I haven't seen a review where it has underperformed any other comparable device.

I've seen a lot of talk about how the Threadripper from AMD is faster… duh. Of course a 32- or 64-core processor that costs 2x-3x than a Mac mini and draws 280 watts is faster than an M1.

The M1 peaks at 20-24 watts and doesn't even require a fan in the MacBook Air.

It's graphic blows away all integrated graphics and is comparable to many discrete GPUs. On CPU benchmarks, it's faster than all but the latest Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, which are in laptops that run hotter, are louder and don't have 18-20 battery life doing real world things.

x86 applications generally just work and often run faster on an M1 Mac than they did on Intel Macs.

Considering the broad swaths of essential business software that is simply incompatible with Apple OS, that's not going to happen.

Depends on what business you're in. If you're in the content creation business, you're good to go [1].

Microsoft Office is already in beta for running natively on M1 and so much other business software is web-based or Electron apps (like Slack) and those work fine.

[1]: "Hollywood thinks new Mac mini 'could be huge' for video editors"—https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/12/hollywood-thinks-...

In some of the benchmarks, the 15W Ryzen 7 4800U outperforms the Apple Silicon M1.

There, now you have seen a review where the M1 underperformed a comparable device.

(This is not to take away from the fact that the M1 is impressive, and is incredibly efficient, and much better for battery life. It's just a reminder that there are actual, real, worthwhile competitors.)

The M1 struggles to run 4-year old games that modern AMD and Intel chips breeze through. While the M1 appears to have good burst capabilities, its ability to handle extended processing loads for anything that isn't hardcoded into the chip (aka, anything other than video processing) is woefully deficient. Whether that's a function of the CPU design, or poor cooling, or both, is not yet clear.

Summary of article:

> Overall, Apple doesn’t just deliver a viable silicon alternative to AMD and Intel, but actually something that’s well outperforms them both in absolute performance as well as power efficiency.

Yes, in some benchmarks, the M1 outperforms... in absolute performance but if you only look at that wording, you miss all the cases where the M1 competitors outperform it... in absolute performance. That's important, only because there seems to be a new commonly held belief by the faithful that "no CPUs compete with the M1 in any sense of the word." That's an inaccurate belief.

Remember the original statement I responded to:

> I haven't seen a review where it has underperformed any other comparable device.

I am definitely going to differ on that. My last job (until this summer) was in Hollywood for a content creation company (live broadcast + streaming) and I worked very heavily with the content creation guys and the digital production team (as a result of working on them for R&D tax credit documentation purposes. That means I not only saw every expense, I also documented the reasons for all of those expenses based on discussions with the teams). We switched off Apple software 4 years ago. They began the transition off Apple hardware 2 years ago. Apple was great for content creation a long time ago, but these days content creators use *nix based systems if they need performance and Windows-based systems if they care about costs. If you suggest using Apple to the content creation guys these days, they'll laugh your ass out of the room and tell you to go back to film school.

These guys didn't choose to switch away from Mac because they wanted to complicate their lives and have to learn a new OS; they did so because the switchover was industry-wide and and they'd already made the switch at their previous jobs. The studios got burned by Apple's lack of support for a decade, combined with the Mac's excessive costs and switched to nix and Windows (primarily nix) starting during the Great Recession.

Generally, Windows is in the mix simply because a lot of the software that the (non-technical) artists use is stabler or easier to support on Windows than it is on nix, like Maya, 3DS, Premiere, etc., and running these on Windows is a quarter of the cost, or less, of running the same software on Mac.

I'd love to see a study on this; the total cost of ownership has always been far less for the Mac than Windows, especially when you factor in the amount of support Windows requires compared to the Mac.

Casual googling confirms this:

https://www.jamf.com/blog/total-cost-of-ownership-mac-versus...

https://www.endpointprotector.com/blog/why-macs-have-a-lower...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-...

An M1 Mac mini starts at $699, so there's no excessive cost. As usual, Adobe doesn't have it apps ready for Apple's latest and greatest… but other vendors are on the case and it'll be just a matter of time before all major video apps are running natively on the M1.

Of course, FinalCut Pro (and the rest of Apple's suite) is good to go; DaVinci Resolve (editing 4k, 6k and 8k RAW video) is also looking pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE

This is simply not true, based on real-world experience. (Again, I did R&D tax credits for 4 years for a media company; I had line-item access to expenses and the reasons for every expense.) Macs cost more than Windows PCs of the same or better performance, are more expensive to replace (since usually the entire device must be replaced), and generally cannot be upgraded. Moreover, the fact that Macs may last years longer is irrelevant to a business, since the "useful life" for computer equipment for financial purposes and actual use is 5 years or less (emphasis on the "or less"; we replaced machines at least every other year with newer equipment).

An M1 Mac mini starts at $699, so there's no excessive cost.

So what? An M1 Mac mini can't run any of the software that you would be running in a video production environment, let alone one requiring real-time editing capabilities for a live broadcast.

Of course, FinalCut Pro (and the rest of Apple's suite) is good to go; DaVinci Resolve (editing 4k, 6k and 8k RAW video) is also looking pretty great:

Final Cut Pro has not been industry standard since before I started at my old job. Apple did a great job of screwing the pooch on that one. As for DaVinci Resolve, it runs even better on Windows, especially since you can put as much RAM as you want, and multiple GPUs, and whatever cooling system you want, and make the machine literally run laps around the top-of-the-line Mac.

Not necessarily; the ARM version of Windows 10 is already running on the M1: https://hothardware.com/news/apple-silicon-m1-mac-windows-10...

> First of all, there is no video or sound driver, so we were stuck with a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768. The network drivers apparently don't totally register with Windows

As a Windows user, testing out my friend's Macbook Air M1 was an underwhelming experience. I've had bigger performance boosts from adding more RAM or switching out HDs to SSDs, and a large part of the M1's performance "gains" can be attributed to the increased RAM on the systems currently featuring the M1.

Furthermore, one of the most stunning things about these devices is their long running battery life, which you'd hardly get much experience with in a quick test drive.

Bad take is bad.

> a large part of the M1's performance "gains" can be attributed to the increased RAM on the systems currently featuring the M1.

Not sure I understand your point. M1 systems have 8 or 16 GB RAM. There are no increased RAM compared to non-M1 Mac.