Hacker News Reader

I can say the same about the M1 Mac Mini and its much cheaper

Indeed. AFAICT it’s a damn fine computer.

I have one. I am not impressed. At all.

(In all fairness, I have the smallest one, but still.)

What was it that you didn’t like about it?

If kids have logged in it becomes slow even after they are all logged out.

Not faster than my > 3 year old linux laptop.

Try ARM-native apps.

Night and day difference. Seriously.

Mine is the smallest one and I love it.

Honestly I see no reason to invest in Apple if they are fine with 5 years of shitty laptops.

One reason would be that you don't like shitty laptops. Any other laptop (I tried top end Dells, Lenovos and Asuses) are much worse in all things considered.

Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. Do you not like fans when you Google Meet? How about fans when you look at your desktop or start your computer?

> Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse.

This is patently false. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster for Apple. Financial reports suggest it may have cost Apple an additional billion dollars per-year in warranty repairs. The M1 machines are nice and Apple seemed to have fixed their reliability issues; but your post is essentially, at best, a cover up.

So what? It was still the better keyboard. I had it for two years. Much better than anything Dell or Lenovo or any other brand I've ever seen had.

Yeah, it had issues, but it never had the issues my Lenovo and Dell laptops had - like keys literally falling off, for example. Two keys on one of my Lenovo machines were broken from the factory. The Dell i9 machine had a key that was attached only on one side and they refused to fix it.

You think Apple's Butterfly keyboard was better than a Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard? That certainly would be a minority opinion. I can't comment on cheaper Dell and Lenovo machines, but that wouldn't really be a fair comparison.

My Lenovo thinkpad keyboard doesn't register the spacebar unless you press the middle of the key. Never had a problem like that with a Mac.

Yeah my Lenovos had or developed the same problem, also not considered something to fix by them. Probably all of them except the really old 4:3 ones I had, which had the oldschool IBM keyboard.

The Lenovo keyboard is good when it works - but I never had a fully working keyboard on any post-2013 Lenovo laptop (my old T530 had awesome and reliable keyboard, but it was the last). I generally spend around $4-$6k on a laptop, so not the consumer-level models. Always at least few keys had issues (or soon developed some) and they didn't want to fix it.

The Apple keyboard was weird for a week and then I got used to it without much further issues. Occasionally a grain or something got under a key, compressed air fixed that immediately. After a year one key became squishy and Apple fixed it free of charge within few days.

Dell keyboards are squishy and unreliable and have the same problems with grains Apple butterfly keyboard had - but in 2022. Dell average is much worse than the worst Apple ever got.

Are you sure? I have both an Intel Macbook Pro (work) and a Lenovo Thinkpad and I love my Thinkpad. I hate the Macbook so much.

It's true my fans turn on a little more with my Thinkpad but I rather have fans over a sluggish Macbook. Plus with my Airpods Pro on, neither the other person or I will notice any fans. (I also won't get fans during a meeting anyway.)

Plus for half of the price of that Macbook, I get a much lighter laptop with 64 GB of RAM and a beefier CPU, plus a touchscreen that I love for the couch.

I had a great Thinkpad once, too. But the 2 subsequent models were all shit - laptop board burning (needed a replacement few times), RAM integrity issues, boot loops, driver crashes etc.

Then I tried 2 Dells - both of them shit in all ways possible (and I spent more than Macbooks cost!) - battery life bad, noise bad, performance bad, thermals bad, sound bad, keyboard bad, display horrendous (never get shitty 4K OLED from Dell, it hurts your eyes!)... - that's a machine that costs $4k+.

Regarding the CPU... I was not able to use even 50% of its i9 CPU because of thermal throttling. And when it was on "full", it got like 2 hours of battery.

M1 is like from another galaxy. The sound continues to amaze anyone who hears it. People can't take their eyes off the display. It literally does not have fans. It never gets hot. I can work 2 days on one battery charge.

And most importantly - even though I have only a 7-core M1 Air - it outperforms my i7-7770 desktop as well as every laptop I ever had, even the beefy i9 Dell - and it cost less than $1500. It has less RAM (only 16GB), but that's alright, I never had a problem with it (as a JS developer).

I agree. The display and touchpad in a Mac laptop are out of this world. And they're are even better if you have one of those new 14" Pros. There's just nothing in the PC world that compares.

Sounds like there are trash models of Thinkpads like there are trash models of MacBooks.

Have to do your research either way.

I personally picked my Thinkpad model. I did not get to choose my MacBook model.

Those 5 years were when Johny Ive had full reign over Apple design with no Jobs to keep him in check. I imagine engineers were screaming in agony but unable to do anything but work within these constraints that heavily prioritized form over function. It's really funny to see all Ive's bad ideas undone over the last 2 years — the touch bar, the lack of ports, the thinness taken to the extreme, etc.

On the other hand we are probably gonna have a stupid camera notch in the next Air. Do you blame Ive for that one? Or is that it’s own disaster?

Or another way to look at it: there's now screen around the notch and that's more useful than that area being just black glass instead. The menu bar used to eat into your screen, but now it's wrapped around the notch in that area and you have more screen for other things.

I'm looking at the menu bar of my laptop right now and I sure do have a bunch of menu bar items that go past the center of the screen. Personally I'd rather just ditch the camera, I never use the thing. Or just not scrape for every fraction of an inch of screen possible. Margins are nice.

As someone with both an M1 and various intel and AMD machines.

The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor.

The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc).

People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc.

Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards...

I never need any of that though, or any additional performance. I need to have about twenty browser tabs and a few electron apps open. If it can handle that smoothly without painful latency we're good.

I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.

I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices.

I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC).

I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

> I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much.

What do you think happened when the people with powerful workstations got sent home during covid?

Obviously for some employers the answer was SSH, or taking a workstation home - but for other places (e.g. CAD users), the answer was 'mobile workstation' laptops.

The answer for many games studios was Citrix/Parsec and ilk, maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

Nobody was getting workstation grade laptops.

(speaking from experience).

> maybe some of the smaller ones allowed people to take PC's home...

I worked for a large studio at the time and anyone who could carry a workstation home could take it.

>I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).

Eh, YMMV. I have an M1 and an i7-1185g7 based Linux laptop. Honestly, I never use the M1. Side by side, there is no noticeable speed difference for my day to day work. The M1 is more efficient, that's for sure - but my Intel laptop already has "all day" battery life. If I need to spend more than 8 hours working without access to power, the M1 wins - but I never see that situation happening (to me).

The biggest thing that turns me away from the M1 is the lack of Linux support, which I understand is also a personal preference thing. Also the M1 MBP is slightly bulkier despite the same screen size.

Depends what you are doing with it. In single-threaded tasks, I noticed my M1 Pro can outperform my gaming PC (5950x).

That is also however a VERY old processor at this point even if it was probably the best thing Intel has ever made (comparatively for the time)

5950X is probably referring to latest AMD flagship desktop CPU [1]

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x

ahhhh nvm then. Should that not absolutely destroy an m1 though?

Not really, Apple is one generation ahead of AMD in manufacturing process at TSMC.

According to Passmark even the 10 core M1 Max gets absolutely destroyed by the 5950X just like I thought. Great chips for mobile use due to power savings but the top desktop chips still are all of course much faster at the expensive of extra watts.

OP was talking about single core performance.

It depends on the benchmark the 5950X is faster single threaded in a number of benchmarks but the converse is also true.

But, it does tend to win overwhelmingly in multi threaded.

Slightly, although less so if you have code you can compile yourself and use -march=native. The M1 is heavily default optimized for the M1, random x86 binaries are generally optimized for something like a Pentium 4. Just tweaking this one thing, can easily double perf.

Also, as someone who owns both, make sure the 5950 is actually turbo'ing correctly. Mine was a real pain to get it up to speed, despite having a seriously overkill water cooler.

I got an M1 on loan while my Intel Mac was in the shop and I was terribly unimpressed. Only 8 GB of ram was part of the problem, but I just didn't notice any performance improvement between it and my Intel Mac.

I went from a 16" MacBook Pro with an i9 and 32 GB of RAM to the MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and my build times at work were almost exactly the same. But the single-core speed makes everything _feel_ so much faster than the stupid slow i9 cores. (At less than half the price, and without a fan!)

In my opinion, the Air is the perfect addition to a heavy Linux/Windows workstation. You get the full spectrum from iOS development to gaming, albeit at the cost of having to babysit two or three operating systems. You can use the Air for meetings or conferences, because everything that's not a game has a macOS version (think Microsoft Teams etc.)

It's worth noting that if your workload is still on x86, it's running through Rosetta emulation and it's significantly slower. I've heard of a few people having similar "what's all the fuss about" to "wow this is great" transitions after their key applications get fully ported to ARM.

I had the 16" Intel i9 MBP with 64Gb and recently got the new M1 Max with 64GB (had to wait almost two months after ordering) and it's not even close. I used to have to be quick about closing things in the back ground etc. Force closing things etc. Fans were always loud. New M1 I have NEVER heard the fans. It just works. And works well. No beach balls waiting. Just works.

My company gave me a i9 MBP for work, but I use my own personal M1 Macbook Air instead as it's so much better; no fan noise or smell of cooking thermal paste! Also and sites nicely under the 45" 4K QLED screen that I use as a main monitor.

That and desktop cooling tends to be lightyears ahead of laptop cooling; you can thrash a desktop for a long time before hitting a thermal limit, unlike most laptops.

A good desktop should never hit its thermal limit no matter how long you thrash it. 24-hour 100% CPU/GPU torture tests are standard whenever I build a PC.

> with power to spare

...but without money to spare. If the desktop fits his needs there is nothing gained in replacing it with a proprietary and form-factor limited device like an Apple laptop unless he's hog-tied to the Apple world - which does not seem to be the case here.

I use a bunch of devices, some portable, some not. When I need something portable I take, let's say, a T42p running Linux. I'm typing this from a resurrected iMac 27" running Linux which sits next to a Compaq 6910p in a docking station connected to a 24" monitor. The iMac is the newest device at 12 years, that T42p is 17 years old yet it still works fine for most things as long as I can reach the server-under-the-stairs. Sure, that M1 makes for faster media consumption but... that is not what I use these things for. I also foresee a not-so-distant future where that M1 lies in a cupboard due to some malfunction - bad battery being the most likely - which is deemed too expensive to repair while most of those old devices around here still continue to work.

Let me jump on this opportunity to give a little unpopular opinion on the M1 MBP, after 1 year of using one (being completely new to apple), since most (all?) of the comments I have seen here are dithyrambic.

Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this.

The software part has not been that smooth for me:

- I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be.

- I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times.

- As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.

> dithyrambic

I pride myself on knowing words, and I did not know this word. Thanks!

According to Merriam-Webster: a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein

Great word and apparently an old one:

Webster's 1913 Dictionary:

• Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb.

• Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.

> I use the python scientific stack

> for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion

I'm in a similar scenario (genomics, not ML). I pretty much gave up on using any local machine for this work and use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work. It just isn't worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments setup and in sync for work like this. I still use the Mac for other things like email, writing, generating figures, etc... but there are far faster machines for more difficult number crunching.

One of the exceptions here would be something more interactive like video or image editing (which is a workflow the Mac is really well designed for).

>use my primary computer (desktop or laptop) to connect to my remote Linux servers to do this work

In my case, the primary computer is the linux desktop machine and I use the macbook to remotely connect to it when I am not home. Feels a bit weird to use a $2500 laptop as a dumb terminal, but I guess that's the world we live in (and which I am part of).

>worth the hassle to try to keep proper dev environments

In my experience, debian stable + poetry + the occasional container have been great so far. De gustibus...

Similarly, I'm kinda looking at a Macbook Air and running Jetbrains Gateway to a big fileserver, as well as pushing a bunch of personal stuff off to my NAS as well. Remote desktop into a VM for casual browsing and doing my taxes and so on.

I could get old RDIMM/LRDIMM sticks (it's not widely known but some X99 boards support it) and a 1660v3 and be up and running with 8 cores at ~4 GHz for basically the cost of RAM, and that would probably be sufficient for my needs. And using RDIMM/LRDIMM would set up a migration path forward to Epyc eventually - Epyc is still Ryzen and still likes fast RAM, but those faster sticks are 3-4x the price per GB, so getting something running now with an upgrade path forward would be fine.

> rosetta stone

I'm confused, are you doing scientific Python or learning a language?

You got me, rosetta, not rosetta stone.

> It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.

Not even close. A 5950x will absolutely smoke an M1 max on a multithreaded workload, and if your workload needs more than 64GB ram the difference is even starker.

I’ve that cpu and 64gb of ecc. It’s so stable. Can even play games when I’m no doing compiling! Or at the same time!

Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan:

- No dust can get in because it's sealed.

- Mechanical parts break more often.

- I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something.

However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.

No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache.

The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives.

Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.

Is it possible that the entire integrated chip can be replaced? Even if at a higher cost, it's better than throwing the whole computer away.

The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket.

I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories.

1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage.

2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap.

3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.

This is ARM now. Look at any SBC out there and you'll see soldered RAM.

If only the M1s were compatible with CUDA....

It seems like chronic problems with laptops are often the fault of Nvidia or AMD discrete video cards. Even for Macs. Once I started avoiding non-integrated graphics in laptops, things got a lot smoother.