Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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

I haven’t read many negative reviews.

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.

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

* 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com