This is not the victory that the title implies.
It's also a _little_ bit funny that the i9 laptop was double the price, given people usually rant loudly about how expensive Apple computers are.
The crazy thing about using a Macbook Pro (with an M1 Pro or M1 Max CPU) is that, in single-threaded performance, it's really no faster than a dippy little Macbook Air. And at the end of the day, single-thread performance is more effective than multicore! TBH I think this tradeoff is the right one (that is, not overclocking Macbook Pros), but when the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro roll around… why not? Just go for it.
I fully expect this is what the new Mac Pro will look like, probably with multiple M1s.
(Also, RIP one of the most tinkerer-friendly Mac configs in a very long time.)
I expect them to come up with something much crazier with a newer design, perhaps in the M2 generation. Doesn't mean much, but the IRQ controller architecture and driver in these machines claim to scale to 8 dies, even though the existing implementation in the M1 Max is sized for 2. That's no guarantee they're looking at a product like that, but they might be.
Basically, all of this is configured at boot and much of it locked off. Apple have done a good job making it difficult to nuke these things from the OS level, for better or for worse :). I once overwrote all the GPIO registers and didn't even break anything (though the Type C controllers did crash, but a hard shutdown and boot fixed it - this was on an M1 Pro MacBook). It's in one of my streams somewhere...
Edit: Since the A6-era for CPU cores and and A10/11 for the GPU cores.
The only thing the Apple M1 has in common with ARM is the instruction set. The actual core design? Completely Apple. No Cortex X1s or A73s in there. Apple does use the stock ARM M3 in a few places IIRC but that's a very-low-power ~100mhz part for managing some internals.
Also, as for who can push the limits of ARM, Apple appears to know ARM better than ARM knows themselves. Both based on Apple's higher-performing core designs than ARM stock, and also because Apple cofounded ARM with VLSI and Acorn, and an Apple VP was the first CEO.
Edit: On that note, it's kind of ironic how every Android phone has the DNA of a company Apple cofounded and initially led.
I think the point about Android commentators is that they may not have been following Apple’s silicon development closely enough to know this, especially if they think that the M1 is the first in the line.
It's not just Android commentators. A surprising amount of people have the view that Qualcomm/Google/<whoever> will surely come up with better CPUs in a couple of years. Apple has been doing this for more than 10 years. They probably spent 4 or 5 years designing A4 before it came out. And A4 came out in 2010
Qualcomm is not going to make a better ARM Windows processor anytime soon. They had five years of exclusivity on Windows on ARM. Every single device they released was massively overpriced, had crappy performance, and until very recently, could not run 64-bit x86 programs at all (only 32-bit was translatable).
Someone is of course going to remind me that they bought Nuvia, and so Nuvia will change the boat around. I'm a skeptic. Judging by previous pricing, I believe that Qualcomm's chips and royalties result in disproportionately expensive hardware (every Windows on ARM machine to date, the cost of devices with Snapdragon 888+), and may not be competitive cost-wise as much as some would hope.
Also, Nuvia was designed for server processors, and is being retooled into a mobile processor. I'm going to bet that it's better than Qualcomm's current lot, but I doubt the single-core performance will be very strong compared to Apple. Qualcomm claims it will be "competitive with M-series," which considering M2 is going to be coming out before Nuvia isn't good news. Also, Qualcomm famously claimed that their Windows on ARM Snapdragon device was "competitive" with a mobile Core i5, but that was quickly laughed off the table when it went to reviews.
Depending on what you mean by significant, they have made those every year since the iPhone 4 came out.
You do realize that the ARM architecture existed for almost a decade before Apple was involved, right? From 1981-1990.
Apple was involved with ARM Ltd, the company that was formed when the chip division was rolled out of Acorn; not in the design of the original chips. Apple wasn’t significantly involved until the ARM6. Considering Microsoft was as involved with the StrongARM project, most of which has long since been integrated into the mainline ARM architecture, you could argue their DNA is just as integrated. By your logic, at least.
> Both based on Apple's higher-performing core designs than ARM stock
ARM’s vanilla cores aren’t intended to be high performance cores. They never sought that out until the recently started X-series, which even still isn’t designed to operate in the same envelope as Apple Silicon. Their designs have always been primarily focused on power efficiency with a secondary focus on drop-in generality.
4-die Apple Silicon machines will surely come, but not with the M1 Max die. It'll be a new design.
Edit: thinking about this for a few more seconds, I realise this is a completely separate discussion, but I was just trying to think how Apple could accomplish the Quad branding even if internally its separate CPUs.
This is part of why if you're overclocking your computer, you end up experiencing errors or unexpected crashes even when temperature doesn't go too high. Past reasonable tolerances, you can't just cool it more and expect it to work.
Overclocking is often a combination of overvolting (leading to more amps), allowing you to increase clock speeds.
The other sibling comment regarding distance isn't true. regardless of how insane your feedbacks are. Physical placement tools have always handled this in my experience (as a chip designer for 10+ years).
AMD chips are doing similar clocks to Intel on TSMC N7, so Apple could (but won't) have a chip running way higher than the clocks they are currently shipping with.
Also, it's kinda inaccurate to imply any overclocked setup will crash, there's plenty of room unless they come turned up to the max from stock like the 12900k.
I expect Apple has an extreme focus on power efficiency and especially idle / leakage power, much more than Intel considering the core basically the same as they use in their phones. They also have a different approach to turbo / dvfs. So I would expect M1 to actually be a lot tighter than Intel and not have so much OC headroom.
Obviously you can buy timing with voltage to some degree, so there would be something there probably. Modern nodes are running into more problems with voltage induced breakdown though so the OC limit looks very different to what you can ship in a product. Has anyone measured M1's VDD?
> AMD chips are doing similar clocks to Intel on TSMC N7, so Apple could (but won't) have a chip running way higher than the clocks they are currently shipping with.
Not their existing microarchitecture though. They do nearly 2x the work per clock as AMD chips which necessitates more logic per stage. Getting a microarchitectural edge means making less logic do more work and it's very possible Apple have some edge there, it just wouldn't be near 2x IMO.
The silicon technology of course plays into it, but when you look at how fast individual transistors and the shortest poly to connect them can switch, speeds over 100GHz have been possible on 90nm. Today's cutting edge is probably over 200GHz (e.g., search ring oscillator). So it's not a fundamental switching speed limit of the tech that gets you.
I would say Apple could probably redo the physical design and synthesis work and minimal logic changes to target a faster and leakier device that's not suitable for phones but might be a little fairer comparison. It wouldn't put it at a 5-6GHz frequency, but could easily be enough to re-take these benchmarks and still be ahead on efficiency.
Not all work is created equal. Decoders on Arm are definitely parallel (= don't have more serial logic for wider decoder) compared to the variable length decode x86 is stuck with. And your backend ports are also parallel (although maybe scheduling isn't?). The only places where wider always means more logic per stage is caches - register file, L1/L2/L3, BTB. For example Apple managed to work some magic with a 3 cycle 192kB L1. AMD and Intel are at 4 and 5 cycles for much smaller L1's. Part of the reason for that is probably because Apple doesn't need to hit 5GHz and can afford more logic per stage.
And in any case, it's very likely you could just shove more voltage through the chip and get it to clock higher, since the current 3.2GHz is very far from what we know TSMC N7/5 can do. I don't think you'd need a rework unless Apple wanted to target 4.5+GHz.
> And in any case, it's very likely you could just shove more voltage through the chip and get it to clock higher,
Yes.
> since the current 3.2GHz is very far from what we know TSMC N7/5 can do.
N7/N5 can "do" 200GHz. 90nm could do 100GHz. The limit a device can do depends most highly on the logic.
> I don't think you'd need a rework unless Apple wanted to target 4.5+GHz.
3.2->4.4? I doubt it with any reasonable voltage that could actually ship in a device. Very hard to predict these things unless you've at least got basic shmoo plots and things like that in front of you.
x86 decode is parallel too
Something, somewhere does have to do a serial length decoding of course. But when you look at the L2 access latency and throughput (which is the minimum L1 fill latency), it's clear you could afford to do that part of the decode over more cycles.
New designs are not just predecoding lengths but entire uops now into the first level instruction cache which is the same concept they just call it a L0 and L1 rather than L1 and L2.
When you overclock you add voltage which helps with this which goes a long way. You would often hit thermal limits first, so heat dissipation is a major factor.
This causes heat and load spikes, and while you get no errors, the increased frequency doesn't give you any real world performance gains. Returning a to a slower configuration actually gives a much snappier and performant system.
It feels unfair to generalize across time and architectures
I stopped overclocking systems after Athlon XP. This is why I gave that example.
Even without overclocking and overheating, I've seen and still seeing partially cooked processors which shut-down half of their FPU pipelines to stay reliable albeit with orders of magnitude lower performance.
CPUs are much more complex with their MCE and more advanced microcode structures ever, and there's much more than meets the eye.
People push CPUs to absurd limits with LN2 cooling so they’d just not true.
Maybe in terms of raw FLOPS or something, but more importantly it has enormous levels of memory and storage bandwidth, which is what's actually important for most user workloads these days.
That's not even accounting for the performance of the GPU cores which can be used for a ton of multimedia workloads.
I've heard this tossed around a lot, but is there any evidence that it's actually true? I struggle to imagine a regular workload that benefits from 32gbps of bandwidth, much less a scenario where the average layman could saturate a 200gbps or 400gbps bus.
Since this is HN, many of us like… compiling, you know, stuff. It is a regular workload for many of us on here.
The main beneficiary of the M1 Max wide memory architecture appears to be the Haskell GHC compiler, which is very, very voracious when it comes to the memory consumption and the data bus width. Regular Haskell builds shift the data around at 35-40 Gbps on average, with the Haskell optimiser hovering around 50 Gpbs and easily peaking out at 65 Gbps on medium size projects. Since cabal (the Haskell build toolchain) for some reason can't fully utilise the «-j10» parameter, roughly a 1/2 of CPU cores are not utilised. Which means we can kick off another large Haskell build in parallel without affecting memory transfer speeds of the first build.
Rust release builds are a runner-up with 30-35 Gbps transfer speeds on average. Static type analysis and type inference in Haskell and Rust is hard, is complex and requires a lot of fast memory and benefits vastly from large CPU caches.
I have not attemped a Rust LTO build yet, but I would expect the LTO builds to like the wide memory bus, like, A LOT. In general, a LTO build (e.g. large C++ builds) is heavily memory bound and shifts data blocks, small and large, around extensively.
But an application is not very useful with a dataset, so many of us then like training our data models. Data model training can easily saturate 200 Gbps per a M1 Max CPU cluster.
Then the application needs to load the data in and usually do something with it. For example, issue complex queries to a graph database. Large CPU caches coupled with a wide data bus is a winner here.
All of the above are examples of real, practical and regular workloads.
I could easily imagine AI model training blowing up a memory bus, but every machine that isn't an M1 Pro or M1 Max is going to delegate that to a dGPU that is bound by PCIe bandwidth, not memory. Even then, properly-optimized CUDA programs will calculate most of the work on your GPU itself, constraining you to the 300-something gbps that your GPU is capable of.
Regardless, neither of these workloads are something that I'd imagine the average Macbook user doing on a regular basis. The only "real world" workload I can imagine that would exercise it is insanely high-res video encoding, which again, is only really going to be taken advantage of by a handful of users.
> I'd be inclined to agree, but my 16gbps i5 520m compiles Rust just fine. Small and medium-sized desktop applications aren't constrained by bandwidth as much as they are CPU-bound.
Gbps refers to the memory throughput, not to the memory footprint. A Haswell CPU equipped laptop with 16 Gb of RAM can compile Rust applications just fine; the difference is the time. Compile times are the single important delineating factor for software engineers.
> Even then, properly-optimized CUDA programs will calculate most of the work on your GPU itself, constraining you to the 300-something gbps that your GPU is capable of.
With all due respect, it is exceptionally unusual to train ML models directly in CUDA, which is a low-level proprietory Nvidia API. Of which CUDA is one, and there are several others as well (ROCm, OpenCL, CoreML, Metal etc), and they are swapped out for one another depending on what the underlying hardware actually is. ML training is done via the use of high-level ML frameworks (Tensorflow, NumPy, SpaCy, Pandas, SPARK and others), but not in CUDA – it simply almost does not exist.
Lastly, whilst the ML training undertaken on a high performant and an exorbitantly expensive dGPU itself would be substantially faster compared to 32 M1 Max GPU cores, one would yet be constrained with the PCIe bus data transfers speeds: ~32Gbps for PCIe v4.0 in the x16 lane setup (the high end of the commodity PC hardware today), and ~64 Gpbs for PCIe v5.0 in the x16 lane setup (not even unavailable for purchase today in PC laptops and desktops). With both being a far cry from the 200 Gbps of a single M1 Max CPU cluster.
Apple Marketing: This year Apple is going green in an all new way!
If this was released and allowed for relatively straightforward overclocking, user replaceable RAM and a full size GPU of one’s choosing, what could they charge?
The M1 Mad Macs edition would be loved by all 9 of us.
That “dippy little M1 MacBook Air” is damn fast. Even for single core tasks. I’ve owned one for a year now, and recently got the new M1 Pro with eight of the same cores, and single thread performance is not low by any sensible measure.
The M1 Max was only released 3 months ago...
(Your other points stand though)
I believe the Pro and Max are the same die binned differently as you alluded to.
This is all in the lower chunk of the die, such that they could basically cut the design on the dotted line for the M1 Pro (not literally, but almost; they definitely didn't redo much if any P&R, as the shared portion is identical by all visual and logical appearances).
And as Hector said, M1Max is identical to M1Pro but with an bottom extension which provides more Ram interfaces, Caches, GPU, Média and Neural Engines, PLL and probably all the logic for a die to die connection.
But this die-to-die area has been cutted on the Apple picture presented in keynote.
I don’t think M1Pro has a such die-to-die logic, but I don’t see real picture of M1Pro die.
Binning comes in with the lower-core-count variants of each chip.
SoC codes T8103 (M1), T6000 (M1 Pro), T6001 (M1 Max).
Yes, they do use binning and e-fuses for the lower core count versions within each die/SoC type.
Techinsights have a die shot of the original M1[0].
But for the pro and max, I could only find the die shots from the apple press release.
The pro just looks like a cropped max, I wasn't sure if it was just cropped for illustration purposes or actually a different die.
Are there any publicly available die shots of pro/max from a third party source?
[0]: https://www.techinsights.com/blog/two-new-apple-socs-two-mar...
I'm not aware of any other public die shots of the Pro, but there is one of the Max that went around on Twitter and it matches the marketing shot, plus an extra strip on the bottom edge as we'd suspected. We do know the M1 Pro has a completely different and smaller package, however, and the M1 Max die would not fit on it. That one was leaked months before the announcement as part of the board layout and schematics for that machine. So the Max die simply wouldn't fit on Pro machines, and this is from engineering drawings.
It may well be that they have different die. But that’s usually an expensive way to do things. Usually you want downgrade paths for devices that don’t yield.
Source: 23 years in semiconductor industry.
Source: over one year working on reverse engineering this precise platform almost full time.
Also, if you've spent 23 years in the semiconductor industry, I have no idea where you're getting the "not connecting metal" story. Nobody does that. How would you even do that for a yield issue? That doesn't make any sense. Chips that have failed bits get the broken parts marked bad via eFuses after production and the initialization logic or bootloader will then read the fuses and power/clock gate those bits and lock them in that state, via existing isolation/gate logic. That's how the entire industry does it. Metal patches are for fixing design bugs in a respin and stuff like that, not for turning things off in a finished chip. And you certainly wouldn't make a change in the line to the metal to disable half a chip from the get go. That's just throwing silicon away for no reason, why wouldn't you try building the full thing first and seeing what works? The entire concept makes no sense.
Obviously the 3080 smashes the Apple GPU but that comes at a huge power cost.
But as we all know what Apple is/was shipping and the best you can get in a PC laptop are very different things.
My M1 Air absolutely DESTROYS my RTX 3090 in h265/422 video editing, which is what my camera (Sony A7S iii) shoots.
My 3090 would shutter and play my 60fps footage at 11fps using 350W while my passively cooled M1 doesn't miss a frame.
it obviously doesn't matter for your workload, ultimately the M1 is faster and that's all that matters for you. just highlighting that this isn't magic, just hardware matched to use case.
But then they don't change that often.
Your probably change your apple laptop more often.
And given that codecs are pretty much the only "high performance" use-case apples target audience has to a high degree putting special hardware in to make it go fast is the right way to go.
But, it had stagnated since the 4th gen. Intels 10th gen graphics were meant to go out with their first 10 nanometer chips, but that took them an extra few years.
All that said, yeah, I'd love to see even better integrated graphics. As others have mentioned, the RAM is a significant limitation.
For now: And for the cases where it isn't, Intel wants you go for an dedicated graphics cards. (There is a cost to stuffing more onto the same CPU package, chiplets do reduce that cost by quite a bit, but are a new technology you have to integrate into your design flow, tooling etc.)
In the future: Similar, but due to some shifts in their approach Intel might reach for chiplets. Similar there are dedicated Intel Graphics cards they want to sell to you.
Probably a more fair comparison of the architectures will be between the M1X and the i7-1280p, since they have similar power specs. It wouldn't surprise me if the M1X comes out on top since it's on a superior process node (TSMC 5nm vs Intel 7) and on-chip memory is faster, but I think they'll definitely be comparable.
Completely silent, cold, and I haven't had any issues in my personal workflow.
My next mobile purchase (or build, I'm into cyberdecks lately) will have a different form factor display, like 4:3 or 3:2, and I hope Apple makes it. I really thought the Framework might be it until I used one, but it felt like they're only making laptops as an experiment in opex minimalism, and that they're planning to sell off as soon as they establish the value of the "overpriced semi-open eco-conscious DIY laptop" market.
I've talked two people into buying M1 Airs and one M1 Mac Mini from Costco on sale. I haven't recommended anyone buy a Mac since 2014, but these things are fantastic.
it's a very strange feeling, they actually burn so much that they itch
A lot of people want gaming laptops, so systems with big GPUs and big CPUs and not so great size/weight/battery life can be had relatively cheap.
But most people that want big CPUs and good battery life but don't care about the GPU so much are people who need the system for their job, so manufacturers can get away with pricing those systems higher.
It seems like most of the high performance numerical computing software today is GPU-accelerated. If performance for your job is super important, why isn't your software GPU-accelerated?
I might just be naive but it's honestly hard for me to imagine why anybody would need a good CPU and not also want a good GPU.
Their supply chain is super optimized, and it's hard to beat them on price if a competitor decides to try (at the same quality that is).
I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago.
But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery.
None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.
Mac hardware holds value because it's well built, supported for a long time, has specs that are enough for a wide range of users...
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For every power user running through battery cycles every day, there's people who just need a solid well built machine and won't feel the need to upgrade just because their machine gets less battery life, or a given IDE needs more RAM.
Those people don't replace hardware because it's broken, they replace it because it feels old. Design wise, materials wise, etc. Not having crummy bloatware slowly accreting gigabytes of junk and a dozen extra startup items.
Compare a sub $1000 M1 Air to any other sub $1000 laptop coming out today. You'd be incredibly hard pressed to find anything even half as well designed... that's how you get people to keep their hardware.
I sold it last month to pick up a new 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max. I bought it with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD because I don't need anymore, 8 years later. And the i7 I had still beat out last years base model on Geekbench.
We've solved the storage latency and throughout bottlenecks, scheduling, and CPU core counts, so we don't really need beaucoups of RAM for a functional laptop.
RAM bandwidth doubles with each generation and throughout and latency improve, so less is needed for the same performance.
Batteries are relatively inexpensive to replace through the vendor are improved in energy density, energy density, and cycles, so there's not a big advantage to buying aftermarket even though you can.
For 2014-2016 Macs with flash storage, they're still pretty great to excellent machines. The greatest detriment to the longevity of 2017-2019 Macs is that they contain Intel components, and that every release of MacOS since High Sierra has been designed adversarial against their security flaws. Costco was practically giving away Intel iMacs recently, offering them almost half off.
Also, I remember benchmarking on apfs post-mitigations and seeing up to a 40% performance loss on some syscalls, which translated to an unusable computer on dual core Intels or anything with mechanical storage. How would upgrading components have helped then?
They downclock the CPU on mobile devices as the battery ages, to keep the CPU from browning out so you
My system, made in 2013, won't be supported by the next OS release this coming fall, but they usually continue security updates at least one release behind. That's basically ten years of hardware support.
Keep in mind that Windows 10 came out in 2015. A ton of manufacturers simply did not support windows 10 on hardware sold before it, because win10 coming out helps them move new PCs.
Apple leads the industry in using slave labour to create disposable fashion items.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/10/seven-apple-suppliers-alleged...
RAM bandwidth is improving a lot faster than its latency. (The latter is almost as stagnant as max CPU clock frequencies.)
I would be OK with my M1 Air performing in a similar way.
My iPhone came out around the same time and Apple is planning to support devices several generations older than mine with iOS 16...
Just saying.
Otherwise, yeah! My wife has an older iPhone still nicely supported, and older than my Note.
My last Mac was a 2012 i7. I used it 6, 7 years? It is still useful, but got coke on keyboard! I fixed it myself last time. Not doing it again.
I wouldn't choose that kind of uncertainty.
If you do any volume purchasing the resale value of old Acer laptop or asus ones is so bad they really do become w waste quickly. Folks w macs use them forever. And then resale market isMUCh better for apple
Can I really run everything windows runs on windows ARM offerings? Be good if MS has solved things this time around. Some of us still remember Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" campaign against Apple.
I'd say 10 years is a pretty good run for a laptop. YMMV
I know someone who got an MSI laptop recently and it’s complete garbage. The screen casing cracked from the force of the hinge within months, the trackpad is borderline unusable, wifi is spotty, the paint on the keyboard started flaking off within months, and it’s a general piece of junk.
But on the store page it looks like an extreme bargain because it has the same ram, GPU and cpu as much more expensive laptops
Yep! Like with dell: non-standard power supply size, non-standard motherboard size. And with most of the companies: a motherboard that uses whatever the cheapest USB, sound, SATA chipsets were in the bin that week.
The boards are designed and reworked constantly by the factories...as opposed to Apple who pour enormous engineering effort into refining, testing, etc each revision.
if you want one or two tb of storage and decent ram you're looking at $3,000+ after taxes
Apple has also repeatedly sold several year old computers at brand new prices, in particular the 13" 2012 MBP that was only discontinued mid-2016, the 2015 MBA that they "updated" in 2017 and sold for another few years, the 2014 mini, the 2013 Mac Pro. What's worse is most of these were computers at the bottom of their price range. I had to steer so many people away from the attractive seeming base model MBP and convince them that yes, it worth spending $200 extra to get a machine that's 3 years newer. What other OEM literally sells several year old machines for new prices?
EDIT: Just remembered they still sell the 2018 i5 Mac Mini for the same price.
EDIT 2: Oh yeah and I just remembered they'd hide what generation Intel CPU you were getting and just say Dual Core 2.5Ghz i5.
This is very real. I noticed that the Lenovo T14s has a noticeably better trackpad than the Lenovo T14, but you can't tell unless you try it out on both Notebooks as both are listed as "Mylar® surface multi-touch touchpad" on the spec sheet.
At the same time, this can be important or not.
When I do my pc builds I pick the cheapest case as well, and I'm fine with it. Similarly I took non-Apple laptops all my life (up to 5 years ago, when I started coasting on employers' hardware) without many problems. I just couldn't justify spending 3k to have a laptop which performs as well as one for 1k, just for the better quality of the materials.
So their entry level machines are a great deal -- you get the quality of a 5000€ machine for just 2500€ if you can live with limited storage.
But if you want enough storage, you're paying the full price...
I'm not a fan of their policy, because the result is that lots of people get computers that are artificially crippled by low storage. But there's no way they could keep their entry level prices as low if they charged a fair price for upgrades.
It sounds really weird to talk about 2500 EUR laptop as "entry level".
> They want to offer computers at every price point
They don't offer anything under 1000 EUR.
Apple is doing the same as car companies: Make the base price of each model as low as possible and then charge ridiculous sums for extras.
Not that I'm trying to blame Apple, they've done a great job and it would be irrational for a company to not take the free money (I'd do the same and it's not that their competitors are better, high end PC laptops have similar margins it's just that less people want them so Dell, Lenovo etc. tend to sell them at massive ~50% discounts eventually (same with Android phones) which Apple never does, since their prefer to sell at relatively low volumes but with huge margins). However their prices for ram/storage are objectively predatory and the only reason they can get away with it is because there is no viable competition, it has nothing to do with "subsidizing" entry levels Macs. If they wanted to they could easily cut their prices by 500-1500 across the entire 14/16" mbp range and still remain more profitable than all the other laptop manufacturers.
I own one of the new Macbook Pros, and the build quality of them is fantastic. It's the sturdiest computer I've ever seen. It's a huge jump from their previous models, it's even better than the 2015 models, which were already very good. I've opened it up to look at the internals, and there's so much material everywhere. No wonder it's heavier. Even the base plate is a lot stiffer than in the previous models.
Now, I must concede that I'm not too familiar with windows laptops, but I've never seen anything remotely comparable to this. If you could point me to a 1300€ windows laptop that's even close to the Macbook Pro in build quality, I'd love to hear about it.
And that's not even mentioning how fantastic the display and the speakers are, because they are unbelievable.
The only thing that's cheap about the new Macbook Pros is the camera, which unfortunately is still a piece of crap, just with some machine learning algorithms applied (they don't help).
Obviously I don't Apple's exact margins, they are probably lower than 50% but not by much however: "But there's no way they could keep their entry level prices as low if they charged a fair price for upgrades." is simply just not true, they obviously could do that if any of the conditions I mentioned changed, they just don't because as any other company Apple seeks to maximize it's profits.
Dell XPS, Thinkpad X1, Razer Blade and Surface Laptop lines have pretty decent build quality, of course they all have inferior CPUs which use more power and generate way more heat compared to the Mac (I didn't say you can get one for 1300€, just that that other manufacturers try to price their premium laptop lines at similar level as Apple but usually end up having to sell them at significant discounts)
Do that, same wattage, less than twice the price, twice the performance. Now what, Intel?
The 100 watts mentioned in the article is the whole laptop power. Google tells[0] me the power consumption of the i9-12900HK is 45 with boosts up to 86W.
Intel's 12th gen i9 is built on 7nm, Apple's M1 max is build on 5nm. Rule of thumb, is about 30% power saving at same performance for a new node.
So assuming max performance of M1 Max is 40W and i9-12900HK is 86W, adjusted for process node we are looking at 40W vs 60W.
[0]https://wccftech.com/intel-core-i9-12900hk-alder-lake-is-a-p...
Which would be throttled to death at that point on a nimble laptop anyway!
Why do they even bother?
>It's also a _little_ bit funny that the i9 laptop was double the price, given people usually rant loudly about how expensive Apple computers are.
They ususally don't do an Apple to Apple comparison, else the price differential for similar features, construction, etc. and some uniques that you only get from Apple is either zero or around $100-$200, when you pile in the extra options.
Instead they check things like that an extra 1TB of SSD is X on the Applestore but half or less on the street...
(Basically I'm going to make battery stats work, polish up the install process, re-do the CPU frequency scaling driver, and ship it)
When you normalize for that, isn’t the power usage they equal?
M1 is not more powerful due to a better design, but simply due to more modern manufacturing process.
Otherwise you would see a much larger gap in performance.
Are you implying that's not something to be impressed about just because lithography is not a property of the architecture?
Apple's contribution to M1 was the design. TSMC built the next gen fabs, and gets credit for the manufacturing.
You can't compare viability or success of the processor design when you compare cross fab generations. It's apples to oranges.
You can state that M1 is better, which is true, but it doesn't follow at all that it's due to the design component.
It could very well be that moving Intel's design to TSMC's fab would lead to it running circles around M1
I mean this is pretty obvious stuff, but these threads always end up full of people that don't understand hardware very well
Or not. There is no reason to believe Apple design has not been a major contribution to the performance. Sure TSMC process is a major component but to quote yourself it does not follow that that explains all of it. It could very well be that a hypothetical Apple design to Intel fab would still run circles around current Intel chips (or not). What we do know is system architecture is sufficiently different, and that it is likely to have a material impact on performance.
So yes, you absolutely can separate them, and that's how it was historically done. Though Intel fell behind on this philosophy.
If you don’t know how the space operates, why are you commenting?
But the problem is that’s hypothetical. The article is comparing products available today. And that’s what Intel has to compete with.
Intel touted this as their “answer” to the M1. They may have overplayed their hand. Maybe should have held that marketing point for next year.
If we normalize for Moore's law then historic processors would compare much more favorably.
In fact it's a bit unfair to Apple to compare this sample unit to last year's production model.
I don’t care why something is better as long as it doesn’t require human sacrifice, just that it’s better. And the M1 beats the snot out of anything x86 without qualification. Add on that you can get it in a Mac Mini for $600 and ding ding ding Apple wins.
Worse, the Microsoft ARM SQ1 in the Surface Pro X performs like 1/3rd the benchmark performance as the M1. I know synthetic benchmarks aren't very meaningful but we have some X's at work and I've played with them and they are all unusually and annoying slow while my Air feels like I'm using a high-wattage desktop.
The value of the M1 Macbook Air is pretty wild right now. The only thing keeping Intel's stock price above water is that Apple will never license this out to Windows laptop makers and Windows has monopolistic lock-ins so not everyone can just switch to Apple, especially businesses, so Intel is safe in the Windows world for now.