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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say that, but I am likely going to buy M2 Mac. I don't like Apple and their anti-competitive tactics, but I admit they won their spot for now. However, as soon as good PC competitor comes in, I'll drop Apple like a hot potato.

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The Apple's second version of everything is always the one to get. The first version is always exciting, but usually comes at some large expense.

- iPhone 2 had 3G and was so much better than 1 - iPad 2 was about 3 X slimmer/lighter than 1

Lots of other examples if I though about it.

I still have an iPad 2. I use it in the kitchen to browse recipes.

I still have another one near bed for reading eBooks

I have a first-gen iPad Mini that still sees light use. Approximately the same internals as the iPad 2, AFAIK.

What, in your opinion, is the drawback of the M1 product series?

I haven’t read many negative reviews.

Memory, ports. That might be more of a product level issue but its a blocker for me.

The RAM is limited to 16GB, IIRC the max I/O throughout is also somewhat limited as well, so you have to compromise on number of USB4/10Gb Lan etc

Dedicated graphic cards doesn't work. No Linux support.

> ”No Linux support”

It’s coming:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/04/apple-m1-hardware-su...

(Virtualized Linux is already well-supported on M1 Macs)

multi monitor support. You can have two monitors max.

In the case of CPU architecture switches, Apple's gone with the same strategy every time so far: switch out the guts, keep the outside design. So maybe not negative reviews regarding the CPU, just a bit boring design.

I disagree with OP though, not second, but third generations have been the one to get for me: iPod 3rd gen, iPhone 4, Apple Watch Series 3. OK, iPad 3 was a bit of a failure, but still, first retina.

The new iMac diverges dramatically from this model. It's a complete new design, one that could only have been done after a switch off Intel.

The most commonly cited limitation I've heard is a max of 16GB RAM on the current M1 Macbooks. The limitation of a single external monitor is probably the second most common.

A lot of users would like to run multiple external monitors and have > 16GB of RAM. I know I'm in that group.

Don’t get me wrong, it looks great. But so did iPad 1 and iPhone 1, until v2 came out.

The main things I would hope for though are more RAM, and probably a much beefier GPU

It’s got a better GPU than anything which uses less than 35W, probably even higher than that.

Yeah it's great. I've recommended 2 people get these laptops and i probably would have got one too if there was a 15 inch one.

I'm just hoping there are some more surprises in store with that slightly bigger battery.

It would be fine for 98% of the things I do but I still need to do that 2%. With the x86 CPUs I always had virtualization with USB pass through as a final workaround solution but with the M1 there are things I absolutely can' do.

* Limited IO * Max 16GB Memory ( at unjustified cost ) * Limited Multi monitor support * No eGPU support ( as of now )

* Only about 50 a 55% of all the software is M1 ready ( looking at some tracking sites ). Technically this is not a M1 flaw but you need something to push the market/iron out the bugs. While when the M2 gets introduced, you may be at 60 or 70%. As in less likely to run into issues as the M1 users are the real beta testers. Even Parallels only recently got good M1 support ( with massive speed increases ).

As of this moment, buying a M1 laptop is a less beta tester feature then it was several months ago. If you ended up buying in Nov/Dec, you spend a lot of time under Rosetta 2 or dealing with issues.

> I haven’t read many negative reviews.

The above was kind of always overglanced by a lot of the reviews, as the youtubers mostly looked at their own us for video editing etc and there most software was on point very early in the release cycle.

You see a lot of reviews in Jan/Feb from people going back to Windows laptops after a month, not because of the CPU being bad but because they ran into software issues.

In the mean time the software situation has evolved a lot more but the progresses with software being made M1 ready has also slowed down a lot.

As a PC user i want a M1 like laptop, that has long battery life, is silent and still powerful ( unlike a lot of Windows laptops where its always the old saying: Pick 2, you can never have all 3 ).

But i prefer one with 8 performance cores, double the iGPU cores ( with preferably DDR5 ) for light gaming and standard 16GB. So some macBook 16 Pro or whatever, if the price is not insane. We shall see what Apple introduces...

So far the new offerings from AMD and Intel are fast but still power hungry and heat generating ( aka fan noise! ). AMD is only going little.big in 3nm.

Intel's alder lake may be a M1 competitor ( for battery life under light loads ) but its again first generation product so expect to be a beta tester until Windows gets fine tuned for a long time to properly use the little cores! For heavy loads, ... well, 10nm is 10nm, no matter how many +++ you add.

Obviously, we won't know if the M1X/M2 has a similar big advantage over the M1 until it ships, but...

You can also look at it this way: The M1 is not the first version. It is (IIRC) an enhanced version of the A14 SoC family, and a clear evolution of the work Apple has been doing on its silicon for the past decade.

The original Intel MacBook comes to mind as well

- released with the (32-bit) Core Duo processor in May 2006 - replaced with (64-bit) Core 2 Duo model in November 2006

It only was supported through to 10.6 Snow Leopard as 10.7 Lion went 64-bit only

Yes! Good example. I was thinking about that too but couldn’t remember my history enough to explain.

AirPods VS AirPods Pro is another I just remembered

I think watch v2 was a big improvement too.

My parents owned (still have) an OG Intel Mac Mini - the box said "Core Solo". Seems like that was one of the few devices sold with that chip.

I got shafted with a similar 6 month duff product - the iPad 3. Now that was a bad decision. The iPad 4 came out later that year, with about 4X better performance and a switch to the lightning connector too.

I was so burned by that experience that I only bought an iPad again a month ago.

I'm really hoping Alder Lake or a similar AMD product gets PC closer to M1+ performance and battery consumption.

The M1 chip is amazing but I'm a tiling window manager man.

https://ianyh.com/amethyst/

I also am a tiling window manager man and tried that a few years back (as well as everything else on the market) when I had a mac from work, unfortunately, without real support from the OS, these are all just poor mans windows managers and can't compare to the real thing. I gave up trying to use any of them and ended up installing a virtual machine where I could actually use one.

I'm a gnome addict. If you ever asked yourself "who are they building this monstrosity for?". That would be me, it fits my exact preferences in a workflow out of the box. Unity irritates me to no end, and my wife's mac is almost unusable for me which she greatly appreciates.

Not sure why you're being down voted, I use Amethyst and love it.

It seems like apple is TSMC priority customer so I suspect they will always be a node ahead of AMD.

Doesn't matter if Apple does mobile and low power stuff exclusively, but if they can scale this design into a higher TDP/core count it's going to get interesting.

This will obviously not be comparable to a tiling window manager, but I've been pretty happy with Rectangle [1] on my mac. The keyboard mappings are pretty easy to configure and i've found it to work well even in multi monitor setups.

[1] https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

+1 for Rectangle; I've been using it ever since it was Spectacle. There's nothing I really miss about a proper tiling window manager (though I'm sure hardcore users would disagree)

> There's nothing I really miss about a proper tiling window manager (though I'm sure hardcore users would disagree)

Agreed. I mostly just needed the keyboard driven window snapping I was used to on Gnome and rectangle has filled than need 100%.

Alder Lake will get closer because of the big.LITTLE structure, but I don't know if we will really see a contender from Intel until Meteor Lake. Lithography size gets too much attention for its nomenclature, but it actually matters for battery consumption and thermal management. Intel must execute flawlessly on 7nm and spend generously on capex to keep the ball rolling.

This is Mac OS:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jupmda/aquayabai_...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/mvuplf/yabaimacos...

Its called Yabai (+ skhd): https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

That is, you can have a tilin WM today with all the advantages of running MacOS.

From your third link:

   System Integrity Protection needs to be (partially) disabled
   for yabai to inject a scripting addition into Dock.app for
   controlling windows with functions that require elevated
   privileges. This enables control of the window server, which
   is the sole owner of all window connections, and enables
   additional features of yabai.

The risk Apple kills yabai after you're adjusted to it is real.

> The risk Apple kills yabai after you're adjusted to it is real.

This holds for anything in the Apple ecosystem, up to Fortnite.

Yabai has been going for long, and every issue could be worked around relatively painlessly.

> This holds for anything in the Apple ecosystem.

Holds for anything in almost any ecosystem. With that said, Apple has stated over and over the Mac will remain developer friendly. Being able to disable SIP, IMO is part of that.

FWIW, I run yabai without having disabled SIP and it works great. There is probably some subset of functionality I am missing out on, but it does what I need it to.

I use yabai without disabling sip. You get most of the features. It's the first tiling WM I've used, so it's possible I'm missing something critical without disabling sip, but so far I'm quite happy with it despite whatever features are missing. ymmv, of course.

Zen 4 will probably at least match the M1, but it will be a while before those chips come out and Apple will soon improve even more.

I have a feeling that Apple has pulled ahead and will stay ahead for a LONG time. They are extending their moat. And applying Mx to VR they will create a new moat.

They started pulling ahead in the A6-A7 days and never looked back. Amazing progression.

I'm curious to see if Zen 4 manages actually. It'll be an interesting datapoint as to what actually makes the M1 better.

It's not exactly a tiling window manager, but if you can program some simple Lua then Hammerspoon is a godsend. You can program anything any of the other window managers for Mac (like Rectangle, Spectacle, etc.) can do and have complete freedom to set up your own keyboard shortcuts for anything.

I have some predefined layouts[1] for my most common usage. So, one keyboard shortcut arranges the screen how I want, and I have other keyboard shortcuts[2] (along with using Karabiner Elements for a 'hyper' key) to open or switch to common apps.

[1] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/1a05e5df545db0133cf7b6f1bc...

[2] https://github.com/kbd/setup/blob/1a05e5df545db0133cf7b6f1bc...

https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai

You’ve gotten plenty of recommendations, but I’ll add one for Magnet [1]. I’ve been using it for years, and I love it. One of the best software purchases I’ve ever made - small, lightweight, does exactly one thing and does it very well, and made by a small developer to boot.

[1] https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/index.html

Well, here's hoping that both Linux and Windows work flawlessly on their hardware at some point.

Not even macOS works flawlessly on the hardware, why should Windows and Linux do. But as far as it goes for Windows, not having every other update completely break my system would be a welcome change.

Because with Linux excitement can change things. What are you gonna do if you miss something in iOS/macOS? The right people can in principle make anything work in Linux but with macOS you are left praying Apple decides your use case is their business case.

Imagine what would happen if the compute/$ M1 laptops would perform in some respect better with Linux than macOS. Things may get out of hand, when huge chunks of the Linux community gets involved.

> Not even macOS works flawlessly on the hardware, why should Windows and Linux do.

This is just pedantry and needless nitpicking. Replace "work flawlessly" with "work well" in my previous comment.

Of all the operating systems, I'm finding macOS to be less annoying than the rest. So far Apple did not make a single computer suitable for me, but if they would release something like Mac Pro Cheap Edition (or whatever, I just want workstation-level specs for $2k), I'll switch to it. I don't really care about M1 or Intel, I think that any modern CPUs are fast enough for any tasks.

No need to hate. Nowadays people in general do make necessity out of convenience and virtue out of necessity.

I almost went for the M1 but "1.0" kept me sane. I will definitely go for the M2.

"Antitrust is okay if you have a fast processor"

"It's not my personal responsibility to attempt to enforce antitrust against companies by boycotting them at significant personal expense".

Exactly, there are bodies that are supposed to protect consumers from that behaviour, unfortunately they failed everyone massively. That in itself begs for an inquiry how those institutions actually work and whether it is worth spending tax payer money on them if they consistently fail to deliver.

...and if that exact kind of navel-gazing is why they don't work? What then?

Charge people for failing to deliver, dispense huge fines and jail time. Then rebuild it in a way to avoid mistakes why the previous solution didn't work.

Additionally, it is still (for the moment) possible to engage with Apple computer hardware without using any of their bullshit services (like the App Store) into which all their anticompetitive behavior has so far been constrained.

This is of course not so on Apple mobile devices: it's dox yourself to the App Store or GTFO over there.

The thing is, every competitor is going to upgrade to these and if you stay with inferior Intel products, you give yourself competitive disadvantage. Unfortunately this is the current state of play. If I won't be able to achieve something the same speed competitor can, I put myself in a bad spot. I try to not mix emotions and business, however for a personal machine, I am rocking 5950X and it is awesome.

> I am rocking 5950X

Irrelevant from a mass market perspective. That chip is still out of stock at Best Buy and the Amazon third party version is marked up 54% versus MSRP.

Incidentally the 11900k is also out of stock at many retailers, but it's so much cheaper. You can still buy a pre-binned version that clocks 5.1GHz; even with markup that costs 30% less than the aforementioned third party 5950x.

Availability and price matter. My take on AMD's heavy focus on the enterprise segment right now is that they have no choice. If your enterprise partners get faced with scarcity issues, they will lose faith in your supply chain. You can tell a retail customer to wait patiently for 6 months, and even an OEM that makes retail devices (eg Lenovo) may forgive some shortfalls as long as there's a substitute available, but Microsoft and Google aren't going to wait around in line like that.

Mass market isn't buying individual PC parts and assembling the PC, they're buying prebuilts or using whatever their office mass-purchased. Go on dell.com right now and you can order a PC with a 5950x and RTX 3080. Good luck buying either of those individually without writing a web bot.

I just did. Fastest delivery (express) for ALIENWARE AURORA RYZEN™ EDITION R10 GAMING DESKTOP with base specs aside from 5950x and the cheapest liquid cooler (required by Dell for that CPU) is May 26. Some of the higher end default/featured configurations would deliver in late June. Not sure whats up with that.

Honestly the price/performance ratio there is pretty nice in the eyes of a Mac user like me, but I don't know what office is buying Alienware, and a bulk order would no doubt take longer to deliver. Those are the only machines popping up when you filter for AMD 5000 series on dell.com.

Considering that 5950x is AM4 compatible, folks who had bought a pre-built machine and want to upgrade are also part of the mass market. And I think you can't discredit the homebuilt PC crowd for a high-end desktop chip. The people who care enough to want this chip can probably figure out how to clip it into a motherboard and tighten a few screws and connectors here and there.

What antitrust are we talking about.

For CPUs Apple is actually upending the AMD Intel duopoly, isn’t that good for competition? Furthermore, AMD only recently broke back into the market, which Intel had a stranglehold on. This is the most competitive the CPU market has been since the early 00s.

It would seem to me there is fairly healthy competition between apple and windows laptops?

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