> Just imagine Apple releasing the Mx chips for server infrastructure. Intel ought to be sweating bullets now.

As a developer, I'm sweating bullets. Imagine a future where Apple is the only serious platform left on mobile, server and desktop, then developers can forget about starting that next disruptive startup and instead they will become just second-class Apple "employees" with contracts similar to Uber drivers.

Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.

If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86.

That being said, I do enjoy the shift to ARM as the dominant arch. x86 has far too many decades of cruft behind it. I don't think Apple will take over the ARM space; in fact I think we will see the emergence of new players as ARM isn't as finicky about licensing their tech as Intel is. The only reason Intel even had a competitor (AMD) in the past 20 years is because they licensed x86 to them before it started becoming the de facto choice.

"The opportunity for competition exists" is the most true statement and response to everyone grumbling about Apple dominance. Somewhere, somehow, the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute, got lazy, etc and now is looking to regulators to bail them out. It makes me a bit sick. Apple is nothing more than a computing stack wrapped in a portfolio of consumer products. They happen to see this future early, invested aggressively in it, from silicon to security and everyone got caught with their pants down.

There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here.

Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

In the consumer space there are only 2 paths for a viable competitor to emerge. 1) a coordinated ecosystem attack or 2) an individual company doubles down.

There are things that lead me to believe 1) can't happen. Google ultimately acquiring Fitbit instead of ecosystem compatibility and integration. It seems like the giants are needing to acquire the pieces to build their own Apple, rather than partner with them. Also Google and Microsoft have complementary businesses but they barely coordinate on this. The closest thing I have seen is Android helping Microsoft with Dual screen Android devices. In most other areas they are setup to compete (chromeos vs. windows, azure vs. gcp, stadia vs. xbox cloud, gsuite vs office, bing vs google search etc).

2) Samsung is the most equipped to lead this.

How far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?

TSMC advertises 5nm as +15% performance OR -30% power consumption. Either one of these won’t be enough to bridge the gap in mobile. Even throwing in another massive 20% IPC improvement wouldn’t do the trick.

On the flip side, once you go bigger the game changes. If you increase the M1 power consumption to amount for interconnects, more memory lanes, more IO, etc the M1 seems to offer worse power to performance that shouldn’t be too unexpected. ARM just announced they are splitting into V1 (performance above all) and N2 (best power, size, performance combo)

Laptop Zen 3 is already equal in multicore perf to the M1 for the same wattage IIRC. While being on 7nm still. Don't underestimate AMD.

Apple ships a 30w charger with the M1 air. I can't find any zen 3 shipping with less than a 65w charger.

Mac mini uses like 25-27w at the wall. 15-25w TDP for the 5800u doesn't include RAM (it's LPDDR4 at 1.1v will use a lot more power than M1 LPDDR4x at 0.6v). 5800u also has a chipset that consumes a few watts.

5800u has some features that the M1 does not (these would likely increase M1 power usage), but still doesn't seem close in power consumption.

Does the charger wattage mean anything? Couldn't it be that they are including a larger supply in order to charge faster?

I don’t have any solid numbers on 5800u, so I didn’t want to make any claims.

4800u isn’t that different as far as power goes (mostly different in performance). A mini-PC with it uses almost 70 watts under load.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...

No. Ryzen Laptops do consume a lot more power than the 15w the m1 consumes under load.

There's also 3) which is another sea change in computing, something that would lead to current device categories becoming irrelevant, and a currently overlooked company positioned to capitalize on it. To me, that seems more likely than 1 and 2, and due to the acceleration of the rates of consumer adoption, it should happen relatively soon.

Yes, that is a good point. It's also hard to know what this is. But for me, the end game of computing is just computing everywhere, reading the world and writing to our screens and our touches programming everything around us. Ultimately this is going to be an ecosystem, not a company. Maybe some better standards emerge that can tie everything together. But as far as devices go it seems to processors, network, storage, sensors everywhere. It's going to be hard to build a new computing company on top of those things with the current investments in cloud and consumer devices, without just being acquired.

Good thoughts. That’s along the lines of my hopes. Imagine if no one ever thought about buying a computing device or computing again because it was cheap and everywhere. There wouldn’t be any more consumer preference regarding how computers feel, how fun they are, how long they last while mobile, etc. All the preferences would shift to a different class of products that happened to be connected to computing in some way.

I see glimpses of this with some of the cheap commodity hardware available, but transportation and design costs are still too high.

Ability to break in would, I suppose, depend on that cost of design and adoption. The ability of large companies to efficiently acquire, though—-not sure what would change that situation.

What do you mean by “doubling down”?

Invest in more Apple like things: vertical integration, cross-device compatibility, app quality, more device types, more accessories, more spinoff platforms (similar to MagSafe, AirTag, etc)

> they wont forever. They never do.

retina imacs and macbook pros beg to differ

8,9 years later still no good alternative

I can’t disagree. I mean the new iMac has some design issues IMO (I hate the white bezel), but damn, the combination of good display (I’d LOVE to buy a 4.5k standalone 24” monitor, 27-28” 4K just isn’t good enough imo), goodish design and an incredibly powerful processor for $1299 is super compelling.

In a space that requires, quite literally, a decade of good product development plus investing a trillion dollars to make a product that can compete with other companies that have already invested a trillion dollars, it's only natural that there be very few competitors in the market, and they're all competing on different things so they can still make a profit [apple only builds for their own products so they can go the console route and make money on the backend; intel/amd do general purpose computing and thus relatively low-margin but wide market-share; nvidia only does GPUs and server stuff because they can specialize in it very well).

Yah, people saying the possibility of an apple dominated silicon industry is a bad thing must have forgotten what the Faustian nightmare that was the last 5-6 years of intel dominance. Competition is good. Intel and AMD will either adapt or wither. It’s not like apple is cornering the market through Broadcom-esque machinations or shady tactics. They put out a remarkably compelling processor that is both efficient, powerful, and relatively easy to get (yah, macs are expensive, but the Mac mini at 700$ comes with the same m1 you get in these new iMacs). I also really love how apple is only offering two almost identical models of the m1. It’s powerful enough for the vast majority of computing tasks and I am so relieved I don’t have to spend time figuring out what the fuck intel is doing with their cpu skus. No doubt an m1x or m2 will come for the bigger iMac, but it’s super refreshing.

> the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute

I see what you did there!

It's probably because the ecosystem is multi-threaded and there's lots of deadlocks and unprotected reads/writes...

We might get something on-par from a Samsung fab: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-exynos-with-amd-rd...

(ryzen APUs are due for a facelift in the graphics department)

It exists, but not everywhere... I think Kirin was close to being on par for a while, it might even have been dangerous? With regards to privacy ? Plus there must have been some serious PLA money involved... anyway now this ARM cpu cannot be fabbed by TMSC because of the sanctions.

If that even happens, chances are the current industry leaders already know about it and are building their own variants to prevent an extinction event. Maybe that technology is more wearables like AR glasses but even that is probably going to be eaten by Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/22/apple-glasses-sony-oled...

> Apple isn't harnessing magic here. The opportunity for competition exists, but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work. > If you want to beat Mx, you have to think outside the box, just like how Apple thought outside of x86.

They didn't even do anything special. People have been telling multiple ARM IP holders to build a wide, powerful chip for ages. Especially for the server space.

Apple is just the first one to actually do it. AMD and Intel have been doing it all along, which is why it's so impressive that Apple's chip is finally in spitting distance of them despite being a fairly normal design with some specific optimizations for use cases.

Maybe the magic is just the discipline to somehow keep tuning and optimizing everything across the chip. Year after year they release another power-sipping design with another 10-20% performance. It's not a sudden tsunami, but an ever rising tide.

You would need to think quite far out of the box and hit it to be able to beat a vertically integrated, extremely well-funded, and successful company.

I guess it's not black magic apple is doing right here. From my experience with big companies, Intel just got buried in its processes, approvals, middle-management etc.pp.; they still got the talent, and in the past years there wasn't any serious competitor to them.

The dual wake-up call from AMD and from Apple (ARM), combined with the money Intel has in its pocket will have a serious influence on the cpu market. Unsure if they'll come out ahead, but it will get interesting and probably cheaper, not only for consumers.

There are lots of very rich companies that claim to want to compete but choose not to take the risks Apple did, of investing in their own vertical integration.

Each individual risk Apple takes is small - they didn’t develop the M1 from scratch; they have years of iPhone and iPad processor development under their belt.

The risk of Apple deciding to design their own chips was massive.

Apple started working with ARM in the 80s, eventually used in the Newton. I don't know that they did design directly, but they influenced the changes that became ARM6.

I would speculate that the Palo Alto (P.A. Semi) acquisition is what kicked off this round of the Apple semiconductor (r)evolution.

The individual risks are small now, but they weren’t when Apple was recovering from near death.

Vertical integration is certainly contrary to mainstream management philosophy these days. Today, the more dependencies you can work into your business plan, the smarter you seem. You’re an expert juggler, woo! That free API you were using got retired? Not your fault, who could have predicted?

To their credit, Apple takes the time and invests the money to build the stronger house.

Like IBM circa 1968?

Vertical integration for our Mgt guru generation could not last. In fact the problem of intel not farming out its fab business (and recognise its asset is x86 etc) is the problem. What apple smart at is cut the line to fab.

Still ibm then have no consumer whilst apple now has no business and cloud business domination ... still lots of space to play.

But if windows moved to arm with the same result I cannot say intel can survive though.

Well, the world was changing and new opportunities arose. I think it's different now compared to then.

In 1968 there weren't that many computing devices around. When video games and home computing came around, there were massive opportunities and the entrenched players missed some of them.

Same with mobile phones, same with the internet, same with smartphones.

I'm really hoping one of the other chipmakers jumps on the RISC-V bandwagon. There's substantial potential to do to ARM what ARM did to x86 here. If Intel/AMD/Qualcomm/Broadcom/whoever started talking about a significant RISC-V offering I'd be buying as much of their stock as I could.

ARM didn’t do anything to x86. One specific team at one company did something. Maybe two if you’re super generous and include graviton.

ARM is destroying x86 across the board, not just at Apple. They've long won the mobile space and are now making significant inroads into the server market, long thought to be the last bastion of Intel/x86.

What's the revenue of ARM server CPUs?

It doesn't matter. The revenue for x86 server CPUs goes down every time Amazon install a CPU they made themselves instead of buying an intel chip.

Good luck getting that info from Amazon, though at least a third of their offered instance types are ARM based.

RISC-V doesn't offer the same advantage over ARM that ARM has over x86, so that's unlikely to happen.

I work with RISC-V, it has a lot of features that are not yet well explored. In particular the instruction set extension mechanism is extremely robust and capable, allowing much more FPGA fabric integration that you currently see on ARM devices. As we move towards more programmable logic it'll be a massive advantage going forward.

At the same time, the software world hates hardware fragmentation, so ISA extensions are the opposite of desired.

RISC-V likely will dominate in microcontrollers and specialized/embedded devices. But in general purpose computers? Highly doubt it. Arm has a giant first mover advantage there now. Great momentum, excellent ecosystem. AWS Graviton2 basically sealed the deal.

This is the really cool part, the ability to add custom instructions are part of the spec which makes them work through standard compilers. Any compiler that can build a RISC-V program can handle the custom instructions as inline assembly so all one needs to do is write a library to abstract them. Obviously you don't have the off-the-shelf ability for the compiler to insert the instructions automatically, but this is rarely the goal for small-to-medium projects.

Example:

https://nitish2112.github.io/post/adding-instruction-riscv/

I don’t think the claim was that tooling could not handle these custom instructions; I think the claim was that nobody wants custom instructions in cross-platform software.

That sounds really interesting — what makes RISC-V better than ARM for this?

Partly the design of the core, partly the open source nature. Speaking from experience, it's really hard to push the envelope with ARM chips as they refuse to license them for FPGA deployments so there's not a lot of work being done there.

What stops anyone from implementing ARM ISA on FPGA? If you think of an ISA like an API - that's something that is not copyrightable, so in theory anyone could do ARM on FPGA. So I am guessing that nobody wants to bear the cost of such development and also risking potential lawsuit?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. There's no real upside and you risk a lawsuit. There are plenty of other ISAs that will work and are licensable for FPGA development

> The opportunity for competition exists

Perhaps, but I guess it would take on the order of a decade for a competitor to build their technology including an ecosystem with customers.

And who says they won't copy Apple's business practices?

> but everyone else is just sitting on their asses while Apple's chip team puts in the work.

That's because the complexity of the semiconductor industry is daunting. You need far more than a team of IC designers, especially if you want your product to become successful in a world where there is one main player.

You mean the business practices wherein Apple is 10x better on privacy than everyone else to the point that Facebook and Google are now being forced to be honest with users, disclose all the user data they are stealing and selling, and disclose all the privacy and security risks inherent in their business models?

Sign me up for more of those kinds of "business practices", thank you very much.

Apple is reportedly beefing up their mobile ads business. Hard to say privacy is the reason when Apple immediately attempts to benefit directly financially and likely with some privacy hits.

Would be helpful if you could support this with some links and evidence. I monitor this issue a lot, and haven't seen anything that presents added privacy risks, at least not yet.

Might be referring to App Store ads

It depends entirely on how they beef up their ads, doesn't it?

Ad targeting doesn't have to be based on violating the privacy of everyone on the planet. Surveillance Capitalism is just the business model that was chosen by Facebook and Google.

Ad targeting can be based entirely on the content of the page where the ad appears.

The last I read Apple plans to add or expand one more ad slot on the App Store. Is there a bigger ads initiative?

Sure if someone is starting from scratch. We have Microsoft, Android and Linux which are alternative computing platforms, and android + linux are already fully ARM. Apple's chips are still much faster than most Android ARM chips, but Android ARM manufacturers are not starting from zero.

ARM also has some decades of cruft attached to it.

ARMv8, ie, AArch64 is a redesign/new, and entirely 64 bit with legacy (32bit) support mode tacked on. The design was done to be able to remove legacy without another redesign.

To my understanding, this is quite unlike AMD64 (ie, Intel's current 64 bit ISA licensed from AMD) - which extended x86.

The 32-bit mode is optional; M1 doesn't even support it.

AMD64 is a really beautiful design for the constraints it was operating under.

Does anyone know who(mses) designed the instruction set?

No, the aechitecture used in m1 is from 2012

This is a really cute pep talk. "Think outside the box. Just like apple did." But it is completely devoid of meaning.

On what grounds do you suggest you know anything about how apple accomplished M1?

Or are you just intuiting that it was some sort of "outside the box" thinking?

Maybe it was raw engineering and management mastery combined with elite head hunting and millions of dollars poured into research and design over the course of a decade?

Nah. Apple's too cool for that. Probably some eureka moment during meditation class, right?

Engineering mastery is pretty cool all by itself, right?

> Apple isn't harnessing magic here.

In 2009, the price to have a chip prototype was about $1M/year in software licenses and $50K-$100K per fab evaluation with half an year delay.

That was 12 years ago. I guess software licenses go up and I am certain that current processes have chip prototypes to cost $500K-$1.5M per evaluation.

Yes, you can say everyone sit on their hands and/or asses.

I say that having money in bank for several dozens of thousands of chip prototypes certainly helps Apple in the design.

> The opportunity for competition exists

This is so deep and powerful if you really think about it. This is what we were promised. While not perfect, I applaud Apple for at least trying.

I wonder how much they paid to engineers to pull this off. If none of them has become a multi millionaire by now, the competition would have an easy way to poach them.

With all the respect in the world, I think the complete lack of that happening at all this century should make you pause and reflect on why you think it's even remotely possible.

I'm happy to be wrong, but I think you're buying too much into the SV/media fearmongering on a handful of companies whose main business is actually just attention economics.

Indeed. It's interesting to see how people like to label Apple a monopoly - a company with a 19% market share in smartphones and an 8% share on the desktop.

Is that market share based on total revenue or based on device count?

I'm pretty sure it's device count. Which means we are comparing $90 smart phones to $1200 iphones that will result in thousands of dollars spent through the apple ecosystem.

This is so often overlooked -- Apple's revenue capture of the market is what is astonishing.

In 2019, Apple captured 32% of the global revenue for the mobile phone industry and 66% of all profit in Q3 of 2019 [1]. Asymco used to report on this frequently but I'm having trouble finding recent examples [2].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2019/12/22/global-... [2] http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/02/apple-share-of-phone-revenu...

When people use the words "Apple" and "monopoly" it's more often about the iOS walled garden: because there's no (good) sideloading, Apple has a monopoly over app distribution on their mobile devices.

Android did not have that and we pay less. But so. Like walled garden in a world where nobody know that you are a dog. And you have alternatives on both desktop and mobile.

Success is not a crime.

in the world sure, but it's a different story in the US.

About 15% of personal computers in the U.S. now.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...

Not happening this century is a big statement. I don't know a lot about this industry, but I don't see why Apple couldn't do what IBM did to arrive at "everyone on x86".

I don't know a ton about the history of x86, but I kind of assumed all of that shook out, one way or another, pre-2000.

I was using admittedly vague language for rhetorical effect. I only technically meant the past 21 years.

As a developer, I’m hyperventilating with anticipation of a tool that significantly advances past the previous generation. Finally, something more than an incremental bump.

Nothing gets me thinking about disruption more, than new, faster, cheaper platforms. We’ve had to accept 10% better per generation for way too long.

I feel like you may be being sarcastic. What are your thoughts?

There's no doubt Apple has a lead in consumer grade chips for the moment, but I expect Apple's lead here will last for 2 or 3 years tops before intel, amd, or perhaps other arm chip oems catch up. Apple doesn't have access to special unique wonderful secrets, arcane wisdom that only the elect can learn. Relax, Apple is not going to take over the world, as we speak their competitors are working like mad to close the gap.

If they release m1 in blade format ... as m1 MACmini is already with mdm ... that might be enough for some mac clouds services.

I guess maybe if Apple makes more changes after all of that happens. 10 years ago Instagram was iOS-only for years. Uber launched on iPhone and later added Android. Clubhouse is iOS-only right now. These companies are choosing to focus on iOS for their startups.

The other day there was an article here about Swift on the server and it was full of replies from people who would love to use it more but lack of investment from Apple makes it often a poor choice. It's doubtful even Apple is using it much server-side in house.

I think companies such as Tenstorrent have a good shot at disrupting the semiconductor industry once again with their AI chips

I'm sure linux will run on these chips as well. If I'm not mistaken linux has already booted on the M1.

For now. What happens when Linux or software that runs on Linux starts competing more broadly with Apple?

I'm unclear what that would mean exactly. Some particular market space where a Linux-only based software package is the dominant solution in a business or consumer space? Do you mean a Chromebook?

Let's say some game producer starts making games that run on their Linux platform that in turn runs on Apple hardware.

You mean how it was with Intel and Microsoft for decades?

Give Mac software a few years to "catch up" and everything will feel just as slow as usual (and I'm not even joking, so far, software was always excellent at undoing any advancements in hardware very quickly).

I feel like things have felt pretty good in the PC world since NVMe SSDs and approximately Sandy Bridge.

But, I do agree that there is a lot of jank in software that we write these days. Over the weekend I started writing an application that uses glfx + dear imgui, running on a 360Hz monitor. The lack of latency was incredible. I think it's something that people don't even know is possible, so they don't even attempt to get it. But once you know, everything else feels kind of shitty. This comment box in a web browser just feels ... off.

Emacs has given me this feeling for a while. Even over a remote connection that is super slow, I am supremely confident in every keystroke getting to the server and doing what I want.

(Except for lsp/company which occasionally just messes up everything).

> I feel like things have felt pretty good in the PC world since NVMe SSDs and approximately Sandy Bridge.

Agree, and I would add that devs on some platforms have not been as thorough about using (or abusing?) all that new power. I've been able to continue use a Sandy Bridge laptop from 2011 - it'll turn 10 years old in a couple of months - because most apps on Linux still have so little complexity that you could run them on a computer from 2006. Electron-based stuff is not the norm. Adding an SSD a few years ago has been my only significant hardware upgrade.

Meanwhile, Macbook Pros that came out two years after my laptop was built can't even be updated to the latest version of macOS, before you even get to the issue of software jank.

Speed is a feature, said well: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

There are some hard usability limits that feel like the performance has stagnated or getting worse: when resizing Relayouting needs to be faster than the time for one frame (16ms usually). On Windows seemingly no software manages to do that.

Are nvmes noticeable over say a sata ssd

This is called "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

and this is now called Electron

trading speed of development with 'hardware optimization'.

Mac being a small market, some users are still opiniated/loud enough to reward nicer/native UI vs cross-ish platform lowest common denominator UI. Maybe there is hope Arm mac stays fast.

I would say that 90% of my pc resources are consumed to execute JavaScript code. If we need dedicated hardware to execute this more efficiently so be it. We do it anyway for so many other domains. Video, graphics, encryption etc.

One of the big deals with electron-et-al is that we're not married to JavaScript, really; we're married to "the DOM and css" as our gui, and things like FF/Chrome/Safari devtools to develop that gui.

Most javascript developers are already using babel-et-al pipelines to build electron apps, which are already transpiling between major variants of javascript, and I wouldn't at all surprised to see a thing where it gets compiled into WebAssembly rather than interpreting javascript. I also think there's a thing, right now, where it's possible to build electron apps with Rust+WebASM; I'm not sure, but I think the main thrust here is it definitely would eliminate a huge chunk of the slowdown.

I guess the main takeaway is just that the development revolution that's happened recently is mainly about how insanely good browser dev tools have become, and not about javascript - javascript was just along for the ride. As an aside - I recently saw a video of someone demoing one of the old Symbolics LISP workstations, and I was shocked to realize how much they had in common with a modern browser console - specifically of being able to inspect all of your gui components, live, and look at all the properties set on them. It's provided a hell of a way for me to explain what the deal was with all the old gurus in the 80s "AI Winter" diaspora who were pretty butthurt about having to move from programming in that environment, to having to write C on DOS (or whatever else paid the bills at the time).

WebAssembly is just another JVM which is notoriously slow for GUI compared to the native alternatives like Qt.

There basically already is in the M1: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

tl;dr it has really sick floating point double performance which directly translates to JS performance

Most JavaScript JITs do math on integers.

Only if using the BigInt type: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

all other numbers are floats

No, this is independent of BigInt. JITs speculate that numbers are integers for performance.

Hmmmm okay! I see what you're saying now.

+ Mac OS checking every binary you run over the internet.

It's slightly more nuanced than that - you can of course just block it from doing so, and there's certainly an argument for it being updated to not need a network call each time, but phrasing it like this makes it sound worse than it actually is.

I'll just quote Jeff Johnson, who's looked into this and written about it - his comment[1] on this is post is quite useful:

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/25/macos-has-checked-app-si...

>The request to http://crl.apple.com/root.crl is simply checking the revocation status of Apple’s own Developer ID Certification Authority intermediate signing certificate. If you examine the cert in the System Roots keychain, you can see that URL under CRL Distribution Points. This request contains no information specific to third-party developers or apps. In contrast, there’s no CRL for third-party Developer ID leaf certs signed by Apple’s intermediate cert. Their status is only available via OCSP.

Notably, this:

>This request contains no information specific to third-party developers or apps.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/25/macos-has-checked-app-si...

You added detail, yet didn't refute the statement. That it isn't easy to simply and specifically turn off is not acceptable.

No, I'm fairly certain I refuted it.

The parent comment is incorrectly stating that each request to Apple is checking a binary, and it's not. This has been well documented both here on HN and across the web.

That's not the definition of refute. The distinction between a lazy-implied always and merely often is pedantic. The point is that it happens enough to reduce performance, while doing something no end-user asked for and is difficult, if not impossible to disable without reducing other security protections.

There is no measurable performance loss from that one time check - it's not something happening constantly.

Pihole and others can block those Apple queries.

What happens if you block them.. do they eventually stop working if they haven't been validated in a long time?

Yep, see the success of the Nova editor.

Funnily enough, I dropped it after the trial expired because the plug-ins - which I belobe are written in JavaScript - were incredibly unstable.

It's a success?

I don't know what qualifies as a success, but I saw in Git Tower's developer survey that it has about 5% share. The share of the whole developer industry should be lower, because Tower's audience is interested in premium tools, but I expected it to be struggling to break 1%. https://www.git-tower.com/blog/mac-dev-survey-2021-results

Yes

discussion of Nova Editor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24495330

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications.

We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long, but things like forEach loops, ineffecient data structures etc) and taking care to profile and optimize.

Result is an application that feels almost as fast as native and doesn't really consume so much memory even, although we are doing canvas based graphics realtime.

My suspection is that many web-developers (and thus, qualified to developer for Electron) just don't have the tenacity or background to write efficient code.

You can write slow-ass molasses javascript code very easily. Just take somebody who has done webdev for maybe like 2 - 3 years and doesn't have any other deeper CS background. Watch what kind of memory inefficient and slow code structures, especially with javascript where you don't really understand how heavy an operation like map() can be in worse cases, or where you are creating copies of your data multiple times for example, and voila, you have a slow-ass memory-hogging electron application.

Maybe I should do a blog post about how our Electron -application is performing just to show people that you can write fast code using javascript also. But it takes skill and time, and maybe in this current day what matters is just cranking out builds that work somehow.

I'm a self-taught JavaScript developer (front- and back-end) and I would love to read such a blog post. I mostly use language features for their expressiveness (map, filter, forEach) and rarely think about their performance implication unless there is reason to believe some piece of code is in a performance-critical path. However with a guide I might reconsider some scenarios where I'd be willing to give up expressiveness for performance.

Thanks for the encouragement. I will look into this more and write a blog post about, it is actually something I wanted to do for some time now, I'll make sure to post it to HN also and report what we have found ..

We have been developing this application since 2011 already, and I also develop in C++ and 3D graphics, so performance has been something I've had to think.

But yeah, there are many guides on what to avoid in JS already, how to optimize for speed and memory. But it is not definitely an easy thing to realize, as it's not inherently visible what can be slow and what not. Most blog posts at this time talk about how to optimize for the V8, and I'm not really interested in that so much, as it can be taunting to try to understand how V8 works for example.

A blog post would be nice. You can also test

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72

https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865

You're not wrong, but at the same time, if 99% of Electron applications are slow, then I have no problem calling Electron (as a movement, not a technology) slow. It is also pretty evident that default Chromium itself is a complete battery slog.

You can make an Electron app not slow/a battery hog, but it requires working backwards from a state of "what on earth is going on under the hood here". This is the inverse of building a native application, where that complexity is often introduced by you. I personally find this significant - you can teach someone how to avoid the latter, but it can require crazy amounts of insight to learn to debug the former.

It is 100% possible to build better Electron apps. I trust almost nobody to actually commit to doing it.

Also, particular yet tangential to this thread: apps like Signal or Discord which still make their Electron apps run under Rosetta 2 on an M1 are a nuisance. I just run Discord in a browser tab at this point.

Yeah it's true. Of course native code will perform by default faster and be more battery friendly, but V8 is also very optimized and can perform easily like 80% of native speeds if given some thought.

Yeah many people do not just have the time to look into this, and most companies don't really care, as we have so much RAM and CPU power these days, so I can see why for example many messaging apps just choose to write their app in Electron, instead of trying to figure out how to do it natively cross-platform, which can be a more PITA especially when you also have web as a platform.

>can perform easily like 80%

This feels like... a trap.

I think there's a complexity in doing that which could be summarized as follows: it's possible, but the more complex your codebase, the more difficult it is to reason about how to get to or maintain that 80%.

Even if we assume that 80% is the maximum, if most products (or the notable ones that we all complain about, I suppose) are hitting 50%, then... well, that's a problem.

For full disclosure: I've defended Electron on the merits of "there is sadly no better way to ship cross-platform UI-based software". I criticize it with this in mind.

Yeah maybe 80% was over-estimated. Depends on the usecase, I've also seen 50% in more cases, but at least according to my experience 70-80% is realistic in some cases.

It isn't just Electron, Node is also plagued by its own low barrier to entry.

One of my former employers had the great idea of hiring hundreds of "senior" JS devs and redoing the entire frontend of the website. When it launched to production the whole system scaled at approximately 1 enterprise-grade server to 1 concurrent user.

While I applaud your efforts to teach people how to write code faster, the majority of JS devs I have found just want to hit feature-complete and go home.

IMO, it’s not just JS devs. Most of the backend PHP devs I work with are similar.

And when nearly every Stack Overflow post asking about performance implications is answered with a litany of “YAGNI” and “premature optimization”, its not hard to see why.

The current comp sci culture seems to discourage this in all but the lower level languages like C.

Please write the blog post and share it to HN. I would really look forward to reading it and learning from it.

Thanks. I will :)

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

Still using a mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 as my daily driver. Everything performs just fine to me, and macOS has even got faster during this time I've used the laptop, which is something to give credit to Apple for.

I use mainly VSCode these days though and Firefox, but even Unity game engine works just fine on this machine.

Any IDE I also throw at this machine works just fine. Only things that feel slow, are things that need a beefy GPU.

I do all my work (java/postgres etc) on a 2012 i7 Mac Mini. It used to be my home media server but I started using it as a "temporary machine" last year after killing my 2018 15" MBP by spilling water over it. I was planning to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine once they became available, but it's performing so well I'm more than happy to keep using it while waiting for a 15" or 16" M1x/M2. Amazing little machines.

> and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE

Probably depends on the IDE and the language. My impression is that newer computers (especially in the "consumer" / "general public" market) have especially improved efficiency. They're not much faster, but they last longer on smaller batteries.

My late 2013 15" (2.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM) works great with Pycharm for moderately sized projects. It's even usable for personal Rust projects (with the intellij-rust plugin).

For Rust it's somewhat slower than my i5-8500 desktop but not by much. For incremental compiles, I don't feel like I'm waiting around more. The i5 mainly wins when it can use all six cores.

It's however quite a bit faster than my work HP ProBook with an i5-8250U which is a much newer machine (2018 I'd say).

Aside from battery life, which is somewhat lesser, all in all the mac is a much, much better machine than the HP, especially for "creature comforts": gorgeous screen, no misaligned panels rubbing against my wrists, great trackpad, no random coil whine, inaudible fans unless it starts compiling for a while, no background noise on the headphone out, integrated optical output when I want to use my home stereo.

My early 2011 MacBook Pro definitely isn't fast but it's usable for checking out a couple tabs worth of stuff on the sofa.

My work 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro actually doesn't feel that fast considering how fucking expensive it is.

My 16” had two speeds.

Quiet and cool with about 11 hours of battery life when writing, reading or some simple productivity stuff.

Fast but loud and hot when doing anything else with about 3 hours of battery life. Even the Touch Bar (which I don’t hate, but I also don’t love) is uncomfortable to the touch.

It seems there is no in between. I’m generally happy with the machine, but I’m very interested in what’s next for the big MBP.

My fully-loaded 2019 16-inch MacBook feels VERY underpowered actually - once you try to use all the cores (multiple compilation threads, parallel tests with multiple docker images running), it goes into what I would call a "heat shock". I suspect throttling kicks in and cpu charts in Activity Monitor become close-to-death flatlines. Oh, and the fan noise becomes non-ignorable too.

Yeah, full utilization leads to throttling, guaranteed. Although apparently it can get much worse than what I've had, down to like 1.0 Ghz.

I've also had issues with the laptop waking from sleep, where it'd either hang for up to minutes, or just outright kernel panic. Big Sur seems to have fixed the kernel panics but waking from sleep still feels really slow.

You know, I believe you on the 2019 - I've heard this from more people than I care to admit, and makes me glad I skipped that year.

I think from 2016-2019 was a rough era for the MacBook Pro when you factor in price for performance; still great machines, but they didn't feel as polished as the 2015 MBP or the 2020 M1's.

Edit: year banding.

My 2016 MacBook Pro has been an absolute pleasure to use. It's small, light, great battery life, plenty of performance, I consider it the second incarnation of my favorite laptop ever, the Titanium PowerBook G4.

Except for the keyboard. Been replaced three times. It's defective by design. Such a letdown.

I have the opposite experience with my 2016 MacBook Pro. It feels really sluggish to me now. 2 cores is nowhere near enough, and the integrated graphics chip doesn’t feel fast enough for everyday tasks if you have external monitors connected. I’m on a video call in discord the machine lags so much it’s unusable. Xcode with swift is basically useless - it lags so much sometimes doing who knows what that it drops keystrokes. I had the monitor stop working because of the design fault right before two back to back conferences. And the keyboard has been replaced once and is now having issues again. Compiling rust on the machine is about 8x slower than my new ryzen based development machine.

We’re in a golden age of cpu improvements. A dual core 2016 mbp isn’t good enough for me any more.

Interesting. How much ram do you have ? Using a 4k external monitor ?

Just wondering, don't those cores still have HyperThreading or such, resulting in actually more cores than just 2 physical ones ?

Ah, I have a quad core with a discrete GPU. Might make all the difference.

Try compiling stuff. There's definitely a difference in speed when I use Xcode on the 15" 2016 MBP, or the 16" 2019 MBP. It's got an additional four cores, and it's noticeable to me.

I actually used a MacBook Air 2011 up until summer 2020 as my main home computer. The only reason I even bought a new MacBook was because I couldn't get the newest version of macOS which I needed for the latest version of Xcode.

Finally sold the 2011 MacBook Air a few months ago for $300. I got so much value out of that laptop.

My old 2013 is still a charming little machine. I made my GF "upgrade" to it from a random ~2017 HP plasticbook and she loves the thing. 4 GB of RAM can still fly if you only run native apps.

This late 2012 iMac is still my main machine (with a new big SSD). Oher than for gaming and Adobe Premier, it is perfectly happy with what I throw at it.

Exactly, I have a 2015 MacBook that works perfectly, unless I try to use electron-based apps.

Is there an equivalent to Parkinson's Law ("Work expands to fill the available schedule"), where software expands to fit the available performance?

"Software is a gas; it expands to fill its container." - Nathan Myhrvold

PS: apparently the quote is from 1997, go figure.

An old joke:

c - the speed of light, independent of the speed of the observer.

w - the speed of Windows, independent of the speed of the hardware.

Software is a gas that expands to fill its container. It's just science.

Could be even worse – web devs writing shitty webapps that are fast on their Macs but dog slow on non-Macs

Nah, don't worry they are using electron apps to build them as well.

But since so much software these days is cross-platform, apps/sites will still have to work performantly on Intel chips. E.g. Google can't slow down Chrome to take advantage of Mac speed increases, because it would become unusable on Windows.

So I actually think that Mac software will hold the performance edge for a long, long time.

It logically makes sense for Windows to move to ARM as well at this point. They already ported it with Windows RT, and now all they have to do is provide a translation layer like Rosetta and release the full Windows experience (instead of the locked down version RT was).

But there's no M1 chip equivalent for PC's.

It's fine to have an ARM version of Windows but there's no equivalently high-performance ARM chip to run it on. Unless you're talking about Bootcamp on Macs.

Any reason why Intel and AMD can't do an ARM chip?

I have a vague tickle in my memory that both Intel and AMD have dabbled in ARM before.

Even if they don't assign large production volumes to it now, they could still have a design team working on it for a contingency plan.

AMD was developing an ARM core "K12" in parallel with the Zen core. K12 was delayed in order to prioritize Zen, Zen turned out to be a massive hit, so K12 got delayed indefinitely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(first_generation_microarc...

Once Apple released M1, rumors of AMD ARM development started again https://www.techspot.com/news/87851-amd-rumored-working-arm-...

Microsoft went with Qualcomm, but indeed it's not-that-high performance. (Even the "new" 8cx gen2, also rebranded as Microsoft SQ2, is still basically an 855… The situation will improve somewhat with an 888 based chip.)

You are right. And I hate it.

Even today the M1 still feels slow occasionally -- hanging for a second or two, browser taking multiple seconds to launch, etc. Granted, that could be due to I/O or power management, but in any case it's clear that software is not making proper use of hardware.

What you just described only happens for me with Chrome on my M1 MBA. Try loading Safari, its instant.

Maybe for some low hangers, but compiling code will still be faster, XCode and VSCode will be a bit snappier, Safari and Messages will be a bit better. These base things need to work on a broad range of products.

The fact that Apple writes much of their software for iOS and MacOS at the same time means much of it is designed to run on fairly light hardware.

I know we’re all stuck with bloated stuff like Slack and some of us with MS Office, but just go native where you can it reap the benefits of the platform.

> but compiling code will still be faster

I don't know about that, LLVM is getting slower with each new release too [1]. Same for Xcode: startup is very noticeably slower than a few years ago on the same machine. Starting into a debugging session for the first time is much slower (it used to be instant, now it's multiple seconds). The new build system in Xcode is most definitely slower than the old one, at least for projects with more than a handful compile targets. Etc etc etc... new software is only optimized to a point where performance doesn't hurt too much on the developer's machine.

[1] https://www.npopov.com/2020/05/10/Make-LLVM-fast-again.html

I suppose that’s a fair comment. The whole build system and IDE slow down when working with Swift. It’s possible Swift wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for faster processors.

One nice thing is Swift is slow to build but quick at runtime.

The work off the back of that article has mostly halted that I think.

This is so true. My work kept providing latest Macs at excellent configurations and those Macs kept getting slow very fast :)

Also, Apple’s buggy releases (which is tradition now[0]) didn’t really help.

0. Apple essentially stopped fixing bugs and they just release another buggy OS in a year or so with a new name and changes that break everything.

We don't even need to wait for that. Right now web developers are creating the new generation of web-based apps that will consume everything that M1 can give and more. In fact these apps already existed, they were just largely ignored because they're so power-hungry (just look at electron and similar stuff).

Even worse: Developers will get an M-series Mac, write Electron apps that performs okay. They will then ship them as cross platform app, that will absolutely suck on any other platform.

Where is that inefficiency supposed to come from though? I mean there are four big inefficiencies that came with JS.

1. Garbage collection and minimum runtime

Garbage collection decreases memory efficiency, browsers need a certain minimum amount of resources to render a page, no matter how complicated leading to 500MB RAM text editors like Atom and worse once you open files. Similar problems plague Eclipse and IntelliJ which both often consume 1GB of RAM. The JVM often needs 150MB for an empty or perfectly optimized app.

2. Everything is an object with pointers

This is especially bad in Javascript where every object is basically a hashmap. This causes performance slowdowns because even something as simple as looking up a field is a pointer chase through several layers now. Raw numerical data may consume a lot of memory if you are not using typed arrays. Especially bad with ArrayList<Integer> in Java.

3. JIT

JIT compilers can only spend a certain amount of time on optimizations, which means JIT languages tend to either suffer from slow start up times or faster start up but less optimizations.

4. GUI complexity

Things like having animations and constantly recomputing layouts.

If you designed your processors for these things and made them fast at this, the only further source of slowdown is a lack of caring because you have already exhausted the unavoidable technical reasons. E.g. your processor is so fast, you write a naive algorithm that takes 5 seconds on the fastest computer available but then takes 20 seconds on an old computer.

I don't think "animations" fits here. Well-implemented CSS animations are generally fine (though this is in and of itself a high skill to do well, I think). If you're still driving animations with pure JS, you probably need a refresher in modern web dev.

Diffing a VDOM might fit here, but that's not really GUI-specific - just a combination of your earlier points.

> If you designed your processors for these things and made them fast at this

What does that look like?

There is a reason Apple doesn’t do #1 and #3 and is moving away from #2 in their own code.

They are just inefficient ways of doing things. Designing a processor to support an inefficient mechanism will still lose out to a processor which doesn’t have to.

I think the next layer is cross platform bridges.

Look at multi-platform products like ms office and how slow they run on a Mac. I suspect because there is a translation layer to bridge win32 calls to Mac equivalents. And that seems like it would be point 5 on your list.

No need to wait, just use Chrome to get a taste of the "future".

Amazon's Graviton 2 is the M1 of the server world in my experience. It's faster, cheaper, and overall a better experience than any other instance type for most workloads. You have to get through a bit of a learning curve with multiarch or cross-compiling to ARM64 depending on what your codebase is like, but after that it's smooth sailing.

Azure and Google need to really step up and get some competitive (or even any) ARM instances--fast.

It's pretty crazy how good the Graviton processors are.

What's even more crazy is that you cannot buy them. Such price/perf is literally only available to rent from AWS.

I hope Oxide does something about this soon; it is a sort of dangerous situation to have such a competitive advantage only be available via rental from a single (large and anticompetitive) company.

Ampere Altra is actually faster than Graviton 2 and you can buy it. (But apparently the motherboard is >$5,000!?!) https://store.avantek.co.uk/arm-servers.html

AMD will probably "arm" up quickly, NVidia is acquiring ARM proper, Qualcomm won't sit still.

Intel? Well, maybe 12 months after they catch up to AMD in x86.

AMD's chips I've seen are decently competitive with M1. If ARM is a not-too-bad microcode adaptation and ditching a whole lot of x86 silicon real estate, AMD might be able to come to market quickly.

Intel isn't just getting pantsed in x86 by AMD and process by TSMC, they are seeing their entire ISA getting challenged. Wow are they in trouble.

Isn't the ARM acquisition kinda stuck at the moment?

It has to go through regulatory approval in the UK but this was to be expected. Jensen (Nvidia CEO) said he expected the acquisition to be complete by 2023.

It is, but nvidia don't need it necessarily to compete in the ARM space, since they already make Arm SOCs

arguably they would proceed on an ARM design with or without the formal company acquisition. It's too good of an opportunity.

Yeah, I kinda wish Amazon would make a Graviton 2 powered laptop or dev machine. It would be really nice to develop directly on the ISA for the instance instead of cross-compiling. An Apple M1 of course works, but more ARM64 laptops need to be available. It's sad that it never got traction in the Windows hardware world.

My concern is data centers, not development systems. One can always just ssh/x11/rdp/whatever into the Graviton machines.

There's also nothing wrong with the $999 M1 Air. Isn't the Surface also ARM? And most Chromebooks?

After you've already got the code, though, it's Amazon's way or the highway.

Packet used to offer bare metal Ampere eMAGs (and old Cavium ThunderX's)… current Equinix Metal website doesn't seem to list any arm instances though :/

Apparently Oracle Cloud is going to offer both VMs and bare metal on Ampere Altras.

Future ARM Surface laptops will probably be faster than Graviton per-core but obviously with fewer cores.

Agreed. I'm busy transitioning everything I can to Graviton2 for the $/perf savings.

For my Java services so far, no change. Aurora was a button click. ECS is the next thing to tackle.

I hope they add support for graviton on elastic beanstalk soon.

As the primary AWS guy in our company I'm pushing for all our developers to get M1 macs ASAP. When that happens we'll start building/testing on ARM systems and I'll transition all of our EC2 stuff over to Graviton processors. I've already moved several systems over to t4g instance types and we are saving $100's per month.

Bonus! This makes performance review time super easy; you've saved the company thousands of dollars this year, how about a raise?!

It's great EC2 instance for perf/cost, but how is it outperformed other x86 instances? Benchmark between Gravition2/EPYC(Zen1)/Xeon(Cascade Lake) shows that all CPUs are similar level. And now C5a EPYC(Zen3) is available, Xeon(Ice Lake) is sold.

For M1, it obviously outperformed competitive.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

I think you are exactly right, but we should celebrate that!

This kind of competitive pressure will inspire a response from Intel and other firms.

The result I would predict and hope for in a few years would be better chips from everyone in the market.

I'm not saying what you think is wrong, but your view seems like it may be narrow, and missing the bigger ecosystem.

Intel has certainly dominated consumer computer sales over the past decade, and until 4 years ago they were largely still selling the best chips for most consumer use cases (outside of mobile.) Intel had several missteps, but I don't think their dominant position was the only source of their problems, or simply that they thought they didn't have to try. They legitimately had some bad decisions and engineering problems. While the management is now changing, and that might get their engineering ducks in a row, the replacement of Intel with Apple Silicon in Apple's products is not likely to be some kind of "waking up" moment for Intel, in my opinion. Either they'll figure out their problems and somehow get back on an even keel with other chip designers and fabrication, or they won't.

Meanwhile other competitors in x86 and ARM have also have a short-term history of success and failure, again regardless of what Apple is doing. And the timelines for these plans of execution are often measured in the scale of two to three years, and I'm not seeing how Apple successfully designing CPUs would change these roadmaps for competitors.

For everyone involved, particularly those utilizing TSMC, there are benefits over time as processes improve and enable increases in performance and efficiency due to process rather than design, and the increased density will benefit any chip designers that can afford to get on newer processes.

I guess if I'd attempt to summarize, it's not clear who is motivated and able to compete against Apple in ARM design. In other words, is there a clear ARM market outside of iOS/macOS and outside of Android (where chip designers already compete)? And in the Linux/Windows consumer computing space, there's going to be a divide. Those that can accept a transition to macOS and value the incredible efficiency of Apple Silicon will do so. Those that continue buying within their previous ecosystems will continuing comparing the options they have (Intel/AMD), where currently chips are getting better. AMD has been executing very well over four years now, and Intel's latest chips are bringing solid gains in IPC and integrated GPU performance, though they still have process issues to overcome if they wish to catch back up in efficiency, and they may also need to resolve process issues to regain a foothold in HEDT. But even there, where AMD seems pretty clearly superior on most metrics, the shift in market share is slow, and momentum plus capacity give Intel a lot of runway.

The only other consideration is for Windows to transition to ARM, but there's still a bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Will an ARM chip come out with Apple Silicon like performance, despite poor x86 emulation software in Windows when run on ARM? Or will Microsoft create a Rosetta-like translation software that eases the transition? I'm not clear on what will drive either of those to happen.

My layman's understanding was that M1 chips had very efficient low-power/idle usage, and better memory + instructions pipelining architecture for jobs composed of diverse (inconsistent) size and "shape". And that's why it blows away consumer workload Intel chips.

In a server high load environment, is this still the case? Continuous load, consistent jobs -- is the M1 still that much better or does its advantages decrease?

I don't think Apple will go back to creating server infrastructure again. In the interim, I know Amazon created an ARM server chip called Graviton, and I'd like to run a kubernetes cluster on that

A lot of other fairly standard cloud native technologies don't yet work on ARM, notably istio, even though most implementations of kubernetes itself will work. This is the major thing preventing me from being able to use a Macbook even for development (at least an M1, but that's all I have).

I would do truly terrible things for an updated xserve RAID (the most beautiful computing device ever made) that supported SATA or NVME drives.

Right now I've got IDE to SATA adapters in mine, which leaves just enough space to also squeeze 2.5" sata ssd into 3.5" drive caddies.

I hope they do, because, ultimately, it will be good for the environment.

Yes, you can run a kubernetes cluster using it.

It's been available for a year: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/08/amazon-ek...

They should do a cloud they have some very unique tech like foundationDB based SQL RDBMS and M chips and prob a lot more cool thingies.

The latest Mac Pro does come in a rack mount option, but I'm not sure what market it's targeting.

I think it’s mainly for Mac / iOS development CI systems like for CircleCI or Mac Stadium. The hardware just seems too expensive for it to replace more generic arm services that AWS is offering.

On-site music and video production. You can rack it in a portable rack with your other racks of music equipment and it fits in the back of a van.

Well, if your portable rack happens to be way deeper than most audio racks…

If you're wheeling around five to six figures worth of audio production equipment often enough to want the rackmount Mac Pro, I think the cost of a new rack is almost a rounding error.

Linus (of Linus Tech Tips) talks about the target market some in his videos about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7Zu3LoeG8

In short, it's for media production, not computing. You put it in a media rack.

Maybe ios ci/cd build infrastructure?

If we're honest most customers aren't going to notice the performance differences, it will mostly be people with heavy work loads.

I run a decent chunk of heavy work loads, and tbh the main things I notice on the new Air are all of the other niceties: instantly awake, ludicrous battery life, no fans. I think those aspects are going to be much more noticeable than many expect.

Agreed - most people use their computers as web browsers to access social media and shopping.

The performance boost there is extremely noticeable on new M1 chips.

Anecdotally; I’ll say this is equivocally not the case. I’ve had a half dozen of my friends upgrade and some of the aspects are absolutely surreal.

The instant turn-on. No fans. Safari alone feels like a completely different beast and a friend and I spent about two hours running through some of the most demanding web sites, side by side against my 2018 15” MBP.

Holy crap. Just...all the subtleties.

I’d actually say it’s easier to notice the immense general speed-up than I notice the difference between a 4min and 2min render time in Final Cut.

Dragging 4K clips around in FCP was infinitely smooth; and it made you immediately be able tell the UI/UX itself was dropping frames and needing to catch up to itself sometimes.

These are things you don’t notice until you’ve tried the M1 for the first time.

It truly is an undeniably insane piece of engineering. They killed it.

But they will notice that they left their charging cable at work/home and were still able to work all day without it.

Not true at all. M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice.

> the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice

Remember when Apple made the Power Mac QUAD, to indicate that the system had FOUR processors, because "men should not live of single thread performance alone"?

> "With quad-core processing, a new PCI Express architecture and the fastest workstation card from Nvidia, the new Power Mac G5 Quad is the most powerful system we've ever made," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

Of course they can't advertise the multi core performances, because they are lower compared to similar systems, just like with the Power Mac they could not advertise that the system was greener, because it wasn't.

The multicore performance is good for a portable, because background threads can run on the efficiency cores without making the whole system thermal throttle. Intel can't do that.

Not right now, but the upcoming Intel thing will combine Atom cores and Core cores (lol) like that.

AMD is the one left without an "efficiency core"… but I wouldn't be that surprised if they somehow manage to squeeze almost the same efficiency out of just low power modes on the same Zen core, which would leave them with better multi-core performance as usual.

I was literally saying the same thing, it's OP that said

> M1 and follow-ups are about single thread performance, the only actual performance most consumers are likely to notice

I beg to differ, multi core performances will be very much noticeable as well.

Especially in this heavy media era

video encoding, image editing, music production etc. are things that nowadays every kid does

single core performances are good only for benchmarks and marketing

You can definitely notice the difference between a formerly top of the line Intel MacBook Pro and an M1 Air. The Air is way faster for opening apps, photo library, and other common daily activities.

I work on a 25-year-old research hydrology model written in C. My M1 Mac mini runs the model about 68% faster than my 2019 i9 MacBook Pro. Definitely thinking of trading that in once a 64GB M1-based system is available.

And M1 Macs won't burn a hole through your desk.

That includes anybody who uses Electron or Chrome... :-)

They will notice the battery. Which is performance.

From some the demos I've seen on YouTube, the Nvidia Jetson AGX would make for a really nice desktop. If Nvidia could release a desktop oriented ARM machine with its graphics chips integration, it could make for a really nice workstation.

Most server infrastructure isn’t designed to be efficient to the degree that Apple’s OS is. I think until we see a significant increase in datacenter power costs due to carbon neutral, we’ll start to see developers focusing more on ekeing out the most performance per watt. Apple’s been doing that for decades and has dragged developers along, kicking and screaming about the upgrade cycle, until they reached today’s pinnacle M1 chip and macOS and iPadOS. The unixy community has refused for years to use macOS APIs unless commanded to by Apple, and only the upgrade to TLS 1.3 finally started compelling app developers to bundle OpenSSL (rather than use SecureTransport), and open source server-type developer adoption of Metal and MLKit and whatever the HTTP request library is (I forgot, sorry) is essentially nonexistent. So the apps that “server infrastructure” might use M1 for are, bluntly, not equipped to perform very well on M1 today.

I’ll know that Apple is a serious contender for datacenters when PHP is updated to use native macOS APIs when running on macOS, because that’s a great litmus test for whether open source is ready to compromise on “generic computing is king” in favor of “high-performance OS APIs for specific hardware platforms”. I’m not holding my breath, and I don’t think most open source projects are willing or able to either decide to take these steps or actually deliver on any such intent. Apple seems content to offer rackmount macOS and that’s more than sufficient for serious businesses that need serious amounts of Apple-accelerated hardware. But I don’t consider most “Internet cloud server” businesses to need that, and I don’t see the developers of our clouds as being willing to give up their dylib freedoms in exchange for higher performance per watt.

EDIT: Think of M1 as a hardware platform dedicated to code that's been ported to Apple’s microkernel, if that helps any. Yeah, it’s not “micro”, in theory; except they run a stripped-down iOS on their HDMI dongle (yes, seriously), so clearly they’re quite capable of “micro” kernel. More on kernels today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26954547

After the XServe, I wouldn't touch Apple servers with a 10 foot pole.

What makes you think that M1 would be better in servers than Ampere's chips or Graviton for instance? Desktop and server chips have different design goals.

But it's not really the chip, we have powerful ARM CPU every except on desktops. It's the combination of software and the chip that makes this a huge computing jump. No one wanted to invest in rewriting software to switch away from x86.

Exactly this. Nobody cares about the M1 except for tech enthusiasts and Apple fans.

The problem is that you effectively have to run macOS to take advantage of it and that's a no-go for a wide variety of people. I don't even care if I can ever run Windows or Linux on an M1 because Apple will make it a pain in the ass to do so. They don't even have a fucking bios UI... Imagine enterprise IT shops rolling Windows out on that garbage? It'll never happen.

And I don't want ARM at all unless the systems built around it are as modular and open as the x86 ecosystem.

Apple will never sell it's chips standalone. Phone, desktop or server, whatever. I can see them building Mx cloud servers and trying to peddle it for CI pipelines, but not selling actual iron.

Well the problem there is you can't really have the traditional mix and match part selection and get that kind of performance, right?

I think Apple's been making major leaps in hardware but slow as a turtle when it comes to software. iPad is restricted by the software despite having the best hardwares in its category. Really wish they would pay some attention to it.

1 - Apple is not going to enter the server market ever again, especially not the generalist cloud infrastructure

2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops. Amazon best selling is ASUS Laptop L210 Ultra Thin Laptop, 11.6” HD Display, Intel Celeron N4020 Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB Storage priced at $199

Basically only Mac users who upgraded to M1 are going to notice the difference

> 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops, most of them are sub $500 laptops.

Apple’s share of the total PC shipments is closer to 15% now and their share of the laptop market is even higher.

... in the US. It's a different story worldwide where Apple is around 8% (source: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/11/mac-huge-q4-growth-49-percent...).

I tried a variety of Google searches, but I can't find information specifically narrowed down to Apple's share of the notebook/laptop market in the U.S. Can you help me?

> 2 - 90% of the laptops sold Worldwide aren't Apple laptops,

This is perhaps the wrong metric to look at. What % of total profit is Apple capturing? Several years ago the accepted wisdom in phones was that Apple was getting ~30% of the unit volume and 90% of the profit.

> What % of total profit is Apple capturing?

Worldwide 9.6%.

I rounded it at 10%.

> Apple achieved a global desktop/laptop market share of 9.6% and ranked fourth behind Lenovo, HP, and Dell. In the United States, Apple accounts for 12.7% of the PC market