I've had top of the line Intel/Windows laptops since the dawn of time, and the latency and responsiveness of my Air destroys them all. Simply navigating through the OS is crisp as is dealing with apps.

My XPS always had tiny bits of lag here and there, enough so that I hated using it. I hated doing any intensive work with it because the fans were annoying. My Air completely stomps it in speed and is silent while doing it.

Surfing with Safari is noticeably faster than on any other computer I have, even my much more powerful Ryzen 3700. Even my Ipad Air 4 is much faster than any browser on my Ryzen machine.

Rosetta 2 just works.

Compare the M1 Air to the new ARM Surface (which is 50% more expensive), and you see how far behind MS is. Their ARM cpu is 5 years out of date, and their x86>ARM translation software is flat out broken. Keep in mind MS has been fiddling with ARM devices, so they have zero excuse for being so far behind.

I'm not a platform evangelist, but Apple is firing on all cylinders and nailing execution across the board. MS seems disinterested in software, and Intel is lost at sea.

> Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast,

I would not lump all devs under 1 group. While the technological aspects of M1 are impressive, the compatibility issues and Apple "being Apple" for lack of a better word are significant enough for some of us to steer clear away. My work issued MBP just doesn't recognize the external display 80% of the time without me having to plug and replug it or usbc hub back in, and the fact that its an issue is simply unnacceptable when my 5 year old Dell, running Linux, has no issues.

Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis, as the speed that you talk of is something that we have had for the past 3-4 years.

> I would not lump all devs under 1 group.

Of course.

> ...the compatibility issues

Honestly, I've seen only one application crash on me due to using an M1 Mac. TBH, didn't try to port my scientific applications on M1 though (most of the time, they run on Linux servers, so no rush).

> Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis...

In fact, I'm a desktop first user. Using M1 daily, since we're WFH. Maybe you can be this responsive on a desktop, but I'm talking on the mobile space. If we take out form factor considerations, I can get the same speed and responsiveness from 6-7 year old servers we use at the office.

I watch youtube before I sleep (I know, bad habit :P) and sometimes I forget to put it on charge before I start watching, and when I fall asleep, youtube autoplay continues to play random crap over and over (usually ends up with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAblynZYhI somewhere in the chain)

OK the point is, more often than not I've woken up in the morning with youtube still playing. Absolutely insane.

In January, I switched completely to Mac from PC, and I did it with an M1 mini. It was time to upgrade my ancient Dell XPS (bought it in 2012 or something), and decided what the heck. I'll give it a go. For only $700, I got probably the best computing experience of my life. Rosetta has been amazing, and a lot of the Mac software I used to use on my top-of-the-line 2019 Intel MBA just fly.

When I first started using it there were some glaring issues that have all disappeared as software has been updated/optimized for the M1 architecture.

Notably back in February I attempted to write a .net core console app, and it would never enter Main() {}. A week later there was an update to .net, and that went away.

I still use my Intel MBA for Parallels. A client of mine is Windows only, and I have to VPN in, then RDP into the development machine, but I'm hoping that Parallels has released the new ARM version officially, it might just work (there were issues regarding connectivity while I was beta testing it).

You can use Microsoft Remote Desktop Beta to skip the VM/Intel MBA.

I'd still have to VPN in to it though which blocks my internet except RDP.

Does your VPN have to block all internet access due to security reasons, or it just blocks just because it can?

They do a lot of government contracts, so I'm fairly certain it has to for some contractual obligation to some government entity.

I’ve a tax return waiting for whatever M2 or M1X pro laptop they come out with.

I simply can not wait.

Just assume that M1 doesn't exist. It'll be much easier.

It'll worth the wait. :)

Exactly. It is sooner than you think.

You won't be the M1 early adopters in 2020 that had their software break in front of them this time when getting an M1X or M2 device this year.

Not only it will be a lot faster thanks to it being possibly going down to 4nm, the software ecosystem will be much improved and supported by it from day 0.

You will thank me later.

Do we know if the silicon shortages will affect the M2 or what comes after? I wonder if they booked enough volume with TSMC to get to 4nm or whatever the next process shrink is or if they will be trying to shove M1s into everything.

AFAIK the silicon shortages (of high end nodes) are partly because Apple has all the capacity (which they have because they're swimming in cash and have high margins and thus have been able to outbid everyone else).

Good for us in the Apple ecosystem with money to spend. Bad for everyone else. Hmm.

Could someone comment why the response times are faster? Is it entirely a question of which CPU is used or does it have to do with something else?

Apple fused a high performance core to a platform which used to run a latency critical platform, the iPhone. Actually it happened over the years.

- They learned to design a phone platform.

- Then, shoehorned a modified version of macOS on top of it.

- Then, they started to iterate on performance. Added iPad. They increased the performance while keeping latency criticality of iOS platform. Trying to have performing CPU/GPU and trying to keep power consumption low paved the way, year over year.

This iteration over and over resulted in M1. A descendant of iPhone and iPad, but with unbelievable performance. They kept the best parts of every platform since they can design from the processor to the latest bit of the software.

At the end of the day, M1 is greater than sum of its parts. An M1 Air behaves a lot of like an iOS device in some parts. Connect to power, screen comes on, a big battery appears with "XY% charged" message and you hear iOS charging chime. It's funny, yet hints on the heritage.

Apple fused everything together. A unified ARM platform. Variety of OSes with the same roots. One optimization for all. With a big blow, they theoretically reduced the software work they have to do dramatically, so they can build magical software again with last effort and can transfer technologies from one to another virtually with no effort.

See: iPad Pro with M1. iMac with M1, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M1. They are the same device. Same performance. A slightly different OS on iPad. That's just it.

Apple is now able to codesign the software and hardware top to bottom. I have no inside knowledge but using one of these things it's basically obvious what's going on. They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. So I think they've been really aggressive about making the interactions low friction.

It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses, etc that we're used to are just gone. They've made the way the software and hardware interact a nearly perfectly smooth racetrack. They've done this to such a degree that it must have been a very overt high level goal.

> They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library.

They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?

They'd still be constrained by Intel/nVidia's expected API design and almost certainly some key code from them as well. With apple controlling the hardware too, they can make the interface work however they want. That introduces the possibility of making some radical simplifications or optimizations.