With how fast and impressive the improvements are coming with the M-series processors, it often feels like we're back in the early 90s. I thought the M1 Macbook Air would be the epitome of Apple's processor renaissance, but it sure feels like that was only the beginning. When we look historically at these machines in 20 years, we'll think of a specific machine as the best early Apple Silicon Mac. I don't think that machine is even out yet.
It’s not a server so it’s not a crime to not always be using all of it and it’s not upgradable so it needs to be right the first time. I should have got 32GB to just be sure.
Thankfully, Apple recently made 16GB the base RAM in all Macs (including the M2/M3 MacBook Airs) anyway. 8GB was becoming a bad joke and it could add 40% to the price of some models to upgrade it!
I’m only compelled to upgrade for more ram, but I only feel the pressure of 8gb in rare cases. (I do wish I could swap the ram)
I'll likely upgrade to the M4 Air when it comes out. The M4 MacBook Pro is tempting, but I value portability and they're just so chunky and heavy compared to the Air.
The M1 Pro was a revelation.
That would cause it to throttle even when idle! But even on battery or using the right-hand ports, under continuous load (edit-build-test cycles) it would quickly throttle.
I was going to say why not compare it to something older! 100000x faster than a pc-xt!
I'm typing this from my mid-2012 retina mac book pro. I'm on Mojave and I'm well out of support for the operating system patches. But the hardware keeps running like a champ.
That’s not accurate.
Just yesterday, my 2017 Retina 4k iMac got a security update to macOS Ventura 13.7.1 and Safari even though it’s listed as “vintage.”
Now that Apple makes their own processors and GPUs, there’s really no reason in the foreseeable future that Apple would need to stop supporting any Mac with an M-series chip.
The first M1 Macs shipped in November 2020—four years ago but they can run the latest macOS Sequoia with Apple Intelligence.
Unless Apple makes some major changes to the Mac’s architecture, I don’t expect Apple to stop supporting any M series Mac anytime soon.
Since Snapdragon X laptops caught up to Apple on battery life I might as well buy one of those when I'll need to change. I don't need the fastest mobile CPU for watching movies and browsing the internet. But I like to have a decent amount of memory to keep a hundred tabs open.
naa... Amiga had the A2500 around the same time, the Mac IIx wasn't better with regards to specs in most ways. And at about $4500 more expensive (Amiga 2500 was around $3300, Mac IIx was $7769), it was vastly overpriced as is typical for Apple products.
>Apple products aren't overpriced
baaahahhahahahahhahahaalaolalololoolol
Oh wait, you're not joking are you.
cough
like saying, "Back in the 70s with Paul McCartney's first band, Wings (...)"
kids? get off my lawn
I've got one and it's really not that impressive. I use it as a "desktop" though and not as a laptop (as in: it's on my desk hooked to a monitor, never on my laps).
I'm probably gonna replace it with a Mini with that M4 chip anyway but...
My AMD 7700X running Linux is simply a much better machine/OS than that MacBook M1 Air. I don't know if it's the RAM on the 7700X or the WD-SN850X SSD or Linux but everything is simply quicker, snappier, faster on the 7700X than on the M1.
I hope the M4 Mini doesn't disappoint me as much as the M1 Air.
I love my M1 Studio. It’s the Mac I always wanted - desktop Mac with no integrates peripherals, a ton of ports - although I still use a high end hub to plug in… lot more. Two big external SSDs, my input peripherals (I’m a wired mouse and keyboard kind of guy) then a bunch of audio and USB midi devices.
It’s even a surprisingly capable gaming machine for what it is. Crossover is pretty darn good these days, and there are ARM native Factorio and World of Warcraft ports that run super well.
Don’t expect to play dark souls on it, but for indies and the like it’s fine.
(Dark Souls is my favourite game/series…how did you know)
The biggest annoyance I've hit actually is that game controller support is pretty bad. Don't expect generic USB HID game controllers to work, support for that isn't baked into MacOS the way it is Windows (Via DirectInput, etc).
The happy path is pretty much specifically a bluetooth xbox controlle.
I’d like a few VMs for a media server and the associated apps. Pihole too ideally, but I keep that separate as that VM going bad is never good.
And pg server. And a few web sites server. And something running in orb stack.
It's the 8gb model and I have around 2gb free most of the time
I like it in every way except price. It just works, comes back online after a power outage, etc. I don't recall any unscheduled disconnects.
--
Additional thoughts: I think there are complaints about the fan being loud so I swapped it out when I first got it. I also have it in my basement so I don't hear anything anyway -- HDDs are loud, especially the gold ones
Nor have I had any desire to upgrade.
I never thought I'd see a processor that was 50% faster single-core and 80% faster multi-core and just shrug. My M1 Pro still feels so magically fast.
I'm really happy that Apple keeps pushing things and I'll be grateful when I do decide to upgrade, but my M1 Pro has just been such a magical machine. Every other laptop I've ever bought (Mac or PC) has run its fan regularly. I did finally get fan noise on my M1 Pro when pegging the CPU at 800% for a while (doing batch conversion of tons of PDFs to images) - and to be fair, it was sitting on a blanket which was insulating it. Still, it didn't get hot, unlike every other laptop I've ever owned did even under normal usage.
It's just been such a joyful machine.
I do look forward to an OLED MacBook Pro and I know how great a future Apple Silicon processor will be.
That was truely the dark age of Apple.
Unbridled control over all design in one hyper opinionated guy was an error well resolved.
What got me, however, was that was the time where their trade-in program was really kicking in. I think I got $800 for my touchbar mac which made the jump to an M1 Pro 14 a little less painful. Now you don't seem to so much pay for hardware as lease the Apple experience, so long as the hardware is still good.
But they spend voriously. And so the desktop PC market is theirs and theirs alone.
That's why the default advice if you're looking for 'value' is to buy a gaming console to complement your laptop. Both will excel at their separate roles for a decade without requiring much in the way of upgrades.
The desktop pc market these days is a luxury 'prosumer' market that doesn't really care about value as much. It feels like we're going back to the late 90's, early 2000's.
That's the thing with macs, all the strategy games tend to release there because the market for mac users and strategy gamers is a circle.
Yeah sure, if you start buying unnecessary luxury cases, fans and custom water loops it can jump up high, but that's more for clueless rich kids or enthusiasts. So I wouldn't place pc gaming as an expensive hobby today, especially considering Nvidia money grubbing practices that won't stay forever.
The frame rate wasn’t even close to my desktop (which is less powerful than yours). I switched back to the PC.
Last time I looked, the energy efficiency of nVidia GPUs in the lower TDP regions wasn’t actually that different from Apple’s hardware. The main difference is that Apple hardware isn’t scaled up to the level of big nVidia GPUs.
He told me his fans were going crazy and his entire desk was hot after that. Apple silicon is just a game changer.
I was so happy when I finally got an M1 MBP for work because as you say Docker is so much faster on it. I feel like I don't wait for anything anymore. Can't even imagine these new chips.
I’m going to be very happy when it’s time to replace my Intel MBP at work.
It’s rarely loud, but boy it likes to be warm/toasty at the stupidest things.
- use native toolchain to produce artifacts for a different architecture
- use emulation to run different arch toolchain to produce different arch artifacts
First one is fast, second one is slow. In docker only second variant is possible.
Why would you need to emulate x86 to produce x86-shaped bytes?
For exmaple, that is generally the way you cross compile Flatpaks in cli or ide. In, for example, GNOME Builder you can just select the device you want to build for, like your smartphone, and it uses QEMU to emulate the entire SDK in the target architecture, you can also seemlessly run the Flatpak on your host through QEMU user mode emulation too.
So when you compiled to WASM you're going with route #1. WASM was designed with this this in mind.
Then there are some gcc quirks:
- for gcc compilation target is defined when gcc is compiled, so only way to cross-compile with gcc that I know of is emulation of target arch and runing gcc for target arch
However, we're talking about docker containers here, emulation would be the default way and path of least resistance.
Again, I will reiterate: every cross-compilation strategy falls into one of these two buckets. In some cases what I've describe in #1 is possible (WASM, java bytecode or really (almost) anything that targets a VM), in some cases it isn't and then you gotta go with #2 (docker, gcc)
- clang and LLVM don't have that GCC quirk (LLVM support less platforms, so give gcc some credit)
- it was in apple's financial interest make sure their things are easy to cross-compile.
- linker job is extremely straighforward in case of iOS
- everything is provided by either apple or application developerBut this M1 Max MBP is just insane. I'm nearly 50 and it's the best machine I've ever owned; nothing is even close.
Yes I agree. I sometimes compile LLVM just to check whether it all still works. (And of course to have the latest LLVM from main ready in case I need it. Obviously.)
Blows my mind how it doesn't even have a fan and is still rarely even anything above body temperature. My 2015 MBP was still going strong for work when I bailed on it late last year but the transition purely on the heat/sound emitted has been colossal.
As long as I don't open Chrome, Safari, Apple Notes, or really any other app...
Compiling gcc multi thread a few times would be enough.
My 2015 could get hotter than my 2010. I think my work 2019 gets hotter still.
I think the Intels were hotter than my G4, but it’s been too long and the performance jump was worth it.
Got an M1 Air, it blows them all out of the water (even 2019, others aren’t a surprise). And it does it fanless, as opposed to emulating a jet engine.
And if you really push it, it gets pleasantly warm. Not possibly-burn-inducingly hot.
Was the only one I needed thankfully. Missed the whole port reduction and power bar mess.
I love my M1 Air. It is the first general purpose computing hardware that felt like a real advance. I measured that two ways:
How much closer to my mobile is it?
How much faster is it?
The Air feels like a Mobile Computer if that makes any sense. One USB port expander to serve as a dock of sorts later and it makes for a great desktop experience.
When using it on the go, it has that light, powerful feel much like running my phone does.
Great machine. It is easily my favorite computer Apple has ever made, 8 bit greatness and an older age aside.
Mine is sticky. As in when others get hold of it, next thing I hear is usually, "oooh" and then it takes some time for it to come back!
I got mine for a song. Sweet deal, but it is the 8GB 256GB configuration. Not too big of a deal, but more internal storage would be nice. Maybe I will send it out somewhere to get a boost.
Would have already, but I worry a little about those services.
Only solution was to increase fan speed profile to max rpm.
It’s way too easy to heat up.
That's pretty much all Intel laptops I've owned since 2007.
The battery life improvements are great. Apple really did a terrible job with the thermal management on their last few Intel laptops. My M1 Max can consume (and therefore dissipate) more power than my Intel MBP did, but the M1 thermal solution handles it quietly.
The thermal solution on those Intel MacBooks was really bad.
Apple seems to have taken that to heart when they designed the cases for the Apple Silicon MBPs and those have excellent cooling (and more ports).
You have to really, REALLY put in effort to make it operate at rated power. My M2 MBA idles at around 5 watts, my work 2019 16-inch i9 is around 30 watts in idle.
Recently my friend bought a laptop with Intel Ultra 9 185h. It roared fans even when opening Word. That was extraordinary and if it was me making the purchase I would have sent it back straight away.
My friend did fiddle a lot with settings, had to update BIOS and eventually the fan situation was somewhat contained, but man I am never going to buy Intel / AMD laptop. You don't know how annoying fan noise is until you get a laptop that is fast and doesn't make any noise. With Intel is like having a drill pointed to your head that can goes off at any moment and let's not mention phantom fan noise, where it gets imprinted in your head that your brain makes you think the fans are on, but they are not.
Apple has achieved something extraordinary. I don't like MacOS, but I am getting used to it. I hope one day this Asahi effort will let us replace it.
The thing then was it was just Apple catching up with windows computers which had had a considerable performance lead for a while. It didn't really seem magical to just see it finally matched. (Yes Intel Mac's got better then Windows computers but that was later. At launch it was just matching)
It's very different this time because you can't match the performance/battery trade off in anyway.
Apple adopted Intel chips only after Intel replaced the Pentium 4 with the much cooler running Core Solo and Core Duo chips, which were more suitable for laptops.
Apple dropped Intel for ARM for the exact same reason. The Intel chips ran too hot for laptops, and the promised improvements never shipped.
The Apple ecosystem was most popular in the publishing industry at the time, and most publishing software used floating point math on tower computers with huge cooling systems.
Since IBM originally designed the POWER architecture for scientific computing, it makes sense that floating point performance would be what they optimized for.
In fact, the form factor is why I'm leaning toward taking a pass - I don't want a Mac Mini I would have to replace every 12 months.
* or rather, Apple doesn't target low enough temperatures to keep machines healthy beyond warranty
Another could be realtime video modification. People like to stream and facetime. They might like it even more if they could change their appearance more than they already can using realtime ML based image processing. We already have some of that in the various video conferencing / facetime apps but it's possible it could jump up in usage and needed compute power with the right application.
And if you regularly use local generative AI models the Pro model is the more reasonable choice. At that point you can forget battery life either way.
You only notice throttling on the MacBook Air when doing things like video renders that use max power for an extended period of time.
That Rossman guy, the internet-famous repairman, built his youtube channel on videos about Apple's inadequate thermal management. They're probably still archived on his channel.
Hell, I haven't owned a Mac post the year 2000 that didn't regularly hit temperatures above 90 celsius.
The Gods didn't deliver specs to Apple for Intel machines locking the company to placement/grades/design/brands/sizes of chassis, fans, logic board, paste etc. Apple, in the Intel years, just prioritized small form factor, at the expense of longevity.
And Apple's priorities are likely still the same.
My concern is that, given cooler-running chips, Apple will decrease form factor until even the cooler-running chips overheat. The question, in my mind, is only whether the team at Apple who design chips can improve them to a point where the chips run so coolly that the rest of Apple can't screw it up (ie: with inadequate thermal design).
If that has happened, then... fantastic, that's good for consumers.
100% Apple Silicon is that for computers. Very rarely do my fans whizz up. It’s noticeable when someone is using an x64 and you’re working with them because you will hear their computer’s fans on.
The work Apple has done to create a computer with good thermals is outrageous. Minimising distances for charges to be induced over.
I run Linux on my box. It’s great for what it does but these laptops are just the slickest computers I have ever used.
Never gets hot. Fans only come on during heavy compilation tasks or graphic intensive workloads.
Some of the choices Apple made after SJ's death left such an unpleasant taste in my mouth that I know have knee-jerk reactions to certain Apple announcements. One of those is that I experience nausea when Apple shrinks the form factor of a product. Hopefully that has clouded my judgement here, and in fact these Mac Minis have sufficient airflow to survive several years.
Like even with Intel chips that actually died early en masse (13th and 14th gen), the issue wasn't temperature.
Insufficient airflow from blowers... not good.
110 celsius heat... not good for lead-free solder... not good for computer.
This whole thread is starting to feel surreal to me. Pretty soon everyone will have me believing I dreamt up Apple's reputation for bad thermal management.
There's nothing in a comment thread so cringeworthy and boring as a person trumpeting their own expertise, so I'll refrain, and leave off here.
I've had an M1 Mac Mini inside a hot dresser drawer with a TV on top since 2020.
It doesn't do much other than act as a media server. But it's jammed pretty tight in there with an eero wifi router, an OTA ATSC DVR, a box that records HDMI, a 4K AppleTV, a couple of external drives, and a full power strip. That's why it's hot.
So far, no problems. Except for once when I moved, it's been completely hands-off. Software updates are done over VNC.
It only gets powered off only when there's a power outage or when I do an update.
How/where are they getting 128gb of ram? I don't see that as an option for any of the pre-orders pages.
Still pretty impressive, I get 1217/10097 with dual xeon gold 6136 that doubles as a space heater in the winter.