Well, to be fair, the perception of value varies between individuals. That's why it's great that we all have choices.
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Beyond the M1 hype and why the fairy dust needs to settle.
- Thread starter Kung gu
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Written like someone who has never used one?
"Windows vastly outperforms macOS in almost every way"... for who? People that use MS Access databases all day long?
I have the whole gamut here.. M1 Mac, Intel Mac, Windows PC, Windows laptops, you name it. My favorite/best computer is still the M1.
Agree, I mean tbh I'll probably end up switching back over to Windows as soon as (or if I suppose) more performant ARM laptops arrive in tow with upgraded Qualcomm (Nuvia) chips. Obvious there is an X86 disadvantage in terms of the perf:watt curves so I'm not holding my breath there, but I'd consider it if they [AMD and Intel] reach "good enough" on actual *sustained loads* or multitasking.
As for as software stacks go, Apple's M1 transition has been nothing short of "as smooth as possible", but I'm not really a fan of Mac OS. Windows 10 is solid, has WSL, better window management, a superior UI with real contrast, and is always improving. It was also more stable for me on Windows laptops than either of my Macbooks have been.
But hey for now Homebrew and the fisher price watercolor UI are okay in exchange for great value and seemingly fictitious performance/efficiency.
Yeah. I have my quibbles with Mac OS but overall, my M1 Air is probably one of my favorite pieces of consumer hardware I've owned. Honestly just wish they'd have done this sooner lol
I've had more issues with my m1 than any Windows laptop, just like you describe. But I've configured thousands of laptops at work, so I guess I'm biased.
The fact that I've gone through 4 TB's written to the hard drive in a couple of months is insane. 1- I can't even download that much due to ISP restrictions. 2- I don't even have that much data. SO WTF is the OS constantly writing to the hard drive! And no, I don't use Safari.
I have 16GB/ 1TB config and the OS will not release ram after applications are closed so I'm constantly seeing ram used and held onto for no apparent reason. It's almost like they got the ram and hard drive routines mixed up. Lots of read/write to hard drive, but not ram.
Constant kernel panics with external monitors running through usb c to display port or hdmi.
Kernel panic when plugged into TB4 dock
Blacks are not good on the display compared to my old Surface laptop.
Palm rejection is bad for such a huge trackpad.
Just launching Chrome takes forever compared to my 3 year old Surface laptop. Same with Word and Outlook.
Nothing 'seems' faster. In fact everything seems like there is a delay before it's functional. Maybe a benchmark is faster, but I don't use benchmarks for work.
I've been using a new Thinkpad X1 Nano at work, and that thing is amazing compared to M1. It's only 2lbs, has a better screen, better keyboard, longer battery life, and in all reality, seems a lot quicker. Especially boot and launching programs. There is no killer app on the Mac that makes me want to keep it, but I probably will have to because I'm beyond 14day and the resale price on maxed out m1 is horrible.
You are right about everything expect the trackpad palm rejection. Maybe it is different on the MacBook Air. But on my 16” MBP it’s amazing.
The constant kernel panics means M1 is not working well with your hardware or could be you got defective machine. But the point is the M1 is NOT ready yet. It’s running a OS that supports both ARM and x86 apps. It has bad memory management due to bad OS kernel bug resulting in high ssd writes.
My 16” MBP has written 7TB and I got that in January 2020. Something in ARM macOS is causing the high writes. My 16” had 1 kernel panic and that was due to 10.15.3 bug that was fixed in 10.15.4 but other than that no kernel panics on my intel 16”.
THE M1 right now is a beta product for Apple. There is a reason why your Thinkpad Nano( an excellent machine btw) is faster, because apps are more optimised and intel(x86) hardware is known to devs.
Now what you should be comparing the M1 Air is the Surface X both run ARM, both new archs for devs to develop their apps on. The ARM arch in the desktop/laptop space is very new, so not everything will be as smooth as your ThinkPad nano.
Just like how Windows ARM and macOS ARM are unoptimised compared to their x86 counterparts.
The Surface X is a very bad device, slow and worse than the M1.
Apple does not work on their boot up times and that’s why it slow, idk why but yeah I guess they think most people put the laptop to sleep. As evidenced when they talked about waking up from sleep is very fast on M1.
The M1 Air is MUCH better than Surface X and the ThinkPad Nano runs a much more mature CPU arch and OS thus is better than latter two.
Have you repaired a light and quiet PC laptop with decent specs recently?
Arguably one of the best contenders for someone shopping for an alternative to a MacBook would be a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano.
No replaceable RAM and no replaceable processor, although the M.2 can be replaced and replacing the battery is easier.
The same goes for the Acer Swift 5 and the LG Gram.
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Currently using the G14 with a Ryzen 9 and RTX 3060 GPU. Makes no noise in silent mode and the battery lasts 9-11 hours with casual use in this mode. The first RAM slot is partially soldered, unfortunately, but I have a second RAM slot with 32 GB, so it currently has 40 GB of RAM. The SSD is user replaceable though, like the Nano.
The Nano isn't a contender as it has garbage battery life. It has also an Intel chip, and nothing from Intel even remotely competes with the M1 for power and energy consumption. The laptop I have now is about as close to an M1 as I'm gonna get with a Windows laptop. Absolutely powerful in Turbo mode, but that requires being plugged in due to the extra power usage required.
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Talk about compromises and making things complicated!
- "silent mode" = manual toggle the will heavily power-throttle the CPU. Once you have these kind of switches you know that you have messed up... remember the old good Turbo button?
- one soldered, one SO-DIMM slot = asymmetrical memory configuration which means cutting your RAM performance in half most of the time. You have a fast 8-core CPU width memory bandwidth from 2007...
It reminds me of those old Soviet jokes... sure, this car can go 100km on 1 liter... if you push it... the 1 liter loss is from leakage.
Most of that is simply untrue. It goes very fast even in saver mode. I'm exporting a video I've been editing in saver mode as I'm typing this. Saver mode is a button press or you can also set it to go to saver mode automatically depending on preset circumstances. It can go to saver mode as soon as it's detached from power. You can have it go to a more powerful mode the moment it's plugged in or plugged in and and hooked up to an external monitor. It does everything for you. It also comes with profiles for different scenarios, one is performance and battery life, so if I want to do heavier video or photo editing or whatever on the road I can get 5-6 hours out of it. There are also auto-profiles that can be set depending on the situation where it will give more juice to either the GPU or CPU depending on what you are doing. Turbo mode is only functional when plugged in, but it screams. When I'm at my desk I can do literally anything with it. There is no remembering to switch toggles and the asymmetrical RAM configuration is a non-issue on this laptop. You're stating an overcomplicated fabrication that has nothing to do with anything, but the mildly sarcastic and condescending tone is definitely appreciated. This is the best general purpose working machine that I've ever used. If I want to do high end work and need every bit of juice I just plug it in where I do 90% of my work. It's nice to have the power of a gaming laptop and the insane battery life of a non-gaming laptop. It's the best of both worlds and has been a joy to use. It's no M1, but no laptop is an M1 right now, but there are very few compromises with this thing.
None of this is like one of those Soviet jokes. You get all the juice you need when it's plugged in. And for more casual workloads the battery lasts all day. So I can either have a ridiculously powerful laptop, or a moderately powerful laptop that can do most things but with much better battery life.
Maybe you are right and I was being overly sarcastic. Again, I don't think that ROG Zephyrus are bad machines for their intended role. It's just that some of these engineering choices really rub me off the wrong way. They are crude and lazy. But then again, the entire world of computing is full of crude and lazy engineering and users are still happy to pay $$$ for it.
Which weighs 30% more and is 30% thicker than a MacBook Air, which is already far to pudgy for what it is supposed to be.
(Please, Apple, please bring back the 11" in a modern costume.)
But then it's a personal opinion and should not be stated as a fact. If one wants to state a fact, then it should either be proofed or be based on a (peer reviewed) study (at least for the criteria evaluated).
This is completely irrelevant for two reasons.
1.) Is the software readout or tool correct when obtaining this type of data?
2.) The amount of actual TB written/read is a useless metric in this case. Go by the usage/health status/wear of the SSD.
Many people reported many TB written/read, but at the same time only about 1% within a time frame of two months. That means, if you keep going like this, you will have 200 months of usage with this SSD before you run into problems/data loss/failure. That is over 16 years of a large amount of data written/read before it fails. Is anyone really expecting to use a 2020 model MBA/MBP in 2036?
Apple to orange comparison. It has a 3060, so it's much better compared to a MBP16 with dGPU. While that is closer in comparison, it's still not fair since the MBP16 comes with AMD dGPU. If you want to compare MBA it should be done with a smaller 13" model which usually come without dGPU (Razer has a 13" with GPU though).
Proper engineering is costly. In a low margin environment, corner cutting is common.
I suppose that’s why Apple’s product command a premium.
We had several businesses down for quite a while due to not being able to print. It only affected specific brands of printers, but they can be quite common in businesses.
And yes it was a massive issue to the point where Microsoft created an emergency patch for it. Not even the deleting user files update a couple years ago was that critical - they just pulled that update not create an emergency patch for it.
Just not my business's printers, luckily. I had heard it was specific printers but never which ones. They do emergency patches a lot, but I rarely see any problems before those patches.
Which is why I compared it to the Lenovo X1 Nano, considering this thread is about M1 Macs and all.
Someone else brought up the G14.
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Had the G14 and its a great laptop. Upgraded the SSD to a super fast 2TB. It came with 32GB of RAM. Total performance is just much higher on the G14. Especially with the GPU. If you only ever have one system then the G14 is a top choice.
Prefer the M1 MacBook Pro for my day to day laptop as I have a PC desktop with a 3060 Ti. M1 are fully silent(no noise), cold mostly and the battery life is much better. It's more like an iPad in battery life. Also I do prefer Apple to Microsoft with their OS. Windows needs a big do over.
Kyocera was the brand. Not too common in my experience. Printing is ****ed up on all computers though.
Yuck! I haven't even seen a kyocera printer in a long time. They were mostly higher end machines, weren't they? Our printing needs aren't very state of the art, just Brother and Lexmarks, and only one all in one. (Brother)
Love the Brother's these days, cheap, not horrible drivers, and they mostly just work.
I didn't mean to minimize the problem, just say that it really didn't effect everyone.
That is a more reasonable comparison when it comes to size and weight. The M1 has the much better GPU though in comparison, it is a SoC however.
No problem, we mostly use Brother for basic printing, canon for photos, and various flavors of HP and toshiba in my work. As long as you avoid Dell printers you’re usually good.
Printer drivers are some serious hacky stuff I’ve been told by my Linux friends, which I believe. I’ve personally managed to cause malfunctions with old eps files and bad pdfs, both Mac and Windows.
if I had to guess, it’s likely a postscript rendering problem that caused the bsod.
That sounds like you really don't like Dell Printers.
Interesting! I've seen postscript problems crash the printers (a lot), but not Windows. I can imagine how that might happen though...
I've been eyeing the Thinkpad X1 Nano too for an ultralight 2# but prefer one with AMD 5000U. Resale value of M1 is bad and have seen MBA M1 16GB/1TB for $1K so I either have to take a big loss or just hang on to it and hope an OS update fixes the major issues. Not hopeful it'll fix things like slow disk I/O though since that's likely a hardware limitation.