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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

They can benchmark all they want. My M1 macbook pro is silent, even during a facetime or zoom call. The battery lasts more than a day which is incredible, and has never burned my legs while watching a youtube video. Every laptop I've ever owned has been Intel and has never been able to do what this machine can do.

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Agreed; my M1 macbook air is the best and fastest computer I have ever owned and it isn't even close. Instantly being on from sleep has made my work intel macbook pro feel old. Teams meetings turn the intel fan into a jet engine. My M1 macbook joins zoom meetings in utter silence for many, many hours without plugging in. I have yet to see a stutter or dropped frame in the M1 UI. My work intel mac pauses when swiping between workspaces on a regular basis.

Intel should be panicking; the M1 is incredible.

Isn’t a misleading benchmark the sort of thing you publish when you’re panicking?

That was what I meant to imply, but it wasn't very clear. Intel is grasping at whatever straws it can think of since they have lost the fab advantage and their power usage is out of control.

I wonder how much of this is because of the OS?

Apple has the opportunity to tune macOS to their hardware like nobody else and now they can also tune their hardware to macOS.

M1 is the result of that.

But the M1 also has another advantage over the Intel chips that preceded it in Macs - it's actually a beast of a CPU, with a huge reorder buffer and lots of execution ports to drain it.

Yeah same, this laptop is super snappy and makes my desktop pc that on paper should run circles around the M1 feel slow. Chrome is the only thing on M1 that still feels 'legacy'. Pixelmator pro is damn near instant which is just nuts.

Hell Intel said it in of the slide: More than performance - It's about choice

Would love to know to whom Intel is presenting this ?

Super excited to see next M1 iterations and what Apple pull of with sw/os updates.

It's also exciting to see a little fire kindled under Intel's ass.

Going from the M1 to any Intel-based system feels like downgrading from an SSD to an HDD. I really don't care what the benchmarks say, the user experience of the M1 feels a generation ahead of whatever the hell Intel is doing. I've yet to see any perceptible drop in the performance of the M1, even when doing the most demanding tasks in my workflow .

Every time I've gone back to one of my Intel-based systems, I've been shocked at how sluggish they feel. I catch myself debating whether these Intel PCs were really this slow two weeks ago, or if the M1 Air just completely upended my expectations of PC performance (hint: it's the latter).

And then there's the fact that no matter what I do, this notebook remains completely cool to the touch. Doesn't matter if I'm using Xcode, VScode, emulators, VMs, this machine always remains cool to the touch. I've yet to see this computer get above room temperature. It's remarkable. Meanwhile I cannot depend on my two generation old Intel MacBook Pro to stream a simple YouTube video without the fans revving up.

And the battery life is so good that I actually get disappointed when it lasts "only" 12 hours on a charge.

Then there's the little niceties. Such as how my windows instantly rearrange when docking my M1 Air to an external USB-C display. Or how animations are consistently 60 fps no matter what I'm doing. Or how the system instantly wakes from sleep.

The M1 MacBook Air is without doubt the best computer I have ever used. I never thought using a computer could ever be so pleasant. This thing feels magical.

This is the weirdest thing to me. I use a surface book and I've never had the fans turn on during video calls, even full-screen with lots of people on external 4k monitor.

Everyone switching to the new M1 talks about how quiet they are and I've not had a computer make noise unless I'm playing a serious 3d games. Why were the last gen macs so noisy?

Yes, Intel MBP running Teams with loud fans is embarrassing.

Intel Macbooks have terrible thermal management. People generally compare Intel Macbooks with M1 Macbooks.

It has to do with macOS and Intel vs Microsoft and Windows.

I think Apple sort of give up optimising x86 on Intel a while ago.

Yeah I really don't understand why a zoom/skype video call absolutely MURDERS the battery on my laptop.

It's basically just video playback. How is it so hard on the CPU?

It's also video encoding/compression for your outbound stream. If you're sharing your video on the call, that is.

But wait... I never do. I join Webex calls all the time without enabling my camera, and it still eats 30% of anything available (memory, CPU, my patience, etc.)

So, I guess I'm not sure?

Audio/video encoding is not cheap and it's questionable whether your device and software support hardware encoding. Decode is expensive too, but has better hardware support (which gives you the illusion that "just" video playback is somehow easy).

It's really one of the most expensive cpu bound tasks in contemporary computing. It's not too different from evaluating CNNs.

Software support for the hardware encoding/deciding is very not good. Webcam streams mpeg to electron, electron probably decodes in software, reencodes in sofware, then decodes incoming stream(s) in software. If there's any client side encryption or filtering, that probably also happens in software. It's probably all JS software too. It's like the worst possible case for how to architect an app for performance. At least it's JITed these days.

Zoom doesn’t use Electron, and AFAIK it’s all native code.

In this instance the Electron VM/etc matters a lot less than the “(re|en)codes in software” part.

Zoom is QT, not electron. Also browser engines have good support for hardware decode, it's really in OSS libs and on platforms like Linux where there is little to no support.

They may have good hardware decode for web content, but whatever the circumstances, it's not kicking in for video conference. Maybe the use of low-latency codecs, multiple streams to decode, or other effects/compositing/analysis happening?

I believe it's about compression and bandwidth.

There might be background removal and audio processing too.

Believe it or not, the activity that drains the battery the fastest on my M1 MacBook Air is video calling. I can expect maybe 8 or 9 hours of battery life if I'm Facetiming all day. With all other workflows (developer workflows, of course), I consistently achieve at least 12 hours of battery (15+ hours is possible on the high end).

It’s the silence during Google meet calls that’s my favourite thing - my god my air was about to take flight every single time. I can’t believe how unoptimised that was. New M1 air offers enough performance for me for the next 10 years

Ditto!

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