I’m pretty impressed with the M1 Mac Mini and look forward to follow ups and the Linux porting efforts, too.
With other companies announcing their own custom CPU designs, I wonder if we are entering into a new era of some kind.
My daily driver is a 2015 Macbook Pro. My iPhone is a 2016(?) 6S. My iPad is the original Air. I'd be happy to upgrade but for someone who lives in Books, Safari and Excel all day, they all work fine. I just can't justify it.
The M1 equivalents are leaps and bounds faster and there are plenty of people who need that power and more but... will 99.995% of Apple users notice further upgrades? Where do we go from here? What's the future of personal computing?
(Fingers crossed for lightweight fully immersive no wires VR in five years)
For instance, this year is not only the year of the M1 but also the Mini-LED ('XDR') displays we see on the new iPad Pro. 1000nits (peak 1600) is a massive improvement as is the improved contrast.
Meanwhile users are on their own personal replacement cycle (say 2-4 years for phone, 3-6 years for iPad and Mac). So by the time the user is thinking about replacing their device, there's several years of accrued changes across many/most components that make the latest device really compelling.
You're right that at this point all the Apple devices have at least a good 5-6 years of 'works fine' in them. But this fall when you go to look at a new MacBook Pro and it's got an XDR screen and an M2 chip that together have you 3-5x screen brightness (vs your 2015's 300nits), 3-5x graphics, 2-3x cpu, 2-3x battery life, better webcam, etc, all compared to your slowly wearing out macbook... that'd look pretty darn enticing to anyone.
As for the future? At some point component capabilities (like cpu/gpu perf per watt) reaches a point when entire new categories are unlocked, like AR/VR or computational photography effects, but those have to be incremented to as the pace of component progress allows.
I'm sure they'll increase the graphics performance and make NVIDIA-level GPUs at some point, probably to drive VR/AR. Maybe they'll try to take the premium server market too (e.g. Graviton for non-cloud offerings).
I wish running multiple iOS and Android simulators didn’t need so much memory.
You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!
But we haven’t seen what they can really do yet. The M1 sure “feels” like an iPad SoC, what with the weirdness with some of the ports and bus limitations. (External displays: little off-kilter right now in terms of limitations.)
I’m optimistic they are preparing some real firepower for a 30-inch iMac and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Or at least, I sure hope so, as I type here, looking at this damned useless OLED strip above my keyboard as my leg hairs are slowly burned away.
All in all, I think it’s impossible to draw any hard conclusions from here. We all have to wait and see.
"I am in the 0.0001% of the people that need 100+Gb ram", so it seems this massive hit of a cpu/laptop, where everyone is raving about it, is not so good when I compare it to what I need that are thousands of a percent of what regular people use.
I'm a developer, I bought the M1 mbp with 8 (yes eight) gb of ram, for testing and was supposed to then be my gf's machine. You know what, almost 6 months in, she still hasn't touched it. I would maybe go for 16gb in the next one, but she will pry it from my cold dead hands before I get a newer model and she can keep this one.
I bought an M1 for my partner and they aren't using it. I am. The battery life is incredible and it feels snappier than the macbook pro I have for work.
I bought APPL after trying this out
Looks at fanless M1 MacBook Air, with 14+ damn hours of battery life in my real-world use
I mean... OK? My minivan isn't an aircraft carrier, either.
> It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.
If you're memory-constrained or doing something with GPU, that might be true. Otherwise, benchmarks plz. And again, high-end laptop... looks at big desktop-replacement laptops, then back over at tiny little fanless MacBook Air