Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssijak | Hacker News Reader

This is literally a dream laptop. Improved in every area and lacking in none I can think of right now. And the price is crazy cheap for this performance if you ask me.

View on HN

Its not crazy cheap, a lot of people overvalue mobility when 90% of white collar work is done at home or in an office.

Even when mobility just means from the office to the kitchen to the couch, that's a pretty big benefit.

Even when mobility just means flying to another state for a week, a laptop is still worth it. I would never switch to developing from a desktop now that laptops are so capable.

Especially now, I’d assume more people are doing work at home _and_ at the office. Sure, you could get two desktops and probably for cheaper, but then you have the cost of time wasted switching contexts and messing up file sync, etc.

I personally work from home but go to a coffee shop as my “office” for a bit every day. Mobility is crucial to my, and many others’, workflows.

Or on the bench in the park, at the beach, on a boat, camping out of an RV. Remote work opened so many opportunities to work in awesome places all over the world, why wouldn't you take advantage of it?

when you work on computers your whole life its nice to be able to get outside every once in a while

If they can (really) deliver Desktop performance, then they are (really) cheap. There is nothing on the market that can deliver such performance that isn't desktop. But the jury is still early on that one, I'd wait for the reviews.

Cheap compared to what you get in similarly spec-ed non-Apple hardware. This will blow the pants off a similarly priced ThinkPad.

I work 90% at home... but my job requires a computer 100% of the time.

If you make 120k, travel once per month, and you waste ~3 hours of productivity each time you can't take your desktop with you... you would have made up for the difference between a $2k desktop and $4k laptop just in wasted labor.

There is one area where the M1 is lacking - software support. There are still areas (eg Docker) that don't work well. It's definitely coming but it isn't here yet.

If you work outside of those areas though, an Apple Arm CPU is amazing.

What issues with Docker do you have? I use it every day and have no issues

It’s a vm

It was also a vm on intel. It has always been a vm on any OS that’s not linux.

This is always going to be the case though. Linux is not macOS and there is no way to do containers on macOS like Linux does.

You also wouldn't want native mac containers. The idea is to run everywhere. Bundling linux in is an improvement for portability when the production for these containers will be linux.

This is what I'm afraid of, too. Maybe things are working well and seamless, but the last thing I want to do is have to worry about being the first dev on my team using non-X86, and pushing Arm versions of Docker images all over the place or having to modify my Dockerfiles to use Arm versions instead of X86.

One of the reasons Mac was so nice was that everything worked the same locally as it did on Linux prod machines, whereas even today there are subtle bugs with naive Java or Python code that doesn't deal with paths or line endings correctly. On big multi-team projects, there are always some junior devs on Windows that just don't get it right.

This seems like another problem waiting to happen as more devs start using Arm, while the majority of developers and environments still use X86.

It isn't too bad in my experience, having been using an m1 Air since release.

For images with an Arm version available, and that's seemingly quite a lot, it mostly just works(TM). No Dockerfile changes needed.

If you have no other options, you can even run x64 stuff with a bit of low impact futzing. Docker Desktop will use QEMU to do this for you, nearly seamlessly. (though rather slowly)

The biggest gripe I have is the local volume perf, which is "tolerable." This is a problem for Intel Macs too, although to a lesser extent.

(edit for typo)

I've been using x86_64 docker containers with the QEMU emulation just fine, and most open source available docker containers are ARM compatible these days.

I don't push containers from my laptop to anywhere, instead those are built on CI/CD... and we are building both x86_64 and ARM containers these days as we are launching new workloads on Amazon's Graviton because it is cheaper and more cost effective.

The eco-system is not just x86 anymore.

I fully expect Docker M1 support will match Intel shortly after this new macbook starts shipping

why? its the exact same cpu arch they've had since M1 was announced. Things are better but not 100% and there's no reason to assume they will magically get fixed

Docker has worked almost flawlessly for me. I had a single container which did not run properly but I just rebuilt the image on my M1 mac and it worked fine.

I have an m1 air and I’ve used it for angular and node web dev including docker. Docker support for me was rough back in march, but it is flawless now. There is no difference to using docker on my intel imac and my m1 air. The rest of the ecosytem has also caught up. Nvm and older node versions were a challenge for a while, but now it works well and I can install old intel builds of node without a problem and use nvm to switch to them.

I was worried about software compatibility on m1 and was glad to have my intel imac for those things it couldn’t do, but in practice it now does everything. Some things require a bit of googling, but that’s par for the course for developer tools. And on the upside, the m1 runs rings around the 9600K in my iMac and it does this without a fan.

The lack of bootcamp imo is a mistake too given the nature of enterprise software. I know people that are beholden to Autodesk software that doesn't even have a mac version and recommends mac users install via bootcamp, which you can't even do anymore despite there being arm builds of windows.

I was surprised at the price point as well

Maybe, I am missing something but the price seems high.

Possibly this is reflected in my general consumer use case, but all of my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop.

Where are you deriving the majority of the value for this offering?

In general, the people here will use the perf to run webpack faster.

webpack is usually fast enough, jest is where I need CPU & RAM.

If I were to write tests, that is.

Pro tip: if you can switch some tests from using JSDOM to Node as the test environment they will run significantly faster.

Ah, thanks for the tip. It will probably not change much for the project I currently work on, with tests using react-testing-library, so JSDOM is required in nearly all test files.

But at least now I know :D

>all of my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop.

That's very unusual. If you want a laptop for the easy stuff you're usually looking at a MacBook Air or iPad in the Apple ecosystem. These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer.

>These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer.

At some point when you are "doing everything" you start to be tied to a physical location anyway. Multiple screens, hook ups to external equipment. So it just doesn't make much sense to me to actually need to do everything in a portable manner.

Edit: Apologies, I didn't address the part about the Mac OS ecosystem.

This is for people who require portability epsilon percent of the time.

If you never require portability then a desktop is sufficient.

If you frequently require portability then it's worth getting an air and building your workflow (if possible) around offloading heavy computation to the network, e.g. heavy use of build servers, SSH, syncing.

But many people spend most of their time at a desk, but sometimes require portability. For example in a meeting, visiting a client, working from home occasionally, etc. For these people a heavy duty laptop is the best solution.

> These laptops are focused on people who want to be able to do "everything" on a portable computer

Like 3D rendering? Or deep learning training?

I suspect there are people who want to do 3D rendering on a laptop, and these devices are probably a good option for them.

More broadly, that's why I put 'everything' in quotes. There will always be cutting edge workflows that require the power and cooling you can only get on a desktop or server, but that's a minority of a minority.

There are plenty of people who want to run multiple VMs, edit/render 4k+ videos, edit large audio projects, do semi-complex data analysis, or any of 100 other tasks without needing to choose power vs portability, or manage multiple devices.

I've always wondered who is buying these super fast apple laptops? Freelancers with that much cash to throw around on a laptop, who wouldn't be buying an imac or mac pro instead for nearly as much? If you are doing this sort of stuff for work, you probably already have a server you connect to or at least a beefy workstation under your desk you are using for the heavy lifting. A lot of people in this space just use an i7 dell workstation from their employer that's probably cheap and thats that. Especially in the age of aws there is no reason anymore to run a lot of data analysis stuff locally anymore when you can get compute power for seconds at a time. I feel like they must sell so few of the top spec macbooks.

I have always used MBP for rendering. Usually not for final renders. I'm not always connected to high-speed internet so it is handy for work-in progress renders especially if you are not in the office.

Or even if you are working on model that is on the server you still need to have good specs in order work with it.

You can remote into the server and use that horsepower from anywhere, no?

Freelancers who work from home and an office or on the road. I edit photos and video and haven't had a desktop machine for almost 20 years.

I'm sure a few people are doing this but it seems like such a teensy market compared to freelancers who generally work in one place in front of a massive imac screen.

Why do you think that freelancers “generally work in front of a massive iMac screen?” That’s anecdotally very wrong, especially depending on what type of freelancer you’re talking about (the term alone is too broad to be useful).

> I've always wondered who is buying these super fast apple laptops?

Employers for their employees?

Usually they do a bulk order of the base model.

Remember, stuff is “cheaper” for freelancers / businesses than consumers. For me, on $2k in self employment income, I have the option of either:

1) Giving a bit less than half of it to the government and getting nothing, or 2) Giving all of it to Apple and getting a MacBook.

Works out to an effective 35+% discount on every business expense.

>my high computation oriented use cases are offloaded to a desktop

That used to be pretty common. But I'll almost certainly use one of these to replace ~2015 vintage iMac and MacBook Pro. Unless you want to keep the contents on a laptop and a desktop separate or have very high-end multimedia workload requirements, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for and manage two separate devices at this point.

The previous "high end" 13" Macbook Pro started at $1800 so this is a $200 increase for larger higher resolution 120Hz screen, much faster performance, and all the ports they took out years ago.

I don't have a desktop.

I think a lot of pros these days don't.

Yeah I just scooped one up, already just a few hours after this announcement and shipping is no longer oct 26 but instead dec 10

From what I can tell this is very high demand. Obviously we didnt know enough about Apple’s launch planning and inventory but it seems like this only happens when there is very high demand.

It was at December 10th within 30 minutes of the keynote.

Maybe its certain customizations that needed that much lead time, whereas a base model did not

strange definition of crazy cheap. esp since we dont know how well it compares yet

they brought back the t-shaped arrows too!

That's been a thing for a couple Intel generations now. I think only the 2016-2017 laptops had those horrible hodgepodge of arrow keys.

Yeah I ordered two maxxed out macs for my dad and I. Price not an issue when you factor in opportunity cost.

Everything and more I need. Otherwise would need to fork up $20k for a mac pro

I can think of a huge area in which it's lacking: GPU performance.

Apple were making direct comparisons to the GE76 Raider 11UH-053 which has a RTX 3080 in it, indicating that it had the same performance for 100W less power consumption. That seems pretty competitive to me!

In what way is it competitive? Like, are there any big titles that I can fire up and have it perform like a desktop gaming PC?

Or is it merely competitive in specs or in applications like Illustrator?

They do not market these as gaming devices. The GPU is intended for rendering content for pro use cases. It is competitive if this is your use case.

Where are you seeing that? The only comparisons I've seen were labeled as being against Intel and AMD integrated graphics.

It’s in the presentation.

Everything in the OP page that talks about GPU perf has a footnote on it that is comparing speeds to Intel Irix or Radeon Pro 5600 (which is about the same).

Yes it’s in the presentation. The video. Skip to the graphs. They have tiny footnotes giving the models they’re comparing to, the highest one is a mobile 3080.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=22m04s&v=exM1uajp--A&feature=y...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/10/introducing-m1-pro-an...

Really? The M1 is a bit slower than a 1650, so 4x that performance gets you solidly into 3000 series range. There might be a handful of PC laptops that can outpace the M1 Max, but none in remotely comparable a package.

There is no way a SoC is running in the same range as an NVideo 3000 series GPU.

The GPU performance of my M1 Mac Mini is roughly comparable to that of my Pixel 5 and Quest 2--both of which are running the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU.

If (Big if) the provided graphs on apple's M1 Pro & M1 Max article are to be believed you're getting 90% the performance of a RTX 3080 Mobile (A 3070 with a clockspeed cut) but at a quarter of the power draw. This seems to be quite a development.

For all the other claims on GPU performance, they call out that they are comparing to the integrated graphics, and they name the GPU specifically. With this one claim, they name a computer, but not the GPU. "Compared to a computer that has a laptop 3080 in it" is not the same thing as "compared to a 3080."

And they don't define "performance". Is it fill rate? Is it TFLOPs? Is it memory bandwidth? The M1 Max has 64 GPU cores. That sounds like a lot! It's not! The NVidia Laptop 3080 has 6,144 cores. That's NINETY SIX TIMES as many cores. I'm sorry, but supposedly achieving 90% of the "performance" of a GPU that has 2 orders of magnitude more cores is just not in the realm of believable. They are being intentionally evasive here.

They very much put some numbers on performance in the keynote, you can go back and watch it.

The Max:

10.4 tflops

327 gtexels/sec

164 gpixels/sec

What I see on desktop 3080 is:

465 Gtexels/s

164.2 Gpixels/s

if those numbers from Apple are real -- that's bonkers

Wouldn't the 3080's core count you mentioned be more comparable to the 'Execution Unit' quoted on Apple's slides: 4096 EUs on the 32-core variant?

https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17016/2021-10-18%2019_21_1...

> performance of my M1 Mac Mini is roughly comparable to ... the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU

I find it hard to believe and benchmarks [0][1] don't seem to support that.

[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-Adreno-650-GPU-Benchm...

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M1-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-an...

Did you check what they were saying about the M1 Max? It is comparable to the fastest GPU in a notebook they could find while using 100w less energy. We have to wait for the reviews next week what it actually means though.

You can't really trust Apple's claims on GPU performances though, we'll have to see how that really pans out on actual benches.

Also you can't compare GPUs _exactly_ since apple ignoring everything except their own Metal thing

If you care about GPU performance, you don't care about 100W of power.

If someone is buying a laptop they are typically going to care about what 100W savings means in a laptop: less heat and noise, longer battery life or less weight, longer component life, ...

Regardless of whether GPU speed is a top priority or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com