20% faster isn't enough to make me regret my M1 purchase, but after one or two more 20% speed gains I'll feel like upgrading to the latest is going to be worth it.
I recently tried using a 486 + CRT monitor setup. The speed at which your keystrokes appear on the screen is simply astounding. I'd like us to pay more attention to how software is written and debloating the layers of abstraction with hindsight.
To add to earlier example, I do some retro gaming on an old windows 98 box with a CRT, the lack of latency moving the mouse in first person shooters of this era compared to today can be incredible.
I wonder how many systems don't qualify as interactive?
I don't think typing into the amazon search bar qualifies.
Use a fast editor like Sublime Text or even something like JetBrains IDEA with the zero-latency mode enabled and the editor delay will be single-digit milliseconds.
Get a modern 120Hz or more monitor (search for gaming monitor) with low latency and your display lag will be less than 10ms.
More info here: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/
I’ll check Jet Brains zero latency mode. I didn’t know that exists, cool.
The (likely) ps2 keyboard on the 486 will have lower input latency as it doesn't have the multiple complex (both hardware and software) stacks that each key-input will need to travel through. People say you can't feel it, but people are regularly incorrect.
I feel like Rick (C-137) when I say, you gotta experience low latency on something like the original pong machine (from 1972) to know what you're missing out on. Once you've used this, the wireless mice and USB keyboards will feel slow and laggy even in low latency software.
The nearly unnoticeable latency is small price for progress.
Yeah, but latest versions of usual apps (especially web-browser) requires newer GPU/CPU.
Sadly, our days coding style by popular software devs is not focused on performance & optimization.
Soon, they'll have to be more creative for people to consider buying every few years.
I wish MBA started having ProMotion.
Well... I'm pretty sure that this is Hacker News. And for many developers, any performance improvement is great.
I first got an M1 Air, which was fantastic. Faster than my 3700X workstation for building Rust projects, while it was passively cooled and portable. Despite the awesome performance of the M1 Air, I upgraded to an M1 Pro when it came out. Moving from 4 performance + 4 efficiency cores to 8 performance + 2 efficiency cores was yet another awesome upgrade, giving again much quicker builds.
I work on machine learning stuff, so the AMX matrix co-processing unit in the M1 was really great for training small networks (sometimes convolution networks are still great for NLP + being able to train locally is nice for development). Then the M1 Pro/Max had double the AMX units, so it's again a great step forward.
Getting 20% YoY improvements will definitely make me very happy (and I bet many other developers).
I'll happily take a laptop that is 10x as fast as my current one...
For me lagging on Windows is not only noticeable but also maddening.
Typically my old laptop with a 3 year old processor and half the memory is snappier running a mainstream distro with KDE Plasma than a brand new one running Windows.
No, they will just stop the "security" updates and force you to buy a new one.
stares in Mojang's poorly optimised Java
(Also, as other people have pointed out, it absolutely can be when compiling, using Photoshop, doing billions of Prolog inferences, etc.)