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Comment by kevstev | Hacker News Reader

I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work.

I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed at you.

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I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second.

The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind.

My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the processor was unused for months, and I didn’t notice any slow performance the entire time.

Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.

Yeah, 2500 cores per CPU sure would be nice.

My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it.

Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.

Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.

It’s the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet it’s still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA. Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years.

(If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I

The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

Emulated apps don’t use more memory. It’s more likely Activity Monitor calculates their usage wrong, it doesn’t show very accurate numbers in the first place.

Any sources for that. I did a quick web search but didn’t find any conclusions to the saga.

I use an M1 powered 16GB MacBook Air and I've never seen any freezing, even under heavy load. I don't use Google Chrome though.

Also, system is writing to the SSD with the same rate of my Linux machines: 4TB/year.

Heavy load in my case is a few dozen terminal tabs, six of which are running TPU training jobs, 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos, a half dozen instances of pycharm, one webstorm, one clion, around 35 macvim windows, and a few dozen PDFs open in Preview. I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

The unfortunate part is, when it freezes, it does the beachball for a full minute before I successfully execute a “switch to activity monitor / s click topmost process / force quit / confirm” sequence. Each step takes around 45 seconds to complete. I assume Apple QA never tested the extreme edges of workloads.

One poor guy on Twitter is already up to 18% of his SSD lifetime, in the first three months of having an M1. We had a heart to heart about how silly it was that the drive will die within a year, that Apple better replace it under warranty, and so on. But it’s a coin toss whether he’ll just have to eat the cost and buy a new one: https://twitter.com/_wli/status/1364934834229977090?s=21

If I do the same in my intel Mac book pro, it not only screams, burns but also slows down. honestly intel chips are overrated and overpriced.

This is heavy load for any machine unless it's configured as a bona fide workstation. Any machine, any OS (with M1 MacBook Air's HW configuration) would trash its SSD while swapping in that case, IMHO.

> I’m not exactly representative, but I think the stddev of usage patterns is high across developers.

When I'm in development mode with all cylinders firing, I have a single Eclipse window in CDT perspective, a couple of terminal tabs, Zeal (or Dash) for documentation and a couple of firefox tabs for documentation not available in Zeal.

Music is either supplied by a single YouTube tab or Spotify, and that's it.

The most unfortunate component is CPU in my case. I try to ooze every single bit of performance from it while running the application. Memory controller comes the second due to transfer operations but, I neither max out the RAM or cause system to do heavy swapping.

I'm always kind of conscious about the hardware resources of the system and minimize my resource usage habitually, without killing productivity.

Well on Linux my 16GB thinkpad would thrash for more than 60 seconds unless I sysrq.

This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I

The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.

Thank you for finding this!

Unfortunately, and somewhat sadly, and melanchololy, I must report that I've been at OS version 11.2.3 (the latest) and run almost zero Rosetta apps: KeepassX, Beyond Compare, and Optimal Layout; of those, Optimal Layout has read 100GB, which is almost nothing.

In comparison, my kernel_task process is at 43TB bytes written, and WindowServer is at 8TB read.

So, as with cancer, there are multiple contributing factors, and hopefully Apple will ship an update to fix it... someday.

Surprise. I bought the rose... theory. Sigh.

Thrash is an odd word for an SSD... I mean, there's no moving parts, so I can't imagine how it's thrashing about.

Swamping an SSD with write requests and forcing it to write-level aggressively is trashing an SSD IMHO. Since it both silently grinds to fulfill the requests and loses a lot of lifespan during the process.

I am genuinely curious how you keep track of all that. Presumably this is all spread out over maybe a dozen workspaces?

Possibly multiple desktops.

I’m reminded of the podcast ATP and the great episode ‘The Windows of Siracusa County’. John’s window management system is both baffling and amazing. It’s a good listen.

https://atp.fm/96

And here I am, thinking that heavy load is one node instance running webpack, a sql server, vscode, Figma and a few chrome tabs.

> 40 chrome tabs, a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos

> around 35 macvim windows

You do you, but I'd wager you could probably trim some of that low hanging fat

I was going to say, there's no humanely possible way you can watch and absorb the content from 5+ videos at the same time right? Like what's even the point? (I presume tabs with videos on them that aren't playing still perform around the same as tabs without videos at all, since there's no need to re-paint frames.)

The surprising part is that you have attention to spare for all those distractions.

a few of which are playing twitch streams and YouTube videos

How many eyes do you have?

Sounds like you should report it in Feedback Assistant since you have an unusual workload.

Apple doesn't and shouldn't care about optimizing for your use-case. At some point, the user should be responsible for stopping processes when they're not using them anymore.

I understand the idea of integrating everything to reduce the electronic footprint, but some stuff like RAM and storage should be serviceable outside of replacing the entire board..

Same here, zero freezing and amazing performance. I use Safari though and have not even installed Chrome.

I consider Chrome harmful TBH. I use Safari and Firefox (and I sync it with my other, non-apple computers).

What about Safari?

That's a perfectly valid question. Lots of people use Chrome because they've used Chrome, and that's the whole reason. Some people need Chrome because it supports some site or tool that they require. I recommend that everyone else at least try Safari and see what they think of it.

When I first had my M1, I ironically had to use Canary for stability purposes

Last time I tried it (couple of months ago) there were practically no extensions and Bitwarden didn't work in incognito. And Chrome's UI/UX is simply great. And dev tools as well.

That’s a personal preference thing. Personally I think chrome UI/UX is horrible and slow. Ut I’m a safari user so again: personal preference.

Sure, I've never used Safari enough myself to have an opinion (since it's never been an option for me due to various things), it might be equal to Chrome or even better (I like Safari's clean UI). I'm mostly comparing it to Firefox which is quite clunky in my opinion (I've given it many chances).

And I'm actually typing this on Safari now and it looks like the issue has been fixed - Bitwarden now works in private mode. Maybe it's time to give it yet another shot. :)

Whoa.

Maybe an hour into testing Safari and I look at Activity Monitor and see that https://calendar.google.com is consuming 1 GB of RAM and https://docs.google.com 865 MB. :o

Don't know if the numbers are comparable but in Chrome's Task Manager the numbers are 224 MB and 121 MB respectively.

Edit: This might be an old (unfixed) issue https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6640430 ... This sucks because I have a specific doc and the calendar that I always keep open in pinned tabs. There are some other sites with seemingly quite high RAM usage as well. Well at least nothing is lagging so I guess I'll just chug on and see what happens.

Edit2: This behavior is just insane. I closed those two tabs and suddenly Gmail shoots up from out of the blue to 1.22 GB?! Then I reopen the two previous tabs (doc/calendar) again and Gmail stays the same while Calendar goes on a diet and sits at 187 MB (doc at 983). This is super weird. I'll just keep them open and see how it behaves overall, might just be wonky numbers?

It sounds like they are sharing memory and the shared memory is getting accounted to whatever tab was opened first until it closes.

I recently got an M1 mac myself and tried Safari out again -- I seldom used it on my 2016 Pro (preferred Firefox) but it's supposed to have stellar battery life, so why not give it a go?

Nice that they've got built-in tracking protection now, I guess, but I left Twitter running in a tab overnight and when I woke up Safari was reporting over a gb of memory use for that tab alone. Something in how they cache or handle JS for some of these long-running services, or maybe having to do with service workers ?, Safari just seems to consume a lot of memory. It's not a huge issue I guess, with the way the M1 never seems to have any memory pressure issues, but it's part of why I remember switching off Safari in the first place.

If anyone knows why Safari seems to consume more memory with these long-running processes, I'd be real curious to know why...

Battery life has been the reason for me trying it in the past as well.

And yeah I mean even though Activity Monitor is reporting high RAM usage I don't seem to have any memory pressure issues so it might not be that big of a deal (MBP 2015 w/ 8 GB RAM).

I'm actually considering getting an M1 myself next week. Have been waiting for the initial kinks to get sorted out and most apps ported to it and I think it's time now. :) SSD wear seems to have been resolved with the latest Big Sur versions and fewer Rosetta apps and now even ST4 beta has an M1 build.

My justifications are that I'll get an excuse to upgrade to 16 GB RAM and I'll get touch ID so I can have a more secure password and not have to type it all the time. And with the stellar performance and battery life of the M1 I can just keep using Chrome (Brave). :P

Meh.

New tabs are opening in weird places, really faaaar to the right skipping between 6-7 (unrelated) tabs. Really cumbersome to navigate.

Horrible selection of extensions still. Really missing searching for any tab with Cmd+Shift+K (I often have ~100 tabs open across multiple windows) that I get with the Tab Switcher extension.

There's a Noscript equivalent extension but it costs $3...

And I can't initiate a search with "url bar -> you[tab]<searchterm>[enter]" (for a Youtube search).

Meh. Safari just doesn't work for me. Maybe if I sat down for a week or two and wrote a bunch of extensions myself but I don't see the value in that.

On the plus side Safari does seem snappy but then again I only have ~30 tabs open (across 6 windows) currently. So I might give it a win on speed but it definitely loses in overall usability.

Will try again in a year or so.

Edit: OH SHIT this is a definite dealbraker - apparently I can't select multiple tabs by Shift-clicking to pull them out into a new window. That completely kills my workflow of separating topics into different windows, and/or closing tabs in bulk.

Edit2: Wtf, how didn't I notice this earlier - I cannot see the URL when hovering over a link. How does anyone consider this within the realm of good UX?

Command+/ will fire up the status bar for Safari which shows you the URLS.

Ok that's a weird default...

For your last issue you can see it when you display status bar.

Ok that's a weird default...

I actually have an orthogonal issue, but I wonder if it's related. When I have an external monitor connected via a Thunderbolt dock, the device takes forever to wake from hibernation (that is to say when I've left it on sleep for several hours). i.e. 10+ seconds, which is kind of ridiculous in 2021. This doesn't happen when the monitor is not connected. I also have a similar amount of things open as you described

Not m1; but unplug and plug it back helps a lot

Chrome is by far the worst-performing browser on my (Intel-based) Mac with many tabs open. It doesn’t come anywhere close to keeping up with my browsing style, wasting tons of system resources, glitching, crashing, etc.... and then oh wow the battery drain.

Safari is best, but Firefox is also pretty decent nowadays.

I have the same issue with freezing regularly. Using emacs aarch64 build and clang from llvm sources ( or OS X native clang, either one ) compiling in emacs window (Mx compile) and it will stop, hang for about 10 seconds, and then reboot. Rosetta isn’t in this chain. Haven’t looked to find why yet, but task switch to Apple news while I’m waiting and I can see the build in emacs halt for a while. Task switch works after a while, but sometimes it doesn’t and a watchdog kicks in it seems.

This does not happen to me on Firefox, I am running 2 windows with dozen tabs each.

I’m unsure if this is sarcasm.

But most tasks (& tabs) are idling your CPU for a majority of the time. There’s no value to this at all.

Shouldn't that be one 8GB memory bank per tab?

I have a 15" retina MacBook Pro from 2012, and another from 2018. The one from 2012 is fine for everyday use. But the difference in single core performance, and also IO, is substantial. That's really important when it comes to a lot of typical development work. For example Rails starts at least 2x faster on the newer laptop.

This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great chip and all. But when you make it the only choice, people are finding the only choice is more than sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a boon for logistics.

The success of the M1 is a boon for Apple, but I'm not sure that only having to produce one CPU to be used across all devices is where the optimization lies, especially considering that Apple is selling the iPhone SE with an older CPU and not simplifying by not selling it.

Just because it's being sold today doesn't mean it's actively manufactured still. They could have stockpiled the older processors or have spare inventory to continue meeting demand

My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770. Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago.

That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through.

One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.

Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so.

Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.

IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS).

As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.

The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.

True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much.

But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.

My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers my heating bills, somewhat).

I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.

I’ve been doing big C++ builds (think gcc, LLVM-sized projects) on my Ryzen 9 5950X and I wouldn’t have it any other way. This thing saves me so much time every day. It’s so nice not to have to do remote builds to get a quick prototype.

The best part is that it was a drop in replacement for my 2700X. I already had a great Noctua air cooler so I was all set.

Ah, Ryzen 5000 and Threadripper 3000 series are absolute beasts, no doubt about it.

I want to work with Rust more and when I get to that point I'll likely start gathering money for a TR Pro but until then, and me mostly working with dynamical languages, even old-ish i7 CPUs are more than adequate.

Yeah, I have two thinkpads -- one from 2010 and one from 2012. Both of them have enough grunt to get through most any task, the heaviest of which is compiling large codebases. One of them was my daily driver for eight years; I only upgraded to a Ryzen because I wanted MOAR COARS and more RAM.

It's funny how today's computers could theoretically handle a user's workload for decades yet Apple builds them to fall apart after four years. There was a Hackernews story recently about a guy faffing around with old 68k Macs from the late 80s, he said that those old Macs were rated by Apple to last for fifteen years. And yet they come from an era of much more rapid utility decay for computer hardware, when a computer would be utterly obsolete after just a few years.

This would be more convincing if I wasn't reading it on a 2013 Macbook. But yes, Big Sur is the last major update available and in a few years it's going to be obsolete.

TBH a 68040 mac would be useful in 1999.

I think you might be going to the other extreme just by a tiiiiiiiny bit. :D

It's true that a lot of people are just fine with a a 10-year old i5 or an i7. Hell, a lot of store owners and front-end offices grumble at an i3 CPU because it's still too powerful for the daily activities of the staff.

But when it comes to routinely compiling C / C++ / Rust then you need all the power and hardware innovation you can get.

I built my own gaming pc back in Nov 2010 with an i7-970 24g ram. While I have upgraded the GPU twice and upgraded to larger SSD's as prices have come down, I am still using the same machine for gaming. Not that what I am doing is very intense or hardcore intense graphics. I can comfortably play all the Blizzard titles, modern FPS like whatever COD is newest, etc. Maybe not on max settings anymore.

Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.

Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases

The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.

10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.

How far does this goalpost go?

The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time. It's just that Intel marketing calls all the shots and they only wanted to sell multicore space heaters with space heater memory to sweeten the deal. With this burden on chipset side, it was impossible to compensate with extra amp hours and maintain portable weight.

> The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time.

You're desperately moving the goal post to ridiculous places. It's like claiming that walking on the moon is supposed to be considered normal just because the technology has been ready for a long time.

That claim is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean, what good does a "technically it's possible" claim do if a) no, it's clearly not possible outside exceptionally rare circumstances b) the average consumer device is way behind any of those outlandish claims.

> (...) provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.

The fact alone that you're talking about using/adding a nonstandard and exceptional battery is more than enough to throw out that claim.

If you took the small 2010 macbook air and doubled the size of its battery you'd be extremely close to 10 hours and 3 pounds, so I wouldn't go with "unthinkable".

My desktop is 2010 vintage 6-core Phenom II 1100T with 16GB RAM, the motherboard is officially maxed out, but I've been told it can take 32GB just fine. It has been upgraded with an SSD and more recently a Radeon RX560, and it really does everything I need. Newer games do need lower settings, but it'll motor through most games at 720p. I added a PCIe USB-C interface card, so I'm not even stuck at USB 2.0 anymore.

I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts.

My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'.

Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.

Gaming at 720p in 2021? Oh come on, you really need to try some 1440p/144hz gaming ;)

I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.

Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)

Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in it, of course.

Yeah smcfancontrol is a must. I keep the fan around ~3000rpm during moderate use and bump it up to 5000rpm or max it out if I'm going to game or render something. I've been tempted to look into TB2 to TB3 adapters and eGPU's but its a janky solution to extending the life of an 8+ year old machine.

I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF. Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.

11-inch 2011 MacBook Air here. It's my main machine.

I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.

Those things are beasts and have incredible ergonomic profile. I just bought one last year, with an i7 and 1tb ssd. Love it almost as much (for other reasons obviously) as my $23,000 Mac pro music rig purchased about the same time.

I wish they could just give me that machine with a modern screen and an M1 chip.

I have a near death grip on my late 2012 Mac mini i7 (upgraded to 16GB and 2 1TB ssds) It has stood the test of time and to me is an engineering marvel.

Aside from gaming it can last another 10 years.

For longevity, I keep it on its side and replaced the bottom lid with an aluminum mesh lid. This has made it near silent for 80% of my tasks (programmer centric). I also regularly clean out the fan.

Same here - I was tempted to upgrade when the newer mac intel models came out, but the soldered RAM / SSD bullshit kept me off them. I've hear that the 2012 mac mini can theoretically support 32 GB RAM (as other similar i7 processor devices can) - I think I'll try that 5 years down the lane for the heck of it. For now, 16 GB RAM and an SSD disk make it a very capable machine, that can (as you rightly pointed out) last for another decade.

My 2012 MacBook Pro (the very first retina model) is 100% usable as daily driver. Only problem is it needs a new battery.

I got a 2009 Mac Pro with dual sockets at a state auction and put in a couple of inexpensive hexcore Xeons. The sum total after 2 graphics cards and 48 GB of RAM was less than $750 and it runs everything pretty well.

If it weren’t for the fact that it’s not good at being a laptop (chunky, heavy, hot), I’d be perfectly happy using my old QX9300 (Core 2 Quad) workstation laptop for day to day. With an SSD and the Bluetooth+Wifi upgraded to Intel AX200 it’s only marginally slower than my newer x86 boxes at most things, and its 15.4” 1920x1200 display is still nicer than what ships on a lot of laptops today. Wouldn’t want to use it as a dev machine, but any less demanding usage would be fine.

Two years ago when I got the Lenovo e590 (Intel Core i5-8265U), I benchmarked running the unit tests of my project on it. (though I didn't really intend on using the e590 for development) I compared against my old desktop from 2010 (1st-gen Core i5-750).

Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU.

P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now (broken USB-C charging port).

I'm also staring at a Mid-2011 Sandy Bridge quad-core iMac that's been on my desk since May 2011.

It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.

There is only one other popular task that a decade-old CPU can’t handle acceptably well: running a web browser. Outside of that, computers have been good enough ever since HiDPI/Retina screens became standard.

I have a quad core i7 from 2013 and the laptop still runs just as fast. I had to replace the hard drive and the RAM is maxed at 16GB (not good for virtualization), but it runs like new except for some odd screen recording hiccups with Microsoft's Xbox thing, but really all of the performance problems seem to just be driver bugs in relation to Dell's way of doing things.

> I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty

Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and hence their spec choices)?

Which computer are you referring to?

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