Ode to the M1
fabiensanglard.net
fabiensanglard.net
> For every extra cycle an hardware engineer can squeeze out of silicon, you will find a programmer adding one hundred cycles to their program[6]. In other terms, I fear that once devs figure out how powerful the M1 is, they will throw more "features" at it.
Can we please stop replicating the "growth" fallacy into software ecosystems? Haven't we learnt enough about how unsustainable and damaging this is?
I hope Electron/CEF die soon, and people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world.
Web technologies are fine, but what we really need is some kind of lightweight browser which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS, but with far lower memory usage. I found https://ultralig.ht/ which seems to be exactly what I am looking for, but the license is a major turn off for most paid services. It makes sense for smaller, indie projects to adopt it, but I haven't seen many "desktop apps" using this in the wild.
Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/) looks pretty cool. I think another possible option is Servo (https://github.com/servo/servo) – it was abandoned by Mozilla along with Rust during their layoffs a while back (but the project still seems to have a decent bit of activity). It would be great if some group of devs could revive the project, or a company could fund such a revival.
Eventually, we'll need to reflect on, and explore whether HTML+CSS is really the best way to do layout, and we could maybe perhaps consider porting the Android/iOS layout approach over to desktop. Maybe WPF/GTk/Qt/etc even got things right, and HTML+CSS isn't the best way to do layout.
GTK, QT, etc which are also superior to the single app, limited size focused Android/iOS UI frameworks. More importantly, unlike iOS/Android, they’re even cross platform.
HTML/CSS/JS are successful because of the same reason electron exists. The success of the web means there’s a huge developer base that knows how to work with HTML/CSS/JS which was the original lingua franca of the web, and there are tons of libraries, frameworks, tools, components, etc available in the HTML/CSS/JS world that makes development easier and quicker.
The actual reason is a different one IMHO. The implementation of web standards enabled cross-platform engines that provide every UI customization one could possibly need for a SaaS product. This decision included many benefits for businesses and developers alike, such as:
- User data stays in the walled garden
- Users most probably already have a web-browser installed
- Responsibility to keep the runtime (web-browser) up-to-date is on the user side
- Automated updates (POV user)
- No installation instructions
I think it as much as a business decision as it was the decision from developers to bet on HTML/CSS/JS instead of GTK, QT, etc.
I think your path to this future is getting a DOM API specced for WASM (as in, not going via a Javascript bridge). WASI might help.
If and when that happens, then you can repurpose that same API without necessarily needing to compile to WASM. The biggest hurdle is that the current DOM API is a Javascript API, not an API describing e.g. memory layouts.
So whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted assembler isn't going to make much of a difference to the end user experience.
Electron and similar apps serve a legitimate purpose in the marketplace which is to allow developers to deliver a cross-platform app for the same cost as a single platform one.
This is why performance matters even with a machine that is mostly idle. A faster system will respond faster to events. It will have lower latency when communicating over a network. It will handle user inputs faster. Users will complain that a program takes a second to respond even if the load average is 0.01.
(I know CPUs enter lower-performance states when lightly loaded. They can go from idle to their highest performance state in much less time than it takes for the user to notice latency.)
Subjectively, every Electron app I’ve used including the local beloved VSCode has been a painful UX. I can always tell. Nothing makes a fast computer feel slow quite like them, it’s amazing. I would settle for React Native at this point.
I do remember. And it now takes A LOT longer on insanely fast CPUs and SSDs. And I hate it every time I have to wait for it.
I think most software is designed to load once and never be quit; you’re probably just supposed to leave photosnot running in the background and let it swap to disk if needed.
But I have a hard time running like that, I quit programs when I’m done using them.
Inefficiency sucks, and electron enables that on a large scale.
I have to assume that photoshop could start faster, but trade offs would be made.
Photoshop still takes a good 30 seconds+ to open.
Sysadmins used to know a lot but earn pittance compared to “devops” or “SRE”; then those more expensive folks outsourced the majority of their hard work to cloud vendors who charge 5-11x the cost for compute.
Developers earn 5-10x more than 15 years ago, yet continue to choose solutions for their own convenience and time saving. Stating that its better for the company if they have to work less.
Surely at some point its just your job to consider the entire ecosystem and your contribution to it.
Otherwise why are you worth all that money?
And more than that - if you have a team that only/mostly has web experience, they're going to use Electron, and... what kind of company would want them to stop and go learn native app development, or hire extra people just to get a native app?
Note: I fully agree with you, I do feel that as a profession we really have descended into a weird "ship the MVP, ship new features non-stop, forget quality" reality, and I dislike it. I'd love it if everything was resource-thrifty native apps, and dev teams could stop chasing new and shiny things and work on improving their existing apps until they were shiny polished diamonds. I'd love to point to an app and say "see? this is 20 years of development, look at how nice it is, how perfectly thought out everything is, how everything just works flawlessly".
But the fact that that's not happening is not because devs are lazy, or not worth their money. It just doesn't make business sense.
Salary for developers that we discuss on HN seems to be in the region of $250k base, but that's not factoring in TC- which seems to be the bulk of income for the last 5 years. It's not unheard of around here to hear people talking about pulling in half-million if they are ex-FAANG. Which is nearly everybody these days.
[0]: source is here: https://www.datamation.com/careers/developer-salary-levels-2... based on https://e-janco.com
If you want to get rid of Electron, you personally have to volunteer to be responsible for 5x the work of anyone else, and accept bootcamp-graduate pay. Do you see why it's not happening?
And HTML/CSS may have its quirks but I'll take it every day over fumbling with GTK or whatever
And you know that because you’ve analyzed whole market and know opinion of users of every web software? Definitely not because you only live in bubble of other software engineers so you’re not exposed to complaints of common folk?
Discord has gotten pretty solid, vscode is spit fast. The hate against Electron feels so selective & antagonistic, picks it's targets, never acknowledged any value, never recognizes any points for the other side. It is just incredibly lopsidedly biased. Over what doesn't feel real to so many.
I was hoping Tauri would be the one, by using a shared library model. That would drop memory consumption down significantly. But they use webkit on Linux and I'm sorry but I want a much better base that supports more modern capabilities.
Like consumers that want to buy a phone that fit in the hand… there is none at a reasonable price.
Kinda like headphone ports and microSD slots on android phones. Are there models that do this? Yes! Is anyone willing to pay more for it? No! But they are very very loud online about it.
There do exist smaller android phones as well, just like a headphone port nothing is stopping you from buying one instead of complaining on the internet!
> Is anyone willing to pay more for it? No!
Is anyone willing to pick a phone over another (despite what paulmd's opinion might be)? YES.
> There do exist smaller android phones as well
No they don't. There is NOTHING on the market currently that is sized and priced like a samsung S5 mini today.
iphone mini wasn't priced like 6 phones, and it still didn't sell well. again, you can't seem to grapple with the reality here that what you want is a very niche thing and it doesn't sell well as a mass-market product regardless of price. that is, after all, why apple stopped making that size once again.
the iphone SE is about as small as the market wants. Below that is the domain of mini phones - which do exist, but mostly from smaller android vendors.
> No they don't. There is NOTHING on the market currently that is sized and priced like a samsung S5 mini today.
s5 mini: 131.1 x 64.8 x 9.1 mm
cubot pocket 3: 133.2 x 55 x 12.3mm
unihertz jelly pro: 92.4 × 43 × 13 mm
just with literally a few minutes of searching.
Still costs 4x than regular android phones.
> you can't seem to grapple with the reality
You can't seem to grapple with the reality that 839€ for a phone is completely insane, and not everybody is a rich spoiled person like you.
> unihertz jelly pro: 92.4 × 43 × 13 mm
Funny… I am returning a unihertz because of software issues (default google apps just crashing)… sure it's small… but I implied that stuff must work.
> just with literally a few minutes of searching.
Too bad that being rich and spoiled didn't enrich your brain uh?
I hope it's ok for you that unlike you, I knew what I was talking about.
For your small phone example, even Apple is cutting production of their smaller phones because not enough people are buying them. The entire premise really is overblown online.
You've ever heard a anyone say "This computer is too fast" or "this computer doesn't burn enough electricity"?
> For your small phone example, even Apple is cutting production of their smaller phones because not enough people are buying them.
Yeah I did mention "reasonably priced", which apple is not.
Just changing their high level data structures alone would yield 10x improvements, easily.
Targets Windows, UWP, MacOS, Linux, BSD, Android, iOS, and Web: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/faq.html
Nothing says you have to use it to make a game. I recall seeing articles here on HN about using it as a cross-platform app development framework. GDScript may be less appealing than JavaScript, however.
So how's the QuakeC development ecosystem these days? How good is ChatGPT at generating QuakeC?
Who's still programming Unity3D in Managed JScript or Boo?
The problem with Electron is RAM, disk space, and download size, which is because every app needs to ship its own copy of Blink. This is a solvable problem, but nobody is incentivized to solve it.
For example all Electron apps I use have their own implementation of a spell checker rather than hooking into the system one. Normally in Mac OS if I add a word to the system dictionary all apps will learn that word, but in each Electron app I will have to do it again, and again, ...
Many also implement their own UI widgets like basic buttons and input fields whose UX is not at all in line with native apps.
It's horrible having to constantly context switch _within the operating system I am using right now within this very moment_. Context switching when switching devices is not a problem at all.
I wonder if anyone did that comparison, an Electron app vs Chrome + a local copy of node+express whatever running the backend
(There basically aren't memory metrics that can show the effect of binary sizes on macOS. It'd show up as disk reads/page ins/general slowdowns instead, but SSDs are so fast that it's very hard to see one.)
Wasn't the whole OSX's new paradigm a switch to high level language and frameworks , with compositing window management to display super fancily rendered hello worlds ?
Decrying cycle burning for the sake of high level abstractions feels like a complete rebutal of everything OSX/macos ecosystem stood for.
No, not really. You're making it sound like Classic MacOS applications were written in assembly, when it was mostly C++. Switching to Objective-C was more of a lateral move, not a clear step forward in time or level of abstraction.
The Mac OS X graphics stack was a pretty big change from Classic MacOS, but it wasn't that much of a change from NeXTSTEP, which worked with 12MB of RAM + 1.5MB VRAM. NeXTSTEP just wasn't as eye-catchingly colorful. Early OS X did poineer gratuitous use of some effects like translucency with blurs in desktop GUIs, but since this was the time period where GPUs were becoming mainstream, these effects weren't egregiously resource-intensive.
And considering that OS X was adapted with relative ease to power a smartphone with 128MB of RAM (with the graphical effects turned up to 11), it definitely wasn't fundamentally bloated in the way that today's Electron apps are.
NextSTEP itself was a big change compared to X or Windows's GUI stack. NeXT machines were beefy and adjusted to high workloads so the user experience wasn't problematic, but it's still more resource use than the standard stacks of the time. I don't see it as a bad thing, but we should acknowledge resource economy wasn't a target of the neither NeXT nor Apple at that time.
> 12MB of RAM + 1.5MB VRAM
NeXT launched in 1988, basically around the times when "640k should be enough for everyone" was a meme. Even in 1996, 12MB of RAM was nothing to sneeze at. So, sure those are not enormous numbers, but they're far from the lower end of what was sold to consumers at the time.
> smartphone with 128MB of RAM
We should take a minute to note that 128Mb or RAM is not small for a phone at the time.
Otherwise, sure electron apps use a lot more than that, but the point was always to pay for powerful hardware and use it at full potential to run fancy apps. People loathe electron apps' bloat, but ease of development has also always been one of the core values. Better have apps that aren't fully optimized than no apps at all.
I say that looking at macos' pretty big market share compared to what it was a decade or two ago.
And we see tons of users choosing VSCode or IntelliJ's offering above Textmate, Codea, or even BBEdit, so the market for handcrafted delightful editors is also pretty slim. And that trend was there since the Eclipse days, so nothing new either.
All in all, I really think the choice comes down to electron/cross compiled apps or no apps, in many many cases.
But yes I also remember the days when lots of software just didn’t exist for macOS and I was thankful for a webtech version.
Cocoa and Electron are not the same.
Yes, so we can go back to writing a hundred lines of imperative code to render hello world.
But more importantly it's really not about the lines you code write once, or very few times in comparison -- it's about the computer does any time the application starts up on any machine, or any user does something. Obviously, to an extent. You wouldn't write a thousand lines of code instead of 100 to make something that is already very fast 10% faster. But I certainly would write 10 line instead of 1 if it meant the code is 10 times faster. It's just typing after all.
11 for the HTML document template
7 for the boilerplate package.json
3 more for the scripts addition to package.json
3 more for the “devdependencies”
20 for main.js
from: https://electronjs.org/docs/latest/tutorial/quick-start
A fairer assessment would be C++ with Qt to be honest though.
build with e.g. gcc hw.s `pkg-config --libs gtk+-3.0`
.globl main;main:
push %rbx
xor %esi, %esi
xor %edi, %edi
call gtk_init@PLT
lea .HW(%rip), %r8
xor %edx, %edx
xor %esi, %esi
mov $2, %ecx
xor %edi, %edi
xor %eax, %eax
call gtk_message_dialog_new@PLT
mov %rax, %rbx
mov %rax, %rdi
call gtk_dialog_run@PLT
mov %rbx, %rdi
call gtk_widget_destroy@PLT
xor %eax, %eax
pop %rbx
ret
.HW:.string "Hello World!"Can comfortably develop on my lap for a full day if needed, only MS Teams draws power like crazy, but apart from that 8 hours+.
Best computer I ever had I think.
I couldn't believe it was designed in such a fragile and user-hostile way. I took care of it, didn't drop it or spill anything on it, and it is bricked after just a couple of years due to a simple component failure beyond my control.
What does accessible even mean ? Far from clear that even Apple won't upgrade/change it.
And as for the boot issue it was not present on older modele and quite a lot of people only learned of it with the recent Rossman video.
remember how normal people operate ffs
I’m not a “car guy” but I can still make an informed decision when buying a new car.
Now people may claim that Apple hardware is superior to other manufacturers and that it will last longer.
-------
On the average that's undeniably true.
But not for some Apple is perfect kind of reason but because apple is producing high quality laptops while others manufacturers are producing a lot of shit too besides that.
Given inflation, the Macbook Airs are pretty crazy cheap. If they break you can just replace them. The base base low end M1 Air is only $1000 last I looked (and another $100 off for those in education). They're some of the best price:perf in a laptop the world has ever seen. "inflated prices" is not an accurate description of an $899 retina M1.
It's not replaceable in other brands, because approximately no one is making a laptop remotely equivalent to the M1/M2. Perhaps the Surface Pro, but even that isn't a good comparison.
Remember when Apple made the first Air and it was so far ahead of every other laptop out there that Intel had to invent the term ultrabook to describe it so Asus and Dell could clone it? Yeah.
Why not?
Concerned about it in general is appropriate for governments and large companies, of course; they can make a dent.
Would you say that someone concerned about food/food-related) waste should not ever buy any food? Of course not. But don't buy food that you don't intend to eat, and don't buy food that causes unnecessary waste like food that is unnecessarily individually-wrapped.
Every time you sell a second. hand conouter you are cutting their sale of new ones.
256 and 8 gb are lowkey unusable for anything but a Facebook machine .
I always look at the price for the 16/500 or 16/1t machine as the reference point
That to say, it’s far more than a glorified Facebook machine and is a truly excellent value. I much prefer it over my work issued intel MacBook Pro.
Calling it a Facebook machine is silly.
Edit: obviously if you need a windows vm you’re out of luck at 8gb ram
M1 Macs would make fantastic Linux laptops, because macOS is appallingly bad at backend development. It makes it up in sheer hardware power and efficiency, otherwise I’d be completely at loss why it’s so loved.
That's news to me. In what way are they bad compared to Linux? Both can run docker, Intellij, Insomnia and Dbeaver.
I do wish the M* laptops had something like a CFexpress slot or similar though. The built in storage is blazing fast and power efficient but soldered. Thunderbolt or USB drives are plenty fast enough these days but the external nature of the ports is a bit of a pain. Large amounts of storage are also where the price inflation really is (since you can't just add cheap storage it has to be the blazing high end storage + markup) so this would help the most.
RAM I'd rather have soldered in these days on a laptop. Performance is higher, power usage is lower, and you can order it with enough that you don't need to wait for new modules to be invented to upgrade and have enough RAM 5 years from now. It does mean you can't take any old M1 from ebay and upgrade it, which is definitely a downside, but for a laptop I think the benefits outweigh the cons. One thing I've noticed is there are always people that order them maxed out and move on when the next generation comes so high RAM options are still available used. One thing that is lost is, again, you can't choose to cheap out and get bottom bin speed memory. You have to pay for 8 channel 6400 MHz RAM in your laptop. Not necessarily a problem with the manufacturing method, it's possible to solder cheap RAM, rather just an Appleism. On the other hand... you do always know what you're getting if you buy one, which could be a plus.
Anyways, all of this is to say if you want a budget laptop which minmaxes it's price/performance ratio at a lower cost then the Apple laptops are definitely not the right pick. The reason for this is not as much how they are manufactured rather wher Apple targets the platform. The best price/performance optimization is probably a Chromebook with a monoboard and soldered RAM.
The sad unspoken truth is that most apple users are just rich enough to replace the whole thing when it breaks, and don’t really care much of the environmental issues if apple hardware.
edit: no hard data after a quick google but every article on the first two pages estimates 5-8 years.
I’ll probably get an M3 and use it for 8-10 years.
I couldn't live with my macbook m1. I hated the keyboard and the desktop - why is there no delete key, pray? UTM crashed a lot. Asahi was lovely but I just didn't like touching the hardware.
- I was a consultant/contractor, and sometimes you have to run software you really don't want to (Citrix, Teams). You can kind of do this on Linux w/ emulation, but on an older machine it's painful.
- Can't drive a 4k monitor at 60fps
- 1366x768 is hard to webdev on
I also had a multi-machine setup so like, a Chromebook for being spied on, a Windows machine for gaming, and an air-gapped Windows machine for music production. My partner and I had decided to move abroad and it felt like a little much to bring 4 laptops over, so I reluctantly consolidated. In truth the only thing I really gave up was acquiescing to being spied on, but at this point that's more because I haven't set up a pi-hole (etc.) than anything.
I do miss (Arch) Linux, and obviously the X220 input system is unparalleled, but I'll say that I'm pretty accustomed to the MBP input system now (I learned Fn-Delete is actual delete, which actually improved my life significantly). I probably lost ~30WPM (I'm around 100-150WPM on a good keyboard) and it's definitely a worse ergonomic experience to have to leave home row to use the trackpad (you're telling me you want me to stretch my ulnar nerve even more?).
There are other niceties. My partner can airdrop me things. I can load truly ridiculous Excel spreadsheets. I can move my music production onto it. I can stream both an Snes9x emulator window and a webcam grab through OBS to game w/ my brother in the states.
Glossy screens on laptops don't make any sense to me though. The argument is you get better color reproduction, but there are great matte screens that do that (I have a 32" matte display with 100% AdobeRGB that proves it), and besides that, I bet if the difference matters to you you've got a high performance glossy screen on your desk in an office with controlled lighting. Laptops go places! Sometimes they're sunny! Matte screens please!
Or have four external monitors; the reason I had to wait for the M1 Pro.
Now its more like: the current device has zero issues, but the newer available models look increasingly tempting for my inner child to play with.
Also I owe my career, salary and life situation basically to open source (so I donate regularly) and ... apple computers that work flawlessly in many situations other laptops would be dead already or require me to tinker with stuff instead of doing billable things.
It shouldn’t be impressive that a basically new computer still does everything that one would want to do.
The problem I have is Microsoft keeps shoving windows 11 down my throat; that damn start menu needs to remain where it was in 1995!
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/56891586200393318... (2015)
https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/11917713453627965... (2019)
i think swift had another post about it a bit more recently but i cannot find it now
if you encrypt the disk at the os level, you only need to throw away the keys, ie: reformat the drive. no need to physically erase as what is store is just noise once the keys are gone.
But even more common in large companies is that it’s all on leases and goes back to the leasing company to be liquidated on eBay; you can always find miles of three or five year old gear there.
it substitutes the internal network/hierarchy bias for a mostly monetary one
To you and people that do this:
Do you enroll your personal PC in the companies MDM like intune or Jamf?
Do you install their endpoint protection/antivirus/EDR/MDR?
or you just leave it unmanaged?
Also I insist on not having security based on VPN/VPC only, but treat every service as if (and often has) direct internet connections, so devs are _forced_ to think about security from day 1.
So strong that despite finding the 15 inch air appealing just in terms of screen real estate, this current laptop doesn't feel dated. Especially since work provided me with an intel macbook pro with great spec but .. just doesn't compare with the exception of remote monitor count.
Working flawlessly since day 1.
This is the main reason why although I love my MacBook M1 Air keyboard and screen, I still use an external monitor and keyboard for the majority of my work.
Honestly don't think too much about it... probably I should care more. Just tend to change places regularly and run/swim daily.
Also, I keep quite a large font to be able to be further away from the screen and having a small view into the codebase forces to know it better. (vscode fullscreen of course with clock/battery in status line, hidden dock)
Multiple monitors is just a baseline requirement in my opinion.
For work, at least 2 is desired.
Emulation is slow sadly. Virtualisation is approaching native speed.
“Both Ubuntu and Windows run at native speed since they are virtualized instead of emulated.”
I have a M2 and the hardware is great, but the OS that came with it not so. If I could replace the OS with Ubuntu that would be great. (Windows would also be great, but I have no experience in installing that)
There are attempts to run Linux on the Mac natively but they have limitations.
You can also get utilities that abuse Mac OS to make it imitate windows or Linux if you want.
Does UTM work well with external displays? Preferably in full screen?
It's very snappy. I run Firefox to work with my Internet banking site in an isolated environment.
I installed KDE -- I am very satisfied.
This thing is so accessible in its affordability and performance that I think I am kinda over obsessing over if an application or service is mac-only.
But in all seriousness I use Notes and Photos like a second brain to story memories and information.
I've just gotten really used to my portrait landscape landscape setup! And of course I'm an outlier so corporate IT won't buy me an ultra CPU version.
I guess that it's to force people to pay more, but it feels like such an arbitrary decision. Sure, restrict it to 2x6K displays, but I'm using 3x4K displays that the Intel MacBook Pro handles just fine.
Also, it's a real hassle trying to explain to angry developers about why their 4 year old ancient x86_64 arch docker containers won't work natively. (The containers crash under Rosetta emulation)
Compiling Emacs in 5 minutes vs 10 on Intel is really nice though!
I’ve seen the longstanding understood technical explanation for this limitation. I can’t recall what it is now, but it seemed more than plausible at the time. Of course, ‘Apple bad’ is always going to be more viral. And, of course, you can take any hardware component and “just add…” it to max spec.
The base M1/M2 only getting 1 display does make sense from apples perspective though. M1 is fundamentally a tablet chip, just a fast enough one that it crosses the line to ultraportable laptop as well (and it’s quite fast for a tablet chip as a result). Tablets don’t need 2-3 external displays. Nor does the average user of a MacBook air. Remember this is a product that’s essentially coming from a netbook heritage, 1 display is fine in that segment.
What doesn’t make sense is not offering a M2 Pro option especially on the 15” Air which could obviously handle it. Because other people do need it, and the MacBook Pro isn’t the same product, it’s got fans and a different display and chassis etc. There is a segment who is just using the MBA as a fanless ultrabook and the Pro cpu is necessary to support the needs of this segment. I really hope 15” MBA gets an M3 Pro option at some point.
And please for the love of god put the 13” touchbar model out of its misery. It looks like it’s getting refreshed again with the M3 line. The new chassis on the 14” and the 16” is just lightyears better.
I know the thread is one day old but in case you read this comment... That's really weird though: on my 7700X the latest version of Emacs compiles in 1m36s (and 1m39s, only 3s more, when it's in "eco mode", thermally throttled at 85 C).
On the 3700X it was already only 2m25s.
I think there's something wrong if a M1 needs 5 minutes to compile Emacs where an AMD 7700X desktop only takes 1m36s.
There is also a trick with external docks that can get an M1 to use two external monitors but I just got a Max.
----
This says otherwise: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP858?locale=en_US
M1 Pro: 2 external displays. M1 Ultra: 3 external displays.
The M1 Pro can do two external, the M1 Max can do four (three at a higher resolution, one at a lower).
I have a Max with five displays total (including the internal). I suspect with some trickery I could get more than five (some external adapters allow two displays to appear as one larger/higher resolution one. But 34,216,704 pixels should be enough for anyone ;)
I'm not affiliated with the company, just a very happy user.
But, speed-wise, I haven't noticed a difference. They're both snappy. In fact the asus would be faster for all practical purposes of mine because: * macos has comically bad UX, it wishes for me to use the mouse far more often than it should, and fights me on keybindings. * programs like blender and stable diffusion just aren't optimized for apple. they're optimized for nvidia. i can't say if the m1 gpu is actually good, because nobody seems to care to support it, which brings me to my final point:
it doesn't much matter if m1 is or isn't good as long as it's exclusive to apple's walled garden. if I can't put it in my PC, it may as well not exist, both from a user point of view but also support of developers. The best outcome of the m-line of CPUs would be for hardware competitors to make another great ARM chip, that I can actually use elsewhere.
I thought https://orbstack.dev/ is what people are using these days instead of UTM.
Am I mistaken?
Speaking for myself, to virtualize arm64 *nix on an M1/M2 Mac, UTM has worked whereas other alternatives didn't work for me (such as VirtualBox). I haven't put my hands on the glowing orb yet; I'm sure it will be mesmerizing and tell me to do things like watch Inception (inside a VM) ^ 4.
And Orbstack has a comparison chart with UTM: https://docs.orbstack.dev/compare/utm
The arm release is a "whoops it got out before it's ready" moment, and the current status apart from being buggy and slow, is that it only runs 32bit x86 VMs on arm.
Also worth mentioning that OrbStack's philosophy to be more like WSL (designed for integration first and foremost, not isolation) than UTM (full virtual machines, isolated from the host).
It's a proprietary container interface that - as far as I could tell - runs on the outdated and unsupported "docker machine"[1]. An alternative would be to run a more recent container runtime of your choosing in a VM through UTM which works beautifully.
I did intentionally delay the update from 23.x to 24.x by a few weeks while I waited for things to settle, because last time I updated from 22.x to 23.x shortly after release and some users were hit by bugs that hadn't been ironed out yet.
Edit: Noticed that you edited your comment to say that it uses "Docker Machine" instead. That's not the case. OrbStack uses a nested architecture where it runs Linux machines [1]. There's a special machine called "docker" that runs a copy of the Docker Engine, but that's not related to the old Docker Machine project.
My confusion must have come from mixed terminology being used by others than yourself on GitHub and in articles about your project I skimmed through when looking into it.
The project might still not be for me regardless of its underpinning, although I will have to say that it's immediately obvious that you persue high standards and care a great deal about delivering a quality product.
https://slickdeals.net/f/16807523-apple-macbook-pro-16-2-lap...
M1 Max doesn’t get the HDMI 2.1 port (although you can coerce some cablematters adapters to do it), or the Wi-Fi 6E, and the M2 Max is generally faster especially in gpu (at the cost of higher power - perf/w doesn’t change much) but in general it’s not worth paying $2k more for.
And of course, this might not be the best time to be spending even $3k. But it doesn't have to be $5K for a fully loaded M2 or $4k for a decently loaded one. $3k gets you a lot of laptop too, just not the M2 right now.
Refurb is another option... you can do a 64GB/1TB with the M1 Max 24c GPU (vs 32c) for $2550 via refurb store if you can get the edu or mil/veteran discount. Personally for another $500 I think the 4TB and the nicer GPU would be worth it but again, it edges the cost down quite a bit.
Woot also has been carrying "manufacturer-refurbished" M1 Pro/Max for pretty good deals recently. IIRC the 16GB/512GB is $1550, and you can get 32GB/1TB for around $2100. And because it's manufacturer-recertified (Apple) it's eligible for applecare.
HDMI has always been a bit irrelevant for me, aside from using it with work-issued displays. I've always used displayport over thunderbolt, and don't know that HDMI offers any advantages. I'd prefer almost any other port over HDMI.
My issue is more that every time I spec out a new MBP, it genuinely feels like I'm being grifted, and it really turns me off more than in the previous 10+ years I've been buying macs. $200 for a ram upgrade was already too high, and hurt the wallet then, but $500 - $1500 CAD for ram upgrades (inflated by the apparent, probably artificial, requirement to choose CPU upgrades that I'd never have in the past and wouldn't likely get any value from.
If I choose the minimum CPU that allows 64gb, I then need to spend an addition $750 to add 8 gpu cores and go up to 96gb (not that I'd necessarily go that high or feel like I'd need to, but it's not like I can upgrade, and just stands to illustrate the point). $750 is my damn rent payment.
So before even going past 512gb ssd or including Applecare or taxes, the computer sits at $5100 CAD, if I were to max out the ram, on the 14" new.
Coudl someone explain it to me how it's possible? Because their website clearly says "On Intel Macs, x86/x64 operating system can be virtualized. In addition, lower performance emulation is available to run x86/x64 on Apple Silicon" - and Windows on ARM64 is still in a preview.
Ascalon is expected to be released in 2024.
i assumed you were referring to jim
M1 was led by Wei-han Lien.
Ascalon is led by Wei-han Lien.
Jim Keller is (and continues to be) CEO of Tenstorrent.
Indeed. The Korg M1 was definitely a milestone in the history of music synthesizers.
Oh wait…
It’s crazy how normalized it is for certain fanboys to just call everyone who disagrees with them “brainless”, “ruled by mindshare”, “buying it for the blue bubble”, etc. I see it all the time even on HN, it is crazy how normalized the android and AMD fans have made it to just insult a group of people to their faces. Even in a tightly moderated community!
But put out one article saying “yo M1 is a good laptop” and watch the “I thought we left fanboyism in the 90s!!!” replies flood in.
They will buy NVIDIA, irrespective to whatever else is available at any given price point.