not going to happen at $1600 for only 8GB ram and 512GB storage.
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Disrupting the desktop market
- Thread starter Bodhitree
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Waiting to see what kinda of single-thread performance and graphics performance it'll have compared to other M1 Macs if any different.
If I ain't wrong they also said it's now possible to edit 8K video without dropping frames on the iMac which isn't possible with previous M1 pointing to some improvement on the SoC. Also The Mac mini was already quite performant on code compiling to Mac Pro levels. Still waiting to see how a game as Baldur's Gate 3 will perform after optimisation.
Code and visual arts seems to be the key segments Apple want to keep with this first round of new Macs which they already have the ecosystem for it. Games are still to see.
Apple's pricing strategy puts them at the top 20% of the global (not just your home country) desktop, laptop or any market.
Lowest-end Mac mini with M1 is $699 while the lowest-end iMac with M1 is $1,299.
Average selling price of a PC with all its parts is $699 while the lowest-end Macbook with M1 is $999.
They let the rest of any industry to fight over the bottom 80%.
I just re-fleeted my manager's Thinkpads and was able to source one with a AMD Ryzen 5 4500U (7nm) 8GB memory 512GB SSD for $669. By all means this is not a Macbook Air with a 5nm M1 chip but it is 2/3rds the cost.
They will not disrupt the bottom 80%.
Lowest-end Mac mini with M1 is $699 while the lowest-end iMac with M1 is $1,299.
Average selling price of a PC with all its parts is $699 while the lowest-end Macbook with M1 is $999.
They let the rest of any industry to fight over the bottom 80%.
I just re-fleeted my manager's Thinkpads and was able to source one with a AMD Ryzen 5 4500U (7nm) 8GB memory 512GB SSD for $669. By all means this is not a Macbook Air with a 5nm M1 chip but it is 2/3rds the cost.
They will not disrupt the bottom 80%.
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Yeah I am a little underwhelmed by the announcement of the new 24” M1 iMac. It will be fine for people who want a “lifestyle” product, colourful it definitely is and the style of the machine is pleasant. But the prices are quite high for the specs that you get, and M1’s GPU driving that 4.5K display is not the best matchup.
When I analyse at what’s there I see a lot of nice-to-haves — a thin and stylish unit, a 1080p camera, Touch ID on the keyboard, M1 processor which is no slouch. But I’m not convinced by the value proposition, from a hardware perspective. It’s a product that’s aimed at a certain public, who want a machine that looks good, performs well, and is simple to use. With macOS it’s still a strong combo.
But it doesn’t blow me away. It’s Apple performing for the faithful, not shaking the computing world. If they had included the 12 MP ultrawide camera that’s powering the Center Stage feature in the iPad Pro that would have been a small thing but better because it’s a feature that suits a desktop Mac.
When I analyse at what’s there I see a lot of nice-to-haves — a thin and stylish unit, a 1080p camera, Touch ID on the keyboard, M1 processor which is no slouch. But I’m not convinced by the value proposition, from a hardware perspective. It’s a product that’s aimed at a certain public, who want a machine that looks good, performs well, and is simple to use. With macOS it’s still a strong combo.
But it doesn’t blow me away. It’s Apple performing for the faithful, not shaking the computing world. If they had included the 12 MP ultrawide camera that’s powering the Center Stage feature in the iPad Pro that would have been a small thing but better because it’s a feature that suits a desktop Mac.
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$1299 for a 4.5K display is dirty cheap. The LG 5K alone costs the exact same amount, and has no computer attached.
I completely agree with this assessment. This is a premium home computer, and as such, it's without doubt going to be extremely successful.
It's a home computer... No, it's not "shaking the computer world" (not sure what would qualify as such an event), but it's an awfully nice PC. Cant get anything close to this elsewhere.
You think so? The prices are exactly the same as they were before, but you get a faster machine with an insane display. Just the display panel alone makes it worth the price IMO.
Why, what is your concern? Sure, it won't be able to play games on it in native resolution, but why would one expect it?
I am similarly unimpressed so far, and hoping the 24 inch transpires to be more than a big-screen Air on a stick. An enhanced M1 is what I was expecting but I've seen nothing to suggest the chip is packing more muscle and no more than 16GB RAM is being offered. As for the ports on the base model, I'm gobsmacked. Apple know their market, I guess, and will sell a zillion or two, but not to me,
I have three 27 inch 4k Dell Ultrasharp monitors. They cost me $368.61, $448, and $589 and they are excellent monitors. The latter was pandemic pricing. You can get used Retina iMac 5K 27s for about $600 in my area. But you have to take the computer with it.
I like this iMac and may get one for my wife as an upgrade from her 2018 base Mini. The integrated speakers and camera and the ethernet port in the power brick would decrease clutter on her desk. I will likely go for 16 GB/512 (or maybe 256) GB. She just does videos, email and web browsing. I'm not sure what I'll do with the Mini.
I don't disagree, they're good monitors, but typically peak at around 300 nits (vs 500 nits for the iMac), have a lower resolution in a higher surface area (that is, less pixel density), and don't always cover 100% sRGB (vs the iMac having P3 color). Unless things have changes a lot recently, this iMac display is still playing in a different class.
I run these monitors at native resolution.
I doubt I could do that on Apple's monitors.
It will be interesting to see how Cloud service providers and data centers adopt ARM-based servers once current hardware reaches the end of its service life. ARM is still a very small fraction of data center hardware, although its use is clearly accelerating with the introduction of recent offerings from AWS, Ampere and Marvell:
Chipping Away At X86 Hegemony In the Datacenter - IT Jungle
I am already looking at AWS Graviton2 instances for some of my deployments, but software compatibility is still a concern in some cases. I think most people will dip a toe in the water with ARM to see if they run into issues, but if they don't and can get the same performance and lower costs, then I expect many will simply vote with their wallets.
Having a large pool of software developers using ARM-based development platforms (from Apple or other vendors) would also help adoption of ARM in the data center, a point that Linus Torvalds has noted.
Interesting, and actually I'm already softening on the 24. No doubt you'll report back if you do buy one.
Yes, but it would be in the iMac forum. I expect this forum will be used less as Apple Silicon takes over the Mac and iPad world.
Didn’t mean to revive an old thread. But Amazon are not doing any favours with their pricing at the moment.
when they first offered ARM they were huge performance per dollar gain, but not any more, they are a lot closer to on par.
As I retire old instances I am rebuilding them on ARM, but to be honest, that will slowly continue over another few years. The graviton2 are also very weak in some in some areas. One parsing server I had seen massive performance loss which I ended up reverting on. Most though have been equal or better, but the pricing is very much on par.
i understand it from a business point of view, but those servers code Amazon less to have. Not just in hardware, But less cooling and a lot less electricity to run for the same performance, so they are just making more money, rather than encouraging the shift.
Well, people may argue whether the new iMac is worth it or not. But it is certainly not disruptive.
I'm also unclear why anyone would expect the lower-tier iMac M1 model to be "disruptive"?
The selling points for the model line are form & simplicity of an AIO -- not high-performance or even performance/$
The 24” iMac with M1 is a big step up in baseline performance compared to the 21.5” model that it is replacing, and could have been disruptive with a processor with 8 performance cores (8+4). That would have had it leading the desktop market in performance, on an entry-level machine. Apple has plenty of headroom to create bigger socs, it’s a choice they could have made.
But it proved to be a bit too ambitious a concept. I am sure they had their reasons for re-using the M1 in a desktop, most likely economies of scale and not wanting to have too many different configurations to update long term by the silicon design teams.
But it proved to be a bit too ambitious a concept. I am sure they had their reasons for re-using the M1 in a desktop, most likely economies of scale and not wanting to have too many different configurations to update long term by the silicon design teams.
I think they're doing a two-tier strategy:
- Initial M1 populating the lower-tier models (smaller iMac / two-port Macbook Pro / MBA / lower-port-count mini)
- Some M1X or M2 or whatever-they-call-it more powerful SOC populating an upper-tier array of models (larger iMac / four-port MBPs / higher-port-count mini)
Thus it wouldn't make sense to put some higher tier chip into a lower tier model.
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"Here we get a big problem with the Intel and AMD business model. Their business models are based on selling general-purpose CPUs, which people just slot onto a large PC motherboard. Thus computer-makers can simply buy motherboards, memory, CPUs, and graphics cards from different vendors and integrate them into one solution.
But we are quickly moving away from that world. In the new SoC world, you don’t assemble physical components from different vendors. Instead, you assemble IP (intellectual property) from different vendors. You buy the design for graphics cards, CPUs, modems, IO controllers, and other things from different vendors and use that to design an SoC in-house. Then you get a foundry to manufacture this.
Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property to Dell or HP for them to make an SoC for their machines.
Sure Intel and AMD may simply begin to sell whole finished SoCs. But what are these to contain? PC-makers may have different ideas of what they should contain. You potentially get a conflict between Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and PC-makers about what sort of specialized chips should be included because these will need software support. For Apple this is simple. They control the whole widget."
debugger.medium.com
But we are quickly moving away from that world. In the new SoC world, you don’t assemble physical components from different vendors. Instead, you assemble IP (intellectual property) from different vendors. You buy the design for graphics cards, CPUs, modems, IO controllers, and other things from different vendors and use that to design an SoC in-house. Then you get a foundry to manufacture this.
Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property to Dell or HP for them to make an SoC for their machines.
Sure Intel and AMD may simply begin to sell whole finished SoCs. But what are these to contain? PC-makers may have different ideas of what they should contain. You potentially get a conflict between Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and PC-makers about what sort of specialized chips should be included because these will need software support. For Apple this is simple. They control the whole widget."
What Makes Apple Silicon So Fast?
Real world experience with the new Macs has sunk in. They are fast. Real fast. But why? What is the magic?
debugger.medium.com
Thanks for the comments. You're right; the Graviton 2 instance classes are not as compelling cost-wise as the advertising would suggest. E.g. for 8vCPU/32GB instances:
The Graviton 2 instances are only 15-20% cheaper at best than comparable AMD/Intel instances (same network bandwidth, comparable storage)
It's still worth having the saving, but only if performance is on a par or better, unless it really doesn't matter.
As your experience demonstrates, it can be a bit of lottery knowing how a given workload with perform, so the only option is to test with a canary deployment.
We don't know how close the next Apple Silicon iteration is, so maybe Apple thought that it was better to enter the desktop market as early as possible with an entry-level iMac 24, rather than wait until Q3 or Q4 to deliver a much more capable (and expensive) machine. i.e. it is better to sell 5 million units @$1299 in Q2, rather than 1 million units at $1999 in Q3.
They need Apple Silicon at every tier of their product offerings, so it was logical to simply put the M1 into the iMac and set the bar for the entry level. It will appeal to a lot of people, and certainly has enough capability to meet the computing needs a large proportion of Mac users. It's not what I would buy, but it would suit just about anyone else in my extended family.
Sadly you cant scale cores up infinitely with consumer computers and expect a real performance increase. (Apple definitely has room to stretch beyond 8 cores, but 32, 64 etc cores wont be very useful to people who aren't professionals running tasks that are specifically optimzed for that)
In servers, having 128+ cores makes sense as you will often have multiple users, each can be assigned one or two cores, and you end up making use of all of them. Personal computers are single user and there really arent that many apps that can take advantage of that many cores at once. Of course benchmark multicore scores would fly up but it wouldnt make a big difference irl.
Intel and AMD keeping those high core counts in server chips probably isnt because they dont want to cannibalise themselves but because that many cores isnt that useful outside of servers.
Good news is that apple (because of arm) was and is able to improve certain other aspects that improve single core performance beyond what amd and intel can do because of x86 limitations. (For example how it has 2x the amount of decoders (8 vs 4 on the highest end x86 chips) meaning it can pretty much process twice as many instructions at the same clock speed, while x86 chips simply cant*)
You can already see how high the M1's single core performance is, only being beaten by desktop cpus clocked at 4-5GHz which isnt reasonable in a laptop.
I think something around 8 high performance cores would be a sweet spot for Macs because so much Wintel software and console games are already used to that. Whether that would keep the advantage of cool thermals is another matter.
For a Mac Pro, I think the more cores the better. You see the AMD Threadripper has gone in this direction, and it has its uses in the industry. There are software solutions out there that work with these kind of chips.
For a Mac Pro, I think the more cores the better. You see the AMD Threadripper has gone in this direction, and it has its uses in the industry. There are software solutions out there that work with these kind of chips.
Oh yeah the Mac Pro could definitely benefit from that many cores, its what i meant when i said "people who aren't professionals running tasks that are specifically optimzed for that"
I think 16 performance cores could also be pretty good for the highest end macbook and imac models (many recent x86 chips are 8 cores and 16 threads, and since apple's chips dont have hyperthreading, you would need 16 cores to match that thread count)