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Comment by michelb | Hacker News Reader

This may be fine for the current M1 macs, since they are most likely not used by professionals or people that will do potentially installation damaging things, so a trip to the Apple Store will suffice. But this better work once the pro machines come out. It's already hard to recover data from the newer mac's when your system installation has issues, not being able to boot from another drive is going to suck.

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You can simply boot to the internet-based recovery image and reinstall or access your data from there, so there is no concern about trashing your installation.

Furthermore I don't see any reason to think that OP's issues are to do with the hardware or that we will have to wait for the next hardware model to have these issues resolved. It seems like a simple OS-level software bug to me.

Oh i did trash my installation. I somehow didn’t have permissions to reinstall from internet recovery. I had to plus another Mac and use Configurator to restore it.

Try erasing all the existing volumes and create a new one before starting the installation next time. That sounds like the message you would get if you are trying to install onto the recovery partition.

EDIT: According to other posts there are in fact some volumes on M1 Macs where if deleted, you will need to do a DFU mode recovery. So perhaps don't actually delete all existing volumes on an M1

SEE !?

Yes, admittedly there do seem to be some recovery concerns on M1 that don't exist on previous platforms.

However I still don't think DFU mode was necessary in your case. If it were necessary, then you would not be able to boot the system at all with the normal method.

Trashing just your OS partition should not require DFU mode. Although yes, it seems like trashing the new boot data partitions might.

M1 Macs don't have Internet Recovery. You need to use another Mac with Apple Configurator 2 to restore the firmware using DFU mode, which unlike with T2 Intel Macs, includes the whole OS.

The pro machines are allready out. You can buy a Macbook pro M1 right now.

Parent doesn't mean machines with "Pro" in their branding name, they mean the models actually used by technical/cpu-demanding pros in video/graphic design/audio/3d/etc. (non technical/cpu-demanding professionals, e.g. some office working just needing web and excel, can use Macbook Air or whatever too).

And those aren't out yet, those would be the 16 MBP, the Mac Pro, the iMac and iMac Pro, and so on.

You can also use the "MacBook Air or whatever" to compile code just as fast [1] as the 16" MBP.

If that isn't a cpu-demanding task then I don't know what is.

(not trying to be rude, just that the Air is currently a very capable and pro-tier machine)

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/17/apple-silicon-m1-compil...

Those kinds of professionals won't be comparing it to other MacBooks, but to other computers of the same form factor. The M1 Macs still aren't the leader in multicore performance or multicore performance per watt.

If you're a programmer that mostly relies on multicore performance, the current M1 Macs aren't the gold standard. Unless of course you are drawn to the OS or something else.

Which computer in the same form factor as the air is as capable or better? All of them are throttling messes. AMD is better then Intel but they still throttle.

The high end Ryzen 5000 series processors even when throttled to their lowest continuous speed still outperform the M1 Macs in multicore. Having twice the cores makes a huge difference.

>Those kinds of professionals won't be comparing it to other MacBooks, but to other computers of the same form factor.

Not really, since most of those kinds of professionals concerned already used Intel Macbooks. It's not like they're gonna win the "build some tower yourself crowd".

The new AMD Ryzen 5000 series laptops are faster multicore than the M1 MacBooks. I'm not comparing towers, a powerful desktop computer would absolutely murder an M1 MacBook in multicore, it wouldn't even be close.

Can you send me a link of a ryzen 5000 laptop with the same form factor? All of them I know are either >14 inches or are much thicker.

Sure, if you're looking for the form-factor of a MacBook Air, there are quite a few. For example, the Lenovo 14p lineup, but there are many others.

Depending on where you live, there may be some supply issues, especially if you are looking for a model with an NVidia 3000 series GPU.

That's not really the same form factor. It's at least 20% heavier and much more thick and larger. The same form factor would be something like a Dell XPS 13 or surface pro. But those are not offered with Ryzen CPUs.

It is less than 10% heavier (1.4kg vs 1.29kg) and is 0.9mm thicker. It is about 22mm wider and 6mm deeper, with a screen 18mm larger in diagonal.

Unless you're really being pedantic the two are of the same form factor. Maybe you are comparing the Intel ThinkBook 14? That one is significantly heavier and a bit thicker.

If an increase in size of around 5% is too much, there are smaller laptops with the same processor family.

But why not call out the specific niche then? Pro does not equal high demands. And audio has very different demands then 3D work for example. In fact for audio work the M1 is perfect hardware wise.

There are pros that don't even need a computer.

We're talking here about pros in the context of "increased hardware demands".

This has little to do with "Pro" in the product name or not, nor with them being more professional than other working people.

The M1 Macbook pro is better then the 16 inch intel Macbook pro. I'm not sure it gets more "pro" then this.

For Apple, the core of "pro" is audiovisual professionals.

I mean, really, it just means "the expensive one", as in AirPods Pro, but sticking to Macs for a second: if your job is video editing, or publishing, the bigger and nicer screen is going to trump a faster processor and better battery life. The (much) better speakers are also a big plus.

Smart users in that category are holding off new purchases, if they possibly can, until the M2 (presumably) 16" MBPs drop. Especially if the rumors hold and it comes with an onboard SD card reader.

The M1 is fine for a lot of workloads but the current M1 macs are not suitable for heavy work. Regarding niches; video work, audio work, ML, compiling stuff larger than simple projects, etc. The current M1 macs start to break down on a lot of medium sized workloads due a lack of RAM. So in my view, pro machine = >32gb ram, better gpu performance, better multicore performance.

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