Apple also made a huge leap forward with their cooling designs. Making the laptop thicker and investing in proper cooling design made a huge difference.
My M1 laptop is significantly quieter than my old Intel laptop at the same power consumption level. It’s not even close.
Apple’s last generation chassis and cooling solution were relatively terrible, which makes the new M1 feel even more impressive by comparison.
The x86 MBP was stuck in a vicious cycle of getting overheated, running the fan all the time at high speed, sucking up enormous amounts of cat hair, and jamming up the motherboard and cooling vents: the hotter it got, the faster the fans ran, the more cat hair it sucked up, the worse the cooling and more snuggly warm the insides got, the more attractive it was for the cat to sleep next to.
I did manage to make it handle Zoom just fine by opening it up and blowing it out with an air duster, which I've been doing about every 6 months since 2018 or so. The interior is a magnet for dust in a way that my Dell work laptop just isn't (even though that thing is a PoS in many other ways, most of which I suspect are down to Windows rather than the hardware).
After a periodic dusting it runs a whole lot better - no lag or dropped frames - even when the fans come on. It's still a nightmare for fan noise compared with my 2011 17" MBP (again, maxxed retail specs, but then replaced internal drive with SSD - which made it a new machine - and upgraded to 16GB RAM because you can replace at least some stuff in machines of this vintage), which then unfortunately died due to the GPU desoldering issue (I've already "fixed" it once by reflowing the solder, but this only held for a couple of weeks before it died again).
I think I'm going to wait for M2 MBPs and then splurge - hopefully get 7 years out of the new machine as well.
It's pretty much silent now, even with the CPU governor pegged to max.
But Teams was a nightmare of dropped sound and video in both directions.
It was not a well designed laptop.
I wish that I'd have been more firm with getting a replacement. I now have tinnitus after a year of a really loud laptop. I'm in my early 30s. I can't even tolerate my desktop with relatively quiet fans.
One day in the office, I shutdown my laptop for the day after the air conditioners turned off at 5pm. There were about 6 people left in the room, everyone noticed that "something had just turned off".
Be careful that your laptop doesn't damage your hearing.
Hmmmmm....
Does your laptop sound like:
- A Dyson vacuum ?
- A jet engine ?
- A Harley Davidson exhaust ?
- The sort of sounds you hear in the datacentre hot aisle ?
Well, I didn't think so either.
Not a cats chance in hell your laptop caused hearing damage.
More likely you had the laptop speakers too loud, or you had headphones plugged in which were set too loud.
Nonsense.
The "rule of thumb" is that you are at risk of hearing damage in an environment where you cannot talk comfortably at normal voice level with somebody at arms length away.
I have owned many laptops in my time (including Macbooks). I have frequently pushed them hard (e.g. compiling code) to the point where the fans run for extended periods of time.
Not once have I had difficulty conversing in a relaxed normal fashion with somebody with arms length or even further away in the room. I've never had to raise my voice.
Its simple, if you don't believe me, get a calibrated decibel meter and take a reading in a controlled manner in a controlled environment. Frankly I'm willing to bet you hard money that the measured sound level with the laptop fans running at full whack will not be anywhere near hearing damage level.
You ended your comment with:
> More likely you had the laptop speakers too loud, or you had headphones plugged in which were set too loud.
To which I suggested that maybe he had very loud headphones because he was annoyed by his laptop fan and wanted to drown out the noise. Which, I concede, is probably not the best life decision, but I can imagine someone doing it.
pmset -g thermlog was showing below 30% CPU limit with only Zoom.
I swore I'll never buy MacBook again. Here I am with new 14' MBP... I have zoom, 10 IDE windows, slack, Spotify, Firefox with tons of cards, docker with ARM images and that thing barely turned fans to inaudible speeds. Only way I can make them relatively loud is by running heavy x86 docker images.
Since 2019, I have been using Zoom multiple times per day on an early 2019 and a last 2019 Intel-based Macbook. Both are 6-core Intel i7 based. One with 16GB, one with 32GB.
Roughly speaking, Zoom eats a single CPU core or so. This is far from ideal but the machine remains plenty usable. No insane fan noise, etc. No problems doing pairing sessions, etc.
This is not a defense of Apple, Zoom, or Intel for that matter. Not really a fan of the latter two myself. It's just interesting that your experience is "virtually unusable" while mine is "fine" -- I'm curious what the difference is.
It's actually a serious issue for sales these days, we have a compute expensive product that can't be demo'd effectively over zoom.
Hot jet engine: Meet on Firefox, slack video, zoom.
Works well: meet on Chrome, AWS chime, pop.
Is totally on MBP for being an odd one, but also on the software since we have counterexamples of good performance.
Might it happen that more recent versions of macOS are extremely slower for Zoom? I’ve always thought they tune macOS for bigger L2 cache and it keeps paginating, but you’re telling me recent hardware is slower too.
Without too much unkindness, MacBooks have been like this since the 1990s.
Many people I know wouldn't have considered them for one second before the M1.
The new slightly thicker Pros are great, but their chassis’ are not a significant factor in how they perform relative to the old Intel models.
The new M2 Air is the thinnest an Air has ever been. I bet it will perform excellently as well.
[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...
Indeed. Turns out there is some utility in function over form. God I hated Ive's bizarre need to shave with the damn thing.
Multiply this by adding the chipsets, other IO controllers, and discrete onboard GPUs.
I suspect Apple are being overly conservative now, partially because these chip designs are new, partially because no internal team wants to be where fingers point if the design is inadequate, and partially because a SoP design gives them a bit more space/flexibility to do so.
Work have me an M1 MBP and I have yet to hear it make a noise, it's amazing.
Then again, Apple has a long history of sacrificing cooling performance for form factor.
I think Rosetta + Swift + SwiftUI might have been a bit much change for the developers at Apple and the users are now paying the price.
I hope they focus on some principles behind stable software next.
Most of my problems these days are with their bluetooth drivers, though. Anything with a bluetooth connection randomly reconnects throughout the day. Most annoying with the mouse and magic trackpad. (And while I appreciate suggestions, future posters, it still happens after a clean install / nvram clear, so it's unlikely to be configuration related).
This is also anecdotal with a sample size of one, but I can't recall experiencing Apple app stability issues in recent Monterey releases on an M1 Air. It may be worth digging into crash logs. https://macreports.com/crash-reports-how-to-use-them-to-trou...
Totally agree, plus Sirouji, who seems like a modern day wizard
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
"iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing."
If you think Apple is somehow not abusing their position of power, that's just foolish. Apple is definitely one of the more evil (if not the most) companies out there.
Now they are getting into cars, tracking your Speed, your Location, How you Drive your car. And you are worried about your Windows sending telemetry about what you click on the start menu lol? Really that's your concern?
[citation needed]
HP Spectre Laptop Computer 13.5" WUXGA+ Touch Screen Intel Core i7 16 GB memory;
Count the number of ways it's better and cheaper.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-Spectre-Laptop-Computer-13-5-W...
This is not a comparable machine. It may win in a drag race, but there is way more to a laptop than FLOPS.
And I don't even use a Mac. I primarily run Windows and Linux. I'm not some brainwashed cultist like you think.
EDIT: And the CPU is still considerably slower than the M1[1], so it doesn't even win the hypothetical drag race.
1: https://www.notebookcheck.net/i7-1195G7-vs-M1-vs-M1-Max_1318...
The next HP I ran into was provided by my employer. Within 9 months the battery started bulging and the trackpad stopped working. They replaced the battery, which turned into yet another spicy pillow after another 9 months.
Eventually, my employer provided me a newer HP, one of their $2,700 mobile workstations. This is my current work machine. It has had keyboard connector problems almost identical to those I had 15 years ago. But even without those problems, I'm shocked HP charges so much money for this machine. Despite the metal chassis, it feels flimsy. The 1080p screen has reasonable pixel density (not quite "retina", but serviceable). However, the quality of the panel itself is atrocious. It looks like the cheapest IPS panels you could buy in 2011; horrible color reproduction, awful contrast, atrocious panel uniformity, backlight bleed out the ass. Even the viewing angle is mediocre by IPS standards.
I will never willingly spend money on anything from HP.
The screen is "nice enough", the battery life is probably fine but she uses it 99% plugged in, the keyboard seems nice enough but it has a numpad so everything is off-centre, etc. It plays the games she wants and runs the app she wants, and it was like $1100, the build quality is good, and it's way faster than anything else we had in the house at the time (with the possible exception of our iPhones).
The only real complaint I have is that it seems as though, by and large, HP and the retailer (CostCo) seem to not really know that this model exists, so when I search for information I have to find the closest model number I can and hope that it's basically the same laptop. Also, spare parts are ridiculous; I paid $50 plus shipping on eBay to a third party from the UK for replacement rubber feet, but it was only one foot. No other official HP parts resellers actually had the part in stock, even though it was only two years old and there were multiple identical (ish?) models.
At least when I want parts for a two (or eight) year old Macbook I can actually find them from someone sufficiently reputable on the same continent as I am.
That's an undesirable generation that lacks efficiency cores and gets barely two thirds the performance of the lowest specced M1, and has 13h of standby time compared to the Apples 18h of video playback. Not remotely comparable, and wildly overpriced comparitively.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-1195G7-vs-Appl...
i7-1195G7 => 1605 Apple M1 => 1729
2/3s? Are you being a little liberal with your interpretation? I'd say its a wash and pretty much the same thing.
Where are you getting those numbers?
The link I gave has Intel at 10843 multithreaded and M1 at 14653. That's actually closer to 3/4, now that I do the math, but it's also close to half the TDP (and everyone knows Intel lowballs their TDPs). And once again, this is a comparison between Apple's lowest-binned chips (which currently sell in a laptop $400 cheaper than the one you linked) and one of Intel's highest bins (which, even though it's old, is still 6 months newer than the M1)
- 8GB on the Air is not the same as it'd 8GB on the HP, macOS + Apple silicon's memory efficiency means it can do more with less.
- The new M2 Air has a better screen by resolution, size, and by brightness (400 vs 500 nits). I wasn't able to find colour gamut specs for the HP Spectre.
- By all metrics battery wise the M2 Air handily beats the Spectre.
- The Spectre comes with bloatware like McAfee LiveSafe and other HP software that aren't essential.
- In ever benchmark (real world and simulated) the Intel® Core™ i7-1195G7 loses to the M1 so it'd be reasonable to assume it'd lose to the M2 as well. I mean it's a 10nm process versus a 5nm so not at all surprising. In some benches the difference is nearly 2x in favour of the M1 which is astounding. Again, we're not even comparing the i7-1195G7 to the M2.
- The wireless chips between are both (802.11ax) so they're on equal footing there.
- The M2 Air has a higher resolution webcam.
- The Spectre does not have fast charging.
- The Spectre has a dual mic array compared to the triple of the M2 Air's. We haven't gotten real world tests of M2 Air yet for it's video conferencing capabilities but if we use the M1 Air's capabilities as a base point then it's safe to safe it'll be better than the Spectre's.
Last year I had a friend who used the M1 Air as a stopgap (from his old Intel MBP) until the 2021 Pros came out and it performed amazingly with a heavy load. I'm talking about running Photoshop+Illustrator simultaneously along with VS Code and node server while have dozens of tabs open all on the 8GB of RAM. I'm positive the Spectre could do the same but the thing is his never made a peep in noise because it literally couldn't since it didn't have any fans.
Hardware is more than it's basal specs, it's about how holistically said specs integrate with one another to create a unified device.
To be frank, comparing a now three year old machine that it's original MSRP is $1600 USD now on sale for $1400 to a 2022 $1500 machine is a bit silly. Even more so when you look closer to the details.
Sources:
https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/
https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-Spectre-Laptop-Computer-13-5-W...
"2x in favour of the M1 which is astounding" False, Intel bests M1 in single core. and pretty close in multi core, i12 beats it and M2 easily. See: https://www.newegg.com/titanium-blue-msi-ge-series-raider-ge... Though pricey, but it beats M1 Max too, so. This laptop completely destroys every SINGLE SPEC of M1 Air, MBP and MBP Max; except perhaps battery life.
M2 air has a webcam? Considering M1 didnt even have one, LOL, that was ... fast.
Fast charging? OK? So what? It's not like I'm gonna sit there and watch it charge. Gimmick, also fast charging wastes/ruins your battery much sooner, I'd rather slow charge 95% of the time.
Bloatware that can easily be uninstalled or opted out from at purchase time? I would consider all the shit APPLE installs BLOAT WARE too. Case and point, why do I need health app (that I need a subscription for), Apple TV app (I dont have it), Apple Home Kit. Hell I cant even uninstall some of these apps.
Resolution, is a tiny bit better, if you want better res there are better than Air res available easily, it's not exactly revolutionary and some people dont like higher res on a small screen. Example: https://www.walmart.com/ip/seort/955928442/
You are just grasping for straws and it's boring to respond. You were running 2 apps simultaneously? Wow, I run like 50 now. There was nothing really interesting with M2.
Source? I agree for other points.
It would be a marketing failure though, and sustained would translate into a longer-term business failure.
How have they been “proven right”? Correlation is not causation. Just because they’re highly successful and they ship integrated components doesn’t mean the two are related.
For example, customers definitely want lower prices, and a modular/user-upgradable Mac would clearly offer that (e.g. upgrading the stock hard drive with something much bigger, faster, and cheaper). So to say that Apple doesn't do it because users don't want it is simply wrong.
Anyway, yes, this argument always comes down to whether enough people want a larger, slower, less reliable, more configurable, more upgradeable device, and it’s hard to know for sure without trying the expensive experiment. At least we got some ports back!
If they want it, they don't want it that much.
If Apple released a "customizable" Mac, or one that could be upgraded like a standard PC, do you believe that would sell poorly? I highly doubt it.
People in the tech community want modularity and upgradability. But you must remember that tech forums are tiny bubbles. The mass market overwhelmingly DGAF.
If you want to be successful at selling laptops to a tiny market, it is possible. You will have a company that looks like Framework or System76.
* I'm not saying Apple should make a "modular laptop", just disagreeing with the idea that users wouldn't buy one.
* I'm also not talking about Framework-style modularity, but "simple" things like swapping out the hard drive and RAM, two things you can't do on Macs or Macbooks anymore.
Even if the average consumer wouldn't ever think to swap out those components themselves, the modularity would directly lead to longer lifespans for devices, lower repair costs, and (significantly) less e-waste. There are many regular non-tech people who would want those benefits.
All of these attributes influence factors for which the mass market does consider when buying laptops.
So again, whatever Apple manages to sell does not really reflect the reality of the market, since they 100% control that particular market. To say that consumers don't want something because Apple says so, is just wrong. Maybe Apple is right (and this isn't just a decision that's beneficial to their already-obscene margins), but there's no way to know. Hence, it is not "proven" in any meaningful way.
Factor in issues with driver support and updates for arbitrary hardware, the weight premium for upgradability, compromises in chassis rigidity and resilience to add removable panels and it’s just hugely wasteful and compromises quality for the vast majority of owners.
Which continues to be in line with what I said. Consumers don't care about it as much. It is proof. Please refute this claim or acknowledge you are wrong. Thanks.
The troll part is because it's also definitively obvious, and I know everyone knows about this, including you. And I can easily form a statement that can't be challenged at all. You're still welcome to prove my statements wrong even though it's impossible.
Obviously you're just not thinking in that direction and you're sort of heavily biased towards modularity and other niche nerd features.
I remember having a conversation with someone who worked on hard drives in the 80s. He got so ^%$^$# excited telling me about all the improvements he worked on between generations; they were mostly things like tighter calibrations, and refinements.
Point being: Don't knock releases like this.
My guess is 18 of them.
Often it gets the performance too, but that’s kind of like a lucky break.
Also, it would make you infertile and it’d drain the battery faster than the charger can recharge it.
https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-solve-overheating-iss....
A lot of these benchmarks run for several minutes and test the system as it OVERHEATs, simulating real conditions and Intel i12 beats M1/M2. So this doesnt change anything or bring any new information.
I can say that’s definitely not the case of the Intel laptop I’m currently using.
But, more importantly, it's like comparing two cars based on horsepower when in practice both will get you to the same place, on the same road, at the same time.
But really we've only had 2.5 released cycles so far. Not much to go by.
Sadly while apple has 128 bit wide memory on the low end (66-100GB/sec on the mac mini and mba), 256 bit wide (200GB/sec), 512 bits wide (400GB/sec), and 1024 bits wide (800GB/sec). Nothing wider than 128 bits looks to be coming to standard laptops or desktops in the non-apple world. I don't really count HEDT chips like the threadripper pro, since they are very expensive and very limited, and burn many 100s of watts.
Sure that's quite a bit less than 409GB, but there's other major parts of the chip like the GPU, video codec acceleration, and neural engine.
Seems pretty unique and useful to me, not everything fits in cache.
However, no screen brightness control, no sound or YouTube currently. And there's some page size weirdness that means Chrome/Electron (?) is not usable, so no VS Code.
If you can live with that, it's so nice having Linux on the M1 hardware.
Considering that M1 was already an overkill for the most tasks, I think it is a meaningful "tok" upgrade.
Besides, I kind of expect the trend of ASIC to continue. Instead of having more extreme and extreme lithography, it kind of feels more appropriate to have computation specific developments.
Apple just teased ~18% CPU increase while staying on TSMC 5nm.
Sounds like they are doing just fine.
The increased core frequency alone brings in around that number already.
https://overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_calls_its_zen...
Also, if Intel can keep up this time, and if tsmc/apple slouches, I wonder if there will be Apple silicon and Intel x86-64/risc macs/apppe devices on available simultaneously?
https://www.slashgear.com/833760/apples-3nm-processor-is-abo...
This is firing on all cylinders. The organizational structure and performance is a marvel for this.