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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

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I run a decent chunk of heavy work loads, and tbh the main things I notice on the new Air are all of the other niceties: instantly awake, ludicrous battery life, no fans. I think those aspects are going to be much more noticeable than many expect.

Agreed - most people use their computers as web browsers to access social media and shopping.

The performance boost there is extremely noticeable on new M1 chips.

Anecdotally; I’ll say this is equivocally not the case. I’ve had a half dozen of my friends upgrade and some of the aspects are absolutely surreal.

The instant turn-on. No fans. Safari alone feels like a completely different beast and a friend and I spent about two hours running through some of the most demanding web sites, side by side against my 2018 15” MBP.

Holy crap. Just...all the subtleties.

I’d actually say it’s easier to notice the immense general speed-up than I notice the difference between a 4min and 2min render time in Final Cut.

Dragging 4K clips around in FCP was infinitely smooth; and it made you immediately be able tell the UI/UX itself was dropping frames and needing to catch up to itself sometimes.

These are things you don’t notice until you’ve tried the M1 for the first time.

It truly is an undeniably insane piece of engineering. They killed it.

But they will notice that they left their charging cable at work/home and were still able to work all day without it.

Not true at all. M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice.

> the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice

Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD, to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"?

> "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

Of course they can't advertise the multi core performances, because they are lower compared to similar systems, just like with the Power Mac they could not advertise that the system was greener, because it wasn't.

The multicore performance is good for a portable, because background threads can run on the efficiency cores without making the whole system thermal throttle. Intel can't do that.

Not right now, but the upcoming Intel thing will combine Atom cores and Core cores (lol) like that.

AMD is the one left without an "efficiency core"… but I wouldn't be that surprised if they somehow manage to squeeze almost the same efficiency out of just low power modes on the same Zen core, which would leave them with better multi-core performance as usual.

I was literally saying the same thing, it's OP that said

> M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice

I beg to differ, multi core performances will be very much noticeable as well.

Especially in this heavy media era

video encoding, image editing, music production etc. are things that nowadays every kid does

single core performances are good only for benchmarks and marketing

You can definitely notice the difference between a formerly top of the line Intel MacBook Pro and an M1 Air. The Air is way faster for opening apps, photo library, and other common daily activities.

And M1 Macs won't burn a hole through your desk.

I work on a 25-year-old research hydrology model written in C. My M1 Mac mini runs the model about 68% faster than my 2019 i9 MacBook Pro. Definitely thinking of trading that in once a 64GB M1-based system is available.

That includes anybody who uses Electron or Chrome... :-)

They will notice the battery. Which is performance.

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