Another ARM(1) - Apple event introduces new low-end Macs as well as updated OS

[Master Delta Chief]

1 hour ago, saltycaramel said:

Both things could be true.

Yes there’s a market for that.

Yes a lot of people will never upgrade a thing and just get rid of the whole machine.

The limitations you mention are accepted as a fact of life for smartphones, tablets, TVs, game consoles, are you consistent enough to only use non-proprietary fully-modular fully-repairable versions of those too? You boycott all closed systems?

These Macs are just more similar than before to ipads or game consoles.

No one asked for those limitations, but we got them anyway. It would be highly beneficiary for consumers to have devices that have a much longer longevity instead of continuously getting rid of them after a certain point in time. If only there were industrial standards for laptops and certain regulations that manufactures have to follow in order to give the regular consumer the ability to either upgrade/repair the device.  

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

2 hours ago, Master Delta Chief said:

No one asked for those limitations, but we got them anyway. It would be highly beneficiary for consumers to have devices that have a much longer longevity instead of continuously getting rid of them after a certain point in time. If only there were industrial standards for laptops and certain regulations that manufactures have to follow in order to give the regular consumer the ability to either upgrade/repair the device.  

With anything Right to Repair, you have to look and see if the benefits outweigh the cons. An example of this would be I think the iPad Air. Now, the iPad Air was the first iPad to feature a laminated screen. That made screen replacements harder and more expensive, but the benefits were having a much better looking and more inclusive display. This isn't some "hurr-durr fanboy" talk, this exact opinion is what Louis Rossmann shares, I can bring up the video if you want.

 

MacBooks Pre-Apple Silicon were not repairable. Simple as that. The ram was already soldered to the board. Moving it on package, making the overall system much faster is a benefit that outweighs the cons of not including a RAM-slot. Yes it costs more now, because Apple refuses to live in the 21st century where an 8GB chip(s) of RAM isn't $200, but the overall system will be much faster because of this decision. 

 

This shit isn't new for the Mac. What would actually be damaging is if Apple started locking down weird shit. Like if they stopped battery repair, screen replacements, or trackpad replacements from working. They do something similar with the iPhone. That's actually something to be worried about. Not the SSD or the RAM that's been soldered to the board since 2016 and even other competitors are starting to do.

[RedRound2]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

No because I'll quote what is relevant to the reply I am making, if it's not included it's not relevant to what is being said. Zero need to waste post and screen space on the unnecessary.

It isnt fair that you get to decide what is relevant and what isn't when your argument is getting tested with those replies. And the effect of cherry picking lines is that you take the whole thing out of context. It's a dirty trick in argument tbh, one I do feel you conciously or subconciously intend on, especially with the previous reply.

However I have my manners and I'll quote everything you say. I'll admit when I am wrong. I'm sure the forum readers who aren't interested can easily identify one full reply and scroll past it

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

Well I simply don't think it's as bad as you or many others make out. There's a big difference been not liking something, which is opinion based, and something actually being bad on a technical level. Windows 10 isn't short of issues but neither has any past version or other OS for that matter.

Windows 10 has issues. That's one thing. All OSs have bugs. Just that windows tends to have more. But what about inconsistencies? That's literally a oversight. Every now and then they release a new UI video and the release ends up having half baked, inconsistent animations. And somehow every new release comes up with whole new grade of bugs some of which ended up wiping people's machines. That's unacceptable and even ex Windows Engineers have spoken about why Microsoft's internal QC for windows releases have gone down

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

MacOS X 10.7 was a giant mess, so were early versions of 10.8. Both in large part were fine for most users but they really do not care about the issues with those operating systems, but for some reason exempt from criticism, not unsurprising at it is simply used by less people.

But those are just one or two releases. Probably there are more. 10.7 had huge changes in them if i recall correctly, from Snow Leopard. It was like Windows 7 to 8. I'm talking about current state. WIndows 10 hasnt majorily changed in anyway since 2016. But it's still for some reason far from complete.

 

And I'm not talking about only Windows. Teams suck. Skype sucks. Usually whatever they acquire sucks. VSCode is quite good for a microsoft product, but I'd wager that it's only because it's open source.

[RedRound2]

8 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Soldered RAM, soldered storage, soldered CPU, overpriced, proprietary everything. I hope it doesn't work out as they want it to.

Soldered RAM, storage, CPU has been a thing for years now. It's nothing new with M1, rather they're talking advantge of soldering on RAM by brinign it on-die. SSD is also 2x faster than their already fast SSDs. I still dont understand why people keep complainign about this as if it's a new thing. It's also the case with many laptops these days.

 

Macs haven't been overpriced in terms of their components they use (upgrades are - that Ill admit). The competition falls exactly within those prices too and if M1 is as fast and efficient as it claims to be, then Apple would basically leapfrog their competition, with the competition really having only Intel and AMD (and I guess Qualcomm + Microsoft) to count on.

[Video Beagle]

21 hours ago, LAwLz said:

One Firestorm (the core used in the M1)

So there's 8 Firestorms in the M1? Or is Firestorm the power cores and something else is the effeciency?

[LAwLz]

9 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

So there's 8 Firestorms in the M1? Or is Firestorm the power cores and something else is the effeciency?

Firestorm = High performance.

Icestorm = power efficiency.

 

Very confusing names.

 

The M1 has four of each for a total of 8 cores. It's basically one high performance quad core and one very efficient quad core glued together.

 

 

One Firestorm core (without the L2 cache) takes up about as much die space as four Icestorm cores (without the L2 cache). Here is a picture of the die from Anandtech:

Spoiler

 

[Video Beagle]

1 minute ago, LAwLz said:

The M1 has four of each for a total of 8 cores. It's basically one high performance quad core and one very efficient quad core glued together.

I appreciate your answers here and eleswhere.  This deep into the hardware is SO outside my knowledge base it might as well be magic.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

It isnt fair that you get to decide what is relevant and what isn't when your argument is getting tested with those replies. And the effect of cherry picking lines is that you take the whole thing out of context.

Not it doesn't, much of what you say is irrelevant to the parts I have decided to address and thus only used those specific parts, the extra context you think helps doesn't at all. You can say as much as you like and I may not agree or disagree with it but if there is something in there that I do I'll address that and only that. I may not wish to comment on anything else in the post which makes those parts unnecessary.

 

And if anyone wants the full post there is a link on the top right of the quotation box that takes you to it.

 

If I only need a sentence, paragraph or page from a book or academic paper then that is how you quote it, you don't just jam in the entire damn book because you needed only part of it.

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

But those are just one or two releases. Probably there are more. 10.7 had huge changes in them if i recall correctly, from Snow Leopard. It was like Windows 7 to 8. I'm talking about current state. WIndows 10 hasnt majorily changed in anyway since 2016. But it's still for some reason far from complete.

There have been other issues with releases after 10.9 as well, plenty of them. However I changed jobs before I really got to use 10.10 and later and my only direct experience with later versions of Mac OS after 10.9 is having to fight all the security changes they kept making for the endpoint backup software we have, it's been a right pain. But since that only applies to a single piece of software that I manage I'm not going to comment about the wider OS version as a whole.

 

Mac OS issues are not limited to just two releases and I know for a fact Apple has not fixed all the issues introduced with 10.7 today, those being the changes with the management framework and the move away from Open Directory and Managed Preferences to Apple Profile Manager. You don't notice the issues because you don't use these functions of Mac OS, most Mac OS users don't. But they exist and IT support and technicians have to deal with them and those issues effect the end users and it is our job to make sure that impact is as minimal as possible.

 

Apple is just as guilty of not fixing their issues too after years and years.

 

Windows 10 on the other hand is still making vast UI changes and OS behavior changes and those are very easy to notice and near impossible to mitigate issues.

[TheReal1980]

Quote

Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro

 

Quote

The M1 chip, which belongs to a ‌MacBook Air‌ with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433. According to the benchmark, the M1 has a 3.2GHz base frequency.

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/11/m1-macbook-air-first-benchmark/

 

These are up on Geekbench now, official figures. It seems Macbook Pro and Mac Mini has almost identical numbers so it's all about how long you can push it for I guess.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

Soldered RAM, storage, CPU has been a thing for years now. It's nothing new with M1, rather they're talking advantge of soldering on RAM by brinign it on-die.

Soldered everything is also par for the course for Dell and HP's low-end laptops as well. 

Only the SSD and WLAN card can be replaced there. As noted by the person at iFixit who took the photo. 

Quote

• At first glance, this looks like a prototype MacBook Air—a bit less polished than the current gen, but strikingly similar.

   
•  

  Similar except for the repair-friendly labels on every component and connector—that's something you don't see in an Apple product.

Note the RAM soldered to the PCB on the XPS 13, still considered a 7/10 for reparability despite only the SDD being user-servicable.

 

 

 

[Dracarris]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Firestorm = High performance.

Icestorm = power efficiency.

 

Very confusing names.

Those names actually make a lot of sense.

[Master Delta Chief]

8 hours ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

MacBooks Pre-Apple Silicon were not repairable. Simple as that. The ram was already soldered to the board. Moving it on package, making the overall system much faster is a benefit that outweighs the cons of not including a RAM-slot. Yes it costs more now, because Apple refuses to live in the 21st century where an 8GB chip(s) of RAM isn't $200, but the overall system will be much faster because of this decision. 

 

This shit isn't new for the Mac. What would actually be damaging is if Apple started locking down weird shit. Like if they stopped battery repair, screen replacements, or trackpad replacements from working. They do something similar with the iPhone. That's actually something to be worried about. Not the SSD or the RAM that's been soldered to the board since 2016 and even other competitors are starting to do.

Oh I know this is something that's been going on for like ages at this point with more manufactures soldering the hardware that used to be much easier to replace, but again that doesn't mean it's a good thing for the consumer. The decision comes down to manufacturing efficiency and design. I don't see how the system is able to be faster just because it's soldered on. It might increase efficiency, but that's about it and not that noticeable to the end-user at the end of the day. Regardless, I hope that one day we can have a more compact modular kind of system similar to what Google did a few years ago with a modular smartphone.

[RedRound2]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Not it doesn't, much of what you say is irrelevant to the parts I have decided to address and thus only used those specific parts, the extra context you think helps doesn't at all. You can say as much as you like and I may not agree or disagree with it but if there is something in there that I do I'll address that and only that. I may not wish to comment on anything else in the post which makes those parts unnecessary.

 

And if anyone wants the full post there is a link on the top right of the quotation box that takes you to it.

 

If I only need a sentence, paragraph or page from a book or academic paper then that is how you quote it, you don't just jam in the entire damn book because you needed only part of it.

I really don't want to go digging for examples where you intentionally misquoted me, nor the parts where you didn't reply to, so I'll leave it at this.

Drawing parallels to research papers, I never asked ou to quote the parts where I replying to others. At the very least you can quote the entire paragraph I wrote instead of cherry picking lines.

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

There have been other issues with releases after 10.9 as well, plenty of them. However I changed jobs before I really got to use 10.10 and later and my only direct experience with later versions of Mac OS after 10.9 is having to fight all the security changes they kept making for the endpoint backup software we have, it's been a right pain. But since that only applies to a single piece of software that I manage I'm not going to comment about the wider OS version as a whole.

 

Mac OS issues are not limited to just two releases and I know for a fact Apple has not fixed all the issues introduced with 10.7 today, those being the changes with the management framework and the move away from Open Directory and Managed Preferences to Apple Profile Manager. You don't notice the issues because you don't use these functions of Mac OS, most Mac OS users don't. But they exist and IT support and technicians have to deal with them and those issues effect the end users and it is our job to make sure that impact is as minimal as possible.

 

Apple is just as guilty of not fixing their issues too after years and years.

Never said macOS is perfect. No software or operating system is. 

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Windows 10 on the other hand is still making vast UI changes and OS behavior changes and those are very easy to notice and near impossible to mitigate issues.

Vast UI changes typically only take one major release for every other company. And it's not "near impossible" to migrate the whole of control panel to Windows settings, or scrap windows settings altogether. And some basic QC testing should prevent issues where an OS update will wipe out hard drive. Or to get HDR and scaling issues sorted (even though 4K res on laptops have been a thing on Windows for years)

 

That's the kind of bugs and inconsistencies I'm talking about. I'm pretty sure Windows isn't as perfect as it is IT management too, but I'm not talking about those - but the very obvious things which close to all users experiance

 

[Dracarris]

3 hours ago, Master Delta Chief said:

I don't see how the system is able to be faster just because it's soldered on. It might increase efficiency, but that's about it and not that noticeable to the end-user at the end of the day. Regardless, I hope that one day we can have a more compact modular kind of system similar to what Google did a few years ago with a modular smartphone.

Going off-chip for memory access is one of the most heavy power consumers in modern PCs because it requries drivers that can charge and discharge large loads insanely fast. Increasing the energy-efficiency of this link will definitely show up beneficial all the way to the user.

 

Well modular approaches usually fail because they turn up to become too complicated, expensive or both. You can't just put a connector everywhere and expect the system to work as before - and connectors are a significant contributor to BOM. High-speed board-to-board connectors for eg. FPGAs can cost as much as 30$ per connector.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

I really don't want to go digging for examples where you intentionally misquoted me, nor the parts where you didn't reply to, so I'll leave it at this.

Drawing parallels to research papers, I never asked ou to quote the parts where I replying to others. At the very least you can quote the entire paragraph I wrote instead of cherry picking lines.

Why when you make a stupid comment like this:

 

Quote

What stands as a fact is Windows 10 is a mess

Nothing before or after it matters, there is no extra context that makes such a thing not a stupid comment. And this is the only statement in that that needed addressing. You declaring something as "fact" does not make it so.

 

What is a fact is millions of people are using Windows 10 absolutely fine and do not find it as annoying as you or many others are saying, neither have we or other IT departments had problems with OS other than initial release when dumb things like the start menu literally stopped working for zero reason and required reinstall of OS to fix.

 

But as to now and previous multiple years, no it's been perfectly fine. The only problems is Microsoft moving where things are which requires user retaining, constantly. That's annoying but those types of changes Microsoft is perfectly allowed to make if they want to and you're allowed to dislike them constantly changing the UI but it does make the OS "a mess", change can simply be annoying.

 

5 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

nor the parts where you didn't reply to

If I didn't quote it then I had nothing to say about it, why is this so hard to understand?

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, RedRound2 said:

And some basic QC testing should prevent issues where an OS update will wipe out hard drive

So some edge cases with some edge case configurations not many people run, likely to never be tested, that caused data loss of some data. You're way misrepresenting situations here. And you're the one that just tried to complain about missing context, but here is a really good example of context that really does matter.

 

But hey like you said Mac OS is not free of issues but lets solely rail on Windows 10 constantly, all the damn time, over playing issues while not doing the same to Mac OS.

[GDRRiley]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

Note the RAM soldered to the PCB on the XPS 13, still considered a 7/10 for reparability despite only the SDD being user-servicable.

at least I can get every part off the shelf and if something on the board dies and I wanted to fix it I could buy the chips. not have to buy charging cases and rip a part off of them because apple told their suppliers not to sell it.

[thechinchinsong]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

So some edge cases with some edge case configurations not many people run, likely to never be tested, that caused data loss of some data. You're way misrepresenting situations here. And you're the one that just tried to complain about missing context, but here is a really good example of context that really does matter.

 

But hey like you said Mac OS is not free of issues but lets solely rail on Windows 10 constantly, all the damn time, over playing issues while not doing the same to Mac OS.

I think there is a big perception of Windows being really bad simply because so much of the world uses it, there are many documented cases and complaints against it. When you have a smaller userbase, naturally you encounter less bugs.

[Blademaster91]

On 11/11/2020 at 5:09 AM, leadeater said:

All first party Apple software should run as indicated on the M1, Apple is simply going to tailor their software to the hardware as they already do in general, just more so now. It's a situation that is likely to continue, Apple putting in dedicated functions in to their hardware to assist their software and it'll become increasingly difficult to compare to Intel/AMD CPUs and will turn more in to evaluating the difference in software and platforms and how you can get a task done quicker on one or the other.

Well first party software isn't the issue, anything else that needs to run through their traslation layer could be slower, but I think not being able to run boot camp is the biggest problem, or no support for a traditional GPU.

And comparing how quickly you can get tasks done is really subjective IMO, it reminds me of the LTT video of mac vs. PC video editing, it depends on what software and platform someone is better or more familiar with.

2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

at least I can get every part off the shelf and if something on the board dies and I wanted to fix it I could buy the chips. not have to buy charging cases and rip a part off of them because apple told their suppliers not to sell it.

I agree and at least you can get a battery for a dell for example, that should count for repairability, dell doesn't seal their batteries into laptops with glue either as apple does with their macbooks.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

And comparing how quickly you can get tasks done is really subjective IMO, it reminds me of the LTT video of mac vs. PC video editing, it depends on what software and platform someone is better or more familiar with.

It may not be the best but that's just how it may end up. Plus something like that isn't too flawed, comparing Adobe to Adobe might be great but if you can largely do the same thing in File Cut Pro and it's much faster at doing it then it's still a worth while comparison and shows the benefit of the software + hardware.

[steelo]

So I saw mention of 'machine learning' Does this mean, they will need to be connected to the internet to so the Apple servers can help in processing tasks? 

[Blade of Grass]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

What is a fact is millions of people are using Windows 10 absolutely fine and do not find it as annoying as you or many others are saying, neither have we or other IT departments had problems with OS other than initial release when dumb things like the start menu literally stopped working for zero reason and required reinstall of OS to fix.

Eh, I don't really think defending Windows 10 as being a good OS isn't really a great position--there's lots that leaves wanting. Sure, millions of people may not find it annoying (or even understand it's annoying), but these are the same people that think the entire computer case is "the CPU."

 

Windows 10 is a mess, few examples of annoying UI stuff off the top of my head:

• weird right hand slide in menu, seemingly designed for touch devices but appears on every device, with no configurability, and uses a prime quick access settings menu to gives access to useless settings like "tablet mode" or "Project" on my DC-hosted VM
• the search anywhere bar, which can't even find files that were recently used
• the settings menu, which contains some settings, but others require going into the somehow-still existent Control Panel
• some things seem to be controlled from a number of disjunct menus, like sound devices
• some settings are buried under a ton of different windows, legit have to navigate multiple chained pop-ups 
• the start menu draws from a seemingly infinite (ok not actually) number of locations to populate items

and as a software engineer:

• Windows PATH variables are the worst. Determining how a variable is set in path is a large headache. I have spent legit a entire workday hunting down path variables to determine why my default Java was 1.7 instead of pointing to the latest
• Windows registry, need I say more
• WSL, need I say more (ok, more specifically, it's useless. It's so isolated from the rest of the system that I question why it exists in it's current state)
• The way apps store their data on Windows annoys me, Local, LocalRoaming, etc, terrible naming for data storage
• Worst terminals ever made, and no way to replace them really
• No support for the most widely used C++ compiler, creates so many headaches and prevents local development
  • cmake linking of libraries is a PITA on windows too
• Microsoft's packaging for DB drivers is also annoying, poorly documented
• Kerberos authentication, also poorly documented

These are just my experiences using Windows, but there is a reason that I strongly prefer MacOS--far fewer headaches. 

[Blade of Grass]

24 minutes ago, steelo said:

So I saw mention of 'machine learning' Does this mean, they will need to be connected to the internet to so servers can help process?

No, they have specific hardware designed to accelerate workloads on-device (well, specifically Neural Networks).

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

weird right hand slide in menu, seemingly designed for touch devices but appears on every device, with no configurability, and uses a prime quick access settings menu to gives access to useless settings like "tablet mode" or "Project" on my DC-hosted VM

I never actually use that side bar at all, Action Center I think it's called?

 

19 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

the settings menu, which contains some settings, but others require going into the somehow-still existent Control Panel

The problem there is mainly that Control Panel is so buried in to the OS itself it's a lot of work to actually migrate away from it and with all those dependencies and interactions with it throughout the OS, and even other tools, it's probably a lot harder to get done than people realize.

 

Look at how hard it was just untie Internet Explorer and Help from the OS, that took so many years.

 

23 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

Windows registry, need I say more

Personally I have no issues with registry, I much prefer it over the Unix/Linux approach of config files on the file system.

 

25 minutes ago, Blade of Grass said:

These are just my experiences using Windows, but there is a reason that I strongly prefer MacOS--far fewer headaches. 

Personally I loath using Mac OS, I just really don't like it. Not a lot of specifics other than for what I do it's really not suited to it and I've spent so much of my life fixing domain joined Mac OS computers that just break in unexplainable ways and are unreasonably hard to fix I simply can't willing use it because I know it's going to cause me pain. I loved Mac OS 10.6 as it didn't have any of those problems.