M1 Macs Reviewed

[Blademaster91]

10 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

My issue is the "3 iPads" think. He wouldn't call an i7 K SKU a tablet chip because a surface runs a core M3 so why call the new Macs iPads. Personally think Linus is going to get ridiculed when they try and make the M1 Macs look bad by trying to bench them like a gaming PC.

Well Linus isn't wrong by saying these are more of an ipad than a PC, the compatibility of x86 is gone, so is built in 10gb ethernet on the mac mini so you have to spend another $150 on a dongle,and memory isn't upgradeable.

But people have been comparing these to high end CPU's and saying the M1 is better in a benchmark that is known to be bad for comparing CPU's.

[Lord Vile]

7 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well Linus isn't wrong by saying these are more of an ipad than a PC, the compatibility of x86 is gone, so is built in 10gb ethernet on the mac mini so you have to spend another $150 on a dongle,and memory isn't upgradeable.

But people have been comparing these to high end CPU's and saying the M1 is better in a benchmark that is known to be bad for comparing CPU's.

Apart from they have an x86 emulator and you had to pay for the 10GB Lan upgrade anyway. Personally don't expect upgradable memory in SFF builds ad ultrabooks plus there's a solid reason for it.

 

We'll see as more reviews come out but it's a bit silly to compare something that uses ML and a neural engine for compute vs CPUs that just use traditional means. Core for core though the M1 is fast than any CPU out right now.

[LAwLz]

29 minutes ago, BigDamn said:

Geekbench has the M1 chip right behind the Xeon W-2140B in the 2017 iMac Pro in MULTI CORE. Now you tell me, would you rather have the M1, or the significantly faster Xeon?

What makes you think the Xeon is "significantly faster"?

I just looked at Cinebench and while I can't find scores for exactly the W-2140B, I did find that the i7-8700 gets around 82% of the score of the W-2140B in Cinebench R15 multicore. Wanna know what the 8700 gets compared to the M1? 77%.

That means that in Cinebench, the M1 should get around the same score as the W-2140B as well.

 

All the evidence we got right now actually points towards the M1 being as fast as the Xeon W-2140B even at multicore workloads. Do you have any evidence that suggests otherwise?

 

 

39 minutes ago, BigDamn said:

It appears that it may be you who can't read benchmarks, because not only did you fail to realize that Geekbench has the M1 scoring closely to beefier chips in multi core, but you failed to realize that my graph shows more than just 8 core competitors. The M1 was beaten by ALL AMD mobile chips, 8 cores or lower. Remember that the M1 is technically an octa-core, with 4 powerful cores and 4 lower performance cores (which are utilized in heavy workloads), so this chip acts more like a 5-6 core CPU and loses to 6 core parts. This was hitting people with a dose of reality, rather than making a mockery of Apple.

Why do you think the benchmark that don't show the score you want is the bad one, and the benchmark that shows the score you want is the good one?

Maybe Cinebench is the bad benchmark and Geekbench is the good one? Do you even know what Geekbench tests or do you just get your information and hatred for it from really shittily written articles on WCCFTech, the cosmopolitan of tech news?

 

One problem with looking up scores of laptop chips on CPU-Monkey is that we have no idea what laptops those scores are from. For example CPU-Monkey do not show which laptop or cooling solution was used for the specific scores. That 4600U that is very slightly beating the M1? That might be paired with really beefy cooling so that it can turbo a lot, and paired with really high speed memory. The score for the 4600U that shows it being beat in Geekbench? That might be from a lower TDP design with low end memory. 

That's why we see such big differences in scores for the AMD chips. For example CPU-Monkey shows the 4800U scoring 10,156 in Cinebench R23 multicore score. Anandtech shows the 4800U scoring 9286.

 

Also, I wouldn't say the M1 is an octa core. The little cores are so tiny and slow that they are not even worth mentioning. Even if you bundle all 4 of them together they don't even match the performance of a single Firestorm core. At best you can try and add the little cores together and call the M1 a 4,8 core. But the problem with that is that things don't scale linearly and because of memory congestion running all 8 core might reduce performance rather than increase it (because the icestorm cores eats up memory bandwidth that would be better used by the firestorm cores).

 

"8 core or lower" is a funny way of saying 6 cores or higher. Are you trying to make it sound like it was a fair fight comparing 6 and 8 core AMD parts to a quad core from Apple?

[Bombastinator]

17 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Yup running every video editor available but Final cut is the best way to bench a Mac because that's why people buy Macs. To avoid all of the lovely optimised exclusive software that performs better than anything else on equivalent hardware. Oh and lets bench everything on wall power too because apple totally doesn't approach a laptop like a laptop and they definitely don't optimise the hardware so it can perform flat out on battery if you can't get to a socket or are on a plane where you can't draw 200W from the wall. 

So you say specifically “games” then go specifically “not games” 

[LAwLz]

18 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well Linus isn't wrong by saying these are more of an ipad than a PC

Why do you think that?

I think they are more similar to PCs than iPads. Why? Because of form factor and the OS.

If we bundle categories of devices together solely based on the architecture they use then my old core 2 laptop is a super computer because some super computers use x86 cores.

See? Makes no sense to disregard purpose, software and hardware and only focus on which instruction set something uses when categorizing a device.

 

19 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

the compatibility of x86 is gone

No it isn't.

 

20 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

so is built in 10gb ethernet on the mac mini so you have to spend another $150 on a dongle

My desktop does not have 10Gbps networking either. Does that make it "more of an iPad than a PC" too?

 

20 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

and memory isn't upgradeable.

Is it upgradable memory that defines if something is an "iPad" or a "PC" now? I know of plenty of laptops that do not have upgradable memory. Are those iPads too?

The Surface Laptop does not have upgradable memory, nor storage. Does that mean it is an iPad too, despite running Windows and having an i5 CPU?

 

 

23 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

But people have been comparing these to high end CPU's and saying the M1 is better in a benchmark that is known to be bad for comparing CPU's.

Vaccines are "known to be bad" on Facebook by moronic soccer moms who doesn't know the first thing about medicine as well. Does that mean vaccines are bad? Or does it mean that the group of people who say something is "known to be bad" without having even a basic understanding of what it is and how it works are morons who should keep their mouths shut?

My bet is on the latter.

[Lord Vile]

9 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

So you say specifically “games” then go specifically “not games” 

Because they generally go macs are bad because gaming and they're worse than a blade studio in video rendering when we use adobe. Funny thing I wanted to go find the video where they compare the MBP to a Blade 15 Studio to see what benchmarks they actually used in that video but I just can't find it. 

[spartaman64]

24 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What makes you think the Xeon is "significantly faster"?

I just looked at Cinebench and while I can't find scores for exactly the W-2140B, I did find that the i7-8700 gets around 82% of the score of the W-2140B in Cinebench R15 multicore. Wanna know what the 8700 gets compared to the M1? 77%.

That means that in Cinebench, the M1 should get around the same score as the W-2140B as well.

 

All the evidence we got right now actually points towards the M1 being as fast as the Xeon W-2140B even at multicore workloads. Do you have any evidence that suggests otherwise?

 

 

Why do you think the benchmark that don't show the score you want is the bad one, and the benchmark that shows the score you want is the good one?

Maybe Cinebench is the bad benchmark and Geekbench is the good one? Do you even know what Geekbench tests or do you just get your information and hatred for it from really shittily written articles on WCCFTech, the cosmopolitan of tech news?

 

One problem with looking up scores of laptop chips on CPU-Monkey is that we have no idea what laptops those scores are from. For example CPU-Monkey do not show which laptop or cooling solution was used for the specific scores. That 4600U that is very slightly beating the M1? That might be paired with really beefy cooling so that it can turbo a lot, and paired with really high speed memory. The score for the 4600U that shows it being beat in Geekbench? That might be from a lower TDP design with low end memory. 

That's why we see such big differences in scores for the AMD chips. For example CPU-Monkey shows the 4800U scoring 10,156 in Cinebench R23 multicore score. Anandtech shows the 4800U scoring 9286.

 

Also, I wouldn't say the M1 is an octa core. The little cores are so tiny and slow that they are not even worth mentioning. Even if you bundle all 4 of them together they don't even match the performance of a single Firestorm core. At best you can try and add the little cores together and call the M1 a 4,8 core. But the problem with that is that things don't scale linearly and because of memory congestion running all 8 core might reduce performance rather than increase it (because the icestorm cores eats up memory bandwidth that would be better used by the firestorm cores).

 

"8 core or lower" is a funny way of saying 6 cores or higher. Are you trying to make it sound like it was a fair fight comparing 6 and 8 core AMD parts to a quad core from Apple?

but the xeon has a higher multicore than the 8700 so why would the m1 beat it in multicore if it doesnt beat the 8700. and i agree that the m1 is essentially a quadcore processor

[saltycaramel]

Interesting new test of the GPU

 

https://twitter.com/lestopher13/status/1329124224498274307?s=21

 

[LAwLz]

3 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

but the xeon has a higher multicore than the 8700 so why would the m1 beat it in multicore if it doesnt beat the 8700. and i agree that the m1 is essentially a quadcore processor

Oh crap you're right. I'm an idiot. Got the multicore and single core scores mixed up there.

Anyway, I would like to see someone actually benchmark the iMac Pro so that we know what scores it gets in different programs (rather than have to rely on CPU-Monkey and estimates).

[Bombastinator]

22 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Because they generally go macs are bad because gaming and they're worse than a blade studio in video rendering when we use adobe. Funny thing I wanted to go find the video where they compare the MBP to a Blade 15 Studio to see what benchmarks they actually used in that video but I just can't find it. 

That sounds reasonable. Blade offers a more powerful gpu even if it’s just an mGPU

[Lord Vile]

47 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

That sounds reasonable. Blade offers a more powerful gpu even if it’s just an mGPU

But drag racing a Mac vs a PC in adobe is a bit pointless. Also the studio with a quadro wasn't a lot faster once you unplugged it from the wall. It went from like 2x faster to 1.1 or something like that. Would find the actual numbers but the video is gone. 

 

 

[Commodus]

18 hours ago, Arika S said:

Why? Unless Apple starts selling their SoCs to third parties, which I don't see happening, then they are not in competition with each other. Apple won't take over market share in the CPU space because they are in their own space

AMD and Intel are still heavily dependent on sales of Windows PCs. I'm not expecting Apple to upend the computer market by any means, but AMD and Intel probably don't want a non-x86 platform to gain share (even if it's just a point or two). Especially not if this non-x86 platform makes their CPUs look bad.

 

Remember, this isn't a modest-but-tangible improvement like you see with the iPhone's A-series chips over Snapdragons. It's a pretty significant sea change that has implications for computers as a whole, not just Macs. AMD and Intel could frankly be left looking stale, even if they're unlikely to lose their positions.

[Bombastinator]

20 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

But drag racing a Mac vs a PC in adobe is a bit pointless. Also the studio with a quadro wasn't a lot faster once you unplugged it from the wall. It went from like 2x faster to 1.1 or something like that. Would find the actual numbers but the video is gone. 

 

 

It’s totally not pointless.  It’s like literally a constant activity for any design shop.   You’ve got highly paid workers making stuff with Adobe, and minutes matter.  Sometimes seconds matter.  The workers cost more per month than an entire machine does in its lifetime. Minimizing render time is absolutely critical and susceptible to math comparisons.  If using a PC instead of a Mac saves merely an hour a week of render time when the highly paid worker is staring at a screen waiting for a render to finish that’s enough reason for an owner to switch from being a Mac shop to a PC shop. Because that’s 12 hours a month if there are 12 designers so yo take their hourly rate, multiply by number of renderers and cost per hour and that is how much extra the slower machine costs per month.  Now multiply that by 12 for a year.  Adds up fast.

 

If reviewers don’t do the test I could actually see a big enough design shop buying a machine JUST TO DO THAT ONE TEST FOR THEMSELVES. There’s that much money on the line.

Edited November 19, 2020 by Bombastinator

[Lord Vile]

2 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

It’s totally not pointless.  It’s like literally a constant activity for any design shop.   You’ve got highly paid workers making stuff with Adobe, and minutes matter.  Sometimes seconds matter.  The workers cost more per month than an entire machine does in its lifetime. Minimizing render time is absolutely critical and susceptible to math comparisons.  If using a PC instead of a Mac saves merely an hour a week of render time when the highly paid worker is staring at a screen waiting for a render to finish that’s enough reason for an owner to switch from being a Mac shop to a PC shop. Because that’s 12 hours a month if there are 12 designers so yo take their hourly rate, multiply by number of renderers and cost per hour and that is how much extra the slower machine costs per month.  Now multiply that by 12 for a year.  Adds up fast.

 

If reviewers don’t do the test I could actually see a big enough design shop buying a machine JUST TO DO THAT ONE TEST FOR THEMSELVES. There’s that much money on the line.

But if you’re rendering on a Mac you’d be using Final cut because the performance delta is massive 

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

But if you’re rendering on a Mac you’d be using Final cut because the performance delta is massive 

Depends on what you’re doing.  Final cut would be garbage for print pre-flight for example.  Kind of niche.  Still done though.  Magazines happen. There are probably others

Edited November 19, 2020 by Bombastinator

[Darkseth]

Hope it hasn't been posted yet but: https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/18/opinion-is-the-base-macbook-air-m1-8gb-powerful-enough-for-you/

 

I found this Article pretty interesting. This "Unified Memory" with the new optimizations seems to handle Ram MUCH more efficient. Things become possible, that weren't on a 8gb Intel mac before.

 

Cinebench points + Power consumption is just a small Part of those SoCs.

 

[Blade of Grass]

3 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well Linus isn't wrong by saying these are more of an ipad than a PC, the compatibility of x86 is gone, so is built in 10gb ethernet on the mac mini so you have to spend another $150 on a dongle,and memory isn't upgradeable.

Since when was x86 the definition of a PC? Guess all those ARM servers are just really iPads ? Someone should really tell AWS and Google Cloud then.

 

I cannot believe that I have to actually say this on a technology forum--architecture is just another part of the tech stack that can be designed and tuned to suit the needs of the larger stack. The lack of x86 support doesn't change anything, it is not the defining characteristic of a PC.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

9 hours ago, Video Beagle said:

I don't hear pessimism...I hear bitterness.  Little asides sniping at others who got test units a week ago, ignoring that he gets test units of stuff others don't, also ignoring that he sounds whiny and unprofessional, both in terms of his continued non-importance to Apple and to his relationship with the reviewers..his peers... who did get early access, some he's friends, or at least friendly, with, with an implication that they're not as "good" as him, so they must suck up to Apple to get where they are.

 

I would really hope someone pulls him back, because it's not a good look for him or the channels, but frankly, I think mostly he has a support system of yes men to ensure him he's right.

He talked about this on the WAN show. His response was something along the lines of "Apple doesn't like to do business with people they can't control". Hearing that, my first instinct was "You literally could not be more wrong". It literally sounded so whiny and babyish.

 

Apple does business with many people, one of which is Dave Lee. You know, the same Dave Lee that quite literally made a video called "I'm Starting to Hate Apple..." that has over 5M views. They do business with Marques Brownlee, someone who ragged the HomePod for how terrible it is. It's definitely not because of freedom of speech.

 

The actual reason why they don't do business with LTT is because they have done the two deadly sins of instantly losing all connection (or possible connection) with Apple. Those two deadly sins are Jailbreaking and Hackintoshing. From what I can see, Apple fucking hates both of those things. Simply talking about the existence of those things are enough to just get cut off instantly. When an individual does it, they really don't care too much because of course, how are you going to prosecute one person? But they definitely don't like when big creators do it.

 

And IMO, they have every right to do that. Both of those things are against their TOS. Why do business with someone who breaks your TOS on video, and teaches his audience how to break TOS? It's like Disney Parks endorsing someone who routinely intentionally fucks up every ride they go on. I think he even mentioned in an interview that the Hackintoshing videos are the reason why he doesn't have a good connection with Apple. I don't know why he's trying to portray that "Apple only likes yes-men, they don't like criticism.". It's not good for his image, and it's low key ruining other people's images. Those words imply that people that do get review units only say good things about Apple and he's the only reviewer you can trust to give a fair review. It's just simply not true... But maybe I'm just reading too far into it.

[Lord Vile]

21 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

He talked about this on the WAN show. His response was something along the lines of "Apple doesn't like to do business with people they can't control". Hearing that, my first instinct was "You literally could not be more wrong". It literally sounded so whiny and babyish.

 

Apple does business with many people, one of which is Dave Lee. You know, the same Dave Lee that quite literally made a video called "I'm Starting to Hate Apple..." that has over 5M views. They do business with Marques Brownlee, someone who ragged the HomePod for how terrible it is. It's definitely not because of freedom of speech.

 

The actual reason why they don't do business with LTT is because they have done the two deadly sins of instantly losing all connection (or possible connection) with Apple. Those two deadly sins are Jailbreaking and Hackintoshing. From what I can see, Apple fucking hates both of those things. Simply talking about the existence of those things are enough to just get cut off instantly. When an individual does it, they really don't care too much because of course, how are you going to prosecute one person? But they definitely don't like when big creators do it.

 

And IMO, they have every right to do that. Both of those things are against their TOS. Why do business with someone who breaks your TOS on video, and teaches his audience how to break TOS? It's like Disney Parks endorsing someone who routinely intentionally fucks up every ride they go on. I think he even mentioned in an interview that the Hackintoshing videos are the reason why he doesn't have a good connection with Apple. I don't know why he's trying to portray that "Apple only likes yes-men, they don't like criticism.". It's not good for his image, and it's low key ruining other people's images. Those words imply that people that do get review units only say good things about Apple and he's the only reviewer you can trust to give a fair review. It's just simply not true... But maybe I'm just reading too far into it.

Nah they have no issue with hackintosh systems because if someone is building a hackintosh they’re doing it to buy apples software and use the App Store on Mac where Apple sees a much higher profit margin. They’d rather someone spend £1000 on a hackintosh and £500 for software from them than not being able to afford a Mac Pro and lose them to Adobe for example.
 

With jail breaking they don’t like it but the more coverage a version gets the easier it is to patch. 

Personally I think it’s because Apple know that they could make a machine that turns iron to gold and cures cancer and Linus would still moan about some stupid none issue like not being able to have a page on the Home Screen with one icon in the middle or some BS like that and say that the Galaxy fold (a device that’s completely impractical, gimmicky and one he can’t even use for work) is a 1000x better. 

 

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

4 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Well Linus isn't wrong by saying these are more of an ipad than a PC, the compatibility of x86 is gone, so is built in 10gb ethernet on the mac mini so you have to spend another $150 on a dongle,and memory isn't upgradeable.

I get what he was trying to say in that sentence, but his execution was awful. It made it seem like "Oh they're just iPads, why would you buy a Mac?". He walked back a little bit by saying "I didn't say iPads weren't bad" on the WAN show, but overall the tone of the original video didn't help his arguments. The tone made the connotation seem like he was saying how Macs would be locked down and harder to control, like an iPad. In many ways they are, he's technically not wrong. By default, Apple gives the ASi Macs iPhone levels of secure-boot, meaning no doing anything with it. But it can easily be disabled, and people are apparently working on a bootloader that can be used to get native Linux working on these machines.

 

x86 Compatibility isn't gone. There's a whole translation layer that's used to convert Intel Mac Apps to ASi Mac apps, it's called Rosetta 2. They didn't replace the "pro" Mac mini, it's still being sold. That's the one with upgradable memory and 10-gig ethernet. In fact, the 2014 Mac mini, the one this directly replaces (even though it was discontinued in 2018, it's really confusing the lineup Apple has), actually had a max of 16GB of RAM and was soldered. When they release the Space Gray Mac mini, it will have 10-gig and upgradeable ram. And if it doesn't, I'm willing to eat my words. And MacBooks have had soldered RAM since 2012, that was always a non-negotiable.

 

4 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

But people have been comparing these to high end CPU's and saying the M1 is better in a benchmark that is known to be bad for comparing CPU's.

People have tested Cinebench, which Linus considers to be a really good test. Its single core score shows it beating every other CPU, at least on this website, except for Zen3, and two Tiger Lake i7 CPUs. Multicore shows it on par with a i5-10400. Keep in mind the M1 has 4-cores high-power while the 10400F has 6 cores. In fact, it's the fastest quad-core on the site.

 

But before people argue that Cinebench isn't "real world", I raise you a "What is?". The MacBook Air is orders of magnitudes faster than the old one (mostly due to the last one's incompetent thermal solution), and what will that excess power be used for? Browsing FaceBook. Opening Google Docs. Using Zoom. Literally, I would go out to say that 70% of these laptops will never experience an all-core load for more than a minute. None of these stress tests are "real world" because the real world is boring. That's why we use programs like cinebench, to push these computers to its limits. 

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

5 minutes ago, Lord Vile said:

Nah they have no issue with hackintosh systems because if someone is building a hackintosh they’re doing it to buy apples software and use the App Store on Mac where Apple sees a much higher profit margin. They’d rather someone spend £1000 on a hackintosh and £500 for software from them than not being able to afford a Mac Pro and lose them to Adobe for example.
 

With jail breaking they don’t like it but the more coverage a version gets the easier it is to patch. 

I think I mentioned that. They don't particularly care if an individual does it, but they're not going to go out of their way to support content creators that show it off. That's why they don't have a relationship with Snazzy Labs, despite him being an "Apple fanboy" or an "iSheep" as I guess the cool kids call it?

[Lord Vile]

Just now, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I think I mentioned that. They don't particularly care if an individual does it, but they're not going to go out of their way to support content creators that show it off. That's why they don't have a relationship with Snazzy Labs, despite him being an "Apple fanboy" or an "iSheep" as I guess the cool kids call it?

Think it's more people making money off it.

 

Wouldn't have thought snazzy labs is big enough, he's not got 1 million subs and he's grown a lot over the last year or so

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I think I mentioned that. They don't particularly care if an individual does it, but they're not going to go out of their way to support content creators that show it off. That's why they don't have a relationship with Snazzy Labs, despite him being an "Apple fanboy" or an "iSheep" as I guess the cool kids call it?

I’m not sure iSheep is a good monicker or not. There is a certain domesticated animal similarity. Choosing apple at this point is the ugly choice of putting up with Apple BS, to gain some protection from internet bandits, or going with the freedom and danger not doing so entails.   If Apple can minimize the BS the choice gets easier.  As they increase the BS the choice gets tougher.  Right now while microsoft is not viewed as one of those bandits, Google is, so I can only see Apple phone stuff growing.  

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

1 minute ago, Lord Vile said:

Think it's more people making money off it.

 

Wouldn't have thought snazzy labs is big enough, he's not got 1 million subs and he's grown a lot over the last year or so

They gave Rene Ritchie access to Apple products before launch, despite him having like 180K subscribers.

 

Then again he did come from a publication, and then left said publication.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

I’m not sure iSheep is a good monicker or not. There is a certain domesticated animal similarity. Choosing apple at this point is the ugly choice of putting up with Apple BS, to gain some protection from internet bandits, or going with the freedom and danger not doing so entails.   If Apple can minimize the BS the choice gets easier.  As they increase the BS the choice gets tougher.  Right now while microsoft is not viewed as one of those bandits, Google is, so I can only see Apple phone stuff growing.  

I don't see it that deeply. Every company in some way or another is trying to screw you over for their profit, so I just go with the product I like the best. No company is your friend TBH, they're all these "bandits".