment.
Something just feels a bit wrong about this machine. Running trivial Swift code in Playground can get it so hot that it becomes uncomfortable to rest it on the lap for example.
Do I need a processor that powerful? I'm not so sure if the price is the unsettling fan noise and being practically constantly warm. And no, there's no 3rd party software that could cause it, it's all Apple apps.
Come on, you can run a linux distribution on a non-apple hardware and not even worry if any of those software will run on it. Plus any of the 40 other top TIOBE tools.
Point in case I have a circa 2008 Dell workstation laptop that runs Linux pretty well, except for some reason its volume buttons (which, as far as I can tell, send standard key codes) only work as expected under some distros running some desktop environments. It's oddly spotty for such a basic function, and last I checked there was no surefire fix for it, just an endless list of "try this".
I do agree that there's enough articles covering the same review feedback. The M1 machines seem to be universally lauded, there's plenty of buzz out there, I'm not sure what the downside is there besides certain software not being able to run on them yet. Personally I'm willing to wait a year to see what the second gen machines will look like, but that's based on my own preferences and curiosity.
Windows runs at less than half the speed on Microsoft's own flagship ARM hardware.
Last sentence of the first paragraph
Rich people problem.
Battery life was mediocre (worse still if you actually use it), it got ridiculously hot under load, the fans where really loud and pitched at a frequency it was hard to ignore - I'd have put it down to a bad unit but everyone else with the same model had the same issues.
It was fine but for double good thinkpad money it wasn't fine enough.
I was glad to hand it back, new place doesn't care what I run so I'm back on Fedora on a fast desktop and I'm happy again, I still have a work issued macbook pro but it sits on a shelf behind me until I need to test something.
I bought a new macbook pro m1 in December. Returned 2 days later after realizing that it only supports one external monitor and even found articles stating that ultra wide monitors were not supported on initial release. "Just use display link adaptor?" No thanks I don't want a 150$ adaptor that may or may not work with my current setup. Even with display link I've heard of displays flickering on initial startup or not starting at all in clamshell.
People saying the MacBook pro 16" might solve the issue but tbh I think this is apples way of pigeonholing users to either their desktop version or their laptop.
This is their first generation M1 and they haven't rolled it out across their entire line (which they have said they intend to do). Today marks the second month since they were released (10 Nov 2020). They haven't yet released something in the same class as the MacBook Pro 16", which it sounds like you'd prefer. Give it a year before assuming malicious intent.
Life in the Apple eco-system isn't like life in the normal computer eco-system, there's very little competition once you're committed to the OS.
You can't upgrade the RAM, you can't upgrade the SSD, it doesn't have replaceable battery and you are forced to run a crippled OS on it (macOS Big Sur deliberately cripples VPN and firewall on it so that select Apple softwares can bypass them, allowing Apple better access and control over your data and softwares).
(And if you don't care about any of the above, then sure, give in.)
That was debunked: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/k0c00f/macos_big_sur_d...
The original problem was with the firewall, there were only passing mentions of the vpn which op tested.
Also problematic, the op released no data. Whether that works for you depends on your pov.
More here: https://medium.com/tripmode/apple-started-hiding-the-traffic...
Some VPN apps use their own kernel extension and macOS Big Sur discourages that. https://tunnelblick.net/cTunTapConnections.html
Some VPN apps that weren't using VPN but used proxying also are affected. Also read https://protonvpn.com/blog/big-sur-exclusion-list/ for more info.
I have a powerful desktop that I pay for incremental upgrades and it works great. I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, but have been before, and either way my goal is to have high quality ultrabook that serves as thin client to desktop/the cloud.
Everyone has a different workflow that works for them, but I'm fortunate enough that upgrading an ultrabook every few years isn't a big deal.
For someone seeking "the best of both worlds" in terms of integration, power efficiency, and upgradability/overall flexibility, that can sometimes be found in 2-3 generation old (where all of the hardware is solidly supported) high-end business laptops running some flavor of Linux, but knowing which models of laptop are the "good ones" as well as setting up Linux to run optimally on them takes a level of involvement and energy that not everybody is up for.
I mostly keep it plugged in and have a charger for each room in the apartment.
I've replaced the battery in a 2013 Macbook pro. It is very similar to the 2015. If I don't buy a newer laptop when the time comes, I'll gladly pay the Apple store to replace the battery for me.
Honestly I'd like an SSD and RAM upgrade but it's not that big of a deal. It costs money, too, and there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't improve with it like the CPU and battery which are key. And secondarily, any improvements to formfactor, screen, webcam, keyboard etc, although that's not as significant nowadays.
I'd rather just sell it for a few hundred bucks now that I'm 6y in, and get a replacement machine with twice the battery and a much better CPU. I think even without resale value $1200 or so machine cost me like $16 a month and I think I use it about 300 hours a month, or about 5 cent per hour. It's quite negligible part of my hourly/monthly wage. With resale value it's probably even 25-30% less, maybe 3.5 cents per hour.
If I were to have spent money on upgrades, it'd be a bit cheaper than a full replacement - resale value, but at best it'd get me to 2 or 2.5 cents per hour. But I'd miss out on improved CPU, battery etc.
Not being able to upgrade parts isn't that big of a deal to me. Back in the day it was, as within 2-3 years I felt I saw noticeable better experiences on the market with new parts. But today I'm quite fine purchasing an experience and having it last the next 5-6 years, before I upgrade. At which point I want a full upgrade, rather than only a few parts.
It's not just about upgrades, but repairability too.
I did have a battery go bad in my MacBook Pro about 8 year ago, and it was replaced by Apple free of charge even though it was WAY out of warranty and I didn't have Applecare. Service like that alone is enough to keep me as a customer.
Most of the rest of the time by the time I am ready to start upgrading components, I am just wanting a newer, faster machine in general. I am not saying these things are not important - the are obviously important _to you_. But Apple has figured, correctly in my opinion, they are are not important to a _lot_ of people, or at the very least are not deal breakers. And more often than not I find myself in the latter camp.
I had limited experience and use of macOS, but didn't like it much.
I bought the Air last month under duress, because I was going to a place that's 10°C warmer than my home, and my laptop's GPU passes the idle quiet threshold. I have tinnitus, so the laptop fan noise becomes unbearable.
I'm enjoying using the Mac, I mainly develop in Rust, so the experience has been mostly good. I've had a few hard crashes of other software that restarted the machine, that's fine though.
I still mainly remote into my beefy Windows desktop in the other room, but I haven't needed to turn on my work laptop as Microsoft also updated Office to work on Arm64.
I didn't know about Parallels, I'll try it out, as sometimes I can't remote into my desktop conveniently.
More or less same story with my previous Mid 2009 13'' MBP. The only reason why it has survived this long is because I've been able to add RAM, replace an SSD, replace the battery twice and replace a faulty touchpad too. Sadly this is no longer possible and modern Apple laptops are increasingly harder to repair.
I hope these newer Macs that have everything soldered together, at least last 4-5 years. I'm going to try get a Mac as my next work device, maybe 2 years from now, so my wife can use my current one in future.
My own take, owning one, and only mentioning things I've never or rarely seen mentioned:
- unibody with no openings for ventilation is kind of mindblowing for a machine that can build Firefox in 20 minutes and 30 seconds. Which also means it won't accumulate dust inside, assuming the keyboard is hermetic.
- it actually feels pretty heavy for its size.
- the edges are very sharp. Too sharp. Not cutting sharp, but uncomfortably sharp.
- it's cold to the touch (except after using the cpu for a while).
- leaving it unplugged and sleeping (lid closed) consumes more battery than on a MBP late 2013.
What causes you to hit the limits? I don't do any video editing, so I could see that being a slowdown for that use case.
These tests spin up a bunch of containers and run certain components with instrumented runtimes that take up gobs of RAM, so having a fat laptop is very useful.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/13442670199449477...
Have you tried other machines as well, such as a ThinkPad? Have you ever used Linux?
Can’t wait for mbpros with miniled display and more arm cores later this year.
Treasure this sensation, it won't last forever :)
What are the issues people have been experiencing? No laptop is perfect.
But I wouldn’t call these “issues”, as anyone who reads the spec sheet can know them before purchase.
That’s it, really. These computers are astonishingly good.
Based on peak performance at least I would assume yes.
Honestly I'd be a little bit worried if you couldn't considering just how expensive they are.
I should stress that my now slightly ageing laptop is much thicker than an Air, but it's also used to play modern games so that balances out.
Personally, for the price of an Air I could actually use I'd just get something cheap and a big PC setup.
It sounds like the things you care about are raw performance per £, and other factors are not important.
If that’s what you are looking for then the Air is not for you, but it doesn’t mean it’s expensive. It just means you don’t need the things it offers for the money.
If you do care about battery life, then the M1 Air is cheaper than the only comparable alternative - the M1 MacBook Pro.
Nobody else even makes anything comparable.
Actually not too bad - not good, but good enough for it to last long enough to write up lab data for 5 hours or so which is all I needed it to do. It's pretty diabolical in Linux, but I think that's partly my fault because I've not bothered to fettle with the power (not an unreasonable requirement given that the rest of the distro has been fiddled with)
If 5 hours will do for you, no need to spend the extra money.
Here's a bunch of reports people made for games: https://applesilicongames.com/
Best color ever.
The delusion is very strong here.
Can we stop with the ridiculous condescension ("delusional") towards opinions we disagree with and make no effort to interpret charitably?
I would have skipped this article if I didn't see your cynicism about this very topic.
Windows is just a "nice to have" for me, in the list of priorities, but not having it had been a deal breaker for that specific machine. now its not.
windows in a VM outperforms windows PCs at the price point--plus like other commenters mention it comes with a native Unix shell
£999 is a lot of PC. The processor in the M1 air is about 20% faster than the one in my laptop (£550 IIRC), but to spec an M1 out with the same amount of storage and RAM brings it to £1999.
Though to be sure, "PC" means "personal computer" and for this individual it might be the exact best experience they could have running Windows. It just isn't for a great deal of other people because they value different things.
I value GPU power, installing Steam, Battle.net (with maxed out settings), ~15" screens and a few other things that make my HP Omen 15 the best Windows laptop I've ever owned. And I value selecting and assembling my own components, performance value, tricked out RGB lighting and large high resolution external monitors, so my custom desktop is the best Windows desktop I've ever owned.
But I certainly don't get the mobility or battery life of an M1 Macbook. So if you value those things highly enough, you may get a better Windows PC experience on one.
The M1 is a good chip. It is great that we have ARM cores that can go toe-to-toe with Zen 3. It is hardly a revolution and it would not be trivial to scale it to a workstation or server design.
It is telling to see someone acting like the competition is still Intel. Intel has been playing catchup since Q1 of 2017. Their server parts in particular are woefully outdated.
Any new Ryzen 5xxx based on Zen 3 is faster in single-thread than the best Apple M1.
In general-purpose benchmarks, like Geekbench 5, the maximum Apple M1 score is 1752, while Ryzen 5xxx score between 1800 and 1876.
In computational benchmarks, where the IPC is limited by some execution resources reaching 100% utilization, so the higher average IPC of Apple M1 does matter much less, Apple M1 is even slower compared to Ryzens. For example Ryzen 7 5800X is 22% faster than Apple M1 in gmpbench (the benchmark was run for both CPUs after tuning specific to Apple M1 and tuning specific to Zen 3 were added to libgmp, so it is a comparison of apples with apples).
The 5800x is a 105 watt part(!!!), still gets starched by the M1 in single core, and is only about 40% faster in multicore despite using all that power to drive double the performance core count.
But by all means, go off to cherry pick more niche benchmarks...
They are not niche benchmarks. Geekbench 5 covers many common application domains and its only flaw is that the GB5 tests are very short so they finish before the CPU overheats and slows down, so this benchmark is much more favorable for Apple M1 than for a desktop CPU.
Even if GB5 is advantageous for M1, it still shows that Zen 3 is faster.
gmpbench tests a fundamental feature of any CPU, its ability to compute operations with large numbers. That may not matter for you but it is definitely one of the important criteria for measuring the single-thread speed of a processor, so when Apple M1 scores 6422 and a Ryzen 7 5800X (not the fastest Ryzen) scores 7816, there is no doubt about which starches which.
Moreover, the multi-thread results that I have seen for Geekbench 5, which very strongly favors Apple M1 (because in a real application M1 would overheat soon and it would slow down) show a 60% higher speed for 5800X, not of 40%, e.g. 12339 for 5800X vs. 7716 for Apple M1.
If you want to live with the illusion that Apple M1 is faster in single-thread execution than Zen 3, even if all the real numbers from benchmark results contradict you, that is your privilege.
The 5950X has double the core count of the 5800X but only manages a 1.6x improvement in multithreaded performance.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-threadrip...
The 3990X is the most powerful desktop part on the market. It gets merely a 1.4x speedup over the 5950X despite having four times the core count. (Granted, the 5950X core is somewhat better).
Geekbench isn't terribly useful at the best of times. It's particularly bad when comparing across architectures and operating systems. And, as should be clear, its multithreaded test does not scale linearly with core count. You should never take the ratio between two scores to mean the ratio between performance, especially when comparing multithreaded scores with different core counts.
It most certainly does not. It trades blows, winning on some benchmarks and losing others. It seems a bit ahead on floating-point workloads and a bit behind on integer workloads.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
It does simply outperform every Intel design. That's great, but not enough to make it the fastest core in the world. It, to no one's surprise, falls behind the parts with higher core counts.
Caveats:
1. These benchmarks are preliminary. We are, by necessity, comparing across operating systems and architectures.
2. Comparing single-threaded performance between a SMT system and one without SMT is a little misleading, since a non-SMT core is worse than an SMT core even if the single-threaded performance is similar.
3. I have no clue how to handle the big.LITTLE architecture. I've never used a machine with heterogeneous cores and have never written any software for it. It is certainly a benefit to efficiency. It probably improves performance on highly-threaded workloads, but I am not sure.
I find myself annoyed by these discussions. I love new hardware! I find this chip very impressive! It is the best chip in the world in performance-per-watt! It is clearly the best mobile chip on the market! It has a lot of interesting accelerators! Please stop forcing me to be the naysayer.
At identical power consumptions, an Apple M1 core is faster by about 30% to 40% than an Intel Tiger Lake or an AMD Zen 3.
All older Intel/AMD CPUs are even much slower.
Nevertheless, the power consumptions of Intel and AMD CPUs can be raised to much higher levels and above 20 W per core, which is probably a little more than 3 times what an Apple M1 core consumes, they match the Apple M1 performance and at a higher power (i.e. in the current desktop Zen 3 and in the soon to be introduced Intel Rocket Lake and Intel Tiger Lake H) they surpass the speed of Apple M1.
So in single-thread execution, AMD Zen 3 is already faster and the Intel CPUs that are expected for end of March will also be faster, but only at much higher power consumptions (3 to 4 times more per core in single-thread).
Nonetheless, in desktops and large laptops those power consumptions do not matter.
>using up to seven times more power.
Power efficiency is where the M1 definitely wins. It is among the best on the planet for single-threaded performance and definitely the best for efficiency.
Your 7x figure, however, is not accurate. You are comparing TDP. That is the wrong number. TDP is calculated differently by each manufacturer. It relates to how big a CPU cooler you will need to ensure the CPU never throttles to avoid overheating, not to how long your battery will last.
Take a look at the following, in particular the big black-and-green-and-red charts in the middle of the page:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...
(Those are desktop parts. I'd obviously like to compare mobile ones, but I am not familiar with AMD's mobile lineup and there are no Zen 3 mobile parts. They'll still help make my point.)
Note that the power draw at idle (where the CPU will spend most of its time) is 10-20 watts for all these CPUs. This would be lower for mobile Ryzen parts, of course. This is the big advantage of the M1: with its big.LITTLE architecture, it will be able to shut down the big cores entirely and use vastly less power than any x86 part at idle.
Note that the power draw at 100% usage is higher than the stated TDP. The CPU can draw more power than it says on the box if the system detects it has adequate thermal headroom. It will also draw less power, even at 100% usage, if it starts getting too hot or if the user chooses to lower the TDP.
Note that the power consumption varies with the number of cores that are active, but that this relationship is nothing close to linear. A CPU can hit its peak power at a small fraction of maximum load, but performance will continue to scale all the way to maximum load. The big chips are more efficient than the small ones when both are fully loaded.
You can't just say "a chip with N times the TDP draws N times more power". The two parts will draw different amounts of power and have different efficiency tradeoffs depending on how they are used.
What, then, is the correct metric? I don't know of a single number that tells the whole story. I can tell you that the M1 is efficient both at idle and under load. I will make no effort to quantify how efficient it is other than to say TDP is irrelevant.
Is there a particular point you'd like to make?
Is the specification of the M1 processor including the GPU part open then?
And can the laptop be repaired by the user?
Web devs will buy the M1 because it executes their slow dev tools faster (npm ecosystem).
Then they will test their web pages on the M1 and deploy them when they are "fast enough".
Result: web pages will be even slower on mobile phones and non-M1 laptops.
Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container - Nathan Myhrvold
Example: Why is the Google Cloud UI so slow? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357409
It's not limited to Google either. Try ordering food on a web app on your phone, etc.
For example I just loaded doordash.com in Chrome's mobile view, and it made 110 requests and consists of 7.7 MB of resources. It took 1.12 secs to load on a core i7 desktop connected to a wired network. How long do you think it will take on a phone with a slower CPU over a wireless network? For a web page that shows pictures of food.
FWIW I worked at Google for over a decade, and this was a problem that got worse over the entire decade. People talked about making the network slow to fix this systemic problem, but it never happened (at least while I was there). You also have to test on different networks, although admittedly the M1 doesn't make your network faster so that problem won't be exacerbated.
I still stand by the original statement; the M1 will make the web slower, assuming it's adopted by a bigger fraction of web devs than consumers (which seems very likely).
Before that, Linux can't run on MacBooks, and after a few years of development it's just barely working, now this thing.
This is never going to be Desktop Linux compatible. Even Linus claimed he would like to but the effort is tremendous.
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I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux.. I have fairly fond memories of the 11" Macbook Air (I think 4,1) that I used about a decade ago (but moved away from because it took Apple too long to fix the screen - and by the time they did, I'd moved on to better laptops, and Apple had moved on to make Linux less convenient).
Apple may run Linux in their cloud, but their laptops don't ;(
I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help.
Linus
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Maybe you can run just some more productivity apps by sacrificing your freedom to be kept captive by Apple. But this also means your machine isn't entirely yours.
*: used liberal here. I don't know what's the exactly word to use but it turns out there are people so sensitive to politics and thought the otherwise.
Ignoring that it's completely up to apple whether this exists in a years time, reverse engineering an entire SOC is really fucking hard. ARM isn't like x86, you basically can't assume anything. The GPU may be completely off limits for years, for example, unless they somehow (this isn't impossible) make a blob out of Apple's actual drivers.
willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.
You can argue that the NVME drive is somewhat able to upgrade, but even that there will be some cautions ahead.
Not only on macOS, but generally the entire web is mobile-first and desktop-last philosophy.
What exactly was made worse by it?
Instead of repeating same things over, there has been plenty of discussion on HN about macOS big sur design changes.
Again, there is no evidence any Big Sur UI changes were to support touch screens. Bigger button areas make computers easier to use, just as bigger tap areas make mobile devices easier to use.