Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro

Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by whalesalad on Wednesday November 11, 2020 @11:51PM (#25066568)

Sure, call it what you want. This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle.

I’m excited for whatever is next.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by alwillis on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:37AM (#25066810)

This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy.

Doubtful. You know they've been using ARM-based Macs with the requisite version of macOS for at least a year inside of Apple.

They've done a processor transition two other times; unlike the last two times, this time Apple controls the entire stack, which wasn't the case going from 68K to PowerPC or from PowerPC to Intel.

Apple has been designing their own processors for a decade now. There's nothing in the smartphone/tablet market that even comes close to the performance of the A series in the iPhone and iPad; there's no reason to believe this will be any different.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by nomel on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:45AM (#25066857)

Rosetta 2 hasn't had much mileage yet, though.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by alwillis on Thursday November 12, 2020 @04:00AM (#25067885)

I’d be surprised if hundreds of apps haven’t already been tested already.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by viraptor on Thursday November 12, 2020 @02:42AM (#25067464)

Even if it's used internally it doesn't mean it's not beta/buggy. Intel releases regular microcode patches and has issues with all their existing experience. This is apple's v1 which was in the pipeline for over a year. The designers are likely months into working on v2 already - that cycle is very long.

"Don't upgrade MacOS to x.0 version" is already a common idea. Why would it be any different for their hardware?

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by alwillis on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:09AM (#25067614)

"Don't upgrade MacOS to x.0 version" is already a common idea. Why would it be any different for their hardware?

Because hardware and software are very different. The M1 is the next stage of Apple’s A series of SoCs—and they've shipped over 1.5 billion of those. I’d like to think all of the R & D and real world experience Apple has learned since the A4 in 2010 has lead to where we are today with the M1.

If anything, this simplifies things quite a bit compared to using an Intel processor, a Radeon GPU (on recent Macs with discrete graphics), Intel’s EFI, etc. This transition has been in the works for several years and Apple knows they only get one shot a making a first impression; I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be shipping if they weren't ready. I’m not concerned in the least about buggy hardware. They just reported the best Mac quarter in the history of the company; it's not there's pressure to ship the new hotness because the current models aren't selling [1].

The release version of Big Sur for Intel Macs is 11.0.1 and I've been running it for 2 days now. It's been the smoothest macOS upgrade I've done in a long time—and I've done all of them, going back to Mac OS X Public Beta 20 years ago.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/21540815/apple-q4-2020-e...

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by deergomoo on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:36AM (#25069150)

They've been making ARM CPUs for 10 years. They're not new to the game, this is just the first time they're in non-mobile devices.

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by viraptor on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:39PM (#25074649)

And I expect it's a big enough change. (I may be wrong. We'll see)

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Re:Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end... by ogre_codes on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:58AM (#25066930)

> This is the beta product. It’ll be buggy. It won’t be full throttle.

Apple has been running a version of OS X on these CPUs for 10 years now. The only thing which is "beta" here is Rosetta.

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