Verne Arase

Having a primary driver with a supported OS is important to me - even though I'm retired now. The only thing the M1 Max brings you (over the M1 Pro) is more GPU cores and double the encoding blocks in the media engine (as well as double the ProRes decoders), and double the memory bandwidth for the CPU and IP blocks. If you're considering the 2021 MacBook Pro, the 16" does bring with it much better thermal headroom along with the screen real estate, better speakers, and a big gorgeous display (along with the increased weight, of course). I find it easier to spring for Apple hardware since I finally put some coin into Apple stock in 2014 when I realized how much my Apple habit was costing me and the missus told me I should put my money into something I believe in - I've owned Apple continuously since then except for a brief stint where I jumped out at the start of the pandemic when Apple fell from around 210 to 150 due to production halt, with an aggregate appreciation of around 981% for a yearly appreciation of about 151% per annum. The wife gives me much less flack about buying Apple hardware nowadays . The 2021 MacBooks have had the best increase in performance I've ever seen over a two year period - though it looks like high end x86 is getting better too. Only difference is that on the x86 side, like always you're getting a portable desktop with a humongous power supply, whereas with the MacBooks you get performance and portability (and the ability to run for a long time on battery). With the x86 models, your performance dives off a cliff when you're running on battery - something that channels like LTT sort of gloss over.

Well, I owned a top-of-the-line 2019 and I sold it prior to WWDC. I replaced it (eventually) with the 2021 16" with an M1 Max which I consider to be the finest laptop made (so far). For around the same price as the 2019, the 2021 exceeds it in so many ways that it feels more like it's a 5-10 years further along in evolution from its two year old cousin. I can make those kinds of comparisons ... prior to the 2019 16" the last MacBook Pro I purchased was the 2011 17" boat anchor - the last 17" Apple made (despite owning the 2010 - I just needed to have that quad core). BTW, the 2011 still works - I keep it around because it's the last Mac I have that supports Firewire 800, but it really became unusable because no one makes FW800, Thunderbolt 1, or ExpressCard/34 peripherals any more. In fact, the only peripherals still being made which the 2011 connects to is USB, and the 2011 only supported USB 2 which is hideously slow. Apple discontinuing the 17" made me reconsider my options, and for those eight intervening years I moved on to iMac 5Ks which have the performance and screen real estate I want. I stopped using MacBooks until Apple introduced to 16" in 2019 which passed my threshold for what I consider to be the minimum usable screen real estate for a computer.

Current and future AAA game ports and native games should make use of the GPU cores, as well as newer developments like Blender 3.1 and above. For me, it's future-proofing as well as any Mac games which do get developed.

The M1 Max performs better in the 16" MacBook Pro - the 14" is clock locked due to thermal constraints. If you must get a M1 Max with a 14", I wouldn't go for more than the 24 core GPU. Firefox shouldn't have the ability to drive the CPU to 100% on multiple cores and set the machine non-dispatchable - probably a bug. I'd see if it still happens with 12.1. These machines are pretty new and they're probably still working the hairballs out of 'em. The latest release of Handbrake (1.5.1 as of this post) allows the M1 variants to use the media engine by specifying use of the VideoToolbox. Remember, these puppies are using a brand new architecture and there are likely to be a few bumps in the road (though I haven't experience any beachballs). I've removed BitDefender from my Monterey Macs as there seems to be something amiss. BitDefender insisted on quarantining a bunch of Win files on my Crossover installation.

Tried to leave this information on a YouTube comment, but you appear to be blocking my posts. The latest snapshot build of Handbrake seems to fix the Media Engine access via the VideoToolbox API - try it at: https://github.com/HandBrake/handbrake-snapshots/releases/tag/mac My testing has shown it improves a 1080p transcode of a 1:48:09 MKV RIP to 1080p HEVC from 45 minutes to 9 minutes. You make the point that putting additional silicon support of IP blocks like the Media Engine is not the way to go, but when you've already produced eight wide high performance cores, going nine wide isn't going to yield much benefit. I'm sure the Apple Silicon team raised a toast when they could get eight instructions to execute simultaneously. There is always a point of diminishing returns. You have to realize that Apple is not a traditional CPU or GPU manufacturer, and their silicon design team does not follow the tried and true path of those silicon developers. Apple's Silicon team does not strive to make the fastest CPU or GPU, but rather optimization of the product pipeline and reduction of pain points for their users. When one route is blocked, they'll take another to try to optimize their product's performance. What is a GPU other than an IP block attempting to optimize graphical workflows? Any way, the latest Handbrake snapshot build appears (at least in my testing) to produce a 5x speed improvement on the M1 Max in my 2021 MacBook Pro 16", M1 Max with 32 GPU cores, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD configuration. I at this time have no idea when commit ce52b4d755a2799a4801f256622b8e8191e71220 will make it into generally available versions of Handbrake.

Well, as someone who lost a 1TB SSD after leaving my laptop uncharged for a month, that's probably not a comforting analogy ... :-)

Just because all the cool kids use 'em now doesn't mean they don't have their own weaknesses. Nothing is good a everything, and there are always trade-offs (some of which we are happy to ignore). Take fast charging - sure is nice to have that battery charged up in such a small amount of time. But with todays sealed in batteries, how does fast charging affect their lifespans?

The things that will chew on your CPU are games, computational photography (including photo/video editing/transcoding), and AR/VR. If you don't do any of those, you probably don't need a super-strong CPU. I know that my 7+ gets quite warm when doing any of the above, and the 7+ is still quite competitive.

I may be wrong on the battery ... I think it's bigger than the 8, but the 8 plus may have the larger battery. The X is pretty much the same size as the 8, but taller (I think). Unfortunately, that means that a 16x9 aspect ratio leaves black bars on both sides, and the actual physical height in landscape is less than the 8 plus (with a higher pixel density which you need with a pentile display). In addition, I've been hearing stuff about OLED which doesn't thrill me - supposedly great for displaying nicely saturated stills, but not so nice for fast action video which artifacts due to pixel cool-down latency. (IPS is a shutter allowing light to show through [quick shut-off], whereas OLED is Christmas lights with filament cool down time.) That and the fact that the blue pixels tend to burn out faster - I don't know if they've fixed that one - and the display may over time start to display half-life induced color aberrations. Still, I'm willing to give it a try - and I have annoying plans for the poop animoji ... ;-)

The A11 contains a neural processor capable of (according to Apple) 600 billion operations/second. Now what that means I have no idea - used to be inferences/second, but they're using new knowledge models which are apparently educated blobs of storage distilled down from standardized training models. AI makes my head hurt.

If we're talking EMC here, it's greed. Definitely greed. I have a dedup box at work using variable length frames codeveloped between EMC and Quantum, and while the Quantum box was around $40K (of course this was an old almost EOL model), the EMC version was a quarter mil.

Considering the snark they used announcing the Kirin 970, that better be some hot SoC.

I thought Qualcomm was an ARM Architecture licensee, which means they could pretty much do what they want. Just look at Apple (who admittedly was one of the founding partners).

I was watching some guy review one of the new iMacs on YouTube recently, and he had a fully decked out iMac 5K with 2TB of NVMe storage (from his workplace) and was chortling about the obscene price of the device (> $5000). I think what he didn't realize is that 2TB NVMe SSD benchmarks out at over 2 GB/sec (thats gigabytes, not bits) which blows away our enterprise EMC and IBM flash in our SAN arrays, and made up a substantial portion of that cost. If you remove that SSD and the obscenely priced 64 GB of Apple RAM - and note I did use the word obscene for Apple RAM prices - the iMac 5K is actually quite economical considering what you're getting.

Huh. I wonder why I still often read about it suffering from initial stuttering then ... or is that only on older systems which can't get the latest OS?