A look at power on the new M1 Max | Hacker News Reader

A look at power on the new M1 Max

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101 pointsexhaustedbrit72 comments

No matter whether you're a fan of ARM, amd64, or something else, this helps everyone. The leaps that Intel, AMD and NVIDIA will have to take to even just stay in the same range as Apple will help everyone. Competition is good!

Yes. Until Intel, AMD, and NVidia start their own walled gardens.

They’re all already there, to a certain extent. Intel with their opaque Management Engine, AMD with their PSP, and Nvidia with their refusal to contribute to open source or enable the development of open source Linux drivers without resorting to reverse-engineering.

The biggest difference is that Apple owns the entire device and software stack. Everyone else is walled to a certain degree. To me, the distinction doesn’t exist.

Regarding Apple’s walled garden in macOS, I think this explanation from Asahi Linux sums the situation up to a good extent:

> The line on Apple Silicon Macs is when the alternate kernel image is booted, while SEP firmware remains closed - which is quite similar to the line on standard PCs, where the UEFI firmware boots the OS loader, while the ME/PSP firmware remains closed. In fact, mainstream x86 platforms are arguably more intrusive because the proprietary UEFI firmware is allowed to steal the main CPU from the OS at any time via SMM interrupts, which is not the case on Apple Silicon Macs.

https://asahilinux.org/about/

I see Qualcomm to be a better competitor to Apple. They already have experience building custom cores and NUVIA acquisition should help with performance. x86(Even Ryzen) is hardly as power efficient as ARM.

Is the efficiency really that depend on the architecture (x86 vs arm64)? I always thought Apples lead comes from things like the little big approach and the lower transistor size. Can someone elaborate?

A part comes from the dedicated units such as the hardware media and neural blocks. So you can export video in Apple’s ProRes in something like Final Cut at way better perf/W compared to doing some other codec blocks on a GPU in Premiere Pro.

You also save a lot of time and power not having to move data between memory pools by having fast access to the unified memory.

It seems that there’s no one thing that achieves the efficiency numbers we’re seeing. It’s excellent execution across the entire design.

Yes it does, ARM provides great performance even at very low power consumption but x86 can't. That's the reason x86 failed for mobile devices.

I wonder, is it actually competition? Apple will never sell any of their Chips to OEM partners so they will have to make do with whatever AMD, Intel, nVidia, Qualcomm, etc. sell. Will it actually lead to more people choosing a MacBook than any other Laptop? With these prices I‘m not so sure.

Yes, it is competition. Whether people buy it immediately or not, the other CPU/GPU companies are going to take notice.

Beyond that, the M1 directly replaced an Intel chip, and that Intel’s CEO has already said he wants to win back Apple’s business (as unlikely as that seems).

>Will it actually lead to more people choosing a MacBook than any other Laptop? With these prices I‘m not so sure.

Not MacBook Pro, but MacBook Air.

The MacBook Air starts at $999. And if anyone has been paying a little more attention one may discover MBA discount is unusually high compared to previous Intel MBA. Education MBA M1 are going at $899 and in some cases $799. The lowest retail discount on MBA goes down to $800 on Amazon.

Basically because the BOM cost advantage and margin on M1 MBA are higher. At this price M1 MBA are selling as fast as they could make them. And Apple could afford to lower the official price of MBA M1 to $899 once newer M2 MBA ( or MacBook ) are out. Compared to the PC industry, not only do they not have anything as fast, as good experience, their BOM cost are also higher due to Intel or AMD chip pricing.

I think once the transition has settled, Apple will announce their 120M Mac active Mac user next year.

While I made this predictions of BOM cost advantage way back in 2014, this actually makes me rather sad because PC has nothing left to fight the Mac. They have nothing on the roadmap. And Apple is no longer the same company as they were in 2014.

94% of people aren't current college enrollees and aren't paying educational prices they are paying the prices listed at store.apple.com. Looking at store.apple.com the 999 model is a dog nobody should buy because its forever locked in at 8GB of non replacable RAM and it comes with an anemic 256GB of storage.

The minimum configuration anyone ought to buy in 2021 comes in at $1400 for 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage or $1600 if you want to bump it up to 1TB. Meanwhile the average PC is bought for between $600 and $700 meaning half of people actually pay less even than that.

Here is an example of a typical PC one can find at Walmart where an average user buys their tires, green beans, and their computers.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-2021-New-Touchscreen-laptop-i3...

It comes with 16GB of RAM and 512GB storage for $649 or 1TB for $719. I do not herein assert that it is an equivalent machine its not. However it is a very typical PC.

Here is another with 16GB of RAM but only 256GB of storage but its also only $449 and you wont have to close some applications before opening others partying like its 1998 with your windows CE portable machine.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Gateway-15-6-FHD-Ultra-Slim-Noteb...

Yes its a gateway. Gives you a warm fuzzy right.

The point is for the majority of PC laptop buyers the M1 macs even the economical models aren't competitors anymore than a Tesla is really competing for the same buyer as KIA even though the goods are absolutely in the same category. PC's are a largely a huge mass of very cheap machines with a minority that compete directly with apple.

Here's another data point.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories/zg...

#1, #2, and #5 are MacBook Airs. The only Windows PC in the top 50 is #39, and has 4GB RAM, and 128GB SSD.

Although I really don't think that power users would always be better served with a 16GB RAM Walmart marketplace specials. RAM and storage space are important data points, but the types of machines made specifically for bargain-basement prices often sacrifice other important design features -- particularly anything qualitative.

I have family that was recently screwed by one of these marketplace sellers. They bought one of these marketplace laptop with great specs, later to find out that it didn't ship with those specs from the manufacturer, the marketplace seller modified it with crap parts and relisted it. Now it has parts not subject to the manufacturer warranty and the performance of those parts is really bad.

And a Chromebook at #25 priced at $179.

And that is at current MacBook Air price. There is no reason why a Macbook Air cant be $799, the same price as iPad Pro from a BOM cost prospective with same margin other than market positioning and segmentation.

And most consumer dont actually care about spec. They want a computer that works. ( Actually most dont want one, they just have to buy one for different sort of reason ).

There isn't a strong justification for pricing it so aggressively when this would drastically decrease their margin. They would be selling their profit to increase market share which is exactly the opposite of their usual strategy especially when demand is high and fab capacity at a premium. They might well be just trading in a higher profit for a lessor if they couldn't make more units than people would already buy at the higher price.

Like I said, in the future time line. It is not "aggressive". It is the normal margin for Apple. Apple has kept their product margin relatively stable in the past decade. And I know their BOM cost by heart. The only situation where they dont go lower price is to introduce more features, mini LED, Pro Motion etc.

This is a good data point for a short term sales trends regarding a new device that is a big upgrade for apple's existing market share.

It does not in any fashion show that short term sales suggest that people who who used to buy 200-600 average PCs are now spending 1000 on macbooks. Macs biggest opportunity rests in flipping people who buy machines in the same price range from PC to Mac. It puts substantial pressure on OEMs to improve their premium lines and yet they don't have a great margin so it looks like there is nowhere to go but up in price.

The Air is a year old model. But yes, it only competes with premium PCs.

But, premium PCs aren’t useless if they only have 8GB RAM and 256GB SSDs, though. There are people who enjoy premium computers who have basic resource needs. Not all of them are developers or video editors.

New airs are being told today and probably will be well into 2022 so its odd to talk about it first being sold a year ago. The average lifespan of a PC is 6 years. It's doesn't seem to me that 8GB is enough even now with browsers and apps built on web tech being as hungry as they are. It certainly wont be enough in 2027 or 2028.

The reviews of base model Airs are generally very positive. I wouldn’t recommend one if it’s a tool you use for work, but it certainly loads Facebook, YouTube, TurboTax, Gmail, and all of the stuff normal people do just fine.

I just opened 12 tabs including nytimes youtube slack youtube reddit and started a game. I'm now at 10GB. I'm not even using desktop apps for many things like slack spotify discord which would easily add GB.

If I only had 8GB changing from game to browser and back would require swapping NOW let alone further along the expected 6 year average lifespan. I think its safe to say that the trend has been that cheaper plentiful ram leads to applications that are more wasteful of it and that this trend is likely to continue.

The difference in costs between a 8GB and 16GB model is probably less than $20 bucks its not replaceable or up gradable so you can tell yourself that the M1 Macs start at less than 1000 even though the 999 model is a dog and kick them an extra $200 for the $20 upgrade.

This is called price bracketing. You are being manipulated and nickel and dimed by a multi multi billion dollar outfit.

I understand price bracketing; I use that technique in my own products.

I know it's not always apparent when immersed in highly technical communities, but there are a significant number of people who use their computers very casually. Not people who sit at a computer for hours, but people who open their computer to go to a website. Plenty of entirely computer literate people simply don't use tabs unless they click on a link that is `target="_blank"`

So it's good for rich people who could be satisfied by a 12 year old dell but whom would like to display their status by spending 1000 to have the appropriate brand on the device they barely use?

Some people make purchase decisions using criteria other than technical utilitarianism alone. But there’s more than a few qualitative differences between any 12 year old Dell and a 2020 M1 Air other than being a status symbol.

I have two M1 Airs. The 8GB/256GB is not a dog - far from it. It’s used for ‘family’ stuff. It’s never given the slightest indication of struggling with anything it’s been asked to do.

That’s simply not true.

MacBook air goes +$200 when you go 16GB from 8GB. And more when you move to 512GB disk from 256GB. These two are bare minimums for a laptop bought today I would say.

So just because Apple shows $1000 for MacBook Air start price that’s underpowered even for today doesn’t make it a good purchase.

And make no mistake - the 16GB (assuming you upgraded, of course right when you purchased) soon will start being less before long. Apple won’t let you do anything about it, except of course allowing you to buy the next MacBook Air.

I have the base model M1 MBA and it works great as far as performance goes. I don’t do any development work on it, just the typical stuff of internet browsing, looking at photos, some TV/movie watching. I remember at the time the consensus was that performance of 8gb on the M1 MBA was equivalent to 16gb on a Windows machine. Something to do with the architecture of the M1 making memory swap more efficient or something like that.

So I think you’re overstating the importance of 16gb and 512gb for the average consumer.

>So I think you’re overstating the importance of 16gb and 512gb for the average consumer.

I dont think HN will ever understand anything about consumer market. Computing or not.

> With these prices I‘m not so sure.

The prices are completely in line with other professional laptops such as dell xps line.

That kind of technology will leak through the whole industry.

Either by hiring those very sought out CPU engineers, sharing processes and components, etc.

Even if you cannot order OEM Apple Silicon chips it doesn't mean it won't directly change the whole industry. There is a significant percentage of people who are in the market for good laptops and that's enough market for companies like Intel to imitate Apple and strive to achieve their impressive benchmarks.

I get the "trickle-down effect", new ideas, engineers, etc. tend to get around but I remain sceptical that this will lead to the same incredible perf leap in other products. The iPhone with it's chips has been around quite a while the Apple Watch a bit less so but Qualcomm's chips still seem significantly behind. If this is wrong please do correct me, this is just my observation.

I do not really know but I would bet Samsung and Qualcomm are working really hard at their chips to match Apple. And sure Apple has a 2+ year lead, especially for the Apple Watch, but I am also pretty sure that said companies are trying hard to snatch some engineers from Apple.

The great deal about ARM devices is not that they are "RISC". It's that they are open (as opposed to x86) and ARM does half of the work for you when you design the chips.

If Apple is really careful they will maintain their lead but if not I give it 5 years maximum till they are outmatched

Honestly I find the potential for fanless “good enough” almost more exciting than the top end.

For most of my use cases computers these days are already “good enough” and apple pushing the bounds suggest to me that soon we’ll have chrome book class (and price) devices that don’t suck

To be honest I’d buy a hypothetical fanless “MacBook Air Plus” with a modest M2 if only it supported 64 GB RAM. M1 is already significantly better than my 2019 16” MBP, and I’d much prefer the MBA’s thermals.

Yeah, I was eagerly waiting for the new MBP but ended up returning it (unopened) because I was disappointed that its 10% heavier than the last model. I think my ideal would be a thin, fanless 16 inch with 32GB RAM. I'm fine with some power throttling under sustained load, but I understand why they filled the new Pros with big fans to avoid that.

And I'm absolutely not fine with it. I've only bought new one because they finally treated constant thermal issues seriously.

>To be honest I’d buy a hypothetical fanless “MacBook Air Plus” with a modest M2 if only it supported 64 GB RAM.

Went this route with my home server. Pn50 in akasa A50 case...8 core zen2, 64gb, passive cooling, 3TB storage fits under couch.

Can't quite compete with the guys running full rack home servers but in terms of self hosting it can do pretty much everything I need (big gotcha is not RAID friendly)

That’s cool (hopefully literally) but I’m definitely thinking of my daily driver semi-portable desktop and I’m definitely very much sticking with macOS.

These power numbers are impressive. The memory bandwidth is also impressive. But one thing to watch for - just because the memory bandwidth is so good, don't skimp on memory.

The original M1 reviews in Feb 2021 convinced me to get an M1 Macbook Air with only 8GB of memory back in March. My brother-in-law who works for Apple hardware assured me it would be more than enough. Wrong - the machine was churning within a day or two of normal operation. Had to return it and stay with the Intel-based MBP.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a 14" MBP with an M1 Max and 32GB of memory, which I expect will be an awesome dev machine.

Unfortunately you might have a nice 4gb for dev work after WindowServer takes 28gb :(

I haven't rebooted in weeks and it's taking up 1.49 for me?

It's probably reference to the Monterey memory leaks (seems I recall something similar back with Catalina?) which end up allocated in various applications (seen Control Center, WindowServer, etc.)

Maybe you've seen the problem discussed here?

Memory leaks are crippling my M1 MacBook Pro

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29142157

I'm loving my M1 Mac mini. I use it mostly for recording and it's very nice for that.

I still have my big desktop, but if I was to start again I'd go Windows Laptop+ Mac Mini. Realistically I don't want to spend 2k on a laptop, it can ultimately be stolen , destroyed, might not last too long , etc.

But with a Mac Mini you buy into the Apple ecosystem at a fairly low price.

>Realistically I don't want to spend 2k on a laptop, it can ultimately be stolen , destroyed, might not last too long , etc.

Aren't most of those things the reason why insurance exists?

Most laptop insurance policies don't cover theft. Likewise with car insurance. You might have better luck with your renters or home owners policy although if you are getting actual cash value with is pretty common you will be getting a value that may be substantially less than you paid for it.

Buyer beware.

Most loss via theft is the result of user error. Setting something down or leaving it unattended where its liable to be stolen like in your car. Fun fact did you know that there are scanner apps that will use bluetooth to tell exactly what car has the $2000 laptop in it so they can break the correct window.

> there are scanner apps that will use bluetooth to tell exactly what car has the $2000 laptop in it

This might explain why a friend's car was hit and laptop stolen. Rear window tint was illegaly dark and the bag was out of sight under the passenger seat. Yet, they knew to hit that car out of a parking garage full of cars. And if they are using a bluetooth scanner it makes more sense.

My laptop is just covered through my home owners policy. I think the age deduction is 25% per year of ownership, so if I put down 2000€ in a laptop and it gets stolen after two years, I should be getting 1125€ minus 150€ deductible for it. It is definitely less than what I paid for it, but a) the laptop was no longer worth 2000€ b) it definitely helps when getting a replacement c) since it's part of my home owners insurance, it doesn't cost me any extra per month.

Sounds like someone needs to make a faraday bag for laptops just like they have for cell phones. I'm sure china has pumped it out by the time you are done reading this comment.

My office is paying for a monitor upto $400. If only I could make a Mac Mini work with an iPad (they’re also paying for a tablet; but not for a PC) without any hacks and extra hardware I would get Mac Mini and iPad so that when I go for my next 3-4 week workation I can just pack MacMini along with the iPad which I would have taken anyway. MacBook Pro and Air are too costly right now imo.

This is old news, but I just noticed that "M1 Max" sounds exactly like "M1 Macs." Mac computers with M1 Max processors are "M1 Max Macs."

The top-specced configs are the maxed M1 Max Macs

Max Tech just posted a video comparing power consumption of the M1 Max in the 14" and 16": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XY_Utsmfvw In some intensive tests the 14" gets ~10% lower performance because the GPU clocks down.

In the future the 16" is supposed to get a high power mode enabled for when plugged in. Should be interesting.

The video also tests high power mode.

Oh, I thought there was something coming in a future release. Cool.

How long will it take that all software is just as slow again and the fans are spinning constantly?

Given we are already using browsers as cross platform gui environments, I don't think applications can get more bloated unless everyone starts integrating 3d effects into all their apps.

you mean "meta" effects? they will come soon enough

It is good for industry in the long term. With all the rumors, obviously I can't wait for Microsoft to release a Surface of their own with fanless design and custom chips.

They already have an ARM Surface model I think it is called X.

The one I played with for a while was first gen using Microsofts ARM chip. SQ1.

A much slower design than the M1 for sure, but I wonder if they can do better in the next generation. I am not sure if SQ2 is out yet.

I know they got really busy once the M1 came out.

The SQ2 has been out about a year. It was only about 12% faster than the SQ1. Neither is a particularly fast chip. To make matters worse, most popular Windows applications still don't have ARM builds and run under emulation.

It's not easy to beat Intel, AMD and Qualcomm at their own game. I would estimate at least 5 year timeline if any company wants to come close to them. Apple had an advantage that they were able to use iPhone which were built first for low power usage as a good testing ground for the chip(iPhone chip were around 60-70% faster in single core than any Android phones).

I haven't looked into the details of Rosetta 2 enough to understand how big of an undertaking it is, but it is so impressive, especially given that of the dozens of pieces of software running on my system right now, only a handful are still relying on it.

I'm curious if anyone has any insight on how difficult it would be to pull off something similar on the windows platform, because it feels like tablestakes. Iirc they didn't have anything like Rosetta 1 when they released their first Windows RT systems a decade ago.

You are going to be waiting a long while

I measured the Gflops/W and the big cores give 2.5 which compared to f.ex. raspberry 4 at 2 is not revolutionary.

What gives the M1 an edge is also it's weakest point: proprietary designs, it cannot run things like Unity or Java Minecraft that require generic x86 CISC to run well.

From my perspective the only hope apple has is linux reverse engineering the GPU to allow OpenGL.

Unity released native Editor for Apple Silicone recently.

Ok, have you had time to try it out?

It's great? it literally twice as fast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IQdSHNmoIo https://twitter.com/_kzr/status/1402636826578362368

15 sec instead of 30? Great? My tournaround is 200 microseconds on Jetson Nano.

For a Mac book air m1 with 8gb or ram is 15 seconds. The Ryzen 9 is 25 seconds. I don't think you're paying attention to the content of the video and what's actually being measured. https://youtu.be/L4NbHk5f2Bs

> it cannot run things like Unity or Java Minecraft that require generic x86 CISC to run well.

It's pretty clear that unity runs fine and well on the lowest spec'ed M1 Mac.

Have you actually tried playing Minecraft on the M1 laptops? It certainly outperforms any laptop I’ve ever played Minecraft on, especially if you use native Java and native lwjgl. Even under Rosetta, I experienced a smooth 60 fps at native settings.

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