I feel like i'm alone to dislike M1/what is it good for (Merged Mega Thread)

[Unregistered 4U]

Apple's marketshare is small for a few reasons as you mentioned. I do believe part of it is again the price for an Apple product. For many it is just out of reach, and the base models are just so lack lustre that paying that kind of money seems better spent on something with better specs and serviceability. Apple knows what it is doing and knows how to make money, they are up there with the best in the world for doing that.

The price is DEFINITELY a part of it, I don’t dispute that. I’m sure their internal conversations are something like “Would some acceptable percentage of 20 million folks a year buy this for ‘x’ price? (which includes the understanding that the systems are not upgradable)” If their analysis seems correct, then they set a price where the total Mac sales in a year including this new product rolls in at around 20 million. They are intentionally focusing on making a profit off of people that have disposable income to spend on a Mac, not increasing their marketshare. I mean, if the marketshare goes up? Bonus!

 

[ric22]

@MacCheetah3 "Poor analogy as, again, Apple devices do have replaceable batteries."
Yeah, they do. But you don't have to remove a car engine to change a tyre... There is literally zero justification for making it as difficult to change a battery as Apple were making it a couple of years ago.

 

[zidarko]

What if you're always plugged in? They wont notice that...

Then they'd sure notice their computer is not a toaster anymore like Intel-based ones are.

 

[ahurst]

Apple's marketshare is small for a few reasons as you mentioned. I do believe part of it is again the price for an Apple product. For many it is just out of reach, and the base models are just so lack lustre that paying that kind of money seems better spent on something with better specs and serviceability.

There are plenty of fair things to criticize about the value propositions in Apple's current line up, but the base models? They're a better deal than they've ever been, by a long shot.

Instead of the cheapest Mac mini and MacBook Air coming with weak low-voltage i3s and i5s with anemic integrated graphics like they did in 2019, today you're getting single core performance that embarrasses the fastest i9 Macs ever shipped and a much more capable GPU for that same bottom dollar. With the current MBA (the cheapest Apple notebook ever, adjusting for inflation), you're also getting absurdly good battery life for the price. With the base model iMac, in addition to the relative CPU/GPU gains, you're also getting a solid 4K panel instead of the old 1080p screens they used to offer at the same (inflation-adjusted) price point.

If anything, it's harder than ever to justify getting a top-spec Mac: if I didn't do demanding data science & neuroimaging work and thus didn't need those 4 extra performance cores, I'd probably be writing this from an MBA instead of a 14" MBP. For single-threaded workloads that don't require more than 16 GB RAM, there isn't much practical difference.

 

[ahurst]

With hardware finally getting ahead of software, all our devices will soon be so good that the hardware will likely just be a commodity, and software the big differentiator. People will likely wish to hold on to their hardware for longer than before, which will make Apple's decisions even more frustrating.

I'd argue the opposite is true: with faster hardware having increasingly smaller benefits for most people's workflows and HDD/RAM specs stagnating industry-wide over the past decade in response (see the visualizations in this thread), user upgradability isn't as important for keeping a computer long-term as it used to be.

For reference, base storage/RAM sizes in Macs jumped from 10 GB HDD/64 MB RAM in 2002 to 128 GB/2 GB RAM in 2012: if you wanted to keep your iMac G4 in service that long, you were going to need to upgrade to keep up with current file sizes and RAM demands. Today base storage/RAM sizes are 256 GB and 8 GB (increases of 2x and 4x from 2012, respectively), a far cry from the 13x increase in base storage and 32x increase in base RAM we saw in the decade before. Assuming that trend continues, there's going to be a lot less need to upgrade your machine to keep it long-term.

 

[ric22]

I'd argue the opposite is true: with faster hardware having increasingly smaller benefits for most people's workflows and HDD/RAM specs stagnating industry-wide over the past decade in response (see the visualizations in this thread), user upgradability isn't as important for keeping a computer long-term as it used to be.

For reference, base storage/RAM sizes in Macs jumped from 10 GB HDD/64 MB RAM in 2002 to 128 GB/2 GB RAM in 2012: if you wanted to keep your iMac G4 in service that long, you were going to need to upgrade to keep up with current file sizes and RAM demands. Today base storage/RAM sizes are 256 GB and 8 GB (increases of 2x and 4x from 2012, respectively), a far cry from the 13x increase in base storage and 32x increase in base RAM we saw in the decade before. Assuming that trend continues, there's going to be a lot less need to upgrade your machine to keep it long-term.

Upgrading storage is likely the key thing we'd want to upgrade on Apple devices. Even if RAM was upgradable we've reached the point (16GB) that will be great for 99.9% of people for a few years to come, considering Apple's excellent memory management. In terms of storage, 4TB disks will probably be as affordable as today's 1TB (or Apple's insulting 256GB 😬 With the volume they could buy in, they could probably source 1TB disks for the same price they source 256GB disks- which would be a 10x increase on a decade ago, but then they'd miss out on the upsell.)

On the PC side I'm sure gamers will still regularly want to upgrade their GPU. For a decade now, games have been GPU rather than CPU limited, vastly. We have a computer in our household that is 15 years or so old, and has had most possible upgrades at this point (hand me downs), and is still more than usable with Windows 10. I love that.

 

[ric22]

Instead of the cheapest Mac mini and MacBook Air coming with weak low-voltage i3s and i5s with anemic integrated graphics like they did in 2019, today you're getting single core performance that embarrasses the fastest i9 Macs ever shipped

Where did that statement come from? In terms of performance per watt it's a better chip, but in terms of pure performance- nope.

Intel Core i9 vs. Apple M1 Max: Which Laptop CPU Is Better?

Intel’s 12th Generation "Alder Lake-H" mobile CPUs offer loads of speed, but Apple’s M1 Max answers with even better power efficiency. We tested—which should you choose for your next laptop?

www.pcmag.com

There's 3 i9 chips that are faster in single core than the M1, and even an i7, according to geekbench.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I'm even fine if Apple wants the OS/core files to be on a soldered down internal 128/256 SSD.

Just add an NVMe slot for users to populate (or buy pre-populated). I don't just want to be able to pop in my own storage, I want the peace of mind of being able to swap it out, especially if something happens to the device.

 

[throAU]

Short data lines? Google is flummoxed by that term.

TLDR:
We are at the point where clock speeds are being limited by the length of the wires used for things like RAM due to signalling problems.

Shorter wires (e.g., onboard SOC) = easier to hit higher clocks.

 

[dikey]

I have eGPU with RX5700, and may decide to upgrade my GPU in the future.

My Mac normally is a Mac and when it comes to entertainment it suddenly become a gaming PC when I connect it to my eGPU and 4K 120hz Display.

I can play all games in Steam which a arm mac can not do.

I can buy a Windows PC but I am not able to buy a house for a Windows PC due to the unaffordable house price in China.

 

[ahurst]

Where did that statement come from? In terms of performance per watt it's a better chip, but in terms of pure performance- nope.

Intel Core i9 vs. Apple M1 Max: Which Laptop CPU Is Better?

Intel’s 12th Generation "Alder Lake-H" mobile CPUs offer loads of speed, but Apple’s M1 Max answers with even better power efficiency. We tested—which should you choose for your next laptop?

www.pcmag.com

There's 3 i9 chips that are faster in single core than the M1, and even an i7, according to geekbench.

That’s why I specified “fastest i9 Macs ever shipped” 🙂

The latest top-range Alder Lake chips have faster single-core now (at the cost of eye-watering power consumption), but the Intel lineup at the time of the M1’s release was really put to shame in terms of single-core. After taking nearly a decade to deliver a chip with double the single-core of my 2013 iMac’s i7-4771, it’s nice to see Intel actually trying again.

 

[TiggrToo]

I'm not sure anyone could defend Apple in terms of creating unnecessary e-waste with their behaviour, driven purely to extract more revenue. It's sanctimonious from a company that preaches environmental issues. If they need to charge more to offer components that aren't soldered in laptops (and desktops), and this also adds 0.3mm thickness, do it.

Sad thing is, the chances are that the overwhelming number of computer users who have the ability to, will never perform any sort of component upgrade.

At best at work we may replace SSD’s on certain laptops but usually we just rotate them out - we have a service that allows us to do that at a cheaper price than always tinkering about.

And home users by and large wouldn’t know a SSD if you threw it at their nose.

That’s the silliness of your position - you seem to be of the opinion that because many laptops currently can be upgraded, that they are. The reality is that most are almost certainly not.

 

[TiggrToo]

SoC: Advantages and Disadvantages of System-on-a-Chip - Profolus

A discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of system-on-a-chip or SoC, as well as its characteristics and applications.

www.profolus.com

Did you not read what you posted. The negatives where not upgradeable (well, d’oh - it’s a SoC), that individual motherboards are more powerful (no mention on cost of doing so though) and that traditional integrated GPS are not as effective.

Apple’s SoC wins on price and power compared to a full motherboard stacked with components and the GPU is far in advance of any other Integrated GPU.

 

[tmoerel]

I have eGPU with RX5700, and may decide to upgrade my GPU in the future.

My Mac normally is a Mac and when it comes to entertainment it suddenly become a gaming PC when I connect it to my eGPU and 4K 120hz Display.

I can play all games in Steam which a arm mac can not do.

I can buy a Windows PC but I am not able to buy a house for a Windows PC due to the unaffordable house price in China.

You are an edge case to Apple. You are not their average target market. Do not expect Apple to change and fulfil your needs.
Gaming on macs seems to be totally irrelevant to Apple. They only cater to the casual gamer on iPad/iPhone/Apple TV.

 

[ahurst]

Upgrading storage is likely the key thing we'd want to upgrade on Apple devices. Even if RAM was upgradable we've reached the point (16GB) that will be great for 99.9% of people for a few years to come, considering Apple's excellent memory management. In terms of storage, 4TB disks will probably be as affordable as today's 1TB (or Apple's insulting 256GB 😬 With the volume they could buy in, they could probably source 1TB disks for the same price they source 256GB disks- which would be a 10x increase on a decade ago, but then they'd miss out on the upsell.)

For most users I think storage upgrades might be even less relevant than RAM upgrades, given the trends over the past decade:

As you can see, apart from the dropping of the 128 GB base models, there really hasn’t been much change in base storage demands over the past decade. A lot of this probably has to do with increased reliance on streaming services for media and (cloud storage for photos/documents), combined with file sizes that aren’t getting any larger for most content. Unless you’re working with video, high-res photo libraries, or (like me) VMs and large 20-50 GB datasets, even 512 GB is a lot of room for the average person. Given the relative lack of market pressure to make higher-capacity internal storage, I doubt there’ll be much in terms of compelling upgrades even for NVMe laptops 5 years down the road (at least not relative to the “quadruple your storage every few years” early 2000’s and “swap an HDD for an SSD” early 2010’s).

On the PC side I'm sure gamers will still regularly want to upgrade their GPU. For a decade now, games have been GPU rather than CPU limited, vastly. We have a computer in our household that is 15 years or so old, and has had most possible upgrades at this point (hand me downs), and is still more than usable with Windows 10. I love that.

Yeah, absolutely, gaming enthusiasts will always want the flexibility to upgrade their hardware. For those people it makes sense. I’m not saying upgradability isn’t important for *anyone* anymore, just that it’s not nearly as relevant as it used to be for the average user.

Personally, I squeezed a good 10 years out of my last laptop, a 2011 ThinkPad X220 hackintosh I’d upgraded with an SSD. The SSD upgrade really extended its usable life! The transition from spinning rust to solid state can only happen once though, and unless “SSD 2” is about to be released I strongly doubt there’ll be a compelling need to upgrade the 1 TB SSD in my 14” MBP over the 6-10 years I plan to keep it.

 

[quarkysg]

The SSD upgrade really extended its usable life! The transition from spinning rust to solid state can only happen once though, and unless “SSD 2” is about to be released

I guess SSD 2 will come in the form of low power high speed RAM that can be powered by a coin cell battery for years. Otherwise it will just be capacity increase. The advantage of SSD over magnetic disc is access speed.

 

[Tagbert]

@MacCheetah3 "Poor analogy as, again, Apple devices do have replaceable batteries."
Yeah, they do. But you don't have to remove a car engine to change a tyre... There is literally zero justification for making it as difficult to change a battery as Apple were making it a couple of years ago.

No but there have been several cars where you had to remove/drop the engine to remove spark plugs.

 

[Arctic Moose]

No but there have been several cars where you had to remove/drop the engine to remove spark plugs.

And replacing the battery on my current car is so involved that I now choose to not do it myself.

 

[throAU]

Sad thing is, the chances are that the overwhelming number of computer users who have the ability to, will never perform any sort of component upgrade.

The other factor is that progress is slow enough in CPU and memory capacity demand increases now that by the time you need to upgrade you're likely also wanting things that aren't on your old board.

Like, new USB standard, new storage IO standard, etc. We're not living in the 90s any more where 50-100% generation on generation performance improvements for CPUs were common. You're more likely wanting to upgrade every 3, 5 or more years.

Upgrading the CPU or memory on an old machine won't get you those things.

As an example: lets say I was to upgrade a Skylake desktop (such as the one I have here at work) today:

• doesn't have any M.2 slots
• DDR4
• no USB4 / type C ports
• no PCIe 4

Its stuck with USB 3, no type C, SATA drives, etc. Upgrading the CPU in it, it's still going to be massively bottlenecked by everything else getting data in and out of it.

 

[planteater]

OP, you described why I moved from my beloved Macs to Windoze PCs. I just purchased a laptop with these specs for USD$1249:

15" 240Hz 1080 LCD
AMD Ryzen 5 5900HX CPU (8-cores, 16 with HyperThreading -- over 24K on Passmark)
16GB RAM user expandable to 64GB
Nvidia RTX 3070 (8GB, 140W max TDP)
512GB M.2 PCIe v4 removeable SSD with a second slot for another PCIe SSD AND a spot for a 2.5" 7mm tall SATA drive

This computer will be used for video editing, image editing, and games. What drew me to this PC was its user expandability along with price. Amazingly, the computer arrived with no bloatware and the upgrade to Windows 11 was free (which, if you haven't used it, is a very Mac-like experience).

Will I miss out on the wonderful integration of macOS with all my other Apple devices? Yes. Will I miss out on the beautiful retina displays? Yes, but the 240Hz display is soooo buttery smooth. Will I miss having to repurchase my computer because I want to expand RAM or internal storage? Nope.

My PowerMac 7500 -- back in 1995 -- was expandable to an amazing (for its time) 1GB RAM using standard modules, and you could even put in a third-party G3 accelerator card. Update the storage? Sure! Update the CD-ROM? Yep. Apple has lost their game in these areas and I miss it a lot.

1080 for $1249? How about $449, regardless of other specs.

 

[makinao]

I was younger and always on a budget back in the days of upgradable MacBooks, so I bought the base models then maxed storage and ram along the way. I finally had enough money to splurge on my latest purchase. I expect my non-upgradable but generously spec'd 64gb 4tb M1 Max 16" to satisfy my needs until Apple declares it obsolete plus a few years.

 

[ric22]

Sad thing is, the chances are that the overwhelming number of computer users who have the ability to, will never perform any sort of component upgrade.

At best at work we may replace SSD’s on certain laptops but usually we just rotate them out - we have a service that allows us to do that at a cheaper price than always tinkering about.

And home users by and large wouldn’t know a SSD if you threw it at their nose.

That’s the silliness of your position - you seem to be of the opinion that because many laptops currently can be upgraded, that they are. The reality is that most are almost certainly not.

If Covid and Brexit should have taught me anything, I suppose it is that the 'average' person is very daft indeed. My position, at least for so called Pro devices, remains sensible and intelligent- those devices should be more repairable because businesses do support them even if you're saying the average Apple home user is too dumb to repair (or pay to repair) their device. The alternative, that some of you champion, to make it hard to repair/update Macs, brings no advantages to anyone but Apple's shareholders.

With any luck, the Right to Repair movement will gain traction, and the likes of Apple won't be allowed to play silly-buggers with their devices anymore, and more and more people will become educated as to how simple and cost effective home repairs (and updates) can be.

 

[ric22]

And replacing the battery on my current car is so involved that I now choose to not do it myself.

Is your car an EV? If not, and you're just talking about a regular car battery- what car did you manage to find where it's hard to change it?!?

If you're talking about an EV car battery, that probably weighs north of 1,000lbs, well, yeah, I would be surprised if you had the equipment to change that on your own. 😅

 

[ric22]

Going back to the subject of repairability... The M1 chip is probably going to be able to run most basic tasks fine in a decade. It's that good! The question is: what other elements of the device will fail sooner than that.

Let's consider the MacBook Air, and the components typically more likely to fail:

• SSD: Unlikely to fail in under 10 years, but will probably be hopelessly undersized by then. A ✅ for surviving.
• Screen: Should survive the decade, but a pixel or two may die. ✅
• Keyboard: If its anything like the pre-butterfly keyboards it'll probably go 5-7 years before keys start dying and you either need it replaced or you need to start using an external keyboard. ❌ for lasting less time than the SoC.
• Trackpad: Usually good for quite a long time. Tick ✅
• The RAM contained within the SoC: Impossible to know. Traditional RAM, perhaps 6-14 years life expectancy. ❓Keep your fingers crossed that you aren't on the lower end (or sooner).
• The battery: I've never had a MacBook battery that lasted more than 3 years, and have had a couple replaced on Apple Care because they degraded spectacularly in under 2 without a great deal of use. Chance of it lasting 10 years: 0%. ❌
• Power circuitry/main board/miscellaneous: Any could go wrong, but Apple usually use very good parts, it seems. ✅
• USB ports: On my MacBooks, and all previous work MacBooks I've used, at least one port is kaput (or erratic) before the device is abandoned. ❌

Everyone's mileage may vary, but if Apple wanted a sustainable product, it should be quicker and easier to replace the battery, keyboard, USB ports, and SSD. The first three are at least all doable at home on most MacBooks, save for those made for a brief period recently, but usually much more difficult than they could be.

I don't expect any to be tool free jobs that any unskilled person can do in 1 minute, but that a skilled person can do in about the same time it takes them to change an iPhone battery. Keyboards are a different issue to the other parts, when tucked underneath the unibody in the position that they are, but if they're going to go the route of making the inaccessible they should spec them to have greater longevity. Certainly, ****ing about for 2 hours+ and running the risk of breaking the thing when you change the keyboard is really unnecessary. Or if you prefer, giving it to Apple to do, and knowing they might just give you a refurbished replacement, because it's so damn time consuming and risky. If they screwed it in rather than pinned it down, so you don't actually have to rip it off, that would be the simplest step they could take- screws fit in the same spaces. Now that MacBook Pros have what looks like a separate tray the keys sit it (I know it isn't actually separate), they *could* make it removable from the top, for example, but it would probably be preferable to just build it to last.

I'm not saying these are all doable (or necessary essential) for a svelte, bottom of the range, device like a MacBook Air, but known failure points could/should be mitigated on Pro devices, IMO.

 

[ahurst]

The alternative, that some of you champion, to make it hard to repair/update Macs, brings no advantages to anyone but Apple's shareholders.

Categorically, no. Hector Martin, the guy leading the effort to port Linux to the M1 systems, has written a lot about this: for the trade-off of having non-replaceable RAM, you get absurdly fast memory bandwidth with minimal power drain (the equivalent of 8 separate DIMMs in the M1 Max MBP and Mini for a total of 400 GB/s).

Basically, given spatial constraints and the laws of physics you have three choices:
1) Make a normal laptop with 2 upgradable DIMMs & 100 GB/s memory (2 50 GB/s DDR5 channels) and average power usage.
2) Make a massive chunky laptop with 8 upgradeable DIMMs & 400 GB/s RAM (8 50 GB/s DDR5 channels) and heavy power usage.
3) Make a thin laptop with 8 soldered RAM modules & 400 GB/s (8 50 GB/s DDR5 channels) and very low power usage.

Upgradability, memory bandwidth, power efficiency: barring some wild advancement we have to pick two. For working with heavy data analysis I appreciate every ounce of memory bandwidth my 14” MBP can give me, and I also appreciate its ability to get ~20 hours of use on a single charge. Personally, I hope the option to choose performance and battery life over user serviceability isn’t legislated away.

As for storage, the advantages are less pronounced but there are some technical reasons for it: you basically get iPhone-style data security even if someone has physical access to your device, and it allows Apple to keep the SSD controller as part of the SoC itself rather than a separate chip. Apple don’t even really use the NVMe standard internally, they have their own custom variant that’s getting its own separate driver in the Linux kernel because it deviated too much to make part of the NVMe driver. Those are benefits I could personally take or leave, but they are technical benefits.