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

[TiggrToo]

I couldn't disagree more.

You can disagree, but the facts speak for themselves. x86 shipments are dropping and Arm shipments are going up

The biggest driver for Arm will be the cloud - cloud providers need the lowest powered, high performing architecture available - and that’s Arm. There’s already a massive number of container images that have been ported to Arm - and more turn up every day.

Many Linux distro’s are already Arm based, heck Microsoft are getting on the act with Windows 11 and their ‘version’ of Rosetta for x86 and x64 apps.

And if that wasn’t enough - we’re still finding critical issues with Intel architecture - years after Spectre and Meltdown first crashed onto the scene - all of which makes betting on an Intel future very dodgy.

Sure x86 isn’t going to die tomorrow - it’s probably got another 10-15 years of life in it. But don’t kid yourself that its growing because it’s not.

There’s a ‘new’ kid on the block and its Arm.

And while Apple may be leading this public charge with their “Apple Silicon”, Arm themselves have some amazing chips coming out - such as the Neoverse chips, and Amazon’s take on the v2 - the Graviton3.

 

[bobcomer]

Sure x86 isn’t going to die tomorrow - it’s probably got another 10-15 years of life in it. But don’t kid yourself that its growing because it’s not.

I'd say 30 at least, businesses don't move fast outside the tech sector. And I never said it was growing -- I said it was the market leader, which it is. Whether it's growing or shrinking isn't a concern of mine.

 

[MisterK]

I don't mind the upgradability part. I've been a Mac user for long enough that I've become accustomed to that. But I've kept my desktop Macs for a long time regardless. One Mac from 2001-2010. Another from 2010-2020. That's 2 desktop computers in 20 years, so I tend to go pretty heavy on options when I get a new one. Granted, I've had my workplaces provide me with several MacBook Pros while those were my home computers, so I've had access to newer computers.

I feel you on the not being able to run Windows part, though. That wasn't an issue for me, but now that I have kids and my son has an M1 iMac, he wants to play games like Planet Zoo or Ark Survival that he sees the YouTubers playing. I wish I could put those on here.

 

[kingtj1971]

That's a bit harsh. I see a lot of businesses, large and small, adapting to a non-x86 world in many ways. A smaller shop may start with touch-based payment kiosks running on iPads and grow from there. A larger company, like the one I just left, may start realizing that most of its employees prefer Macs now. This is all anecdotal, of course, but just as a personal example:

When I started at my previous company in 2011, it was a Windows business through and through. Macs were an afterthought. In my tier one desktop support job, we had maybe 3 Macs--one for testing, one for development, and one for support to mess with. Very few people even bothered with them in my department. When I left the company at the beginning of this year, 3/4 of the total internal user base was on a Mac.

The last time I job hunted, the question "Do you prefer a Mac or PC?" was not even an option. Every offer I've gotten recently has included that question. And when I say Mac, I don't get the eye rolls or snide comments like I used to back in the old days. I really feel like the worm is starting to turn in this regard. I maintain my theory that a very, very large percentage of the Windows user base is people who were learned on beige box Gateway 2000s and AOL in the 90s. That demographic overlaps with a lot of others as well, but I can't think of a worse reason to stick with x86.

Things HAVE to progress. Businesses HAVE to progress. x86 is legacy. You cannot run forever on legacy. It's just not sustainable in the days where literally almost every human on earth has a computer in their pants pocket.

Just want to chime in that I agree, except I'll say that for a lot of businesses, the idea of offering employees their choice of a Mac or a Windows PC is more driven by the interest in employee retention than anything else. The argument that x86 is a "legacy" CPU architecture isn't that relevant in most cases. Businesses generally don't care what's "under the hood" of a computer except for what directly relates to APPLICATIONS they want to use running well/properly.

Honestly? The primary reason a Mac is even viable in the modern workplace is thanks to so many things moving to the cloud. If you wanted to use Microsoft Great Plains accounting or CRM software, for example? There's no native Mac version for it, and likely never will be. But they *do* have a cloud-based edition now. Same thing holds true for many document management products on the market like DocuWare. No native desktop Mac application but they're trying to sell their user-base on moving to a cloud edition (better pricing for what you get), and that happens to enable the ability to use it on a Mac too.

The thing is? Apple has had great success winning over the home user, to the point it's changing that tradition situation where people come to a job familiar with Windows because it's what they've used at home all along. So it compels businesses to accommodate them by offering a Mac option.

 

[jonblatho]

I actually know the head of engineering (I think that’s the title) at the Met Office, and we for some reason we’re talking about HPC. He said that few small projects could move to Graviton, but the large archaic models in FORTRAN are decades of not more in moving to a different platform.

I’ll ask my fiancé who worked in weather / scientific computing at NTNU, but I feel based on prior discussions, he’s not optimistic about a migration either

Edit, he’s a technical lead at TMO

Yeah, not everything’s going to have an easy path to running on Arm. I work in a different meteorological agency (across the Atlantic) and we’ve already run into some tricky situations just trying to replace our aging Intel-based Macs with Apple silicon machines, let alone anything involving our actual servers/data processing. Much of the past couple of weeks I have been working feverishly on getting an old VirtualBox-based dev environment for some legacy projects replaced through Docker Compose so that M1 Macs can run it (and even then, it’s frankly a cobbled-together solution meant to get it running now because, well, we need it now).

To be clear, though, the fact that the Met Office was able to transition their data assimilation onto Arm is far from trivial. On our end, that case study got us thinking about how we could apply that to our own data ingest/processing because at minimum it’s proof that it can be done and has tangible benefits. But of course, absent more people to work on it, we’ve unfortunately got bigger fish to fry with other ongoing major projects. It’s still something we’d love to do.

 

[ct2k7]

Yeah, not everything’s going to have an easy path to running on Arm. I work in a different meteorological agency (across the Atlantic) and we’ve already run into some tricky situations just trying to replace our aging Intel-based Macs with Apple silicon machines, let alone anything involving our actual servers/data processing. Much of the past couple of weeks I have been working feverishly on getting an old VirtualBox-based dev environment for some legacy projects replaced through Docker Compose so that M1 Macs can run it (and even then, it’s frankly a cobbled-together solution meant to get it running now because, well, we need it now).

To be clear, though, the fact that the Met Office was able to transition their data assimilation onto Arm is far from trivial. On our end, that case study got us thinking about how we could apply that to our own data ingest/processing because at minimum it’s proof that it can be done and has tangible benefits. But of course, absent more people to work on it, we’ve unfortunately got bigger fish to fry with other ongoing major projects. It’s still something we’d love to do.

Indeed.

OT but you remind me of someone I met on IRC years ago with an interest in meteorology.

 

[Tagbert]

it just a tool for work as 3 year you need to upgrade. Either x86 nor arm m1 . still 3 year depreciation

You can depreciate the expense over 3 years though you can continue to use the machine for much longer. I switched from my 2014 MBP to an M1 Air last year after 7 years of solid productivity. No reason to not expect the same out the M-series Macs.

 

[progx]

“Classic” Intel Mac…? You ran an Intel Core Duo? You know, Apple had any used Intel’s chips since 2005, right? A classic Mac would be pre-PowerPC and running a Motorola chipset (which is a distant RISC cousin to Apple Silicon).

The last Mac that had great upgradability was the iMac G3 and the MacBook (2008) for me personally. My late 2012 iMac was the first “sealed” 21-inch machine, so you want to throw in the phrase “being a prisoner to the machine”?

Even though my current machine (late 2018 Mac mini), I was able to add RAM and an eGPU, it’s still super limiting compared to the wider X64-86 world where you can build one from buying the individual pieces at Newegg.

You can’t compare these new Arm-based PCs to their X64-86 counterparts. They’ve almost eliminated possible latency between individual components (such as CPU, GPU, RAM and storage) for a more seamless experience. My Mac mini i7, with 32GB of RAM and an 4GB Radeon 570 gets clocked by the new minis. Not mention, the generation of Intel Apple was stuck with was old. It would’ve been awesome if Apple switched over to AMD Ryzen’s CPUs, but these new chips are just starting out and I can’t wait to see how this changes the PC world. Microsoft, Google, AMD, Qualcomm, Samsung, Dell and so many other companies are working on their own Arm-based SoCs, so you might feel like a prisoner with ANY PC in the next 5-10 years.

 

[progx]

You can depreciate the expense over 3 years though you can continue to use the machine for much longer. I switched from my 2014 MBP to an M1 Air last year after 7 years of solid productivity. No reason to not expect the same out the M-series Macs.

Could last longer. Just look at how long Apple has continued to support the iPhone 6S.

 

[sherwinzadeh]

Lack of upgradability is offset by Apple products maintaining a high resell value.

I'm from the old days where I built my own PC when I was a kid but those days are gone. Today users want way more than just more RAM... Apple consistently pushes brand new technology that can't just be upgraded to.

 

[Tagbert]

Could last longer. Just look at how long Apple has continued to support the iPhone 6S.

Yes, it did last longer. I gifted it to my niece who is still using it. Even if not, I consider 7 years a very good useful lifetime for a laptop.

 

[progx]

Yes, it did last longer. I gifted it to my niece who is still using it. Even if not, I consider 7 years a very good useful lifetime for a laptop.

Haha. I meant the new M1 machine you bought as well.

 

[alien3dx]

You can depreciate the expense over 3 years though you can continue to use the machine for much longer. I switched from my 2014 MBP to an M1 Air last year after 7 years of solid productivity. No reason to not expect the same out the M-series Macs.

Yes can used longer but kinda need safety if anything problem . So after 3 year , need to buy new one.

 

[strayts]

Chiming in to note that many Macs throughout the 80s and 90s had MEGA upgradability and expandability. To say that Steve Jobs didn't want Macs to be user-upgradable for the entire history of Apple is simply not true. Also, he died a LONG time ago now.

 

[ArkSingularity]

Sure x86 isn’t going to die tomorrow - it’s probably got another 10-15 years of life in it. But don’t kid yourself that its growing because it’s not.

There’s a ‘new’ kid on the block and its Arm.

And while Apple may be leading this public charge with their “Apple Silicon”, Arm themselves have some amazing chips coming out - such as the Neoverse chips, and Amazon’s take on the v2 - the Graviton3.

I don't think x86 is really going to die anytime soon. x86 is still pretty much ubiquitous in the PC market, and we're still years away from it really losing its command of the market thanks to massive software compatibility issues that have plagued Windows on ARM. Apple's custom-designed cores are also substantially faster than the publicly licensed ARM cores available for PCs. (ARM's fastest non-Apple core is the Cortex-X2, which is roughly comparable to a 10th or 11th generation Intel in terms of performance. Definitely respectable, but it's also very power hungry compared to other ARM cores, and certainly much more so than Apple's own ARM designs. It's not really in the same ballpark as Apple's Firestorm and Avalanche cores.)

Many of the tricks Apple used to make their processors ridiculously efficient also weren't really ISA-specific. A ~300 page PDF recently came out detailing many of the inner workings of Apple's processors (be prepared, the research in that document is mind blowing), and Apple basically completely re-imagined how out-of-order execution works at a low level, and was able to design ultra wide pipelines that were much more efficient than predecessor designs. Many of Apple's innovations are uncharted territory in the CPU world, and aren't even seen in competing ARM designs. They also benefited strongly from some of ARM's inherent advantages (such as equal instruction length, which make it easier to design ultra-wide pipelines without wasting power), but these advantages are only one part of the picture. The inherent advantages of ARM were undeniably important, but Apple's engineering is what really took the M1 over the top.

ARM has responded by announcing a second team of engineers working on clean-sheet processor designs (called the "sophia" cores, currently believed to be coming out in the next year or two). But Intel and AMD are also on fire right now, and are innovating at a rate we really haven't even seen since Sandy Bridge. x86 definitely hasn't reached its peak yet, and I think we will be seeing aggressive innovation in both ISAs for many years to come.

 

[aParkerMusic]

Hey everyone,

I recently had a M1 Mac Mini, 1TB Storage, 16 gb of RAM. I never had M1 Mac before, just "Classic" Intel Mac. ?

And you know what ? I kept it 2 months, and sold it.

I have a really "mixed" feeling about that M1 chips.

Of course, M1 chips have really very great performances. I was impressed to see a Mac Mini with such perfs.

But there a couple of things i really can't stand with that M1 chips.

1/ Zero upgrade possiblity.

Let's be clear, i always hated that apple decision to solder components, BUT i can admit it gives advantages about performances.
But what i feel is like Apple saying "You won't touch inside our machines. We will do everything possible to make it non-upgradeable. Don't touch our computers. You should pay 2X or 3x times the normal price with our configuration."

Look at the poor Luke Miani who had a hope when he opened his Mac Studio... He tried swapping the modules and got 100% locked by Apple. I could feel hope in his eyes, but reality came back very fast ?

Of course, Apple was never reputed for making upgradeables machines. We all know that Steve Jobs didn't want this.
But at least, most of machines before 2012 could be upgraded with RAM and new Hard drives. I think it was really the minimum Apple could offer to customers. And i'll be honest, i always enjoyed that.
Look at 2020 iMac, memory was still accessible.

In my mind, i really can't stand to be stuck with my machine. I know if i want to change anything in my machine, i have to change the whole machine. And i really feel sad about it.

I feel like : Having a very great machine but being prisoner of it.

2/ Lack of compatibility

Of course, Rosetta is good, and ARM chips are just like the transition from PowerPC to Intel in the mid 2000's. It's totally normal that it lacks of compatibility.
However, i've been so much used to run multiple systems like Linux or Windows, additional to MacOS that it frustrates me a lot.
I won't expand on this topic, i think it's useless.

BTW, i feel very mitigate about M1 Computers, and i feel very alone. Everyone seems to love it so much.
Anyone feeling like me ? ?

You‘re not alone, even as you are misguided. I hope you find the solution for yourself, there are many options out there!

Not sure why someone would post on MacRumors about being “alone” in regretting a Mac
purchase? Seems odd. But to each their own. Best wishes!

 

[seek3r]

Look at the poor Luke Miani who had a hope when he opened his Mac Studio... He tried swapping the modules and got 100% locked by Apple. I could feel hope in his eyes, but reality came back very fast ?

Miani didn't know what he was doing, iFixit was able to move modules and use configurator as should be expected by anyone who's looked into restoring any AS Mac. So Miani didn't get locked by Apple, he just didn't know what he was doing

 

[aParkerMusic]

Not if they’re both thunderbolt. And please, if you are replying to me, use the reply function, it makes the thread easier to follow

Please stop with the attacks. This site has enough toxicity.

And, yes, you’ll reply saying you are righteous and correct, and my comment is misguided, etc, etc.

I’m just saying, don’t sweat the small stuff. Do you really care that this person responded to you but didn’t directly respond to your comment? Like….come on.

Address their point, then move on. What is with these forums?

 

[ct2k7]

Please stop with the attacks. This site has enough toxicity.

And, yes, you’ll reply saying you are righteous and correct, and my comment is misguided, etc, etc.

I’m just saying, don’t sweat the small stuff. Do you really care that this person responded to you but didn’t directly respond to your comment? Like….come on.

Address their point, then move on. What is with these forums?

I’m only asking them to use the reply function if they are trying to respond to me; I generally find it easier to track conversations and replies using the tools available.

Maybe my expectations are too high.

 

[aParkerMusic]

I’m only asking them to use the reply function if they are trying to respond to me; I generally find it easier to track conversations and replies using the tools available.

Maybe my expectations are too high.

You’re being pretentious. This is an Apple fan site. Chill out. Are you serious? Stop. Come on. Lets not enforce forum decorum.

And now you’ll attack saying I’m wrong, you’re right, etc. It’s all so tiresome. Cant people just chill and enjoy talking about Apple rumors?

 

[ct2k7]

You’re being pretentious. This is an Apple fan site. Chill out. Are you serious? Stop. Come on. Lets not enforce forum decorum.

And now you’ll attack saying I’m wrong, you’re right, etc. It’s all so tiresome. Cant people just chill and enjoy talking about Apple rumors?

I haven’t attacked you and have refrained from doing so, not that I can find anything wrong.

I don’t think you preempting does any justice to the thread though.

Of course I’m not here to enforce decorum; I’m not a moderator above all else.

As said above, I find it much easier and less ambiguous to use the reply functionality.

 

[Apple_Robert]

OP,
Why do you feel the need for validation of your opinion from strangers? If you are happy with what you are doing with your Apple devices, it doesn't matter what other people think about it, at least it shouldn't matter.

 

[arvinsim]

1/ Recent Intel Macs are exactly the same. (Apart from the Pro)

You can upgrade the RAM yourself with the Intel Mac Minis

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Chiming in to note that many Macs throughout the 80s and 90s had MEGA upgradability and expandability. To say that Steve Jobs didn't want Macs to be user-upgradable for the entire history of Apple is simply not true. Also, he died a LONG time ago now.

These would be the same 80’s where Steve Jobs was driven out of the company, yes? And he returned in 1997 and introduced the world to… the no-slot iMac.

The folks that worked with Steve Jobs were aware of his disdain for upgradability. And, considering that the iMac saved Apple and sold well, it wouldn’t surprise me that others after him would follow his lead just based on that.

 

[Fomalhaut]

I had a plan to buy an F-150 pickup with a V-6 engine and simply add two pistons to increase the performance, but I couldn't find any garage mechanics willing to take on the task. Wimps.

There is a large grain of truth in your analogy. Few people complain about not being able to change the core components of their car, their TV or their fridge. (although my father use to bemoan the fact that he used to be able to fix his 1950s-1970s cars himself, but newer cars were impossible to fix without specialist tools and equipment - the "right to repair" is an old concept...)

I find it best to think of Apple products as "appliances" not computers in the sense that some of us are used to - i.e. modular machines in a large box that allow you to add or change components, or even large laptops with lots of removable panels for getting at the insides. This is arguably less of a problem these days because (in general) performance increases year on year are not huge, so there is little compelling reason to upgrade anything. That said, the introduction of Apple Silicon *was* a big jump - but as there was no option to upgrade an Intel Mac to an AS one, that may be a moot point.

Bear in mind that some of the earliest consumer home computers were also just appliances, with little upgrade capability, e.g. Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore VIC20/64, BBC Micro etc. - although you could plug peripherals into them (including "RAM packs" that must have had horrible performance). In most cases, if you wanted more internal RAM you had to buy a new computer...same as today! It wasn't until the advent of the Apple II and IBM PC clones that the idea of expansion really took off (I'm sure there were some other options out there too).