While Apple probably will go to Arm v9, a lot of the stated 30% improvements are coming less due ISA changes (the day-to-day ISA isn’t changing much from v8 to 9 wrt performance) and more their upcoming core designs which Apple doesn’t use. Don’t mistake me, SVE2 is really nice and a good standard and will improve things but it should also be noted that Apple’s NEON implementation is actually already quite impressive. Certain microbenchmarks have it performing up there with much wider vector designs when properly filled with work.
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Beyond the M1 hype and why the fairy dust needs to settle.
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While Apple probably will go to Arm v9, a lot of the stated 30% improvements are coming less due ISA changes (the day-to-day ISA isn’t changing much from v8 to 9 wrt performance) and more their upcoming core designs which Apple doesn’t use. Don’t mistake me, SVE2 is really nice and a good standard and will improve things but it should also be noted that Apple’s NEON implementation is actually already quite impressive. Certain microbenchmarks have it performing up there with much wider vector designs when properly filled with work.
Looks like @leman beat me to it
Edit: Ah dang it ... thought I was adding this to my previous post. Oh well
Have you owned a Mac recently? With the way they are built now with everything soldered in, if it’s out of warranty a normally easily replaceable component now requires replacement of the motherboard, which is insanely expensive. It’s even worse now with the advent of the M1 chip in which the entire system is on one chip. Windows PCs are incredibly easy to repair.
Forrester Research and IBM Studies Show Macs Are Cheaper than PCs
It’s taken as gospel that Macs are more expensive than PCs. A quick look at the Dell Web site reveals laptops for as low as $300. Sure, we can s...mbsdirect.com
IBM says it is 3X more expensive to manage PCs than Macs
Saving up to $535 per Mac per four years in comparison to PCswww.computerworld.com
That's just marketing. Whoever bets their workforce on a new untested platform is probably fired by now.
First of all, RAM/SSD failures are so exceedingly low that it doesn’t really matter, and other component failures require an expensive replacement in any case. Second, soldered-on RAM is a standard in premium laptops nowadays, because there is no other way to achieve good performance and power efficiency (premium laptops use LPDDR these days that don’t come in socketed format).
Doing an out of warranty repair on a laptop is almost always a waste of money. Selling it for parts and getting a new one is usually the most reasonable choice.
As I wrote before, I have managed hundreds of laptops, most of them Apple, a few Surfaces, Dells and Lenovo’s. Failure rates among Macs were the lowest and it took our service partner on average less than two days to return a fixed machine to us - we never paid a dime for any of the repairs. Dell offered an on-site service which meant that we had to sit for hours on telephone, exchange dozens of emails and then wait a week for a guy to show up who’d then disappear with the laptop for another week. Lenovo was a total disaster - more than a month for a trivial diagnostics and than trying to blackmail us into paying some additional fees using the laptop as a collateral. Screw all that.
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The OP has actually changed their original stance and has come to realize how powerful M1 macs actually are. Of course there is still another person here who refuses to acknowledge this.Wow. 13 pages and still going.
So I assumed this is supposed to be a trick question. I can't find any solid information, but... 128GB dimms do exist and that's the spec on the chip.
Really? Have you tried repairing or upgrading a Microsoft Surface Laptop?
Windows laptop are now also becoming hard to repair, Solder RAM and SSD. Only the thick bulky Windows laptops have
replaceable RAM and SSD but they have horrible battery life and get too hot.
The desktop iMac is All in One and Windows All in Ones are hard to repair too.
Windows desktops/towers are easy to repair.
The Mac Pro is a tower and is modular and easily repairable.
One thing is for sure Apple is going to have the Performance to Battery to Quiet Fan ratio crown for their higher end laptops this year.
Now if the upcoming rumours are true of a redesigned MacBook Pro, the return of SD card(easy storage expansion),
magsafe and removal of Touch Bar coupled with better Apple Silicon is happening, the laptop space this year will get interesting.
This isn't true at all. I repair Windows laptops all the time and most of them have replaceable components. I've worked on thousands of them over the years, new and old. Many laptops, even high end ones, have replaceable RAM and SSDs and batteries. Not just the big bulky ones. All-In-Ones suck in general and I try and avoid them and get people to avoid them like the plague. The topic isn't desktops, it's laptops. Desktops have always been (most of the time) easy to work on, including Mac desktops like the Pro. Most Windows laptops are just as easy to repair as they've always been. If easily serviceable is something you want, then there are obviously certain laptops you should avoid. The Razer Blade is an example of a high end, MacBook-like, thin laptop in which the RAM and SSD are easily accessible and replaceable.
There's about a million other kinds of laptops out there that are easily repairable. Some laptops are so repairable you can even upgrade the CPU and GPU like some of the higher end Alienware laptops. Choosing the Surface as a failed attempt to make it okay that MacBoooks (and now iMacs) are literally not repairable isn't helpful. Everything I said is true. You can no longer repair MacBooks on your own, and iMacs are going in the same direction. It's actually comically bad. You should see the process of just replacing the battery in the newer MacBooks. There's over 60 steps on the iFixit website and one of the steps involves removing the entire motherboard (or pay Apple 200 dollars to replace it if it's out of warranty). Someone said Macs are cheap to upkeep. That just simply isn't true anymore. I used to work in a business environment repairing Macs and Windows computers and Macs used to be really easy to repair. But now, when something goes wrong, it requires an entirely new motherboard. Yes, the Surface is horrible to repair, that is very true, yet it has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making since the Surface laptop does not represent every Windows laptop on the market. Apple only has a handful of different models and they're all going in the impossible to repair direction.
Apple generally don't make decisions that negatively impact the bottom line. If having to replace a bad logic board due to bad RAM or bad SSD chips were a frequent occurrence, they would have likely stuck with socketed parts. In my own experience, I've received a bad RAM stick that needed to be replaced, but once installed, I've never had one fail. Soldering means no upgrading, but the vast majority of users never crack open their machines. For those that need that level of expandability or upgradability, there's the Pro.
Using socketed parts means thicker, heavier machines. Judging by sales numbers, I'd say Apple made the correct choice for not only their existing customer base, but others as well.
As for upgrading, again, in my own experience, it's a bit of a wash. Being able to upgrade a graphics card is nice. But other upgrades like CPU and RAM can entail having to purchase a new logic board anyway, especially for Intel who can't seem to find a socket they like to keep for more than a generation or two.
Using socketed parts means thicker, heavier machines. Judging by sales numbers, I'd say Apple made the correct choice for not only their existing customer base, but others as well.
As for upgrading, again, in my own experience, it's a bit of a wash. Being able to upgrade a graphics card is nice. But other upgrades like CPU and RAM can entail having to purchase a new logic board anyway, especially for Intel who can't seem to find a socket they like to keep for more than a generation or two.
How is the Pro an alternative if you need a laptop?
This isn't true at all. It's about performance, not thinness. The Razer Blade 15 is .66 inches and has socketed components while the M1 MacBook Pro is .61 inches. That's a difference of .05 inches.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that part of this isn't about Apple pushing their profit margins.
I'm not harking on people wanting the M1 devices. I think they are great devices. What's being discussed is 100% entirely about their reparability, which is nonexistent now.
For the M1 Macs, I would agree it's more from the performance angle, as LPDDR4X SO-DIMM modules are not available. Apple's SoCs are designed with very hungry needs to be fed data as fast as possible, and DDR4 probably doesn't cut it. I believe using DDR4 would severely hobble the M1's potential. Using socketed RAMs would also give up bandwidth and access latency advantages compared to soldered RAM ICs that's as close to the memory controller as possible. Using socketed RAM also means adding extra components and increase thickness. With MacBook's aluminium casing, additional materials means heaving overall weight. Going thin reduces weight. Engineering is always about trade offs.
Also true that it's all about profit margins and achieving the maximum profit. That's the objective of all for-profit organisations. Any company executives claiming otherwise would be lying thru their teeth. Having said that, Apple's gross margin has been consistent for quite a few years. It has not been on an upward trajectory.
Yes I am aware of that "laptop". The Area-51m is awesome in terms of upgradability. But use it as a laptop its VERY bulky, like on the go and away from the power brick. It will die. The cost of upgrading CPU and GPU will make the laptop THICK.
However replaceable RAM and SSD is easily doable, but Apple won't do it cause of profits from their huge mark up
on BTO configs. I never upgrade from the base model on Apple's website, as I believe the base models without
upgrades offer the best value.
Yes, the end point is Apple's laptops are not repairable or upgradeable expect the fans.
But I am still interested in Apple's 2021 Macbook lineup, I know they won't be repairable but they will offer excellent performance with excellent battery life.
The 16" right now offers a 99Wr battery, now if they keep the same battery and update it with their power efficient chips one can imagine the battery life. It might as be the best in the laptop industry.
Now I want to see if Apple can deliver, I guess we have to wait and see.
If the M1 in the mini I am typing this on has done anything, it has excited me for the future of Apple again. I am very impressed with the M1, and I hope it only gets better from here. I am also very interested in the upcoming iMac.
They're great laptops, I was just responding to the idea that they are cheap to repair/maintain compared to Windows laptops. Now that they all basically require a logic board replacement if anything goes wrong, this is no longer true for out of warranty repairs. They are absurdly expensive to fix at that point. But they are very fast and very efficient with hilariously long battery life. Apple did a good job with them, but saying they're cheap to fix is absurd (not saying you said that, just commenting on what the other poster said).
I'm curious to see how the more powerful laptops are going to be from Apple if this is what their "weak" ones are doing.
Macs have always been about the whole package, all the way back to 1984. While the Amiga was stunning consumers with sampled sound sequencing and 4096 colours, the first Mac's pixels had two colours: on and off.
Of course it's important to have perspective. With the M1 transition, Apple's making some clear choices about what they think a computer should be this coming decade: that includes some incredible gains, and some of what others will think are sacrifices to software options, upgradeability, and freedom. So you do your research, then you pick your path.
For those of us who use macOS for the range of its offerings, and for its philosophy and values, macOS does way more than Windows ever could. You don't have every game, but you have lots of games, and if you're a developer, you can make them for macOS. It means Safari and iCloud. macOS means Metal, it means Logic Pro, it means Final Cut Pro, it means Pages and Keynote, it means Nova and Xcode – Windows has none of those. And that's all about to get better than ever.
Of course it's important to have perspective. With the M1 transition, Apple's making some clear choices about what they think a computer should be this coming decade: that includes some incredible gains, and some of what others will think are sacrifices to software options, upgradeability, and freedom. So you do your research, then you pick your path.
For those of us who use macOS for the range of its offerings, and for its philosophy and values, macOS does way more than Windows ever could. You don't have every game, but you have lots of games, and if you're a developer, you can make them for macOS. It means Safari and iCloud. macOS means Metal, it means Logic Pro, it means Final Cut Pro, it means Pages and Keynote, it means Nova and Xcode – Windows has none of those. And that's all about to get better than ever.
I think you’re misunderstanding what they mean by cheaper in context. The context they were referring to was businesses deploying them for employees. Repairing such computers needing actual internal hardware replacement is ... uncommon - regardless of Mac or PC. That’s typically not a cost that matters outside of mainframes, clusters, or high end workstations - all of which are increasingly outsourced and less likely to be done internally now. And not really relevant anyway outside of Mac Pro workstations.
For employee computers what’s more germane is hardware cost, hardware failure rates, and cost of IT support - the last being by far the most important. The point of those studies are that cost of deployment for Macs can be considerably lower even factoring in higher hardware costs.
Now with the M1 even the cost to performance ratio is much better than it was and the failure rates of something like the Air are lower as it has no moving parts. With less heat overall, even other M1s with fans should also last longer. There is some concern about SSD lifetimes, but we’ll see over time how much of a concern that really is for most users.
That’s the threat he’s discussing to the PC business model to businesses.
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Internaut
macrumors 65816
It is good that some excellent AMD and Intel PCs are now coming out with performance comparable to the M1 Macs. Couple of points to consider:
- Would they exist at these great price points without the existential threat casually thrown their way by Apple and ARM?
- What these PC’s do to outperform in M1 in some metrics is by brute force, with crazy power draw and clock speeds while the M1 Macs get along with things pretty sedately and without fuss.
The available RAM doesn't matter. It won't work. Mainboard chipsets are not supporting it. There's no way to make it run with 1TB. That feature is vaporware for marketing from AMD. In order to bridge the memory gap between Threadripper and EPYC, they've introduced the TR PRO and the WRX80 chipset. It remains to be seen if this will actually work as expected.
Apple: "And it brings the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal compute"
Apple stated they had the fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer which leaves room for
1 .CPUs which are faster but with slower or non-existing integrated graphics
2. CPUs with faster integrated graphics used in non-personal computers
I'm pretty sure that almost all of the CPUs from Intel and AMD which has better performance than the M1 comes without integrated GPU or a poor one.