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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Pretty good considering the level of R&D that went into pushing their new ARM M2 platform across their entire computing line.

We just started buying M2 Macs at work, and oh boy, they are lightning fast, robust refined HW and the battery life is incredible. It’s a check-mate for the personal computing industry, pending they get their enterprise MDM features in shape (ie Intune) and get more apps ported to macOS.

For those wondering, just in the last few months you can now bind a M2 Mac to InTune and remotely manage most things. You can’t login to the system with Office365 email yet (coming soon), however you can block personal AppleIDs, push a managed AppleID that uses Office365 SSO without any third-party plugins, and remotely track every device using FindMy. And yes since it supports InTune you can push and deploy endpoint protection and company apps.

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My M1 2020 is great for battery life, can’t imagine what these are like!

Those MDM functions have been available in other MDM platforms for ages. Microsoft has been consistently bad at Mac management, I think mostly it’s they don’t care.

Yeah there was Jamf, but especially at a small company ~5-10-ish people, having to deal with a provider where you have to go through a sales person is such a pain. They have minimum license buys and deprio you if you're small... Now that it's natively supported just between Apple and MS, you can on-board yourself in about 1 day without talking to anyone, and the whole platform costs $0 if you have Office365 E3 already.

The M2 seems incredible. It is the first thing in a long time that has tempted me to try out a Mac. The price is high, but is the performance worth it? 32GB of unified memory would be nice.

I bought the 13inch m2 air a few months back and it's awesome. Super sleek design and feel, awesome keyboard, no touchbar, and also magsafe. It's really good. I actually hate MacOS and use a framework for 60% of my day (my work machine), but I have to admit the m2 is just a pleasure. I've used Macs extensively for years because that's what most companies provide for software hires, but the m2 air was the first Mac I've ever purchased with my own money, and I don't regret it.

> no touchbar

I actually liked it. Too bad it’s an evolutionary dead end and never made it to the desktop keyboards.

And I even liked the one without an ESC key.

take a look at apple’s return policy. you’re invited to take it for a test drive, just don’t treat it like a rental car.

Or if you're near an Apple Store, go in and ask if you can play around - if they'r not busy they'll often let you download stuff onto the demo machines, etc. They can easily reset them.

And then buy a refurbished one on the Apple Card to save a bit of cheddar™.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/FNWE3LL/A/refurbished-16-...

I think it is, definitely. Have recently upgraded and it's immediately noticeable from the old Intel-based Macs.

Much improved compute speed + battery life, barely noticeable battery drain. I'm a very happy customer.

It’s impressive moving from an x86 Mac. From an x86 Windows, it’s mind-blowing.

I'm a career-long PC guy and had an excellent watercooled "Battlestation". I dipped my toe in with the M1 Mini, then an M1 Max MBP... and my battlestation now has like 1/4" of dust on it. It helps that most of my work anymore is AWS Console or VSCode, which does just fine on either.

There are a few games that it won't play, and..... that's about it. I'm still surprised at how quickly that happened. Worth a try, the M2 mini is cheap and easy, and the 8gb/256gb config was "enough" for me. I honestly didn't even notice the bump moving to the max 64gb/2tb. Doing it over, I'd probably do an Air with 16 or 24gb and be happy as a clam.

$0.02 :)

I'm happy as a clam on my 16gb M1 air. One hidden nice feature is how cheap and easy DIY repairs are. To date I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers (my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine), and everything about it was downright trivial, with cheap parts readily accessible and iFixit's walkthroughs very comprehensive.

> I've replaced my battery, monitor, and speakers...

I have many 2015 MacBook Pro's. All tour. All are almost permanently on. I replaced the battery on two machines last year. Speakers fine. Screen fine. Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced?

Read the sentence after the one you quoted in their comment and you'll see they clearly weren't blaming the laptop.

> Are you implying the relatively young M1 Air is so badly made, the speakers, monitors, AND battery have already needed to be replaced?

> my lifestyle involves very rough handling of the machine

No, it's not badly made, GP seems to be a huge exception. Please, read the full comment...

My M1 Air has been around since launch, have traveled with it just throwing inside bags, dropped a few times, sat on, etc., it still works 100% fine without any part swap, and looks almost pristine with just a tiny scratch on one of the edges from a drop.

The speakers didn't need to be replaced, that was a misdiagnosis on my part. But the process was easy (note for the readers: take a dry toothbrush to your speaker grilles if they ever start to sound off).

As for the battery, yeah ideally it'd last longer. But it's seen a lot of physical abuse, tons of full charge cycles, and generally wonked out charging setups so I can't get too upset.

For the monitor I'm honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did. It had been slammed around and crushed far more than what it should be able to take.

Interesting about the battery cycle. We have four original M1 and have the same issue. Apparently fixed on the subsequent hardware. As a matter of interest, did you also buy AppleCare, and use it? I don't know where you bought, but in the UK we get, effectively, 6 years 'fit for purpose' with such purchases. So, despite our slamming and crushing and touring, no replacements were needed until beyond 6 years of abuse.

I didn't get AppleCare. Looks like it'd be $70/yr, so I'd be $210 down (plus $100 for screen repairs). The battery was $130 [1], and the screen was $170 [2]. Comes out to a bit cheaper to DIY, and I don't have to give up access to my device to random technicians for an undisclosed period of time.

And how are you saying you've had M1 devices for 6 years? I don't think thats possible.

[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-air-13-a2337-late-20...

[2]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/385103589564

I could have been clearer. Such UK retail purchases are guaranteed for 6 years. So the point I'm making was that it was beyond 6 years before any of my 20 x 2015 mbp's failed in any aspect. The 4 x M1s had poor battery cycle count, very early on, and subsequently became unreliable when not powered. I use them in the office. I should add there would be a significant investment hurdle in new peripherals to move to the 'new' usb-c standard, hence holding on to the 2015 model. It's been nothing short of the most versatile laptop I've ever worked with. But it's time is almost up.

Also have a gaming desktop, and I just find myself using my macbook more. The macbook "feels" faster even though on benchmarks it's not. The mac just never misses a frame. No bugs, no random hangs, no noticeable delays doing anything.

The thing I find is, the arm Mac’s have way better feeling input. I don’t mean the hardware end but the latency from key stroke to appearing on screen.

I don’t think it’s just down to macOS because the Intel Mac’s didn’t feel as good. I think it’s likely down to the E cores and moving more of the IO handling processors onto the SoC (according to the Asahi folks anyway)

When my Intel Mac or AMD PC are under load, input struggles to fight with the things taking up resources. And that might be as simple as running Teams which is a resource hog at the most random times.

The Arm Macs never hit that issue for me even when I’m using aggressive loads.

Wow, that's good to know, because that's something I feel a lot when going from my Intel MBP to my AMD Windows laptop, especially important for accessibility (VoiceOver).

The 16gb configuration is an absolute powerhouse and seems to be fine ... RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.

My daily driver for the past couple of years has been the last Intel Macbook Pro with 32GB of RAM, but I just started using an M2 Mini in the last few weeks and with 16 GB of RAM it easily outperforms my older machine. A couple days ago, I realized I had a lot of stuff running without any signs of trouble at all, and I checked and was using only 14 GB of RAM with all of these apps open:

XCode, a Flutter project in Android Studio, a Rails project in Rubymine, a running server/database and 2 different mobile Simulators, Sublime, Safari, Chrome, and 3 different Firefox profiles.

I'm looking forward to picking up a new Macbook sometime in the next half a year, but for now I'm quite delighted when using my Mini which literally boots in less than 5 seconds.

Edit: just wanted to emphasize that sometimes my Macbook Pro struggles without even all of the above apps open.

A more extreme example—- I had an 8GB M1 Air that outperformed my 64GB Intel MBP that was less than a year old when I got the Air.

I've seen this a lot since the first m1 macs came out. While I'm not a hardware engineer my understanding is this:

For regular stuff that's not gpu intensive, it's not really much different to any other system in terms of how it uses ram. What's different is it has a ridiculously fast SSD and can swap without much performance hit.

Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.

> Relying on your ssd for swap over getting enough memory in the first place seems like false economy to me.

Important to keep in mind you won’t be able to replace that SSD without taking the machine to an Apple Store, and I’m not even sure they can replace the SSD without replacing the motherboard.

It’s more that the system itself is designed with the assumption of a super fast SSD, so it keeps way more in both ram and swap longer because it can swap fast enough to not be bottlenecked.

So almost no matter how much ram you get, in multi-application day to day workflows it’ll still use swap sometimes just because it can.

If your workflow involves something like giant objects in python or huge data structures that need to be in ram for performance, then you need the ram. But for use cases like 2,000 browser tabs plus photoshop plus Lightroom plus ten electron apps, mac osx “feels” like it has way more ram than an equivalent windows machine.

I don't believe I've yet seen any swapping on my 128G M2 studio but I also don't watch it like a hawk.

Being able to use swap is obviously beneficial, and if you're going to use it, it's better if it's fast.

But relying on it in place of regular RAM means you're just artificially shortening the life of your SSD - that's what I meant about "a false economy".

The machine "feeling" responsive isn't the point.

If all other factors are the same, the ssd wear on a machine that's used the ssd heavily for swap is going to be significantly higher.

> RAM usage on macs, particularly ARM, is completely different to Windows.

Using a Mac (or Linux) is deeply enlightening on how terrible the Windows user experience is. From random slowdowns to odd degradation patterns under load, it’s a very frustrating environment.

The only reason I can imagine people putting up with it is being unwilling to change - it takes work to move from Windows to Linux, but Macs are so well rounded, and now with their ARM CPUs, they can offer a much tighter integration between hardware and software.

And, for developers, it’s Unix from top to bottom (well… no X, but that’s another story). WSL is impressive, but it’s still a Linux bolted on a VMS-like OS.

One thing: considering how long Macs remain usable and the fact they are impossible to expand, it’s wise to get more memory than you need right now. Thinking on developing for cluster environments, I’d try to get a Mac with 32 or 64GB of RAM.

Yeah, but I want to play with LLMs. I think at least 32GB is a must even for something like falcon-7b.

For coding, I think ram gets a little overrated sometimes. Many projects would work fine on 16GB machines.

I'm about due to upgrade my 2017 Air, and it'll be to a 13" M2 Air. I would have done it already, but every time I price it out and see that they want to charge me $300 for 256 gigs of storage, I get a little offended and close the tab. As with every Apple purchase I make, it'll just come down to necessity, after the old one finally breaks. I'll hold my nose and pay the Apple tax, knowing that they think of me as a sucker, and they're probably right.

Yep you get an extra 25% GPU and an extra 256 gigs of storage for 300$.

Dammit price discrimination. I realize buying the cheaper option frequently is the better option with Apple prices but they really know how to price in storage anxiety.

One caveat! You must buy the M2 Pro (14" or larger, non-air) model to get 2 external screens.

We bought the wrong model to start with (13" M2 regular) and spent a week messing around with ours trying to get it to work with our 2 external displays when we rang Apple and they explained the difference between M2 Regular and M2 Pro. If you were buying one for yourself and budget was of no value, note the 13" and 14" are virtually the same physical size, and yet the design and technical capabilities of the 14" model are far and beyond ...

I wrote off the 13" as a loss and paid the difference myself, and now use it as a laptop at home :) Old design, yes, but it was such a nice piece of kit, no way I was gonna send it back to Apple!

I believe multiple screens are possible, even on the M1 MBA, you just need a docking station. Officially some don't support multiple screens, but there are mainstream solutions to this in the form of docking stations, just not sure why Apple doesn't even so much as hint that it's possible. It's a really unclear process!

It's possible only if you use a DisplayLink dock which requires using very specific dongles and installing specific third-party drivers. Our company already has 10-ish Dell Monitors with USB-C docks integrated, also Thunderbolt Dell docks, and neither of these work. There is no workaround.

If someone sells all that in one box, that’s still an easy solution.

What may not be widely known is that going from 256GB -> 512GB on M2-based machines also gives the SSD a huge speed bump, because 512GB is made up of 2x256GB chips with dual channels. Apple uses a single chip for 256GB configurations as a cost saving measure :(

For some use cases, you're even better off upgrading the base model M2 Air to 512GB vs upgrading the RAM from 8 to 16GB for a similar cost. This is because swapping suddenly becomes twice as fast.

…your description makes it sound like an upgrade, when actually the 256 configuration is just incompetent, a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”

    a failure (or sabotage?) compared to the m1 models that 
    worked properly without the expensive “upgrade”

I don't know the specifics, but the "lowest-capacity model has reduced performance because there's only a single chip instead of multiple chips being used in parallel" has been the case with SSDs for just about as long as they've been around and it is definitely not an Apple-specific thing.

My understanding is this: when the lowest-capacity model is only using a single chip, it's because the manufacturer is no longer making smaller sizes. For example, Apple's supplier(s) may not even be making 128GB NAND chips any more or may be discontinuing them soon, so they don't even have the option of using 128GB+128GB instead of 256GB.

I wouldn’t say “incompetent” if it still outperforms most x86 laptops you get for the same price.

Think of it as having one SSD fitted on the low end and two on all other models.

I’m on an M1 Max Mac Studio with 64gb of ram, it’s absolutey wonderful. Best workstation I’ve ever owned, bar none.

My understanding from benchmarks is that M1 and M2 have an excellent performance / energy consumption ratio. But in terms of raw performance, many Intel and AMD options can still deliver more. Another very interesting aspect of Apple's CPUs is that they offer a lot more performance than the competition for entry models. I cannot find anything that matches a Mac Mini M2. Sadly, Asahi does not support the M2 yet.

Regarding the Mac Studio, I had heard complaints about noisy fans. Can you comment on that?

I have never once heard the fans in my Mac Studio

Personally, I've never heard them. It's dead silent and i'm constantly running CPU intensive build pipelines and heavy CPU bound sql queries on it.

I love mine too

> The price is high, but is the performance worth it?

The numbers reflect Mac revenue down -24.2% YoY to date; if it's worth it, the market certainly hasn't voted with their wallets yet.

M1 Max here

looking forward to the M3. just for the RAM at this point, for me nothing changes between 64gb - 128gb (aside from recent LLMs) but 128gb+ opens up additional applications for me,

aside from that I think incremental improvements in GPU and other special purpose processors will be intriguing in conjunction with the RAM boosts

I have a hunch that 2024 or 2025 chipsets will give more RAM to the neural engine for very fast AI output. Will we still be using "tokens per second" by then? Who knows. But I think there will be OS level inclusion of models by then and Apple machines will have a consumer level chipset leaps ahead of others, in mobile and laptop form factors.

Apple's hardware is second to none, really great time to be a mac user honestly. What would make it even better would be if the software caught up a bit. It feels like MacOS is in the in-between where it wants to be like iOS but it doesn't really feel like it's been done "right". Things like stage manager are a great example of this.

Apple products are also:

- a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors.

- a checkmate to the right of repair.

- a checkmate to the environment.

- a checkmate to most hardware terminology (they will create their own so you cannot compare products)

- a checkmate to modularity.

I really don't see how they're much worse than the average in their industry for almost any of those. Mac Mini, Studio, and Pro all want an external monitor, and that's essentially the same product lines any other company would sell an external monitor on. With the iMac being a smaller part of the line, they're maybe even more in line with the rest of the competition on monitors.

I literally own a Framework. I care about this stuff in general, but it's not like they're making equal or worse products. What Apple is getting out of their M# processor lines is insane. Honestly, it's questionable if my modular laptop is better for the environment with how much more power I have to spend charging it vs. most of Apple's options, given that I've generally kept using my laptops for 5-7 years at least.

I've thrown away way more e-waste on my fully modular external monitor Windows/Linux desktop than I've thrown away Apple products over the years. Modular essentially means "throw away some of your parts regularly". What else am I supposed to do with a 6 year old CPU and Motherboard? I could run it as a server, but I don't need to consume that power for anything really, so it just sits in a closet for years until I throw it out.

Anecdotally, I was between buying a M1 Macbook Air and a Framework 2 years ago. I'm already curious about upgrading my Framework to the new AMD mainboard/CPU set. I can almost promise you if I'd bought the M1 Air, I wouldn't even be considering an upgrade for another 2-3 years. Repair/upgradeability also makes it way easier to impulsively generate e-waste.

Because you keep editing in more stuff - I'm really not sure I can blame them on the "making new hardware terminology" line. It really doesn't seem like it's so you can't compare it. There's plenty of benchmarks comparing it. They clearly went to ARM because it got them a ton of compute power on very little power. Yes, it can't compare to an old Intel chip the same way, but there's plenty of folks pursuing this line, and it seems like it's been well worthwhile.

    a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors.

Can you elaborate?

Don't question or think, just hates muha apple

Connect a 4K monitor or TV to a Mac.

The result is tiny widgets.

Still dont get it. Using a 4K LG display with a Macbook and everything works as intended. Whats your specific issue? What does "tiny widgets" mean?

Completely incorrect. Plenty of actual reasons to dislike Apple, no need to fabricate new ones.

I'm typing this on a 4K monitor connected to a Mac and everything is perfect.

I don't remember what the default behavior is when MacOS sees a new 4K monitor, but you can go into the display preferences and choose "Larger Text" (essentially, 2X UI scaling) or "More Space" (no scaling, "tiny widgets") or incremental noninteger scaling modes in between.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dmin2flhod4rkqxfm494k/macos_d...

Does not that just result in a 1920×1080 resolution with low res text?

Try using the same screen on Linux, take a close picture of text and compare.

3rd party monitors have the HiDPI mode disabled.

I'm not sure Linux is the comparison point you want for "handles high resolution consistently with various monitors." I'm sure I could mess around with settings to get any behavior I want, but I've been wrangling multi-monitor high-res setups on Linux for over a decade and it's never been better than OS X's monitor handling. They both have plenty of issues.

I think I see the cause of confusion here.

After some googling, it looks like M1 (and I guess M2) Macs don't always expose HiDPI options for 3rd party displays. That sucks. WTF is Apple doing? I'm not sure if there are workarounds or what. I will research this before buying an Apple Silicon based Mac, that's for sure.

I have a Intel Mac (latest MacOS) and have never experienced this problem with a variety of 3rd party monitors over the years. So I didn't even realize this was an issue.

Additionally, I forgot that subpixel rendering is disabled by default. You can enable it with `defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO` but I forgot that was a required step.

Well, apropos of anything else, I think they very deliberately "broke"/tweaked Display Stream Compression when they released the Pro Display XDR.

My cheesegrater Mac Pro with a beefy graphics card under Catalina, I was happily running 2 4K displays in HDR10, at 144Hz.

First beta of Big Sur, which came out with the Pro Display? I could drive them in HDR10 at 60Hz. 95Hz in SDR.

Was reproducible - by me, by many others.

Turn DSC 1.4 down to 1.2 on my monitors, and it got a bit better, HDR10 @ 75Hz, 120Hz SDR, IIRC.

That remained broken all through Big Sur, despite a huge number of reports.

Remained broken through Monterey too.

I believe it's fixed in Ventura, but I've since changed monitors.

Initially, people were wondering about the Pro Display's bandwidth and how it was doing 6K HDR and other USB connectivity, and it sure as hell seems like they messed with the DSC spec to make it happen, and 'screw other monitor owners'.

That's completely f'd up. Brings me one step closer to ditching Macs.

Honestly life has been turbulent the last few years and I just haven't had the energy to switch, even though I think everything I do at this point is easily doable in Linux anyway.

I have tons of issues hooking 4k monitors to my macbook but that is definitely not one of them.

> a checkmate to the environment

more than other personal computers/devices? how so?

In my experience Apple is the only electronics company to actually repair your product rather than discard a broken one and give you a new one where I live. With some repairs (usually just battery replacement), their products can last and be fully functional for nearly decades, and I often pass on my older devices to my family members. Yes, they are nearly impossible to repair yourself, but that's far from "checkmate to the environment" in my book.

Many of the "repairs" are discarding the motherboard and putting a new one.

Are they fully discarding it? Or just replacing it? I actually don't know the answer here, but I'd be surprised if they didn't have some refurb process for removing still-working parts of the mainboard and attached components.

From a turnaround and customer experience perspective, it makes sense to just swap the part and do the diagnostic later so that you avoid having to guess-and-check through the multitude of parts that could be broken.

What a nonsense. I had a few thinkpads in the past and if I had any troubles, their employee will come directly to my house the next working day and replace the broken part in my laptop. It is way better than the support Apple provides and also way better for environment, because unlike Apple, who makes the whole board as a single piece where you cannot replace anything, other laptop manufacturers make it possible to replace every part of your laptop independently (motherboard, ssd, memory, wifi, etc.).

My MBP is 5 years old at this point and I never needed to repair or replace anything.

Not everyone lives in US. In Europe most electronics is shipper back to the producer by mail for an indefinite amount of time (weeks to months) without any replacement while it’s gone. The item that comes back is usually a brand new replacement.

Even in the US - my dad used Thinkpads for his work exclusively and they regularly would just overnight him a new laptop and have him return the broken one under warranty. I don't think we ever had anyone come to the house/office to repair a laptop in person. This is the first time I've ever heard of a company doing that.

> In my experience Apple is the only electronics company to actually repair your product rather than discard a broken one and give you a new one where I live.

In my experience, no.

I had an MBA, battery charging chip was damaged. The laptop ran fine on AC, the battery was intact and fine - it just could not get a charge delivered to it.

Took it to Apple Store. Thought what might be reasonable... $200, maybe $300, parts and labor.

Genius comes back out with a quote for $900, to repair the charging circuit on what was an $1,100 laptop. First words, "Maybe we can talk about getting you set up in a new Mac today."

> - a checkmate to most 3rd party external monitors

Why? Their display is extremely niche and iMacs aren’t really a big deal these days either

I think it’s a jab at poor compatibility with 3rd party monitors.

I’ve got a stack of 24 Mac minis, $600 a pop. With barely any power draw, and killer compute, it’s a steal.

curious what type of workload this would be good for?

Don’t know about them, but I build and manage clusters so I can build and manage clusters.

I have one of 4 RPi Zero Ws that right now runs a Docker Swarm with Hercules running VM370. And Squid proxy because I don’t want it polluting the Wi-Fi network for no good reasons.

The cluster is named Gibson.

Nodes in a distributed system, polling server for tasks.

but why mac for this? Is it really more cost effective than cheap linux boxes?

Performance per watt on an M2 is better than anything else you can buy. Barely generates heat. Considering for $600 each and I don’t need to spec anything out and can just drive to the Apple Store any time I need a few more and it’s really useful for a home business cluster.

Wdym? Jamf already fills the macOS enterprise MDM space.

Still no M2 iMac...

It’s going straight to the M3.

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