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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

This was published on March 21, 2020 which is well before the introduction of the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro on November 17, 2020.

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I think this is important. I switched to macOS and stopped using my desktop completely because the M1 chip in my MacBook Air is so powerful it beats it by a long shot. It runs literally everything I do so smoothly and without emitting a single sound since there's no fan (and no coil whine under load for those who know what that is on the Intel MacBooks.) Unbelievably, it just doesn't get hot. I'm averaging temps under 30C without a monitor and under 35C with a 4k external monitor attached. Only brief bursts above that when compiling or doing something more intensive, but you don't even feel it. I do everything on this laptop. All my professional work, simultaneous Chrome profiles, dozens and dozens of tabs, video calls through Meet/Zoom, programming, VSCode, Photoshop, watching 4k videos, terminal, everything. It doesn't even stutter, and has NO FAN.

I've been really happy with my M1 and it's my first Macbook ever, I've been a diehard Windows guy my entire life. So, so, so tired of loud and failing fans on my Windows machines, terrible trackpads, terrible displays, constant hardware issues, Windows update forcing shutdowns in the middle of meetings, malware-level upgrade prompts, etc etc.

It was a love hate relationship with me. I had an intel MacBook Pro and hated it for a couple of years. So went and got a Ryzen based T495 thinkpad. This was pretty good but I got seduced by the M1 so jumped in.

I had three major issues with the M1. Firstly not enough RAM and it’s crazy expensive. Secondly I couldn’t run local x86-64 VMs which are if you like it or not the defacto cloud standard. Thirdly a lot of third party stuff just doesn’t work at all. The last point was the killer. I had a massive problem trying to get something Qt based working properly and eventually gave up. Oh and the thing feels physically horrible - give me a plastic laptop with rounded edges any day.

Then the whole CSAM thing.

So fuck Apple. Out came the T495 again and it’s sitting here with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TiB SSD that I put in myself and didn’t have to pay in organs.

In fact as a pricing point the T495 cost me £550 new old stock with 20 months of next business day premier warranty left. +16Gb of RAM was £77. +1TiB £109.

I don't actually think macOS is any less buggy than windows, as someone who uses both constantly. And wsl2 is decent if shockingly hard to set up properly. But damn, having my macbook not relocate all my windows when disconnecting from a monitor is such a godsend.

> But damn, having my macbook not relocate all my windows when disconnecting from a monitor is such a godsend.

and it puts them all back where they were when you plug it back in. it's so nice!

That has not been my experience with my Mac. Seems like once or twice a week the arrangement is off or the task bar is in the wrong spot.

I'm not sure I've encountered a single bug in the half year or more I've had this. I don't ask a lot of it, to be fair. I guess Firefox as my main browser really drains the hell out of the battery, which is annoying. Not really a bug.

That is amazing. My work machine is on Big Sur and the minor glitches are pretty constant. Having bluetooth connected can cause weird issues, the dock and top bar frequently forget where they are supposed to be, and quite a few other similarly minor issues.

Yeah, in my experience macOS work really well if you just stick to the same few applications over time. I guess my problem is that I'm always installing new stuff, tinkering with settings, and tweaking things everywhere I go. I don't think I've ever gone more than a year or two without having to completely wipe my mac and start over from scratch because of bugs.

I probably tweak more settings than most on macOS and I've not encountered any of the common bugs people experience.

Reviews on tech boards about macOS are similar to reviews for apartment buildings: why would anybody bother writing a good one? Complaints and issues bubble to the top.

One other big problem I've had with bugs and issues in macOS is that every time I look online for solutions, I consistently find people entirely dismissing those problems as rare or "you're using it wrong" instead of acknowledging that problems exist and/or offering potential solutions.

It's extremely frustrating when you're just trying to work and your OS gets in the way _and_ everyone online just says, "Well, it works for me!"

Amusingly, trying to debug issues with Windows is equally frustrating, but for different reasons.

shrug

Post your issues/an example then. I'm legitimately curious.

I was quite impressed when I ssh-ed into the M1 machine offered by the GCC Compile Farm, and found that it recompiles the TXR Lisp standard library in under 3 seconds.

I just ssh into my desktop if I need more grunt. That’s a lot faster than an M1.

Sure, a many-many-core desktop will be able to beat the M1 when the workload extensively uses parallel processing. But there likely isn't any faster single-thread CPU in the world at the moment[0], barring any overclocking. If there is (maybe through other benchmarks), then the difference will be minor and the competing CPU would be extremely power hungry in comparison.

Remember the M1 is a 10W chip.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

You’re probably right for synthetic benchmarks.

But none of my workloads work on macOS. So the point is moot.

I did have an M1 MBA and mini until recently for reference.

16GB max ram is a non starter for any real work.

It really depends on what you’re working on. It seems fine for most of what I do. (Intellij / vscode and a compiler). I have 32 gigs because it’s cheap but I could get away with 8 gigs if I wanted to. I probably wouldn’t even notice.

M1 can accommodate 32G now? I thought 16 was max.

No; I have 32 gigs on my desktop machine. I assume they’ll have 32 gig options when the M1 MacBook Pro models land - whenever that happens.

does M1 run linux just a well?

It's still under heavy development (see https://asahilinux.org for more details). Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has been doing great work on getting Linux graphics to work on the M1; just a few days ago she announced that she got GNOME to work on the M1, though without graphics acceleration (https://twitter.com/alyssarzg/status/1429579145827127296). It's still going to be a while until Linux on the M1 reaches daily-driver status.

As far as I know there has been progress made to add native linux support for the M1 (the work done by the people at Asahi Linux comes to mind) but there's still a long way to go. However virtualization isn't too bad, I've been using UTM and their prebuilt images and that's worked for most of my needs so far.

No, and it probably won't unless Apple releases GPU documentation or a kernel blob (neither of which are very likely)

I don’t think the Linux port to M1 is complete yet

Is this the 8GB version?

And, notably, before Apple's announcement that they will incorporate some of their child safety features in macOS Monterey. No NeuralHash/CSAM scanning just yet though https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

Additionally the M1 Mac Mini is a remarkably nice little machine. Not perfect, but fits the"I just need a basic desktop machine" niche very nicely.

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