When will Apple ship other M2 Macs? | Hacker News Reader

When will Apple ship other M2 Macs?

eclecticlight.co

99 pointsingve188 comments

OT but does anyone else find their M1 Mac to have very bimodal performance? I have an M1 Macbook Pro (2020 model) and in general it's very fast. It's certainly the fastest web-browsing machine I've ever used.

But when I overload it (dev servers running, Google Meet, Notion / Slack all up) it goes full spinning-beach-ball and sometimes takes minutes to recover. It seems like in particular it's much too eager to give 100% of all cores to something like "npm build" and doesn't leave enough power behind to run the UI. For example it's really common for my music to skip/jump when my code compiles, which is not something I'd expect on any modern computer.

My Intel MacBooks before this and my Windows laptop never have these kinds of issues. They definitely got very slow at times, but never totally locked up.

Happens to me too. I bought this Mac last year and I wonder if it was the right choice. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it.

I've had absolutely the same experience. I've had to share my wife's laptop when I had water damage on mine and she generally keeps all mail and calendar in chrome instead of using the native apps for some, to me, inexplicable reason and so my user would then do that frequently.

Compilations would be lightning fast, but otherwise it feels exactly like you describe it.

I use web apps. I'm using multiple systems over the course of a day and I like just having a uniform environment across them.

I found “grep” on a 10GB text file on an external USB-C SSD will cause that stuttering behaviour.

This is pretty minor. The area I have noticed a real performance difference between Intel and Apple silicon is the macOS activity monitor. On Intel machines it populates immediately when you switch between cpu/memory/energy. On m1 machines there’s a noticeable lag.

Like I said, it’s pretty minor but when I’m going into activity monitor it’s to check a process and the performance delay feels bigger than it actually is.

I doubt that's anything to do with the CPU... on my Intel MacBook Pro the Activity Monitor also lags about 5s before showing the stats.

That's because it only polls every 5 seconds by default. You can reduce that to 1 or 2 seconds in View > Update Frequency on the menubar.

Weird....

I've done a bunch of stuff with my 16GB M1 Air - processor intensive java unit test runs taking ten minutes each, for instance, while also using microsoft teams and slack at the same time - and carried on using the machine as normal in between. I don't think I've ever seen the beach ball...

Haven’t seen that on my work-provided 32GB 16” M1 Pro MBP running iOS dev, Android dev, and once in a blue moon web dev workloads. Maybe the extra cores compared to regular M1 are enough to dodge the issue in most circumstances.

In general I would say that beachballs long enough to really notice are more frequent on my personal base spec iMac Pro.

When I overloaded my Intel Mac it did the same thing. MacOS is just not that great under pressure. Bluetooth regularly dropped out even with just one build running, when I started 2 at the same time (iOS+Android) there was always a chance for a reboot. (64GB ram+i9 cpu)

Had an M1 Mac Mini with 8GB ram for Lightroom+Chrome use, it did not cut it. 16" MBPro with 16GB ram is heaps better, but no developer experience on that machine.

I think buying as much memory as you can afford is a good advice for Mac buyers. 8GB is enough for Chrome + a few native apps, but would go for 16GB for anything more and now you can get 24GB with the M2, that is nice (like a 20GB machine + a 4GB GPU).

There are many people that say that OSX doesn't have memory pressure and that Linux vm suffers so horribly in comparison. I have seen the same behavior as you describe.

I find that almost any system fails under memory pressure, they just fail differnetly.

On macos, whenever I have a high memory pressure, coupled to a large swap usage, I find that the system becomes really sensitive to I/O intensive tasks.

If I start an IO intensive task (eg a recursive grep or a backup), any task that involves pulling data from the swap (eg switching desktops) gets significantly slower, and I often see the dreaded beach ball

I think it is mostly people comparing iOS with android and assuming the same situation applies to desktop operating systems as well.

There's this hivemind on Reddit that believes M1 chips use memory 'more efficiently' and an '8GB machine is like a 16GB machine'

Having run Linux side by side with Mac OS since 2010, I'm not sure if it amazes me how much more memory the Mac uses or how efficient Linux is.

It’s not a hive mind, I had my intel MacBook Pro and M1 MacBook Pro side by side with the same apps open.

One was using 10GB, the M1 was using a little over 5GB of memory.

The M* chips have a very fast connection to the SSD so swap is less noticeable if you're basically running two memory heavy programs but only using one at a time (the other will swap out and can swap back in very fast).

Nope that first line is not true. 8gb does not feel the same as 16gb

I had the 8gb for work, and i was routinely using about 10gb. Switching apps or desktops meant changing chunks of memory in and out of swap. it was noticeable most when switching 'spaces', since video memory is shared with that 8gb and was also swapped.

Honestly it was ms teams that was the worst offender for ram, even running all my dev environment stuff and other electron apps.

Don't M1 chips just have some advantage with using hardware dedicated to constantly compress & decompress memory based on whether it's relevant or not to what the user is doing? Obviously this isn't unique to apple, I just read it was something the m1 chips could do quickly.

"Fail different"

For Linux zswap (lz4+z3fold) works quite well as a tier between RAM and direct swapping to disk. When RAM use hits a threshold it compresses pages and stores them back in memory (as opposed to writing them to disk). I've had pretty good performance with it provided there is enough CPU capacity for the compression and decompression. At the very least the slowdown when you begin swapping is much more gradual, especially on low memory machines.

I've been having somewhat similar issues without overloading the system. For context, I have an M1 Max 14" with 64GB of RAM.

When I join a zoom meeting in my web browser, the system hangs for a few seconds. There's also random issues like my bluetooth keyboard lagging and then repeating keys for the first few seconds after it reconnects. It also intermittently seems to drop keys from my USB keyboard when connected to CalDigit TB4 dock and needs to be unplugged and re-plugged in multiple times.

I've never pushed it enough for it to completely lock up, but I've had some weird bugs/crash happen to me. Like all webviews crashing at the same time (all electron apps + all browsers), with an impossibility to run anything (commands would hang, trying to open apps didn't do anything, etc). But what was uncanny was that the UI would happily run smoothly at 120hz, with all the menus still working and being responsive.

However I've had a lot of issues with WindowServer. I have an external 4k display connected to my mac (Macbook Pro 2021 14"), which I usually scale down to 3200x1800 HiDPI. And 2-3 days after a fresh boot, I'll start to have issues such as the WindowServer process jumping to around 140-180% CPU, and staying there until I reboot (or restart the process). I'll also randomly have my cursor start "glitching" and jump around in a 20px radius around the place I want to point; but only on my external screen.

My feeling is that it has something to do with the non-integer scaling I'm doing , and WindowServer entering at some point a state which introduces rounding errors (which would explain the glitching cursor) or something like that. Also, switching resolutions (or even refresh rate) of the external display will temporarily fix the cursor glitching issue.

But my biggest complain, by far, is that there is virtually zero way for me to troubleshoot/debug the problem. As far as I can tell, there is no way for a debugger to attach itself to the WindowServer process, no documentation on internal workings of the rendering pipeline, virtually no logs, etc. I've been trying to narrow down those issues for 6-8 months, and I've stilled not been able to track it down

Have you tried sticking to the default scale (1:1) for a couple days or other whole integers of scaling?

I’ve seen mine come to a crawl when trying to playback 4k video sometimes. Generally ok with HD.

I've tried, but for me limiting myself to the default/whole integer scaling is more of a pain than the bugs I encounter with it.

With 4k, at 1:1 I basically have two choices of resolution : either 3840x2160 native (which results in tiny text, even on a 32") or 1920x1080 HiDPI (which is way too small of an effective resolution, especially at 32").

With 1:1.5 scaling, I can get 2560x1440p HiDPI, which seems to be more stable (and renders text more crisply), but still a tad too small for what I need.

A 5k display would fix those issues, but the price difference between 4k & 5k is way too steep to me for the marginal improvement I would get out of it.

However, I've never had an issue with 4k video playback, even on non integer scaled resolutions. What's more, they virtually never drop frames, even with the system under load. My bet is that their hardware video decoding pipeline is significantly better that what's present on Intel CPUs, and is able to better delegate video decoding to the hardware decoders.

But did the issue persist at the 1:1 scaling?

I'm using the M1 Pro all day, never noticed it struggle with anything.

I’ve seen this with my M1 and M1 Pro machines. I think the biggest culprit is the RAM. 16 just isn’t enough for large workloads no matter how much faster disk IO is. Usually killing off whatever is taking the most RAM gets the machine working well again.

It might indeed be the RAM. I've never seen this behaviour on my M1 Max with 64GB.

Classic swap fail. A good rule of thumb is that when a swapping OS runs out of RAM it literally cannot swap its way back to stability unless you kill some of the tasks.

Faster drives help a little, but the most practical option is to have enough RAM to use no swap at all.

I have a 64GB Mac and I'm regularly over 32GB. If I only had 32GB my ten core Mac would still grind to a halt.

The RAM usage on Mac is a little misleading I think. If you have lots of free RAM it will aggressively start caching stuff that could easily be offloaded if memory pressure were to increase.

That's why they promote memory pressure as a metric. Generally bad things start to happen once the graph goes into the red.

Swap helps for some use cases - the most common one being having two large programs, but only using one at a time. Imagine having Photoshop and Illustrator both open, both using 6GB of RAM on an 8GB machine - if you're only using Photoshop then the OS can swap out Illustrator's RAM to make room - but if you're actively using both that won't work.

640KB ought to be enough for anybody

I get that with my M1 iMac

Very likely this is RAM-related. The M1s cope very well (particularly with memory compression).

However, get a set of electron-based apps in there (Notion and Slack from your list)... and seems to struggle.

I've never had this issue. I'm on an M1 air, and generally it doesn't break a sweat even when I have a ton of demanding things running.

The only exception is when I'm running one of my own computer graphics projects, and I accidentally try to allocate frame-buffers which are an order of magnitude or so too large. Even then it's only locked up for a few seconds.

I would imagine there is some specific issue which is causing this failure for you. Maybe a bug in some software, or a hardware failure of some kind.

Watch your memory pressure in Activity Monitor.

Mine's typically orange/green during web dev and works fine, but if I open too many electron apps it'll go red and the laptop grinds to a halt.

I've experienced severe slowdowns with any 16GB models. That's why I systematically max out the memory on my Macs now (64/128GB). Come at a premium, but the peace of mind of not having to care about memory usage is worth it tenfold.

I’ve been using last years Pro and even during light video editing, compiling code etc its never missed a beat, never spun the fans. I’ve been blown away tbh (but not by the fans)

How much memory do you have?

I’ve definitely seen this a lot on my 8GB MacBook Air and it coincides with running out of memory. Open Activity Monitor and see if your machine is under memory pressure.

Have similar issues on my 16GB MBP 14 which stays pretty close to maxed out regularly. Sometimes I end up closing tabs or apps.

I have the same issue

Try opening 25+ tabs in Chrome, and the whole system will slow to a crawl (with a measly ~3GB swap if you have 8GB RAM). Safari doesn't seem to have this issue. Force Chrome to aggressively suspend tabs, and the issue goes away. The slowdown also happens to me when running lots of Electron apps, and consistently happens around 3GB swap (strange, considering how small 3GB is, and how fast the storage is on M1 Macs).

Might be a bug in Electron, in Chrome, or in how macOS manages memory (this 100% survives across reinstalls with minimal apps installed). Regardless, I hope Apple is looking into it, and tries to address it either with a macOS update or by working with Google et al.

I take it back. Safari definitely does the same thing when you get to 3GB of swap. What's worse is that Apple has a pathological aversion to transparency and just can't admit this is a known issue and that a fix is coming, so we can only assume they don't know about this (this issue has existed for at least 2 years now).

8 or 16 ram?

fwiw, I've also experienced this on windows if I allowed msvc to use 8/8 threads. the cursor wouldn't even move smoothly. the solution at the time was to lower the compilation thread priority below whatever the default was.

The only time I've managed to overload my M1 Pro Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM is when I overprovisioned on RAM and caused excessive amounts of swapping to occur. Keeping my resources under control, I can run upwards to simulated 10 node data clusters with loads and extracts running, among other activity, and be able to do other things while that runs in the background. Keeping resources under control is going to be paramount to any system, let alone something not designed for this kind of workload.

Even when I let resource usage go a bit out of control I've never had it lock up. Early on, I had USB related system crashes, but those went away as updates were released.

My 2020 intel MacBook can barely run docker, an express/grapnel backend and a react frontend. I tried adding live share on top of this and it crashed the laptop. My 2021 M1 Mac mini can do all of that while live sharing my entire dev setup, running video chat, etc.

I haven't had issues like that, but usually it's Xcode doing the "use all cores" thing so I suspect they're properly assigning QoS.

I did find that if I switch power on my desk fan _and_ my USB-C hub is plugged in there's a ~10% chance of a kernel-panic and reboot.

Just task switching on a CPU should not possibly be able to do that, so sounds like it's thrashing[1], would kind of fit except that with SSDs it should recover much faster than HDD. But I'd certainly put it more on IO than cpu.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)

I’ve been wondering how much RAM to order on my MBA. I’m not a dev, but I do like to have many tabs open in Brave. I’m not made of money, but I don’t want performance bottlenecks. How much would folks recommend for heavy but nontechnical use? In case it matters, I’d be plugged to a 1080 display, so not a huge draw from the graphics side of things.

8GB with a 4K display connected was definitely not enough for me, but I also have a ton of tabs and a lot of stuff running at the same time. This kind of use seems much better with 16GB. You may be able to get away with 8GB, but 16 may still be worth it for you.

Thermal throttling?

Yes, absolutely, I've never seen this talked about before, so I'm happy to read it here. I also experience MASSIVE audio crackling and insane lags. I think it's related to memory pressure (high swapping) since it seems to happen once the graph goes into the red. I switched from a 8GB Pro to a 16GB Air and am much happier with the function keys and the increased RAM.

It's memory for sure. My art program easily gets to 100GB+ usage (on a 64GB MBP) and whenever I do a large scale the rest of the system goes to shit, especially audio.

My Intel Mac (2017 base MBP) actually quits applications when RAM usage is too high. There's no warning, and no notice that it's happened. They just quit. And this is despite plenty of swap space. It's mind-boggling.

That really sounds like hitting a RAM wall.

My M1 Air 8GB is great for everyday tasks but if I start running heavy IDEs etc. and start hitting memory pressure it acts like you describe.

My Intel MacBook Pro skips music and drops bluetooth packets during heavy workloads.

What are your ram usage stats like?

Sounds like this is just a memory issue which makes sense because it does only happen when I let too much memory pressure / swap build up. I only have 8GB, Apple should have never sold a Pro model with that little RAM.

Still, I feel like the failure mode for low memory is different on M1. This isn’t my first underpowered machine but it’s definitely the one that stutters the hardest.

Even if Apple were ready to move right away, the delayed supply chains force their hand to hold stuff back. In the UK, if you want to buy even a basic spec 14" or 16" M1 MacBook Pro, you'll be waiting till August (mid August if you want to customize the spec). They can't drop a M2 based replacement at that level any time soon without a slew of cancelled orders and I imagine they have all the parts either ordered or ready to go on those.

People have been wondering why the M2 is going into an older, less desirable 13" MBP chassis first, and I think it's because if they even put it into the 14", they'd lose a ton of existing 14" and 16" orders. Best get those made and shipped first, then drop the good stuff.

Part of this may be deciding which countries/retailers to send to, as Best Buy in the US has those in stock for pickup today, but the Apple store is listing August. Interestingly customizing it pushes it from Aug 16 to Aug 23.

The most important aspect is which SKU and config you're looking at. Various stores will stock what they think are the big movers, and will not have much of anything else on hand.

Usually that's the base model and one almost highest specced one

MKGQ3LL/A and MKGP3LL/A are listed as "get in 5 days" (this means BestBuy has one somewhere in their network and will ship it to you or a nearby store) and MK193LL/A and MK183LL/A for pickup today (as you guessed, lowest and nearly highest).

I wouldn't have expected the new 14" or 16" MBPs to get the base M2. They never got the base M1, just the Pro and Max. I would expect those will be updated to the M2 Pro/Max when those launch.

The existence of the 13-inch M2 MBP is just bizarre and seems like a case of "make it cause people might see Pro and buy it, and we have assembly lines for these bodies we can continue to use".

I imagine in the future, the base M# chips will be for the MacBook Airs and iPads, while the Pro/Max/Ultra go into the various Pro Macs.

There are people who consider the touchbar to be critical to their workflow. These laptops are a cheap, easy option to support that while bringing those people to ARM (and also clearing out their stock of proprietary keyboard screens).

I suspect they’ll wind up introducing an external keyboard with the touchbar in the future.

I'd put good money on a bet against that prediction.

If there are people who consider the touchbar to be critical to their workflow, I've never met them, and I've worked with a lot of people who used a MacBook Pro with a touchbar for work. The most positive takes I've heard are "it's fine," and everyone else (including me) hates it and was thrilled to see the new designs went back to physical keys.

Why would they be redesigning all their laptops to drop the touchbar if they were still committed to it? It barely got any adoption from developers when it was built into their laptops, and it certainly wouldn't get any more if it became an optional accessory that most people don't want.

I think Apple has admitted the touchbar was a failure, along with the full switch to exclusively USB-C ports, and the thinness at the cost of performance.

M2 die is a fraction of the size of the M2 Pro/Ultra. The air is far and away their best seller. The M2 no doubt will also go into their tablets which also far outsell their bigger laptops.

Selling 3-4x as many devices with the same fab capacity is a better deal for them. That’s probably the biggest reason why the M1 Pro/Max lagged by so long.

It's crazy how the M1 is still unmatched 1 year and 8 months after it's release. Apple is working with some alien technology.

That alien technology is coming from Taiwan.

The processor node tech is from Taiwan and plays an important role. I’d argue that a lot of the speed is also thanks to a great system architecture: the unified memory, dedicated silicon for video, ml, etc.

The manufacturing is, but so much of the magic is also the architecture of some parts of the chip like the x86 translation layer being so performant, and the hardware/software integration that enables an exceptionally smooth user experience for transitioning between architectures.

Kudos to Apple (and TSMC) for executing flawlessly on multiple levels.

And the Netherlands

The alien technology is coming from California. It’s just made in Taiwan.

The "made" part matters a lot. They heavily rely on TSMC's process being so good.

Unmatched by who?

It just covers a predefined set of use cases, it still doesn't match other configurations, where e.g. GPU intensive tasks require dedicated hardware.

Power to performance efficiency.

That's almost certainly not true. E.g.,

https://www.embedded.com/risc-v-core-said-to-outperform-appl...

> is said to

To most consumers, this will only be interesting if it's shipping in laptops.

What laptops are shipping with this and are outperforming the Apple processors in real life?

I'm not sure I was just responding to a claim about a CPU's performance per watt.

The quotes in that page have some of the most spectacularly misleading statistics I’ve seen for a while. Might as well point out that for telling the time looking at my watch is more energy efficient than looking at the clock in my car dashboard (and then calculating energy efficiency while comparing power consumption of a car and a watch)

Is this a shipping product?

Not sure. It's likely a lot of small low power CPUs can beat the likes of M1 on perf/watt tasks though. That one was just the first hit I got.

Also a Tesla Model 3 has a really good power to performance efficiency, but somehow people still like buying luxury and powerful cars.

It's just a metric, but the whole package is still not that awesome (software compatibility above all, but also limited amount of ports, the typical Apple walled garden, etc.)

Software compatibility is quite good on MacOS for all but specific niches, like industrial software or PC gaming. The same criticism could be said for Windows or Linux, which is why things like Wine and WSL exist.

There's no walled garden on MacOS.

No absolutely, in fact I can develop and deploy apps to iPhone and iPads from Linux and Windows, without owning a Mac.

Undoubtedly a solid chip, specially for its performance per watt, but Intel's new i7-1280P performed better in comparison[1]. It'll be interesting in the coming months to see fresher benchmarks of M2 vs Intel 12th-gen vs AMD Ryzen.

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-Plus-with-i7-1280P...

In a laptop that, according to the article, is louder, hotter, and with a much shorter battery life.

That's an 6p/8e core machine vs. a 4p/4e core machine, not exactly a fair comparison. A better comparison would be against an M1 Pro or Max, with 8p/2e cores.

Some quick Googling shows that the M1 Pro/Max outperforms that Intel part by some margin.

All while my M1 Pro is in the laptop with which I have yet to experience a sound of fans running.

And I'm skeptical that the Intel can be 48% faster as this chart implies: https://i.imgur.com/uelXzJ7.png

XPS13 weight is 1.23kg that is almost identical to MacBook Air , and size is similar, so still valid comparison.

I would love to see a much bigger focus on performance per watt from the rest of the industry, all the way up to high end enthusiast desktop components — even in a nice airflow focused ATX case and with a big Noctua CPU cooler, the extra noise generated when pushing the machine can be really irritating, not to mention creeping power requirements make for replacing PSUs before it’d otherwise be necessary.

On a somewhat related note, I’m also mildly annoyed that no case, cooling, and motherboard manufacturers have tried to copy the current Mac Pro’s design with dramatically larger heatsinks, about half as many fans as a typical PC (with the few it has not running as hard), and RAM on the backside of the motherboard where it can be swapped without messing with the CPU heatsink. Being able to build a generic PC version of a Mac Pro would be amazing, but unfortunately the ATX standard has accumulated cobwebs from lack of innovation.

Workstation computers, such as HP Z8 G4, uses PMG5-esque non-ATX placements, though I don't think users are half as much enthusiastic compared to Apple users about that.

That’s kind of what I was getting at, my hope is for the ATX standard to evolve to better fit modern hardware so users can enjoy many of the benefits of some of the better current non-ATX arrangements while also having a broad selection of parts available.

The ATX standards have done a good job of evolving the power delivery. But in terms of physical board dimensions and layout, little has changed and we still have a system optimized for maximum PCB surface area when what modern computers need is to maximize heatsink volume with unobstructed airflow.

I'd love to see bigger focus on performance per watt from other browser vendors, for that matter.

There was the BTX standard, which failed to catch on. Most PCs had only two fans: It used the same fan as CPU fan and main intake fan, and then the PSU fan. It had pure horizontal airflow, quite similar to earlier aluminium Mac Pros.

However, the CPU fan and cooler (including duct) had to be a fixed size. Too large for small form factor systems, and too small if you needed more cooling. ATX/mATX/mITX was cheaper, more flexible and hade more momentum.

Who else these days has an end to end ecosystem they can steer in any direction they please? So of course there is no competition.

When AMD released the Opteron A series my first thought was "This will fail as there is no Arm desktop to develop and test on. Why don't they release an Arm desktop/laptop ready APU with AMD GPU, dual channel DDR, SATA (before NVMe) and PCIe to complement it?" That would have been an awesome setup right there.

I mentioned this out loud in a forum and multiple people replied with the same retort: "No one will buy into an ARM desk/laptop without a software ecosystem." Which was true because even if you argued that Linux was good enough, who was going to buy an AMD Arm just to run Linux? Apple can point the ship where it pleases.

Very satisfied I waited to buy an Air until the new M2 machines were announced today.

In March I ordered a Mac Studio (not the Ultra model) and it arrived in early May. It’s an absolutely amazing machine.

I thought about waiting as well a few months back but with the supply chain issues I decided to just order a 'suped up MBP with the fastest processor and 64 gigs of ram. Took 2 months to arrive too. Hoping the machine will last me a decade since my other MBP is from 2013 and still runs everything I throw at it (mostly web dev stuff).

It won’t. Apple just discontinued support for the 2016 MacBooks which is pretty disappointing.

Wow! That’s disappointing, I never had issues updating the OS either but now I’m worried since rolling back is so painful.

Extremely disappointing that a machine with decent hardware gets sanctioned to be trash when it’s still useful to do 95% of daily activities. This stuff needs to be enshrined in law…

That's not true, and you can easily check this for yourself: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

This applies for repair part availability iirc. The latest OS announcement was 2017 devices and newer.

check out the "see if your mac can run macos ventura" section here: https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-ventura-preview/

That is not 'out of support', what I linked to explains what is and isn't out of support, how the categories work, what the retirement schedule looks like, and so on.

Any machine which isn't out of support will continue to receive security updates for the last version of the operating system which it does support, for a minimum period of ten years for Macs.

To reiterate, a 2016 Mac is still under support, which means both that Apple will repair the hardware for a price, and that the operating system it's able to run is also still being supported.

It isn't the latest OS, trying to gloss this as a lack of support is misleading.

That's "supported" in a somewhat weak and contrived sense.

I think a lot of people would, in practice, expect "supported" to mean that they can use their device to run the latest version of macOS.

I disagree. For example when we build software, if we choose to build upon third party software with a regular release schedule, we often have the choice of upgrading to an LTS release or the latest stable. The LTS doesn’t have all the new features of the latest stable, but it still accepts bug reports and receives security patches. That S in LTS stands for Support, and I don’t think that’s unwarranted.

Similarly, if your Mac can’t run the latest MacOS but Apple is still shipping you security updates and will still help you at the Genius Bar, that’s what I’d call supported.

That's actually good news I wasn't aware of. I have a couple Macs (a MacBook and an iMac) that I mostly just use for browsing. As long as they get security updates I'm pretty well set.

I probably will replace the iMac with a Mac Mini at some point but this means there's no rush.

And even after they go out of official support there are people who figure out how to run the latest or at least later software on them, depending on what you use them for.

And of course, with the Intel ones you could install Linux or even Windows.

Mostly just browsing. All my multimedia, code stuff, and other essentials are on an M1 MacBook. I could probably run nothing but a browser if I wanted to clean up the systems. So basically I can keep running them for a long time. They're fine for their current purpose.

Yeah, Chrome keeps getting updated for a few years after support is dropped, and Firefox for a bit longer.

My M1 Air still feels faster in practice than the monster hex-core AMD desktop I built less than a year before I go the M1. And waaaaay faster than my 2015 MBP.

I expect it'll last me until the M4 or M5 :-)

[EDIT] Though, yes, if I were just getting ready to buy one, I'd be glad I waited for the M2, as well.

A related question to illuminate this: when will we see the new Mac Pro? Will it be M1, M2 based, or something different from those two?

The current Mac Pro was released in December of 2019. Apples said they’d release a new Pro eventually. But they’re historically beyond slow at updating the Pro. They even invented the iMac Pro as a sort of tide-over before releasing the 2019 Pro. Also helpful to contrast this with TSMCs release cycle. Apple is so slow to update the Pro that they might just wait until the start of a “node cycle” at TSMC to maximize the time they can ship unchanged hardware on it.

Ie, going to be a long wait.

They also said at WWDC 2020 on June 22 that they would have completed the transition within two years. So somewhere between 13 days and a very long time away.

I can totally see Apple spinning "December 2022" as being within two years of WWDC 2020.

Just looked it up and the first machines that shipped with M1 were released on November 10th so you might be right considering they never said 2 years from WWDC 2020 specifically.

Right, I just reviewed his comments at the end of the presentation, and it's easy to interpret Cook's comments as roughly 2 years from the first Mac at the end of 2020.

https://youtu.be/GEZhD3J89ZE (roughly 1:45:00)

I assume by November/December 2022. I think they meant 2 years from the release of the first Apple silicon Macs which was in November 2020.

Isn't the Mac Studio sort of the replacement for the Mac Pro? The branding is different, but it's certainly the beefier Mac you can get at the moment.

That’s the thing I can’t really square. The Studio even approaches Pro prices at the upper configurations.

No – they explicitly stated at the time the Studio was released that a new Pro is on the way.

I would expect it to be released around the November timeframe, which would mark two years since the first M1 release and matches with the two-year transition timeline they initially pitched.

I wasn't aware of that statement. Guess in time we'll get news about the Pro.

I'm wondering how much "Pro" market is left after the Studio - which must have cannibalized some of the sales that would normally have gotten a Mac Pro.

Apple does seem to be one of those companies that are quite happy with cannibalising themselves. It's probably more important and beneficial long term when users stay within the ecosystem than totally offload themselves to Windows/Linux.

Sure - but then it gets harder to exactly define the Mac Pro compared to the Studio (especially since right now the defining thing would be video cards, which isn't something that the M* processors really support yet).

With the introduction of the Mac Studio, I'm starting to think that the rumors of it being designated as something else (e.g. X1) make sense. It might be a different version to meet the wants and needs of the Pro customers.

Personally disappointed that they didn’t refresh the Mac Mini with M2. Been wanting to get one for home to upgrade my dev machine but don’t want to shell out for the M1 Pro/Max on the Studio (though I was perfectly fine getting my employer to foot the bill for a Studio with M1 Max and plenty of ram)

I suspect that’s because they’re working on a full re-design to deliver something much smaller. I’m also waiting for this to upgrade from my homelab M1 Mini.

That would be wonderful.

I'll be curious when we can expect a Mac Pro Tower on apple silicon. I know one person whose high-end music studio revolves around his tower and low latency multi-channel audio cards. He's starting to have concern they will be abandoned.

For apple it's a small niche.

Is it really a small niche though? Many 'HPC'-ish creative workloads demand freedom of expand-ability in those ways it seems. I'm hopeful we'll see an Apple Silicon-based Pro that does offers PCI-e expandability amongst others. The Studio simply won't be sufficient for everyone.

I do not see their sales numbers, but based upon their actions it's pretty clear where their top sellers are.

That and Apple has a notable history of dropping standards they no longer feel are current to push new standards. Even if those changes very clearly abandon current and active users.

I'm planning to move to 24GB Macbook Air M2 from 16GB Macbook Pro (2019) 16" purely because I think the machine can be easily handle web development (Rails + ESBuild + Chrome + iTerm2 + Discord) workflow.

I want to move to a machine which is not over optimised for my workflow and easier to carry around. I'm waiting for the reviews to pour in before taking the call.

Why not the MacBook Pro with M1 Pro/Max

It's so heavy! I love the laptop but it is a little bit heavier than ideal for me. I think a MacBook Air works for me too! I don't need much computing power. I wish they had a larger screen version of it

I used an M1 Air since late 2020 and loved it, but it was falling over on certain workloads - mainly because I hadn’t specced enough memory.

So I recently bought a 14” Pro with 32gb RAM, which is amazing - it makes mincemeat of all my workloads.

BUT… it is noticeably heavier and more unwieldy! So much so that I decided to keep the Air as a second computer for the couch or the coffee shop.

Two laptop life is good. But now I wish I’d gone for the 16” Pro …

carrying around 16" is no fun. There were countless times I can recall where I dropped the plan to work out of coffee shop because I felt dreadful putting that bag pack on my shoulder with laptop and other accessories.

I got a 17" Windows laptop at one point for games to replace various old semi-functional Windows DIYs I had lying around. I never really used it a lot but I wouldn't have wanted to carry it around with me in any case.

Yeah the 14” doesn’t move further than home office -> living room and back again, and with me on the occasional biz trip. So, all scenarios where I would benefit from the extra screen size of the 16” and not really care about the extra weight and heft. Everything else - couch, coffee shop, standing desk, etc, I use the Air.

Forgot to mention another bonus: the continuity features in MacOS are good enough to use the Air as a second screen for certain activities. You think you won’t use it, but it turns out to be surprisingly useful.

I have a similar philosophy, inspired by Elliot J. Stocks [0]

I want the beefiest small computer for out of office use while at the same time the beefiest computer for in office use. So for the past decade, I've been using the 11" MBA -> 12" rMB for my mobile computer, while my office machines have been the 2012 Mac Mini -> 2018 Mac Mini -> Mac Studio Max. The rMB has definitely been getting long in the tooth and I've been waiting for the M2 MBA.

[0]: https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-cloud-centric-mac-set-up

My guess is cost. Why pay for performance you don’t need? Or portability? Weight is weight.

It will probably handle that workflow really well. The fanless design isn’t as good for sustained performance (gaming, video exporting, etc) but for edit/compile/debug cycles it’s great.

Keep in mind the M2 machines still have a limitation of one external display. To have two monitors you need at least an M1 Pro 14”

My work assigned me a 16gb M1 air for similar work (swap Ruby with Python) and it's perfect for me. The battery life is amazing and development feels as fast as my gaming laptop. Keep in mind it can only do 1 external monitor.

Literally the only MacBook you can take home today from Apple is the M1 Air. Every other one says late July delivery minimum. Crazy. Best Buy has a version I want, so I'm going to grab one there. But wow.

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac

Technically I feel when Apple upgrades their MacBook Air with a new chip, they should simultaneously also update the Mac Mini

Upgrading the mini makes sense, but the performance motivated desktop market has the Studio which is early in life cycle.

As long as they are constrained on M2 chips it probably isn’t worth the customer confusion to bring the Mini closer to the Studio.

There have been rumors that the next Mini will be available in M2 and M2 Pro configurations.

This is backed up by Apple still selling Intel Mac Minis at the high end. They seem to think that product niche hasn’t been filled by the M1 mini yet.

If so I would expect the mini to be updated when M2 Pro is announced.

OT, also, but has anyone had issues with a "crunchy" sounds from an M1 MBP speakers? Seems to occur on my 2021 M1 during periods of high usage. It's terribly annoying.

I've been following this Reddit thread looking for fixes, but no luck on a permanent fix yet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookp[]ro/comments/qmpg3k/2021_m...

Everyone has had that issue. There's marathon me too thread here https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/132423

I seriously thought about getting either the M2 Air or wait for M2 Pro, but I eventually figured that I dislike the system software so much that I would not enjoy the device. Even though it had a clearly superior CPU, and even though my nearly every other computing device is an Apple.

Perhaps when Asahi i.e. Linux on Apple CPU becomes a stable thing, then it will be a very interesting machine. The hardware is clearly superior to almost every PC out there, although my current machine (Asus Zephyrus G14 2022) gets very close.

The article doesn't even mention TSMC, Capacity / Node improvement and wider market chip constraint while only looking at Apple's previous record or cycles.

TSMC already mentioned first 3nm revenue will be from 2023 and not 2022.

Good question. I was not terribly excited by the M2 releases because of the 24GB RAM cap. I have a 2020 MBP with 64GB and I enjoy being able to run large ML jobs while my colleagues complain their machines are choking :)

M1 Macbook Air is capped to 16GB, whereas the M1 Pro (on the Macbook Pro) goes up to 32GB and the M1 Max goes up to 64GB.

M2 MBA capped at 24GB seems fair imho. It's a tiny fanless laptop.

Thanks for clarifying. Would be nice to have an M2 with 64GB.

The M1 pro and M1 max are faster than the M2. Might as well get those.

Ah really, didn’t know that. Thanks for this tip.

I would be under the impression that the M2 has faster single core performance, but the M1 Pro and Max to have better multi-core performance. Until the M2 Pro and Max come out.

pro and max are the same clock speeds as the base m1, just more 'performance' cores. m2 has faster core speed

The M1 Pro/Max/Ultra exists right now. If TFA is correct, the M2 versions of those are at least a year away.

If you can disclose, what kindof ML jobs do you run on your MBP? Im interested in ML myself, but I've always found myself sticking to my beefier desktop with cuda. Even now on my M1 MBP 13", using the M1 version of Tensorflow, the iGPU seems to chug, and TF for M1 doesn't always work. Just curious as how you make ML on a mac work for you...

Sure, at the moment these are non-NLP sequence models.

I'm interested in the iMac with 24GB of RAM tbh!

When they're ready.

I was hoping so much for:

- Mac Pro.

- New XDR Display.

- More M2 product upgrades.

No new professional gear for devs at a developer conference :(

They pre-announced the previous Mac Pro at WWDC 2019, but even that was only available in December, I think. Before that, they previewed the previous Mac Pro in 2013. So, yeah. No harm in hoping but it's really rare for them to actually release new pro-branded hardware at WWDC.

I think a lot of people were expecting them to because this WWDC marks 2 years since transition to Apple silicon and two years ago they said the transition would be complete in 2 years. So it begs the question, is the transition to Apple silicon "complete" since there isn't a Mac Pro with Apple silicon? Or, will Apple kill Mac Pro and the studio will be the new "Mac Pro?"

Even if you ignore the COVID and supply chain problems — which I’d argue are pretty OK reasons for schedule slippage — they never were that clear from what point you should count the two years: the announcement or the first availability of a Mac on the new architecture. If it’s the latter, they still have some months.

I knew iBook really use an lot of ram. I saw 1GB easily in both intel and M1. I have to kill it

$1200 for 8gb of ram and 256gb ssd. seems bad value. basically paying premium for a fancy case.

been using dell xps win10 for 8 years without any issues. at least the UI does not change for no reason ever year, just to sell more hardware.

You just complained about a hardware company releasing new hardware.

no i complained about the poor value.

i mean the OS are only changed every year to give people a reason to buy new hardware. there are so many regressions in the OS over the years too. why does the appearance of finder have to change every year...

i bought ipad mini to find the OS no longer has a UI zoom feature which was there on the previous iPad OS, just totally deprecated = of course returned it

This is false, the iPad has both zoom-in[0] and increase font size[1].

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/zoom-ipad9a245e3e/15.0/...

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/display-text-size-ipad9...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/display-zoom-missing-wi...

I think it’s a software company (apple) making changes to the ui to sell more hardware (apple). In a predictable coordinated fashion.

The issue here is apple will always be the bad guy since they are seen doing all of this in a coordinated attempt to sell more stuff. Dell on the other hand only sells more stuff either when the software landscape, that they don’t control, has moved too far for the legacy hardware to keep up. Or they innovated on the hardware and show enough value for you to change hardware independent from software. Dell will almost never be the bad guy here unless they make subpar machines. The XPS and precision laptops are far from subpar.

So you get guys like the parent that prefer dell since it seems more natural and not like they are being played.

To me it just feels like this release isn't very exciting other than the new colour. The new chip sounds fine, but until real world independent benchmarks come out it's probably safest to assume it's an incremental improvement. Otherwise if you're getting a base model then you're not getting a lot more than you would have gotten in 2020 (still 8GB memory which is becoming laughable for such an expensive machine, still 256GB SSD, slightly fancier screen and webcam), and at least by UK pricing you'll be paying 25% more for the privilege.

> and at least by UK pricing you'll be paying 25% more for the privilege

the US prices that apple show on their US website are without sales tax. in the US you pay the sales tax separately from what apple is advertising.

in the UK the VAT is baked in.

I mean that the release price of the M2 MBA including VAT (£1249) is that much higher than the release price of the M1 MBA including VAT (£999 - the same price as it is today on the apple store although in practice you can find them new from £850-ish).

If you only care about ram and SSD yes, but if you look at the whole package including screen, speakers, build quality and battery life then it’s not that much of a premium. I have a work HP laptop that is more expensive and even though it gives me more storage and more ram, the little fan runs high 80% of the day and unless I’m maxing out the ram every now and then, I don’t see the benefit of the trade off.

Your xps have 100gbs ram bandwidth? No

10 hours battery life? No

Superb handling of fractional ui scaling? No

Perfect trackpad? No

Single cable charger? (Maybe) no(t)

Unix? No

>Your xps have 100gbs ram bandwidth?

No but at least the ram is not soldered onto the board and can be upgraded easily.

>10 hours battery life?

maybe 6 hours but i never used it without a charger, so not an issue. also the battery is user replaceable.

>Superb handling of fractional ui scaling?

Windows has better UI scaling. I can scale the UI or fonts alone up to 200% in 10% increments. I have visual problem so i can tell you without a shadow of a doubt macos is waaaaay more limited. you have like 4 scaling options only.

couple this with the complete lack of contrast or affordance in the latest flatsh*t FisherPriceOS and its a disaster.

>Perfect trackpad?

I use a mouse. trackpad is good enough, no issues. it does have a 4k touch screen. perfect is a subjective thing.

>Single cable charger? (Maybe) no(t)

Yes it does

>Unix?

Can run a VM of any linux distro, dual boot any intel compatible linux distro or windows subsystem for linux. One of the benefits of having more than 8gb of ram and 256gb ssd ;)

---

all this plus 1tb SSD 16gb of ram, dedicated gpu, 4k display

also you need an apple account to install apps from the appstore, most apps get deprecated every 5 years because apple needs to sell new hardware, complete lack respect for backwards compat, where i can run pretty much any windows app from the last 20 years and sometimes more.

EDIT: My message was posted when the above comment was only a "yes to all", and before that a borderline snarky response that could've gotten a mod warning for an insult. The above commentator then deceptively added far more to his comment after my response.

Actually that is not possible, and if you believe so, you are misled.

A top-of-the-line desktop Core i9 can't handle more than 75GB/s memory bandwidth (the Intel memory controller literally can't handle it regardless of how many RAM sticks you have), the M2 can handle over 100GB/s with M1 Ultra over 200GB/s. That is actually unheard of and cannot be matched on a desktop system. (Partially explains why Apple's RAM is so expensive.)

Secondly, as for your Unix claim, unless you are running FreeBSD, Linux is not Unix. macOS ironically is a certified, commercial Unix, but Linux is not because it is a Unix clone and not a derivative. I doubt you are running FreeBSD though, because outside servers, hardware support is messy and several years behind.

Finally... you might think otherwise, but it is a broadly accepted fact that Windows UI Fractional scaling sucks with certain apps and even built-in apps messing up and looking fuzzy or awkward, which almost never happens on macOS.

EDIT 2: The original commentator must have never used a Mac, ever, for this message: "also you need an apple account to install apps from the appstore where i can run pretty much any windows app from the last 20 years and sometimes more." To which I simply say the situation is exactly like the Windows Store on Windows which requires a Microsoft Account but nobody really cares because not many people use either app store.

EDIT 3: The original poster deceptively edited my Edit #2 out again without notice. At this point the OP has changed his message over and over to reflect my criticisms and try to put me out of context violating HN rules repeatedly.

Personally I would much rather run Linux than whatever "Unix" means.

> Secondly, as for your Unix claim, unless you are running FreeBSD, Linux is not Unix.

Inspur K-UX, which is built on Linux, is Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX

FreeBSD is, legally, Unix-like.

Let it go. I've been watching people compare apples (ha, ha) to oranges so they can declare Apple products a rip-off for over a decade now.

You're right, I have let it go too, I used to argue much more online.

I got into Apple stuff at around 2005 so I have had the same experiences.

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