Apple surprised people by what these actually turned out to be.
They’re better than folk expected.
We’ll have to wait and see how that plays out in the long run, but I don’t really think it’s something to get worked up over.
Yay, new cpus that don’t suck on a laptop that doesn’t suck.
I know it’s a low bar to clear, but it still makes me happy.
This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC).
So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.
Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.
I so hope there will be a Mini with the M1 Max, as this would finally be the desktop Mac, so many people have been waiting for (me including).
The future finally happened in terms of fast external peripherals (especially storage), and I don’t have a burning need for a Mac with upgradable internal storage anymore.
In 2010 I got a $100 graphics card that let my PC do things that the PS3 and Xbox could only dream of. Now for the cost of a “mid-range” GPU it’s possible to get a Switch with a game or two that look fine and run at fast FPS.
One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back
RAM slots aren't free; all that extra interconnect length increases power requirements and becomes impractical with large buses. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots to match the bus width of the M1 Max models, at much higher power consumption and slower performance. LPDDR RAM doesn't even exist in removable form for these reasons.
Modern embedded SoC integration is insane. Yes, the "two" memory chips you see on the M1 are really 8 discrete dies/chips (4 stacked together inside each of the two packages), and the "two" big fat things around the Pro are actually 2x8; double them up for the Max and that's how you get to 32 channels. Good luck putting that through a connector...
I don't see that happen any time soon, not with their new focus on building the core as a SoC. Maybe with the MacPros, there will be on-SoC RAM and slower off-SoC, but I doubt it till I see it.
never going go happen as Apples loathes users' freedom. they prefer selling a disposable brick.
Yes. I remember seeing several Clevo models in their offerings. Like most laptops, they have really bad thermal management and atrocious manufacturer software.
The m1 stuff has "tensor" cores and allegedly a faster GPU - that is, it's faster at some things my GPU handles for me, such as h264/h265 encoding.
Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead?
Ignore the 140W PSU!
Another thing to consider is that it may be marginally easier on you to develop on an ARM machine if you're planning on deploying to ARM servers, though this depends heavily on your workload.
I bought a Zephyrus G14 a year ago with high stats, but I often get weird issues where I have to restart my computer or find some fix online. And there are some build/design quirks that are a little annoying. I already want to replace it.
I also have a Macbook Pro from 2015 that I only switched because I wanted a better GPU. It still works fine and looks great. I don't think the G14 will be so great after 6 years.
We also have Macbook 13" 2018. The famous butterfly keyboard on it got broken after a year. It was repaired cost-free, but it took for Apple reseller 2 weeks to do that. And then overheating was terrible even after a dust cleanup. It was necessary to use a cooling pad under a heavy use. When I got a newer laptop on my job I tried to sell it for a reasonable price, but it turned out the resale value was much lower than I expected. So we keep it as a sort-of spare/guest machine.
I agree. If you know how to hack, of course hardware lasts longer. I think i have a Motorola PPC[0] mac somewhere that boots BSD
[0] totally 603e
1. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...
configured with 32GiB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2599
Wrong question. You're comparing different values. Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference.
I think this heavily depends on what you're gaining. I think for a lot of tasks or scenarios it's not worth it. Especially around things like video encoding.
For example if you're a solo worker and you need to batch render 10 hours of video and your computer is essentially unusable for that time you would do this action overnight. If rendering everything finishes in 5 hours instead of 6 hours that doesn't matter because you're sleeping. If you need to render a quick 1 off video that takes 10 minutes there's a bunch of semi-productive things you can do while that finishes and it finishing in 9 minutes instead won't make a noticeable difference.
Now you might say if you're a professional video renderer you'll want to render videos during business hours as fast as possible in which case if you're operating at that scale you wouldn't use your daily laptop to do the rendering. You would remotely render it on a dedicated server (this is how most "pro" places work). This way you can comfortably edit video #2 while video #1 is rendering.
Even 6 year old hardware that costs $800 all-in can give you sub-100ms code reload times in most Rails, Django, Phoenix, Laravel and Node web apps even with Webpack or esbuild running -- even running within Docker on Windows (WSL 2) or native Linux. Also all major code editors can run well without input latency. That's a decently large amount of "pro" web development use cases. Unless you're doing hardcore continuous compiling in a spot where you expect to do this sequentially on your main laptop I can't really see a 10% gain being worth a 2.5x+ cost increase for most dev work.
For example if you can edit at $your_target_resolution and everything is liquid smooth without dropping frames even with a decent amount of effects then any improvement is overkill.
I'm sure for crazy high end set ups (8k video, etc.) an M1 Max would be nice but for other folks editing 1080p or 1440p videos at 30-60 fps you can get liquid smooth editing even with ~5-6 year old hardware that costs $1,000 all-in (a bit more expensive now due to GPU prices being temporarily crazy in price).
It's really a very specific niche that's targeted here: namely mobile(!) video editing and -production.
There are very few use cases these days that benefit from a high-performance mobile (cannot stress this enough) solution.
So unless your specific use case benefits at all from local processing power, I'd argue that it'd be hard to even get a 5% productivity increase that cannot be reached by other means (better/bigger display, more ergonomic peripherals, optimised workflow, etc.).
I'm not denying the fact that even a 5% improvement may justify the price difference. I'm just questioning whether the improvement in performance can meaningfully contribute to that in most use cases.
The improvement only materialises in a very niche use case (e.g. primarily mobile workplaces with virtually no additional weight/space for things like mice).
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-4800H-vs-Ap...
The rest is not strictly about M1/Apple, but I found technically superior hardware can be quite sluggish depending on your software stack.
You probably shouldn't. Your laptop is more than adequate for your tasks. It may even be better in some respects (you can play some AAA games if you want).
Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag. You can get a nice portable monitor and a very good stationary monitor for just the price difference.
For me, yes! It's how interact with the machine for hours and hours each day. This is also why the keyboards over the last few years were such a travesty - they are the primary input method.
We basically have a 5+ year gap of little improvement in PC Industry. ( Comparatively speaking ).
7 year gap, during which Apple also experimented with the trashcan, the emoji touchbar, the shallow keyboard, the non-magsafe non-SD connectors. It was like a pause on personal computing.
7-year gap from 2013 to 2020 where social media became political machines, and all companies became cloud-first.
Strange decade indeed. Unless you are in US and the financial disaster hit hard, then I think I look back in 2010 that 2000s were comparatively uneventful.