Every M1 Mac is due for a 2022 refresh with faster M2 chip, new designs | Hacker News Reader

Every M1 Mac is due for a 2022 refresh with faster M2 chip, new designs

macworld.com

188 pointsorangebanana1295 comments

I don’t understand the magic at work in an 8gb M1 macbook air.

If i run android emulator (consuming 4-6Gb) + iPhone simulator (1-2Gb) + react native hot reload toolchain (1-4gb) + vscode (1-2gb) + firefox (1-3gb) all concurrently, then my memory pressure is around 65%, i have about 3gb swapped but very little paging activity.

Everything feels snappy.

What is this magic? I was convinced it would be the speedy SSD masking the page faults but there’s very little swapping going on.

Quite taken with it tbh. Still think MacOS is crap overall though. Soon as linux is viable on M1 as a daily driver, i am checking out of macos.

OS X does memory compression.

A few years ago I was trying to reproduce a memory issue in a C++ app by sending it a ton of the same thing over and over again.. on my OS X laptop I couldn't reproduce the problem at all, until I had it send random data.

If you open "Activity Monitor" and look at the memory tab, it will show you a value for "Compressed"

see https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/13/compressed-memory... or similar for more info.

Which is why, as an iOS developer, you should never respond to memory pressure notifications by actively freeing memory! You'll inevitably end up touching compressed memory pages in the process, increasing your app's memory use as pages get decompressed so you can free the allocations.

[this is technically true on the Mac, but your Mac app isn't going to get jetsam'd like your iOS app will]

This is not usually true. Memory compression prioritizes speed not compression ratio so even something like a bitmap from a JPEG source is not likely to be very compressed. Freeing the buffer is still a net win.

Further the pages themselves (for a large allocation) don't all get touched when freed so the kernel can skip decompressing them.

Measure the behavior of your application. Most of the time freeing cached values is the correct response to memory pressure, or use things like NSCache that handle it for you.

It is true except for freeing large allocations; that's the only safe thing. Calculating what you have to free can also be problematic, or running a GC which has to decompress pages to scan pointers etc. This will come up if you see your app getting background killed. If nothing bad happens then nothing bad happens, of course.

You honestly shouldn't use NSCache as nobody understands what it does, or tests its eviction behavior, and what it actually does - evict everything under memory pressure - is probably the time you want your cache to work.

Would this be the case if you just used the `free(3)` syscall, and didn't otherwise touch the memory?

I can imagine destructors in most languages involving touching the memory, just curious if a free syscall alone does it or not.

Above 16KB (one page) it's safer. Depends how much work you need to do to figure out what can be freed.

It's better to free things as you go rather than wait for warnings.

Section 3 are library calls, section 2 has the actual syscalls.

Some related trivia. The `errno` command, for looking up syscall error codes, is not installed in `/usr/bin` in macOS like on typical Linux distros. But the same information is available in `intro(2)`, e.g.

  $ man 2 intro | grep -w 17
       17 EEXIST File exists. An existing file was mentioned in an inappropriate

Windows 10 also enables memory compression by default, on Linux it is optionally available (zram); Android phones typically make use of it.

On Linux there are also zswap with a compressed cache in front of the real swap. Depending on workload either zram or zswap may work better under the memory pressure.

Also, there is a matter of the compression algorithm selection. With modern kernel using anything but lz4 or zstd is rather suboptimal.

But then again I have Samsung 980 PRO SSD in my laptop and with it I just disabled memory compression and use the real swap. The read speed is like 2 times faster then lz4 decompression and while the write speed is like 3 times less than lz4, it does not tax CPU which is a big bonus when I compile a big C++ project that does occasionally triggers the need for SWAP even with 32 GB of RAM.

M1 pro/max has huge memory bandwidth (including L1, L2 and DDR: 102GB/s), I guess it helps compression faster than x86?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

memory compression allowed me to to allocate and store 20GB of genomics data in memory on my old 16GB MBP. ZRAM in Linux allowed me to do the same.

You used the ASCII encoding for it, I presume? That's trivial to compress to 2/8 = 25%, or 5GB in your case.

if it's one byte per 3-base codon, that's 6/8 compression 15GB/20GB

I went from a 64GB RAM ThinkPad to a 8GB RAM M1 Air, and ditched my PC entirely. No fans, no noise, no heat, it's like a fairytale. Watching videos in 4k60 has very low CPU usage if any thanks to excellent hardware acceleration with modern browsers (especially Safari for obvious reasons). Many things to be impressed about.

>Watching videos in 4k60 has very low CPU usage if any thanks to excellent hardware acceleration with modern browsers

This is in no way exclusive to Apple.

If you know of a laptop that runs Linux which isn't ChromeOS that can YouTube at 4k60 without its fans ramping up at all or being audible, I'd love to hear it. My experience has not been such.

Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit all support VAAPI on Linux but often require extra config/flags/packages. Closer to working out of the box though.

thinkpad x395 (2019), the one I am using.

I suspect your setup isn't using hw acceleration for video decode.

Correct me if I’m wrong but the M1 performs and looks better on paper when doing synthetic benchmarks because they’re heavily optimized for specific tasks with ASICs on the SoC. While commendable to the general public, once a new video codec that’s NOT H264/H265 comes out, it’ll probably rely on general purpose cores and may fall behind dedicated GPUs which have slightly more capability than ASICs for general use. Fortunately, H264/H265 isn’t going anywhere so that MacBook will continue to efficiently process 4K60 videos on little power.

The keyword here is excellent hardware acceleration. You can have all sort of hardware acceleration, partial hardware with help of GPU or CPU or full hardware. But at the end of the day it is total watt during decoding that matters. M1 decode H.265 and VP9 4K60 using 150mW. I am not aware of any other current video decoder on PC that offer this low power usage.

All modern integrated GPUs have full accelerated video decode for both H.265 and VP9.

Where did you get your 150mW figure from?

Full accelerated video decode does not equal low power video decode. I think I need to keep repeating this until I stamp out all accelerated video decode are created equal. ( Otherwise you would have market wide AV1 decoding by now ) You could spend 1W or up to 4W decoding 4K60 on non-Mobile optimise Video Decoder IP. It doesn't block your CPU, but it is not low power.

>Where did you get your 150mW figure from?

It is consistent with Apple's video decoding power requirement over the years. May be slightly lower given at one point it was 250mW. You could do your own measurement on your macOS with powermetrics utility.

Moden laptops ALL have dedicated low-power video decode. There is no modern laptop that will use 4W decoding video on the GPU. EVERY single modern laptop has a video decode IC that is optimized for mobile usage. Hell, AMD laptops even share their iGPU desgins, loosely speaking, with some smartphones.

> It is consistent with Apple's video decoding power requirement over the years. May be slightly lower given at one point it was 250mW. You could do your own measurement on your macOS with powermetrics utility.

No, you can't. powermetrics on macOS is not granular enough to do that. If you figured out a way, please be explicit on how you did it.

>This is in no way exclusive to Apple.

Perhaps not, but on most Intel laptops (especially those with comparable form factors to an air or pro), you're probably at least going to have a fan spinning up playing 4k60 content.

I have an X1 Carbon 6 (2018) ultraportable with an i7-8250U 15W quad core processor. I feel certain both Windows and Linux handle 4K60 streaming without spending more than 1-3W and no fan.

I’ll test and check back soon.

This.

I am considering buying a 24” iMac now as well.

> Still think MacOS is crap overall though. Soon as linux is viable on M1 as a daily driver, i am checking out of macos.

This is a weird position to hold. You just argued why macOS does some fundamental things (at least memory management) really well.

It's possible to appreciate certain aspects of a product and still dislike the product as a whole. I appreciate how relatively easy it is to understand Windows' directory structure (for example) but that doesn't mean I want to use the whole OS on my own time.

Sure, but there is a difference between "I don't like this" and "this is crap". I can 100% see how macOS might rub people the wrong way, and there are definitely some dubious choices in there from a purely technical point of view, but that doesn't really amount to "crap overall".

Ye, I dislike the Unixy way of mounting hard drives where ever. There is some mental calmness of having the root of the HD at a drive letter in "My Computer" ...

Linux disk management tools were my gateway drug.

diskpart and diskmgmt.msc are fine, but gparted does nearly anything feasible, it’s indispensable.

Then you just run ‘mount’ and ‘df -h’ a lot and in the end that’s similar to ‘net use’ on Windows + My Computer wrapped into one.

“Everything is a file” is a useful paradigm, and then just think of your disk as an image file in a fixed spot.

Sorry if this winds up a ramble or you’re well aware.

It really is.

Even if you dont like the macOS GUI, I dont think any reasonable evaluation could call macOS 'crap overall'.

Distros like Ubuntu, are excellent, but they just dont have feature parity with macOS.

> I dont think any reasonable evaluation could call macOS 'crap overall'.

Would it not depend on the workload? I hear a lot of web developers and content creators who share this sentiment; fair enough. But there's a number of consumer markets who would indeed drag MacOS for lacking 32-bit support, decent container compatibility or a package manager. It's overall less compatible with software than Windows or even Linux, and if you want to do development outside of the Apple ecosystem or besides the web, getting a proper development environment up and running is an exercise on the treadmill of neverending maintenance. It certainly doesn't look appealing to a gaming crowd or people writing software for Windows (with M1 cross-compiling is dead in the water), it can't do Boot Camp anymore and it's a nightmare for DevOps folks who want to run Docker tests on their laptop.

I can understand who likes MacOS and why they'd like it, but if you do anything other than text editing or media encoding for a living then the benefits of using MacOS start to deteriorate very quickly.

Ya, but that is still a kind of 1 star until they do x kind of thing. Meanwhile if a macOS fan was to say they think Windows is crap because for some reason they feel the need to re-install the OS every month to solve some inexplicable stability problem, it would probably make a bit more sense. I'm a gamer and have a PC only for that purpose, I don't feel like my mac is crap because it doesn't play some of them.

Maybe I am old, but modern operating systems are so much better than what I had in the 90's that honestly I don't care too much to micro-optimize my personal usage with the perfect operating system. As long as they do power management and external displays well, I don't care too much if using Mac OS, Fedora or Windows 10/11 with WSL.

just a guess, but probably they are saying from a developer perspective; there are less options in macos (many libraries/packages not available) and less room to customize things

It's mainly three things:

- ram compression (fast CPU helps that this is non-noticeable)

- aggressive swapping on a fast SSD (you'll notice that macOS swaps unused pages even if there is ram left to make space for file caches)

- the M1 is just very fast, especially ram, so it's snappy overall

These are all true, but you’re missing the main one.

“Apple Silicon” is very highly optimized for strict reference counting (instead of garbage collection). The retain/release performance is just off-the-wall — even in Rosetta. Details here: https://blog.metaobject.com/2020/11/m1-memory-and-performanc...

Anecdotally, I spent most of last year in Docker, XCode and Node on an 8gb Air, smoove sailing

I don't think that's at all the main one given OP's list of apps. It'll accelerate things built in Apple's Swift/ObjC ecosystem, but it's not going to help node, android, react native toolchain, etc.

And regardless of that, the instructions speed the atomic operations required when updating references in a mulithreaded environment. It's lowering active CPU use. They're not going to do anything to reduce the impact of a mostly idle application in the background on the rest of the system.

The reference counting mechanism itself does mean you don't have to walk memory as much to do garbage collection, which risks pulling rarely used memory back in from swap. But that was true on the Intel Macs, too.

Now that’s a piece of the puzzle i hadn’t heard of before. I knew about the memory compression, and iStat menus does a decent job of visualising it but this, this is new to me.

HN is such a useful community for finding little tidbits of brain candy like this.

That's true, I forgot that!

There's also this informative comment [1] from the post author (Marcel Weiher) explaining some details:

"This doesn't use less RAM, it decreases the performance cost of using the more frugal RC."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208007

Interesting. I don't think retain/release itself is helping with the memory, but reference counting very much seems like it would, and the retain / release speed makes that possible?

It's kind of crazy how well 8GB does. On a PC when you have all the pre-installed crapware +++ 8GB is really too low these days.

Sortof. I personally dislike the way it won't kill ridiculous processes, and "merely" slows everything down massively.

To be fair, I'm doing DS on this so end up dealing with really large in-memory datasets, so I hit this relatively often.

That use case is tough for this model for sure. You're not tempted to remote to some other box with more memory? It's not hard to buy / spin up a box.

Oh yeah, that's what I tend to do since I discovered this problem. It's a pretty small company, so they'd prefer that I didn't keep large boxes running constantly though (which is fair).

They're getting me the new MB Pro with 32gb of RAM, which will definitely help.

Making atomics (and thus reference counting) fast is absolutely not the "main" benefit of Apple silicon.

The swapping is crazy good, I had an insane memory leak on a process I was running and my swap was up to 60 gigs before I realized what was happening (slight UI stutters at that point) and killed the process.

The degree to which swapping hurts responsiveness depends a lot on why and how it occurs.

If swapping just means moving large contiguous pages that are completely inactive, it's a bunch of writes which neither slows hot memory access nor the ssd.

If, on the other hand, you're swapping out pages that frequently need to be re-read, that's another story.

So if swapping works well, that's to some degree a sign that your software has bloated "dead" memory regions.

Memory leaks typically don't swap back in, so affect performance less than you'd think. Something like a GC scan can swap them though.

Well, it depends on how you're leaking things. If you're doing small allocations and the leaks are interleaved with extant objects, the pages will remain live and you'll just cause pressure.

I did a few min of Google but couldn't find a source, but I remember Apple had specific instructions and hardware block specific to Memory compression. Making higher and faster compression then previous method relying on solely on CPU.

They do; the instructions implement WKdm in hardware.

I'm keeping an eye on Asahi Linux for M[12]. Other than the CPU, I don't much care for the entirety of the Apple experience, but that's me. This M1's absolute silence with all the cores running and its battery life are wonderful.

What makes you think a reverse engineered driver set, with no official docs, on a custom and closed platform - is going to offer anything close to M1 MacOS experience ?

If you want a quiet device with low battery consumption and don't care about performance you can downclock/disable turbo boost and get that on other devices, with better Linux support.

Probably with a performance penalty in comparison to the M1 though, and the Apple chassis quality/design is something else, you just don't get it elsewhere.

Considering what the Asahi team has been doing so far and their reports I'm positive the CPU isn't a problem (since it's ARM). If they can get decent GPU performance (power consumption mostly) I'll be all over them.

I wonder if we 3-D scanned a PC laptop chassis and then machined a copy from an aluminum block using a CNC would give us a macbook-like chassis for a PC.

Or design one from the ground up, which would probably be cheaper. Since designing a motherboard to fit the cramped space in the macbooks is very hard. They're really cramped in there.

> What makes you think a reverse engineered driver set, with no official docs, on a custom and closed platform - is going to offer anything close to M1 MacOS experience ?

My hopeless optimism, and the fact I don't consider Apple "magic".

Is there a Linux laptop like that without a fan at all like the M1 Macbook Air?

If you're fine with the performance of a 2-core Kaby Lake and rather big bezels around the display, the Google Pixelbook is pretty awesome otherwise.

Interesting. I had the opposite experience. I had a 16GB M1, and once the RAM is exhausted it grinds to a halt - everything lags, including simple tasks like switching browser tabs, every now and then the spinning beach ball of death would come on. It was the worst experience I've had in a modern laptop.

Now I'm on a 64GB M1 Max and things are super snappy again. (Monterey on the other hand is buggy as hell, simple things like tap to click and pinch to zoom are broken. [1])

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tap-to-click-issues-on-...

Try using Safari instead of Chrome. Chrome on M1 is a lackluster experience. Safari is amazingly fast, even with a hundred open tabs.

You can tell Apple has been optimizing a web browser on their own silicon for a long time.

I use Firefox as my main browser, and Brave as my secondary. Safari might be blazingly fast but unfortunately I rely on a lot of extensions that don't exist on Safari. And I rely on Firefox's containers too. :)

These trackpad issues were fixed a long time ago.

No it hasn't. If you read the latest relies (including mine) in the thread, you'll notice that CMD/SHIFT + tap is still broken, at least on the 14". I'm on the latest 12.3 beta too.

> Still think MacOS is crap overall though

And you were doing so well! ;-)

WRT M1 hardware, thats my experience too!

I picked up an M1 Mac mini 8/256 on the Apple Refurb Store as a stop gap machine whilst I waited for the Pro laptops. I ended up waiting a long time!

But it was amazing. The 256GB drive was a bit tight, and fills up a little too quickly. But overall, it was the best computer I'd ever owned!

In the early days I had USB related kernel panics, but later macOS updates seemed to fix all that!

I replaced it with a 16" M1 Pro 16/1TB, and the Mac mini is now working out it's (hopefully) long life in my server cabinet!

I agree, even the GPU is impressive and I say that as someone whose main computer is a gaming PC with an RTX2080.

But the mind-blowing part is the CPU where on some tasks I can get desktop-i9-like level of performance.

“Crap”

I daily drive 3 Linux devices and 2 macOS. macOS isn’t close to crap. It’s better than Linux in some contexts and worse in others. Overall about par.

But that's just, like, your opinion, man.

I think Windows is crap and yet it has billions (!) of users.

I'd argue that's because your use-case doesn't match that of billions of users. Microsoft has to make judgment calls based on user experience of billions of end users on both kernel and front-end parts whereas the the Linux kernel developers can care only about the power users, which makes for a great kernel with superpowers, but you also need superpowers to wield it.

Yes desktop Linux is probably better these days for casual users of many degrees, but those users should probably be using ChromeOS (disregarding privacy questions, only UX) whereas the Linux desktop gives you the choices of boatloads of desktop environments and configurability. There's a reason Windows is the most used "computer operating system" (disregard android and ios).

I'm very happy on Linux myself just to be clear, but there are reasons why we're just a few percent of the market, and using free as in Libre and gratis software mostly.

Windows is crap, Linux is crap, macOS is crap... the crap frat in action. Maybe I'm too pragmatic, maybe OSs are difficult and engineers working on them deserve some credit. Maybe...

Calling something crap doesn't give any meaningful information. Tell what are the use case where it doesn't work correctly for you.

I know OS X has had a feature for compressing data in RAM on the fly—the processor is much faster than RAM, so compressing & uncompressing & loading a smaller amount of data was faster than just loading the larger amount of uncompressed data. That might be what you're seeing.

OS X has insane memory management. One time I had a runaway process using 120gb of swap and never even noticed until I opened Activity Monitor to do look at something something unrelated.

Hopefully Linux on the M1 won’t introduce big issues. I remember daily driving a MacBook Pro 2014 or so and it was pretty horrible .

I have Ubuntu on a ~2017 MBP and except for the camera it works great. I had to fiddle with a few settings for quite a while to get sleep mode working well but other than that no problems.

If I could get an M1 working as well with Ubuntu I'd switch in a second (currently on a Thinkpad).

Apple must explain what it is doing here, otherwise high performance programming becomes like a cargo cult.

They have explained, in some detail. Most of the explanation has already floated up above this comment.

Possibly they improved caching algorithms? Cache misses are expensive.

Maybe a lot of user issues regarding lag wasn't GB of memory which everyone made it out to be but really slow OS and Intel chips getting progressively slower all those security patches...

I wonder if CPU architecture differences have any perceptible impact on user experience. It may be my imagination but back during the PowerPC → Intel transition it felt like the two CPU archs had different "responsiveness profiles" with the OS stalling or feeling bogged down at differing times/situations.

> Quite taken with it tbh. Still think MacOS is crap overall though.

So the amazing memory management you love so much is likely part of the crap os you don't.

> Soon as linux is viable on M1 as a daily driver, i am checking out of macos.

Might as well check out of the apple ecosystem and save yourself some money while you're at it. AMD is supposedly releasing an Arm SoC and theyre also working on one with Samsung (likely mobile). Whether either of them are Laptop/desktop ready or comparable to the M1 is unknown (unlikely competitive without a comparable software ecosystem).

This is good news. I was about 95% of the way to purchasing a 14" MBP this weekend. The 13" is what I really want, having had a late 2013 13" model prior.

I'm on a surface laptop 3 at the moment, but its pretty garbage compared to my experience with Apple previously. The keyboard is already starting to go out on me after barely 2 years of light use. I don't even write software on this thing.

Assuming Apple doesn't shank this refresh with a stealth removal of magsafe or Fn key swap for touchbar, I'll be somewhere at the front of the line on launch day.

Why not just get a 13" MBA, then sell it in a year if the M2 is worth it? The 13" MBA isn't heavy like the 14" model, it's relatively cheap for being significantly more responsive than the Intel 13" MBPs, and it will preserve most of its resale value.

I've got the 13" MBA - I'm pretty impressed. My main computer is a beefy desktop gaming PC with an Intel i9 - but the MBA with M1 can do some of the tasks in a comparable time! The GPU is also impressive - better than any integrated GPU that I've tried before, and not that far behind the RX570 in my HTPC. I'm pleased that Apple is back to focusing on general computing after all those years focusing on mobile devices.

Edit: I meant to say RX570 not RX560. The M1 GPU is actually slightly faster than an RX560 see e.g. https://askgeek.io/en/gpus/vs/Apple_M1-gpu-vs-AMD_Radeon-RX-....

To get decent ram/storage on a MBA (e.g. 16GB/512GB) you're looking at at least $1400 - at which point the 14" m1 pro starts looking attractive with its MiniLED/ProMotion screen, speakers, ports, better overall performance, and physical fkeys.

Plus, the M2 refresh is expected to be announced in March and follow shortly after...

Because that's probably going to be the Apple purchase least likely to retain resale value in the history of their line-up?

I doubt this. Normal people don't care, especially not those looking in the used market. If this were not true, I'd not have a majority of anecdotal accounts of people paying asburd sums for baseline macs brand new that might have even already been out of date.

In one case, I knew someone who "wanted something to watch movies on" and bought a 13" brand new base model macbook pro through a third party installment company. Ended up paying around $4500 CAD for a 13" laptop with 4gb of ram. She tried selling it to me for a huge discount, but even that couldn't have been worth it.

8gb version is so cheap (constantly on ~100€ discount on Amazon, 950€ right now) even if the % loss is high, total loss is low. I'm comparing it to new MBP pricing (13 inch M1 mbp seems pointless) which would be the alternative here - the cheapest m1x is 2.5x the price.

Heck it be worth keeping as a backup device. The only question is - would 8gb version work for you.

Also, I'd recommend buying it from Apple's education store for $100 off if there isn't anything cheaper. It's $200 off at Microcenter sometimes as well.

https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

Do you have any hands on experience with 13" MBA vs 14" or 16" MBP? I will be working from AirBnbs and coffee shops for the most part this year (digital nomad) and I am deciding which Macbook to take for fullstack web development.

I am afraid 13" or 14" won't be big enough. I'm currently on 2015 15" MBP which is mostly fine and theoretically I am prepared to sacrificate some screen size for better mobility (smaller and lighter laptop).

It depends on how much the screen size matters to you, though an iPad using Sidecar might be worth looking at for additional screen real estate.

I put off upgrading a 2016 13" MacBook Pro, thinking that the second iteration of the M1 would be worth the wait. I should have just gone ahead and upgraded earlier. The best thing about the upgrade is that it hasn't been an exciting at all. Instead, all of the minor annoyances of my older laptop went away. It's the same size and weight as my old 13" MacBook Pro, but there is no beachball, no fan noise, and the battery lasts forever.

I also like that it essentially looks the same as recent Intel MacBooks, so it isn't a special target for theft and doesn't look like I spent a ton of money on it.

Here's a side by side comparison.[1] I think the single core Geekbench numbers are often the most relevant to how fast they "feel".

One other note: How revolutionary will the M2 be? A lot of the star talent responsible for improvement in per core performance in the A14 (and M1) chips has been recruited away from Apple[2], so future progress might be slower as it has been for the A15.

[1] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-comparison-chart/?compare=...

[2] https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and...

I have a 14 inch M1 and a 16 inch Intel- the M1 was primarily to test a bunch of ARM stuff. I've also had a 15inch for years.

My take is that the 16 inch is a bit too big to be conveniently portable (especially on airplanes, it's impossible to use there). I don't think the 14 inch is unreasonably small, but it is noticeably smaller than what I'd like. I use external monitors though and have no problem, and I'd much rather carry the 14 inch around.

One thing to note is that these are definitely on the heavier side for Apple, which is part of why I'm happier with the smaller one as my portable machine.

I was leaning towards the smaller models but because of availability and starting a new job I ended up with a 16" M1 Pro and I love it. Usually I prefer smaller items that I use daily but the screen real estate and battery life are worth it in my opinion. That being said, the specs on the base 14" and 16" are definitely overkill for web development. I've never had the fans turn on.

Just switched jobs and got a M1 16". It's definitely bulkier and heavier than the previous gen Intel 16". If you're not at a desk and doing web dev, I would say go for the M1 Air. It's plenty fast and very portable.

I've been working with a 13" MBA, coupled with a Lenovo 14" portable monitor. Obviously when I go to a coffee shop I leave the monitor at home. I like the setup.

Not parent, but I'm in the exact same boat. For me, the 13" MBA doesn't cut it because of the lack of ports. If there had been an M1 MBA with MagSafe + 2 USB-C, I'd have gone for it. But instead I'm holding out for the MBP, which will give me three USB-C ports, SD, and HDMI (assuming it matches the other MBPs).

The main downsides of the the MBP for me are: (1) it will cost more, (2) AppleCare will cost more, and (3) it will be somewhat heavier.

But for extra USB ports and an SD card slot, I'll take it.

> For me, the 13" MBA doesn't cut it because of the lack of ports.

Out of curiosity, why doesn't a powered Thunderbolt dock solve that problem for you? I went from a Mac mini to a (generally docked) MacBook Air, and that setup has worked great.

I don't work in one stationary location, and I don't want to worry about bringing yet another dongle/dock with me. I've had a couple docks over the years, and quality varies. I have friends who've found them to be very fiddly — bumping the table disconnects their monitors and requires a couple minutes to get everything back in place.

Oh, and they cost $150 to $250. After shelling out for a new computer, I don't want to spend hundreds more to have access to functionality that was included with every new MBP (and even some MBAs!) seven years ago.

Makes sense, thank you! My use case is much different since I never need more than two ports while I'm portable, and when I'm at my desk the dock/hub means just one cable for power, monitor, networking, and all of my other devices.

Just get a dock for your MBA.

The only thing that dicks me with the MBA is the shitty webcam. Even the base 9th gen iPad has a decent front camera. I use my iPad Pro 11 for that instead though.

I have a 2017 MBP (no touch bar, so only 2 ports total), and I have a dock. But I don't want to bring it with me everywhere I go.

The mediocre webcam doesn't bother me that much, but I do wish Apple made it easy to use your iPhone's back-side camera for video conferencing. Seems like it would be so easy, and then you could use all the bokeh effects and such.

I hope the redesigned MBA doesn't have a fan and has the same crazy long battery life. The only improvement on battery life I see is making it even better. The M1 MBA is just that good.

For what it's worth, the 14" MacBook Pro is nearly the same size. 0.34" wider (left to right) and only 0.35" deeper. Smaller bezels and the fact that the 14.2" screen is measured diagonally mean that it's actually not that much bigger than the 13.3" device (basically a third of an inch, 0.9cm). I was also worried about the size of the 14" MBP, but it's the best Apple machine I've ever owned and it's not even close (and I was coming from a 2020 13" MacBook Pro with one of the 28W processors).

I'm skeptical of a refreshed 13" MBP. Apple doesn't like having products that only have minor differentiations and offering a screen size that is only half an inch wider seems to muddy the waters a lot. Offering a 13" MBP with M2 Pro would mean pricing it at essentially the same price point as the 14". The 16" is $200 more expensive (for comparable models) with a 2" difference.

Likewise, people talked a lot about how the 13" MBP and the 13" MacBook Air were essentially the same machine, but the 13" MBP is $250 more. What does that get you? 500 nits instead of 400 nits and 10-15% more battery? A fan that seems to never kick in? We know Apple is ditching the TouchBar which was the differentiator for the current M1 MacBook Pro (even if most people hated it, it did increase the cost of the unit).

It just seems unlikely that Apple will want to offer a screen that is only half an inch less wide for basically the same laptop. And realistically, if they're moving to the notch and the 9:5.85 aspect-ratio (~16:10.4), they'll either need to increase the screen size from 13.3" or you'll end up with a narrower screen than the old 16:10. The 16:10 screen should be 11.3" wide so they'd need to boost it to 13.5" to keep the same width. At that point, what's the difference between the 14.2" and 13.5"? 0.7" on the diagonal, 0.6" in width. By contrast, the 16.2" is 2" more in the diagonal and 1.7" more in width - a significant difference when choosing which machine to purchase. The differentiation in screen size between a 14 and 16" MBP is 2.85x larger than the difference in screen size between a 13" and 14".

Either Apple creates a 2022 13" MBP that's essentially an identical product to the MacBook Air or they create a product nearly identical to the 14" MacBook Pro.

What sold me on the 16” is that it is not larger than the 2015 15” models

What wasn’t good enough for you in the 14” line?

Just for reference, the 14 is not actually much bigger than the 13" at all. It's the reduction in bezels around the screen that does it

This is good to know. I probably need to take a trip to the store and compare for myself then. I didn't realize it was basically the same physical size as the older 13" models.

I tried comparing at the store and the overwhelmingness of it all makes it hard somehow. I don’t know if it’s that the tables are so big that the computers look small, the lights, or the fact that you have like 30 screens next to each other. When I compared the 13 to the 14 it didn’t seem worth it for the size difference. However I bought a 14 because I wanted the good screen. To me it’s worth it. I have a 27 IPS 1440p 144hz monitor and I find myself wanting to use the MacBook on its own more just because of how crisp the text is and how black the blacks are.

For portability I fit it in a small tomtoc shoulder/messenger bag that is made for the 13 and I don’t even feel it.

I went from a 13 to the new 14. For the most part it feels like the same size as the old 13, but the screen is noticeably bigger. Other than price, it's hard for me to imagine anything that is better in the 13 than the 14...

Why old 13” instead of the new 14”?

Same size but bigger screen with less bezels, and new keyboard

The M2 may not actually offer a performance advantage over the M1Pro/Max. It will have a more "consumer" core setup.

I suspect that we'll be seeing an M2Pro/Max, soon enough.

That Air might be nice.

My understanding is that the 14"MBP is supposed to be ~the same form factor as the 13"MBP, except the bezels are smaller so you get a bigger screen in the same size package. Am I wrong?

The 14" is larger than the 13" Pro it replaces. It's about the same size as the 13" Pro before that, i.e. the one that still had USB type A ports.

Your last sentence made me laugh out loud as I imagined them announcing the space bar was now a touchbar.

This title reads like they are going to put new chips into existing and already purchased computers :(

Over the air software update ;)

In the future, nanobots will accept an over-the-air hardware upgrade and reassemble your CPU to a new configuration.

...inside your brain.

As long as you're paid up.

I divine that they're already talking about that in meetings about implanted chips, which they want to make mainstream.

Brain implant as a service.

You could probably get the free version with ads constantly showing up in your brain.

As cool as these things run, an over-the-air update that just lets it run a bit hotter could work surprisingly well, especially for devices with fans.

This evokes in me an image of a laptop built with fully reconfigurable hardware (something like an FPGA).

Imagine if you could actually download a faster processor :)

You can (and most likely already do) with microcode [0] :)

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16549/rocket-lake-redux-0x34-...

Yes but can we download more RAM?

You put your existing chip in the microwave to encode the upgrade electromagnetically

Finally, the successor to Apple Wave!

If Elon Musk ran Apple, that's the way it would work.

That's because the headline is not what the author actually wrote, which was: "every Mac line is due for a refresh this year"

The editors dropped a key word.

I have been working on a number of projects involving ARM64 assembly lately. My take is that we haven't even begun to max out the potential of Apple Silicon.

First, many apps still run on Rosetta2. When they are finally converted, libraries and all, to native ARM code, that is real low-hanging fruit yet to be picked.

Second, my sense--this isn't something I have data for--is that the code that is output by compilers can be further optimized much much more than for x64. One example is library routines not using all of the available hardware algorithms, e.g., in cryptogrpahy.

Third, optimizing multithreaded programs for performance vs. efficiency cores. If there's an easy way of doing this, I couldn't find it. I implemented it myself. Making sure intensive tasks are on the performance cores and not randomly assigned to the efficiency cores makes a difference. OS handles this most of the time, I think.

Fourth, Apple could open up some of the internal compute stuff that you need their frameworks for.

Some combination of these things could see our existing M1s feel faster for a long time. If the M2 is a big improvement (hopefully in cores and RAM), I look forward to trying one.

This is music to my ears. Thank you for your efforts. When I first started using my M1 Mac, it was like a computer from another planet. It was so freaking fast it took me back to the 90s/early 2000s when every upgrade was a night and day improvement. I could never believe a computer could be so snappy in everyday usage. It just brings joy every time I use it. Meanwhile I have this 2019 Core i9 Macbook pro at work and it is a slug compared to the M1.

I had the same experience. When I got the DTK I couldn't believe it was running almost everything in emulation and was going to sell for about $500. And that wasn't even an M1.

Exploring all of its unique nooks and crannies has definitely taken me back too!

The percentage of apps that are recompiled for AS is now around 68% https://isapplesiliconready.com/statistics

that’s pretty good for a system that has only been available for about a year.

> Second, my sense--this isn't something I have data for--is that the code that is output by compilers can be further optimized much much more than for x64. One example is library routines not using all of the available hardware algorithms, e.g., in cryptogrpahy.

Your senses are not failing you. Let's pick apart a specific example being the stock openssl binary (/usr/bin/openssl) compiled with unknown C compiler flags vs the manually built one (I have used the one that homebrew ships).

The stock binary reports:

  $ /usr/bin/openssl speed sha256
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 24823543 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 17875138 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 256 size blocks: 13158887 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 5565350 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 874073 sha256's in 2.99s
  LibreSSL 2.8.3
  built on: date not available
  options:bn(64,64) rc4(ptr,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
  compiler: information not available
  The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
  type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
  sha256          132632.74k   382026.73k  1125063.44k  1902869.91k  2391966.26k

Let's tinker with the homebrew's CFLAGS and add ARM64 v8.4 specific optimisation flags + unroll loops + free up the frame pointer register for the general use (-Ofast -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -w -pipe -march=armv8.4-a+simd+crypto+i8mm+bf16+fp16):

  $ /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl@1.1/bin/openssl speed sha256
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 16 size blocks: 76652798 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 64 size blocks: 52778508 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 256 size blocks: 22320676 sha256's in 3.00s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 6744512 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 899002 sha256's in 2.99s
  Doing sha256 for 3s on 16384 size blocks: 451670 sha256's in 3.00s
  OpenSSL 1.1.1m  14 Dec 2021
  built on: Tue Dec 14 15:45:01 2021 UTC
  options:bn(64,64) rc4(int) des(int) aes(partial) idea(int) blowfish(ptr)
  compiler: /usr/bin/clang -fPIC -arch arm64 -Ofast -funroll-loops  -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -w -pipe -march=armv8.4-a+simd+crypto+i8mm+bf16+fp16 -mmacosx-version-min=12 -isysroot/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.sdk -DL_ENDIAN -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_CPUID_OBJ -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DKECCAK1600_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DECP_NISTZ256_ASM -DPOLY1305_ASM -D_REENTRANT -DNDEBUG -isystem/opt/homebrew/include -F/opt/homebrew/Frameworks -isysroot/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX12.sdk
  The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
  type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes  16384 bytes
  sha256          410182.20k  1129707.19k  1904697.69k  2309826.18k  2463085.08k  2466720.43k

By simply specifying ARM64 v8.4 specific code generation flags, the speedup for the 16 and 64 byte blocks is nearly 4x, is nearly 2x for the 256 byte test and a 21% speedup for the 1024 byte test.

What I have begrudgingly noticed, though, is that way too many open source packages go a very long way to forcefully override CFLAGS / CXXFLAGS environment variables (I set mines in the shell rc file) to set them to something else. What are the most usual / typical choices, though? Not very imaginative: «-O2 -g», «-Ofast/-O3», «-O -g» or simply «-O». My personal plea to open source maintainers: can you please stop overriding CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS variables in your Makefile's / CMakefiles unless you know that a specific combination of the optimisation flags breaks your package. «make» / «cmake» et al allow for the conditional or additive setting of variables (i.e. ?= or += vs :=), so please stick with those and inherent the values when they are present in the environment.

Wow! Thanks for this. Always good to know I'm not crazy!

Annecdata: I was editing a movie in FCPX on my 27" iMac (Intel) w/64 GiB and it kept crashing. Reluctantly, I restarted on my 13" MBA (M1) and finished with no problems. Granted there might have been something specific to my circumstances, but I was very impressed with the performance on the lowest-spec M1 laptop.

IMO, the M1 laptops are fairly priced, but the Mac Pros have been poor value in the past. I'm really curious to see if that changes.

> IMO, the M1 laptops are fairly priced, but the Mac Pros have been poor value in the past. I'm really curious to see if that changes.

I, too, am curious how the new Mac Pros are priced. I have a 2013 Mac Pro I paid around $3,800 for. Still using it. Last fall it had a significant performance drop, which I attribute to the Intel security mitigations (it was apparent after a security update to Big Sur).

The current Mac Pros are very much out of my range, but the processors in those things are so expensive. They might be able to lower the price a lot, to the level that the 2013 was at. Hoping, at least.

Well, yeah, that's Apple's standard hardware upgrade cycle.

Breaking – iPhone 13 expected to get upgraded this year with upgraded chip, more features.

Not for the Intel machines. MacBook Pro got at least a CPU bump about every 12-18 months, but machines like the Air, Mini or Mac Pro could go several years without any update at all. https://infonewt.com/apple-release-patterns/#macbook-pro

Exactly. A yearly bump for all the computers like they currently do for the phone would be a huge improvement.

The first batch of M1 machines were released in Nov 2020. Assuming the refresh happens later this year that's still a 1.5-2 year cycle, similar to the old Macbooks.

Plus, even the Intel Macbooks that didn't always get flashy marketing or design updates still had their processors bumped up behind the scenes pretty frequently.

It would be nice if it was upgradable. Then it wouldn't end up in a landfill.

Updates don’t mean that we should expect to trash the existing computer and buy this year’s model. It’s like cars, new models come out each year but most people don’t trade in every year.

If it still works the 2nd hand market for macbooks is hot.

That could be because they're highly sought after, or it could be because there are so few of them that didn't end up in a landfill.

The 2013 Mac Pro went 6 years without an update. 2013 to 2019.

Spoiler: It will be the best iPhone they've ever made

I thought that the previous one was the best

And YOU will LOVE it

Or basically the same chips, slightly faster but changed just enough to exploit the human need for 'new'. But fuck the earth, there's a new iphone.

I wished it was.

I hope they don’t use the power efficient CPUs as an excuse to make the batteries smaller in the new entry level laptops. The current gen is glorious in that regard.

Their batteries have been a huge marketing point. Doubt they will compromise.

Though, with Apple, you never know.

Hoping the new MacBook Air redesign comes in smaller than the current 13” model. I’m looking to upgrade from a 2014 11” MacBook Air, which was one of my favorite computers I’ve ever owned, but the performance was never great. Vastly better performance in a similar form factor and a jaunty color to boot would be a really great upgrade.

I begrudgingly admit that the M1 Air is one of the best computers ever made, having never liked Apple as a company. Not sure what kind of smaller you’re aiming for, but that thing is borderline too small, which is just about perfect.

12" Macbook form factor would be perfect. That thing was always slow with Intel, with M1 it would be super-compact, powerful computer.

Agree, it's a fantastic product. Performance is great, form factor is great. I don't every really think about the computer at all, just what I'm doing with it, which is perfect.

If anything, I think the perfect machine for me would be a 15" macbook air. Same thin design, slightly larger chassis with an edge-to-edge screen. I don't need more performance, but a little more screen real-estate would be nice.

It's a bit bigger and heavier than the old 11" MacBook Air models. Lots of people found that one too small. It has a short trackpad because the screen is so short. It still had a full width keyboard though.

Personally I'm expecting the Air revamp to bear a strong resemblance to the discontinued 12" MacBook, with the big differences being:

- Screen with taller aspect ratio and notch

- Keyboard with slightly more travel

- Die-shrunken M1 CPU (M2 will probably be for flagship models only, similar to latest A-series in iPhones/iPads)

It'll undoubtedly work better than when they tried that with Intel CPUs.

Macbook is the one I bought to side with 15”. Still waiting for the same form factor and weight to get another macbook. Do have a m1 to get my feet wet.

I doubt that they would use a screen smaller than the 13” but they might shrink the bezels enough to get the overall package pretty close to the size of the 12” MacBook.

I had that 11.5” Air and it was my main computer for several years. Amazing performance for such a tiny thing. Mostly connected to an external display when at home.

I'm still incredulous that the M1 only supports one external monitor. Pro and Max support two, but still, in this day and age, supporting only one external is ridiculous.

Apparently the M1 can support an external plugged monitor and an iPad via SideCar. Not a big monitor, to be sure, but it's not nothing. [1]

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_pBL2fMux0

Yeah, I do this; 2020 M1 13" MBP; 4K external monitor and iPad Pro on Sidecar, plus I keep the laptop open so I have three screens. I find Sidecar a bit flaky (it disconnects or freezes a bit too often to be breezily accepted), but with a big iPad (mine is basically A4 paper sized) and SwitchResX in play, it's not bad at all.

Edit: ... and having said all that, I'm looking forward to upgrading some time in the next year and going back to two "proper" external monitors. I'll still love using the Sidecar'ed iPad Pro as a second screen when working in cafes, though...

Remember that the M1s are intended a the consumer line. Very few customers at that level are using multiple external displays. It is a testament to the performance of the M1 that professionals are using them and would want more displays. I hope that they add another display controller so that the M2s can handle more screens.

M1 Mac Mini in my office has 2 external monitors, one connected with HDMI and another one with thunderbolt (usb c).

Right, m1 supports up to 2 displays, including built-in one.

the commenter is referring to the m1 mac mini which is a desktop device last i checked. which does support 2 external monitors

M1 computers work with >1 external displays almost flawlessly with DisplayLink-capable dock-station/adapter. Dock stations are shit though. I use dell d6000 and do not recommend it. It's hot and USB ports on it stopped working. Charging and display outputs still work. And it's expensive.

So it's flawless and shit? Am I missing something?

My reading: Dock display output was flawless, other aspects of the dock (overheating, USB port reliability) were shit

I've got a displaylink adapter and run 3 monitors on my M1 mini. I don't do anything intensive on the 2 of the monitors though, so I don't know how it would do if you were doing some crazy 3 monitor gaming. Works fine for software dev though.

> so I don't know how it would do if you were doing some crazy 3 monitor gaming

Let's hear it for all the Mac gamers!

stock cricket chirping sound effect

Ridiculous for their entry level product?

their previous entry level models did

The M1 Mac Mini can drive two monitors.

i had one and returned it because of this i KVM between devices and like using the same setup so it broke the deal for me.

seems m1 is still highly praised though so maybe i should reconsider..

Not to take away from your point, but Max supports 4 displays.

The Max supports three external monitors!

Four displays, actually, with the last being limited to 4K60.

Have you used an M1?

It does suck, but the incredible speed made the tradeoff worth it for me.

I'm particularly excited about the fact that Apple has added 10 gigabit support and reasonably priced it at $100 more on mac minis. Looking forward to the M2 refresh as long as it includes the mini.

That’s the expectation. Rumours suggest the form factor of the mini will be slimmed down too, given there’s a lot of excess space in the chassis from the Intel days.

I hope they don't cut the size down too much so that the M1 Pro/Max/Duo/Quad chip that they will inevitably put in will not be thermally throttled.

As long as they leave plenty of thunderbolt ports.

I really hope for a design form like the MacBook 12".

CPU was really underpowered but it felt so small, cute, and optimized in term of reducing footprint. M2 can bring this form factor to the next level.

12 was the best machine they made, maybe a little underpowered. With the M1/M2 it would be a dream.

I still use 12" as my 13"Pro with touchbar (worst apple macbook) died several times and I'm tired of paying for it.

Yeah I'd like that too. I've got the M1 MBA but it's a bit bigger and heavier than I'd like.

I'm still just desperately waiting for the M1 Pro Mac Mini.

Seriously! I have been awaiting a "Pro" Mini for a while now. Only reason I haven't pulled the trigger on the current M1 Mac Mini is due to the limits on ram (16GB).

I would really like to see an M1 Max Mac Mini. I’ve been holding out for March announcement.

I finally gave in a bought an M1 Mini from Costco–they have a 90 day return policy on electronics. If Apple releases a better Mini in March, I'll probably upgrade.

I'm very close to doing all future development on AWS and avoiding depending on my machine anymore. Local price/meaningful performance (given frontend apps are getting fatty) is plateauing in my view.

I'd rather migrate workflows that have high variance in compute requirements to a place where that variance can be satisfied easily and quickly.

I'm not much of an Apple/MacOS fan, but I do think I may get an M2 based laptop (esp the M2Pro when those become available). Didn't want to jump on the M1 bandwagon since it was still pretty new. Also by the time M2's are available maybe the Linux on M* Mac story will be better?

I avoid first-gen products almost as a rule, but M1 has delivered on promise amazingly.

I wonder if this will include the Mac Mini - over the years the Mac Mini hasn't been updated particularly frequently, and it only just got an update to the M1 chip.

I know the article mentions Mac Mini but Apple doesn't seem to have been super enthused about it's lowest end machine in the past.

An M2 mini is a day one purchase for me. I have been so thoroughly impressed with my M1 mini.

I'm assuming you're being serious here.

If you consider your M1 mini as being impressive, why would it need to be replaced already?

If they are replacing, it is likely they have a few machines they run as servers and they refresh them every 4-5 years.

He didn't say replace. Do you only have one machine?

I only have one desktop.

I'd be right there with you on this if they support hdmi 2.1

More RAM for all please!

A MacBook Air with 32GB RAM would be a dream

A MacBook Air that can push 2 external monitors is mine

Why do you all dream of Airs and not of Pros?

I have a 14" Pro but I long for the days of something similar to my favorite Mac of all time: the 12" Retina MacBook. The keyboard was trash and performance was terrible, but as someone who travels quite a bit, it was a dream to use on the go.

They've addressed all of these issues with Apple Silicon + new keyboards and a resurrection of the 12" MacBook (maybe with built-in 5G wireless) would be an instant purchase for me.

Because they are lighter and easier to carry around and also to use on one’s lap. I have a pro however because I don’t mind all that that much.

Most of us don’t need the raw horsepower (and cost) of the Pros.

Fanless

I agree, give me 16GB in the base and 32GB in the ~1300 model and they'd be a lot more tempting for me.

This. I still wonder if it was worth it to jump from a 16GB MBA to a 32GB MBP for twice the price...

I was worried 16GB wouldn't be enough considering my Windows machine would crash with docker+chrome+IDEA due to out of memory errors; my m1 mac with 16GB has all that plus countless other apps and runs very well.

I waited and got the 64gb ram one

Not enough to run a Solana node but I think it covers all of last decades use cases that i would encounter

I went for M1 8gb to M1 16gb, mainly dev machine.

No change.

Sure, but it'll come at $400 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB :(

I love my $200 64GB with my Framework Laptop.

Fuck Apple they should be sued for price gouging.

> they should be sued for price gouging

Price gouging laws relate to raising prices in an emergency, which is not something they've done, or for people in a monopoly position for the product, which is not Apple as there's a huge market of laptops.

It's not illegal to price something higher than you'd like.

That's not what gouging is.

How's that battery life treating you?

Keeping aside rest of the debate, I'm genuinely curious if 6 hours vs 12 hours (just as an example, not real numbers) is really an issue for most people. I work exclusively on laptop, no external monitor and have for last 8-10 years. My laptop is almost always plugged in. I go at most 1-2 hours without it being plugged and most modern laptops have batteries that last that long.

Am I in the minority who uses their laptop as such?

Battery life isn't a huge concern for me, there are outlets everywhere these days, even on planes, but user-swappable SSD and RAM are absolutely non-negotiable for me, as is the ability to run Linux natively, and actual function keys. Macs are unusable.

That said if I'm not doing number crunching I can easily get through 4 hours or more and that's plenty good for my use case.

Did I miss something, or is RAM price somehow related to battery life?

Edit: your response has literally nothing to do with the parent comment or my comment, so I'm not even going to engage with you on this.

The MBA, 13inch MBP, the bigger imac and the mac min are all old designs that were updated with a M1 processor.

The 2022 update will bring a new industrial design on top of the new architecture. The same way the imac and the 14/16MBP were refreshed with a new design + a new architecture.

My predictions form each:

- MBA -> many colors, white screen/keyboard background (similar to imac)

- MBP 13 -> renamed MacBook, a MBA with more ports, no colors and black screen/keyboard

- iMac -> might be renamed imac pro, black screen and keyboard background. Same small footprint as the consumer imac

- mac mini -> the current mac min is pretty empty. I think we'll see something much more compact but really similar in design.

EDIT: style

I think it's more likely that the MBA is simply renamed to Macbook. "Air" used to mean something but it doesn't anymore.

The true successor of the MBP 13 is the 14. There is no reason to keep the 13 around.

I'd really love to see more memory in these devices. I have no need for a Mac, but everyone I know who uses one complains that RAM limitations come up fairly quickly with all of these devices. I even know a guy with a 64 gig iMac Pro who complains that he runs out of memory on a daily basis. I'm not sure if this is workflow-dependent or just a limitation of XNU's memory model (perhaps both), but giving people more memory options would be an easy fix and a big draw for programmers, sysadmins and creative professionals who are still using Intel Macs.

    but everyone I know who uses one complains that 
    RAM limitations come up fairly quickly with all 
    of these devices

Everyone?

The initial 2020 M1 machines maxxed out at 16GB; however the 2021 M1 Macbook Pros are configurable with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB.

I'm not sure what to make of "RAM limitations come up fairly quickly." 16GB configs haven't been a problem for developers at any of the shops where I've spent time in recent years. Places where developers were not shy about complaining. Of course, I recognize that lots of workloads do require more! Working with big data, video work, etc.

My problem with the 16GB limit was more theoretical. If I'm shelling out $2-$3K for a machine, I'd like a more future-proof amount of RAM.

You're still screwed if you need a desktop though.

The (now discontinued) iMac Pro officially supports 256 GB of RAM. 3rd party RAM resellers claim it will work with 512 GB. I assume any M1 or M2 replacement would support at least the same amount.

He just needs more than 64 G. So yes, workflow dependent.

For example, i seem to use 24 G most of the time. A 16 G M1 won't do then.

What worries me is they talk about a M2 but also about the M1 Pro/Max making their way in more systems. Does this mean the M2 will replace just the M1, be still limited to 16 G and the Mac Mini will still be crippled?

It's reasonable to assume there will be Pro and Max versions of the M2 as well, and they'll have different capabilities across the line like the M1 variants do.

My guess is that there is going to be a Mac mini available with a Pro or Max chip at some point, but it's a weakly held guess. It's possible that we're going to just see the Mac mini as the "regular" headless desktop and a Mac pro as the more powerful one, so we get a matrix something like:

        |                  | Regular     | Pro         |  
        | ---------------- | ----------- | ----------- |  
        | Laptop           | MacBook Air | MacBook Pro |  
        | Headless Desktop | Mac mini    | Mac Pro     |  
        | All-in-One       | iMac        | iMac Pro    |

Would require the Mac Pro to get significantly cheaper on the low end. Starting price difference between M1 MacBook Air and M1 Pro MacBook Pro is 2x, but the difference in starting price between M1 Mac Mini and the cheapest x86 Mac Pro is 8.5x.

If not, the matrix would look something more like this:

        |                  | Regular     | Pro         | Corporate |
        | ---------------- | ----------- | ----------- | --------- |
        | Laptop           | MacBook Air | MacBook Pro |           |
        | Headless Desktop | Mac mini    |             |  Mac Pro  |
        | All-in-One       | iMac        | iMac Pro    |           |

I'm amused at your third column, and it's arguably not wrong currently, although it's almost more niche than "corporate" in its current form. :)

The "pre-trashcan" Mac Pro models were considerably less expensive, even adjusted for inflation, than what came afterward. (The first Intel Mac Pros started at $2299, and IIRC I bought a PowerMac G5 in the early 2000s for something like $1599.) So Apple might lower their introductory pricing down to something that, if not cheap, is at least less expensive than the current Mac Pro. I wouldn't bet money on that, to be sure -- but it's possible.

There's also the possibility of a "Mac Mini Pro," though, maybe? In a sense they kind of did that with the last update to the Intel model; I could see them making this a more deliberate bifurcation in the lineup.

That's interesting. I'd sure like to think that the M1's 16GB limitation (and the limitation of 2 displays) was an aberration.

But, now that you mention it, maybe they have a segmentation strategy there. The M2/M3/M4/etc will be limited and the M2X/M3X/M4X will not.

Hopefully that's not the case. I get the feeling that it's more of a tick/tock cycle like Intel used to do. Where they'd ship new architectures every ~24 months, and at the halfway point between major architecture releases they'd release interim models with beefed up cache / core counts / clock speeds.

But perhaps that's wishful thinking.

> maybe they have a segmentation strategy there

That's what I'm afraid of. I'd very much like to not have to pay 6k+ for a Mac Pro because ... I don't need one. But if they continue crippling the Mini I just might have to.

He either has a memory leak he hasn't spotted, or is really low on disk space (so it can't create swap files.)

My home Macs have all been 8gb for the past 11+ years and never wished for more ram. (MBP 17, MBP 13, Mini, MBA M1). I've done light dev on them, I even run a Windows ARM VM on my M1 Air and play Steam games through it.

That said, my work provided machines have always been much higher specced.

Not kinda true anymore with M series chips.

Look at other comments here, people are amazed how their 8gb MacBook Air works.

People have been saying this from the moment M1 came out, 8gb Air/Pro feels like 16gb.

So would these being using the same TSMC process and instead be a layout change rather than a die shrink?

They may adopting the (lost ?) Intel tick-tock approach:

- one year you shrink the geometry and reap speed-power-area gains

- the other year you refine the logic circuitry and improve efficiency

Great, more e-waste due to lack of upgradability.

At which point does polluting the plant intentionally becomes a crime?

You can sell your old macbook instead of throwing it away.

How common is it to upgrade a notebook? What is usually upgraded? I've looked into upgrading my last one, but by the time I felt the need, everything else was so obsolete that it just didn't make sense to put the money into it. This has actually always been the true for me, since my first desktop computer 20 years ago. I stopped buying for the future with my first computer, when I paid a little extra for a second GPU slot for SLI.

well one of the things people who buy upgradable laptops like to do is buy the cheapest upgradable specs and buy their own parts to install. I.e. buy laptop with 128 GB M.2 SSD and upgrade it to the fastest+largest available SSD. Thats what i did with mine. Also I took some parts out of my laptop and installed them into my desktop(s) and Intel Nucs.

Poll: getting my M1 Max in mid March, any reason for returning it and waiting?

M1 Max will still be more than twice as fast as any M2 chip machines due to the number of cores. It is unlikely that Apple will be ready to upgrade the M1 Pro/Max to M2 Pro/Max until next year. Even then the increase in performance for M2 cores is probably in the 10-15% range over M1 cores based on what we have seen with the A14 vs A15 cores in the phones.

Is there a physical limit on improvements they’ll hit soon? I mean, there’s probably so much they can do considering heat and power requirements. But I’m totally ignorant about CPU architectures.

I think that question applies to transistor/feature size in general. Look to TSMC’s process roadmap.

Not just on the physical side. I suspect there are still some architectural improvements that we'll see with the M2. They've had more time to characterize various types of workloads and that should feed back into architectural improvements.

I bet there will be architectural improvements, but in the long run, those can only go so far in comparison to process improvements (or even brand new technology like optical or quantum computing, or who knows what else).

Isn't M2 potentially the first 3nm process to be released?

The physics limits of a Mac size computer performance involve a black hole density and matter organised to form optimal quantum computing devices. You would need to be a very optimistic Apple fan to expect this in the near future.

"Every M1 Mac .. due .. for .. refresh .. "

Great, I look forward to Apple sending me an M2 to put into the CPU socket, or will it be a download to reconfigure my M1 into an M2.

Just give me a 27” iMac with an M(something) Max

Maybe the more interesting question is when will they not be able to make a +1 processor? Is it 5, 10 or more cycles away?

Yeah. How much of the M1's spectacular showing is process advantage, how much is superior design, and is any of this sustainable?

I think the M2 series chips will give us a pretty good idea.

Of course it's also worth noting that the M1 didn't come from nowhere. We already have lots of other data points. Apple's A-series processors have been competing very well with x86 for a while now. For example, here's the A14 compared to its x86 contemporaries in 2020:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

Raw performance was very close, and perf/watt was stellar relative to x86. And these were Apple's mobile chips; they weren't even targeting laptop/desktop performance at that point. So from a CPU perspective it suggests that they've had the ability to compete with Intel on more than favorable footing for quite some time now, and I wouldn't expect that advantage to dissipate soon either.

And they just _finally_ certified Apple Silicon at work and started allowing people to upgrade to M1s like last week.

Bought my MBA 13 days ago. I have 24 hours to decide if I want to return it for a full refund or not...

This is an unwinnable game. The moment you purchase something a newer, better version will be announced.

It's an unlosable game! Stuff keeps getting better

I think I lost a little bit when I bought a specced-out MBP 16” in 2019 ;)

The new MBA likely won't be announced until WWDC and come out shortly thereafter. It will also likely have design language that reflects the new iMac. Let that temper your decision making.

Just keep it and trade it[1] in this Summer when the new models ship.

1. You'll get much less from Apple, but its still decent and better than dealing with randoms on Craigslist and eBay.

I did this with my 16" Intel MBP that I purchased about 4-5 months before the Apple Silicon MBP 13" was announced. I don't regret it a bit.

Keep it. It's not like it's crap. If they really do release a must-have feature on the next one, the upgrade cost isn't that bad (especially on an inexpensive computer like an MBA). In the meantime enjoy the M1.

Hah, I did this with a 16" MBP when rumours came out that they were building ARM CPUs. Now writing this on the MBA 13" M1.

Return it if you payed more than current stock x price.

You can always resell it later. Just don't get apple care and any additional accessories.

meta: usually i don't see comments > post score unless the content is poor.. this is good news from apple though, what gives?

Ready to take on Windows' PC market

Windows 11 ARM runs blazing fast when virtualized on the M1 Mac. The best Windows machine is ironically a Mac. Only problem is...its Windows 11 :/

I think Windows 10 ARM images are floating around but it seems like Microsoft has discontinued them.

Wish there was a way to properly virtualize Windows 7 or just to even see earlier Windows OS run in this M1 environment.

in that combination, can I run all those cool indie games on Steam that are Windows only? or are they really x86 windows only? for some reason I was just hoping they only needed some APIs from Direct X instead of actual architecture

Parallels on M1 will run many games well, and some near perfectly. There's also Wine / Crossover which does better on some games and worse on others. If you had both, you could probably run the majority of Windows games out there.

Apple Gaming Wiki has a list of games and gives a general idea of how they perform. Reddit's /r/macgaming is also helpful.

https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Home

oh wow, alright! lots of AAA titles there, I have been getting some mobile ads about games and they all turned out to be indie PC games, which was disappointing because they are mostly sidescrollers. I'm getting optimistic that these less demanding games will work well on at least one of these environment simulators, but I guess it depends on the APIs they rely on.

I'm going to guess that 99.9% of games ship x86 executables / dlls. Even if the developers used something like PyGame, the code is compiled before distribution.

Games are x86 only but Windows has emulation so they should work.

Getting a new iMac one of these days.

There's literally no information in this article.

Planning to buy a dev laptop and contemplating which M1 pro flavour I should go with? They come with in so many gpu cores options

How important is GPU to the work that you do? Or do you use the CPU more?

If you can answer that question you might get the performance you need without spending a lot of money for power you won’t use. The purpose of the Max is to provide maximum GPU cores. If you work mainly in CPU then the Pro might be all you need.

I hate this, after weeks of thinking on whether moving back to Apple laptops or not after few years without them I finally decided to get the Mac Book Pro 16 and was going this afternoon to an Apple Store.

I totally forgot that one of the bad things of Apple is the anxiety they create with the new releases. I may stay out of Mac world for few more years.

The 16" was released three months ago. It will not be refreshed soon. The rumors you read around Apple’s releases are just click bait because these websites want to generate ad impressions.

Check https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac to see which device was released recently.

Thanks! It was just a feeling I forgot, I know that they were released few months ago but now I already know about M2.

To me is not a secret that Apple uses this strategy, and I have been a happy Apple user for years.

Anyway, at least i collected few downvotes from the Apple fanboys :)

Thank you, I’ve been trying to remember where that buyer’s guide lived.

> I may stay out of Mac world for few more years.

when you decide to jump back in, do it after a refresh. :)

The 14 and 16” MBPs aren’t due for a refresh. The ones up right now are the air, the base model 13” pro and the mini. You can buy the 16” now and expect it to be top of the line for at least one more year.

Just purchase something that's already "outdated". Did this with iphone 11 and macbook pro m1 last year. No regrets, no anxiety.

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