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I feel like i'm alone to dislike M1/what is it good for (Merged Mega Thread)
- Thread starter Lyndon92
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I feel similar: I do not like the iPhone 13 Pro Camera. It is just garbage because everything looks overprocessed, almost like an Aquarelle, have way to much contrast and textures look flat. Had upgraded from an iPhone 8 Plus. Those photos were honest, had grain and such thing..
actually that moved a lot of windows users to mac and kept them there. Some people will just go back to windows and tote an m1 ipad. The only thing they will miss is final cut or logic pro. Despite the whiners, the i9 macbook pro is good gaming machine, which the M1 is not. I do realize that the .01% of mac users that ARE pros actually need the power of the M1 pro or max, but the other 99.99% are just strutting their stuff browsing the web and playing phone games on half of a computer
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Really cripples the Mac for you.
I've never ever used it on any of my Macs and I come from a Windows background and still use it daily.
I used to use Parallels because I needed some Windows apps whilst using MacOS, but I've even stopped that.
My M1 MacBook Air feels 100% complete for me and not even remotely "crippled".
I'd be interested in knowing the numbers of people who were activity using Boot Camp over virtualization.
Your post was phrased that you were making a sweeping generalization.
Next time it might help to qualify your statements to avoid other people questioning you.
Don't blame others for responding to your post as it is written. We're not mind readers.
Wrong. A number of folks where I work used to use it for business purposes.
And that still doesn't provide a number.
Why would you say that?
In my experience it's not trivial to beat the read and write speeds of the internal storage on current Macs, not to mention the significant loss of convenience, especially if it's a laptop.
The SOC architecture does put you in a situation where you have to compromise on upgradability to get performance and compactness. Upgradability of RAM and especially storage has always been a benefit of more open architectures, and probably extends the useful life of a machine by a year or two. But I like having the tight integration of Apple devices, and most of the time the efficiency of my MacBook Pro M1 outweighs the benefits of an upgradable machine.
My white 21-year-old G3 iBook still boots, and I can still use the terminal; even the screen is good except for one line of dead pixels. but there is no point to upgrading it, because the processor isn't ever going to be upgradable -- the cooling requirements and power requirements and footprint changes within generations of the same processor, let alone with different processors -- and modern desktop software just won't run on a 500 MHz Power processor. It seems like a terrible waste to recycle something that _seems_ to work, even though it has no real utility. So for now I keep it in a drawer out of nostalgia, and will probably boot it one last time and connect it to the Internet for its 25 anniversary, browse to some low-requirement sites just to leave an Easter egg in their log files, and pull the drive and recycle it.
My white 21-year-old G3 iBook still boots, and I can still use the terminal; even the screen is good except for one line of dead pixels. but there is no point to upgrading it, because the processor isn't ever going to be upgradable -- the cooling requirements and power requirements and footprint changes within generations of the same processor, let alone with different processors -- and modern desktop software just won't run on a 500 MHz Power processor. It seems like a terrible waste to recycle something that _seems_ to work, even though it has no real utility. So for now I keep it in a drawer out of nostalgia, and will probably boot it one last time and connect it to the Internet for its 25 anniversary, browse to some low-requirement sites just to leave an Easter egg in their log files, and pull the drive and recycle it.
AFAIK Qualcomm has an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft to only run ARM Windows on Qualcomm processors. That agreement is supposed to be nearing its end. When that agreement was drafted there really weren’t a lot of other ARM chips around to use. Now that is changing and the hope is that MS will allow licensing after that agreement expires.
Out of interest, and I haven’t followed hardware for a while now, has there been other vendors bar Qualcomm?
The benchmark is CPU Mark’s single threaded. If the M2 base CPU Mark score is over 3,896 (which Apple only needs to improve the base performance by less than 5% to get), then the M2 base will beat the M1 Ultra, M1 Pro, and M1 Max’s single threaded CPU Mark score and is not outlandish to think so.What benchmark is this? Geekbench 3 / 4? It's better to use the de facto standard of Geekbench 5 for comparison, because these numbers don't look like anything I've seen in the last few years.
But to your point; yes, it is a given that single-core results are likely to be in the high 1900s or better (GB5), which will probably be noticeable (M1/M1 Pro/Max is about 1760)
M2 multi-core and Metal benchmarks will no doubt be better, but I don't think anyone really knows by how much. It would be (pleasantly) surprising if it beat the M1 Pro in any metric, but even if it doesn't, it will close the gap between...until the M2 Pro is released of course
That said, I don't think it will convince a large proportion of M1 owners to upgrade so soon.
No, the way folks buy computers isn’t going to change. Most folks buy what they need and keep it for a number of years. New Intel processors couldn’t get them to upgrade and new Apple Silicon one’s won’t either. Lucky for Apple, there are billions of folks that don’t own any computer OR don’t own a Mac. Apple only needs to sell upwards of 20 million a year. It doesn’t matter to them if that’s a prior Mac owner or not.
I know that there are other ARM licensees than Qualcomm and Apple but I suspect that most of those chips are used in specialized applications. Samsung does make ARM chips for phone and tablet use. Not sure about Chromebooks.
As an internal drive? Yes you sure can estimate. I have been operating at 50% capacity of 1TB for the last 5 years so I have 2TB now. I only keep the operating system and programs on the internal drive. All work and data is external.
That’s interesting. Some businesses are different though. Getting a system and months later getting a drive/RAM from Newegg throws of our capital expense books and it’s just not worth the hassle. Also, we have had bad experiences with some SSD upgrades on Dell systems with horrible firmware. Biggest issue was a full batch of 75 OCZ SSDs all went bad quickly due to a firmware problem. That’s the point where we stop upgrading components. If a drive or RAM goes bad, we invoke the Dell warranty and get it fixed.
I agree with this.
For the past fifteen years, Apple has been selling glorified PCs. Sure, they had better screens than most, nice unibody cases, better trackpads, great battery life, unique OS, sometimes better hardware configuration (when Apple used GeForce 320M, others shipped laptops with Intel GMA X3100 and didn't care), etc. But for the most part, they simply offered same Intel platform as Dell XPS or HP Elitebook or Surface Laptop PCs did, while costing more, especially when you add more RAM or storage.
But today's Apple computers are completely unique; they offer more performance and more battery life for the same or a better price.
And it will only get better; can't wait for next Apple Silicon processors of «A16» generation.
I disagree. I bought my gaming PC in early 2017. A few months ago, I replaced the 1060 with a 6700 XT. That increased the performance enough that I could replace the 24" 1080p monitor with a 34" ultrawide 1440p monitor without lowering graphics settings. That was at least as significant improvement as switching from HDDs to SSDs back in the day. Not bad for a ~$900 GPU upgrade to a five-year-old PC, especially considering the prices of new gaming PCs today.
Gaming PCs are not the typical computer user. Very few other people are going to do any post-sale upgrades on their computers. Gaming PCs are like hot rods where there is a community of people getting specialized parts and customing their rigs. Most car buyers don’t do that and continue to drive their Accord or RAV4 until they need to get a new model.
From my perspective, these M1 have been revolutionary. This is my first experience with ARM on a computer though. But the fact we have neural engines, off cpu/GPU encoders/decoders, and more than just “CPU + GPU” has been a game changer. I used to not be able to work on stuff while my videos were exporting due to the high cpu and GPU utilization in Intel based macs. But now it’s like I have two computers in one since the dedicated encoders are doing a lot of the work. I was shocked seeing such low cpu and GPU utilization.
Like I said though, ARM probably has done stuff like this for a while now and you can’t really see it in action on the iPhone processors.
As a desktop user, I don’t actually care for battery performance. It looks like the power profiles of these chips from what I’m hearing so far are locked into the enhanced battery performance profile.
That they were costing more than Dell and HP notebooks isn’t really making it a Mac either.
To me, what makes a Mac isn’t just the hardware. It could still be using Intel and I wouldn’t care less, but the software. But do remember that Apple design both the hardware and the software.
But at the same time, a Mac is a glorified PC. It still has the same constructs as a PC does. The departure is small but insignificant.
I actually agree with some of this, especially with compatibility. I recently started a new job (I'm a software developer) and was given an M1 MacBook Pro completely maxed out and was pretty excited. Sadly, I realized that many of the company's docker images hadn't been updated to add arm support, and they simply crashed or didn't work while running in emulation mode. Seems like other people got intel Macs and just used those rather than fix the underlying problem.
I've spent nearly a month updating docker images for Arm support instead of developing, and some simply won't ever work on my machine. (I'm aware I'm talking about a developer specific tool, but just sharing my experience)
I also can't run any of the companies VM's for windows testing since you can't virtualize x64 on these machines. But apparently my company can no longer get any more intel macs
Pros:
I do enjoy the battery life, performance (when not running in emulated mode), and especially the fact apple made the MacBook Pro awesome again. I'm sure many of these are growing pains, but I really wish it was possible to emulate x64 platforms in a VM to get past some of these growing pains.
I'd say that gaming is the most common reason to have a home desktop these days. There are still probably more desktop PCs in offices, but gaming is a mainstream activity and one of the most important uses for desktop PCs.