M1 Macs Reviewed

[Bombastinator]

I just looked at the Apple store site.  They are referring to m1 memory as “unified” memory but there seems to be no 16gb option at all that I can find.  It doesn’t even seem to be offered. 

[captain_to_fire]

25 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I just looked at the Apple store site.  They are referring to m1 memory as “unified” memory but there seems to be no 16gb option at all that I can find.  It doesn’t even seem to be offered. 

It is offered as an optional upgrade before checkout 

[RedRound2]

27 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I just looked at the Apple store site.  They are referring to m1 memory as “unified” memory but there seems to be no 16gb option at all that I can find.  It doesn’t even seem to be offered. 

M1 devices are available up to 16 GB of memory. It starts at 8, and you can step it up to 16

[Spindel]

7 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Yup. That is the fact of reality.

Since ages, Apple is able to convince companies and its devs to implement features for new hardware or use new software technologies.

 

When its Microsoft, companies and devs goes (being said in a silly way for comedic effect):

"Heumm how about no... we want a full business case that justify the expense, even if the expense is an absolute minor one. We also want people at the front of our doors, with money in their hands, begging for that feature to be implemented for a minimum of 6 months without bathroom breaks, and THEN and only then, we will gladly put it in our "Ideas to consider" list...., it will be item 500, we are doing item #2 today. So maybe, just maybe, in 20 or 25 years if all goes well, no delays anywhere, and we, as a company, still exist, we will get on it!".

 

I never could really understand this. Is it because competition between applications on Macs is more active than on Windows?

Or is it because Apple users sees values in these new features, and that is not the case under Windows with its user base?

Heck, even Android faces similar problem, where even Spotify on iOS is better than on Android, despite the massive Android user base.

Or microsoft could have some balls and actually drop all legacy crap in its code. 

[captain_to_fire]

3 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Or microsoft could have some balls and actually drop all legacy crap in its code. 

That would piss off a lot of industries using legacy systems, developers and enthusiasts given Windows still is the most used OS. Apple can do all of this transition because one, their market share is smaller and secondly, Apple can dictate their product roadmaps and devs will have no choice but to follow. Just look at the iOS App Store, when Apple decided to drop 32-bit support for iPhones and iPads, devs just shrugged it and moved on to updating their apps. 

[Spindel]

5 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

That would piss off a lot of industries using legacy systems, developers and enthusiasts given Windows still is the most used OS. Apple can do all of this transition because one, their market share is smaller and secondly, Apple can dictate their product roadmaps and devs will have no choice but to follow. Just look at the iOS App Store, when Apple decided to drop 32-bit support for iPhones and iPads, devs just shrugged it and moved on to updating their apps. 

When Apple do this it also pisses people off all the time. But because Apple actually has the courage to do it it's not a big problem because business learn to not become dependent on software from defunct companies. 

 

Microsoft should gather the balls and just say FU to those companies and say "adapt or go extinct". I promise you they won't move to Linux anyway just because MS actually tidy up their codebase. 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Spindel said:

When Apple do this it also pisses people off all the time. But because Apple actually has the courage to do it it's not a big problem because business learn to not become dependent on software from defunct companies. 

 

Microsoft should gather the balls and just say FU to those companies and say "adapt or go extinct". I promise you they won't move to Linux anyway just because MS actually tidy up their codebase. 

Yea not happening, you don't find Mac OS on naval warships responsible for radar and fire control but you do find Windows. So as scary as you think that sounds the much broader and critical roles that Windows serves actually does make a vast difference compared to Mac OS.

 

Ignoring the fact it's much much more difficult than you're making out or think. There is no just cleaning up Windows code base, there is a slow progress that is happening now or starting an entirely new one, there isn't the third option you are wanting as it's simply not feasible.

[captain_to_fire]

1 minute ago, Spindel said:

Microsoft should gather the balls and just say FU to those companies and say "adapt or go extinct"

Windows is so ubiquitous nowadays, I doubt W10oA will ever take off the way Apple Silicon did. Microsoft is a victim of its own success that’s why it cannot move on from legacy code. Apple succeeded on what Microsoft has been trying to achieve for the past 8-10 years with Windows RT and Windows 10 on ARM, both of which flopped. 

 

If I was a company owner who has remote employees due to the coronavirus, why would I spend money on a Surface Pro X which is overpriced and underpowered when I could just give them an entry level MacBook Air with M1 and use Apple’s zero touch deployment?

[Spindel]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Yea not happening, you don't find Mac OS on naval warships responsible for radar and fire control but you do find Windows. So as scary as you think that sounds the much broader and critical roles that Windows serves actually does make a vast difference compared to Mac OS.

 

Ignoring the fact it's much much more difficult than you're making out or think. There is no just cleaning up Windows code base, there is a slow progress that is happening now or starting an entirely new one, there isn't the third one you are wanting it's simply not feasible.

But old versions of Windows don't stop working just because you make an update. I'm guessing that in Naval warships a lot of the windows installation for critical systems aren't even past Win XP. 

[captain_to_fire]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yea not happening, you don't find Mac OS on naval warships responsible for radar and fire control but you do find Windows

But you can see iPads being used by pilots, and soldiers,.   

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Spindel said:

But old versions of Windows don't stop working just because you make an update. I'm guessing that in Naval warships a lot of the windows installation for critical systems aren't even past Win XP. 

Neither does Microsoft just stop supporting them either, and new installations use new versions and you start putting massive changes in that effect upstream software and you're making vast amount of work for everyone kicking off huge chains of software validation. This would extend all the way through every industry and actually affect you, things like medical software would all need to be updated and certified. It's just really that big of a problem.

[leadeater]

10 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Apple’s zero touch deployment?

Microsoft has this too, had it for a long time now. When it comes to device management Apple is way behind Microsoft, or way ahead in regards to mobile devices which died when Windows Phone died lol.

 

Spoiler

Still use my Windows Phone hahahahahaha

 

[foldingNoob]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Neither does Microsoft just stop supporting them either, and new installations use new versions and you start putting massive changes in that effect upstream software and you're making vast amount of work for everyone kicking off huge chains of software validation. This would extend all the way through every industry and actually affect you, things like medical software would all need to be updated and certified. It's just really that big of a problem.

na it takes years to commission and build a new warship. It takes years to lobby government to upgrade electronics. I remember there was a UK navy ship that was launched the year XP lost consumer support and was commissioned on XP based systems. I worked for a company that had some insight into software usage. One of our customers (non-government) had something like 40 ships all running small business server after this product was discontinued. Were talking a server 2003 running in 2014. Sometimes you can't just upgrade things. We also saw engineering firms with hardware worth millions running on windows NT/98/XP over a decade on with no plans to change the hardware because these automated machines were the lifeblood of their business.

[foldingNoob]

But would I buy a mac mini over a top end Intel nuc? probably not. Remember when intel made a NUC with AMD GPUs? I bet those systems are still kicking it more than the new mac mini.

[leadeater]

14 minutes ago, foldingNoob said:

Were talking a server 2003 running in 2014.

We have 5 running right now 

 

14 minutes ago, foldingNoob said:

na it takes years to commission and build a new warship. It takes years to lobby government to upgrade electronics. I remember there was a UK navy ship that was launched the year XP lost consumer support and was commissioned on XP based systems.

Well I was more referring to when they actually do electronics platform upgrades, the current stuff today isn't XP but it's not Windows 10 either. It really isn't much different to the medical software situation, just slower than that. The reason why hospitals for long time after new versions of Windows come out aren't running them is that their software vendors haven't validated that version yet, takes ages, so you aren't allowed to run it. It's not just a case of the vendor not giving you support it also means you aren't covered by liability insurance anymore for example, so if it's not supported it's never going to be used, not ever.

 

Microsoft simply has to bend to the needs of these customers, if such software requires legacy interfaces to work it'll stay in their until software no longer requires it and there is a lot of software out there where the developers and users are actually very concerned and largely unwilling to change what works because any issues means very real problems.

 

Like you pointed to, nobody wants a bunch of crushed fruit because the sorting line calibration is off or is buggy as an example.

[foldingNoob]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

when they actually do electronics platform upgrades,

I wish i hadn't given away my minix book. The intro has a great explanation of what an operating system is, like an abstraction layer, an API that removes the programmer from being bothered by differences in hardware. It's really a failure of Microsoft that industrial and military machines can't work with their latest secure OS. I'm still running my android music player that I made for Android 2.3

[Spindel]

Here is a really niche test a user over at Macrumors did.

Basically he opened every default app at the same time on a fresh system to check ram usage/swap on a system equipped with 8 GB.

 

In short:

Quote

The ‌MacBook Air‌ is able to seamlessly open every app with no lag time even as the number of open apps grows. Safari, Maps, Mail, Messages, Keynote, Numbers, Pages, the App Store, Notes, Reminders, and more are all running by the end and the 8GB unified memory in the machine handles it all without an issue. By the end, with every app up and running, App Memory comes in at 3.38GB.

 

While a bit interesting I don’t expect magic because a 8 gb data file (video, image etc) is still 8gb.
 

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/17/m1-macbook-air-opens-every-default-app/

[hishnash]

 

53 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

devs just shrugged it and moved on to updating their apps. 

As a dev making products for the platform we are very happy when apple does this, since it means old apps (that tend to be very low priced or free) that are no longer maintained stop being comperition to our apps. This is why it is easier (not easy) to make a living selling apps as an indi on apples platforms.

 

If an app is actively maintained such changes tend to be small, if you make then every year. If you wait 5 years without doing any updates until the api is fully removed from the os (you normally get about 5 years deprecation notice on these apis) then it is all of a sudden a big task. So it is worth the effort to be on a platform were you do not need to worry about competing with a 15 year old app that is free. Free apps aprea and normally then die off rapidly on macOS, users might not like this but devs love it.

The other thing apple do that MS should do as well (this would not break backwards compatibility for those nasty old apps) is make it that if you as a developer want to use any of the new apis you MUST fix up most of your nastier deprecation warnings. If you realy don't need any of the new OS features then you can still ship your app using an older version of the SDK but if you want anything new you need to fix up the bits that need fixing... this encourages us to do lots of small changes every year rather than wait 5 years and end up with a massive unfixable mess.
 

[Brooksie359]

14 hours ago, LAwLz said:

@leadeater Told you so.

The M1 is fantastic.

Slightly better than Zen3 for single core performance.

Way better than anything Intel has to offer.

Only gets beaten in heavily threaded applications when compared to 6+ core chips.

 

Also, the SPEC2006 and SPEC2017 results are more or less the same. Can we please stop hating on SPEC2006 because "hurr durr it's old so therefore it's bad" now?

Changing from SPEC2006 to SPEC2017 changes things a little, but not to the point where one chip might look really good and then in the newer/older test it looks bad all of a sudden. It might changes a couple of percentages here and there but that's about it. Easily the kind of differences you can see in real world applications as well.

 

SPEC2006 int:

M1 - 69.40

Zen3 - 68.53

M1 performance compared to Zen3 - 101%

 

SPEC2017 int:

M1 - 6.66

Zen3 - 7.29

M1 performance compared to Zen3 - 91%

 

SPEC2006 fp:

M1 - 104.10

Zen3 - 94.08

M1 performance compared to Zen3 - 111%

 

SPEC2017 fp:

M1 - 10.37

Zen3 - 9.79

M1 performance compared to Zen3 - 106%

This literally proves the point. The 2006 results show the m1 beating all the competition to losing in one and beating in the other by a smal margin. Also most people weren't even saying that the M1 wasn't a good chip but rather that we should wait for additional benchmarks and not extrapolate everything based off of one benchmark. This is basically the case with all cpu releases. You wait for more info rather than claiming that the cpu is the best things since sliced bread based off of a single benchmark. Now it is looking like the cpu is definitely a great cpu and with all the extra information we have we can clearly see just how great it is. For the tdp that it runs at it definitely is the best you can get in terms of performance. 

[hishnash]

4 minutes ago, Spindel said:

While a bit interesting I don’t expect magic because a 8 gb data file (video, image etc) is still 8gb

So apple have used memory compression for years on the mac, so it does depend on your file and how easy it is to compress (memory compression does not have any impact on perfomance since the memory controller does the compress/decompress not the cpu or other compute units of the SoC.  In Fact by using memory compression you can increase the effective bandwidth of your memory as well.

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, hishnash said:

The other thing apple do that MS should do as well (this would not break backwards compatibility for those nasty old apps) is make it that if you as a developer want to use any of the new apis you MUST fix up most of your nastier deprecation warnings. If you realy don't need any of the new OS features then you can still ship your app using an older version of the SDK but if you want anything new you need to fix up the bits that need fixing... this encourages us to do lots of small changes every year rather than wait 5 years and end up with a massive unfixable mess.

Hell yes to this, +1.

[GDRRiley]

1 hour ago, Spindel said:

When Apple do this it also pisses people off all the time. But because Apple actually has the courage to do it it's not a big problem because business learn to not become dependent on software from defunct companies. 

 

Microsoft should gather the balls and just say FU to those companies and say "adapt or go extinct". I promise you they won't move to Linux anyway just because MS actually tidy up their codebase. 

 

its not courage its stupidity. just like intel+HP in the early 2000s with Itanium.

X86 will be still around in 20-30 years because code written right now for it will still be in use. Just like how POWER is still around and so are IBM mainframes

 

1 hour ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

But you can see iPads being used by pilots, and soldiers,.   

congrats you put a map and charts on a computer. you could do that on any tablet

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Yup. That is the fact of reality.

Since ages, Apple is able to convince companies and its devs to implement features for new hardware or use new software technologies.

Not particularly true, but it's a lot easier on the mac to just recompile things for the latest OS and not have to do anything special because a lot of Mac software is self-contained. 

 

6 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

When its Microsoft, companies and devs goes (being said in a silly way for comedic effect):

"Heumm how about no... we want a full business case that justify the expense, even if the expense is an absolute minor one. "

Kinda of true, to give you two examples

a) Autocad, billion dollar engineering firms have to keep licences for every version of AutoCAD going back to 2012 due to purposely not having backwards compatibility, despite various clients only having one version of the software and sticking with it as long as possible. Like municipal governments.

b) Adobe, Many people who had a version of Photoshop prior to CS6, are going to hold onto it till the bitter end, because that is the version they are familiar with. I still use CS4 because that was the version I use and don't need to pay Adobe a monthly fee just to open PSD files.

 

Adobe quite literately had to be dragged kicking and screaming to upgrade to OSX, x64 AND the pulled off the Carbon API on MacOS X. Like if you were a CS2/CS3 owner on a mac, you got dragged over the coals and had to needlessly upgrade to versions that were incomplete.

 

6 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

 

I never could really understand this. Is it because competition between applications on Macs is more active than on Windows?

Possibly.

 

People won't update software on Windows or Mac unless the software nags them to, and then sometimes it breaks their workflow. There's plenty of situations where newer versions of software are less functional than older versions and the only difference is the UI overhaul that was done to "work" on the new UI framework the newer OS has. See MS Office.

 

 

[LAwLz]

42 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

This literally proves the point. The 2006 results show the m1 beating all the competition to losing in one and beating in the other by a smal margin. Also most people weren't even saying that the M1 wasn't a good chip but rather that we should wait for additional benchmarks and not extrapolate everything based off of one benchmark. This is basically the case with all cpu releases. You wait for more info rather than claiming that the cpu is the best things since sliced bread based off of a single benchmark. Now it is looking like the cpu is definitely a great cpu and with all the extra information we have we can clearly see just how great it is. For the tdp that it runs at it definitely is the best you can get in terms of performance. 

"beating all the competition"

Yeah... by 1%... Way to make the lead sound bigger than it is.

 

 

The relative performance numbers changed by 5 to 10 percentage units.

Did you see the previous thread about this? People were saying SPEC2006 was a joke because it was 14 years old. People said it was only a good benchmark if you wanted to know what old and outdated software would be like on a CPU.

What I said, and was flamed for, was me saying that I don't think SPEC2006 and SPEC2017 are different enough to actually change any conclusion. I said that the scores would probably differ slightly but not enough to discard or call SPEC2006 irrelevant. Someone even said SPEC2006 was only "useful for a few people" because it was so old and the numbers it spits out was not relevant to today's software.

For crying out loud, the people in the other thread I was arguing with didn't even realize that the SPEC2006 was recompiled with a new compiler. They said things like "SPEC2006 doesn't use newer x86 extensions like AVX", which it absolutely does.

 

All the previous threads have been shitshows.

• As soon as one benchmark gets posted people tried their hardest to figure out reasons for why the results were not valid.
• Geekbench? Nahh I heard someone say 8 years ago that it was bad so therefore it doesn't count.
• SPEC2006? Well it's old so it doesn't count.
• Encoding tests? Probably uses some hardware acceleration so it doesn't count.
• Other benchmarks posted? Well they are synthetic so they don't count. Oh they aren't synthetic? Well they aren't "actual work" and since it's a Mac it's not a "real computer" so therefore they don't count.
• A very popular MacOS app was benchmarked? Well I haven't heard of it so therefore it doesn't count.
• Cinebench? Ehm... It's running on different OSes so it doesn't count. Also this 12 core CPU beats this quad core so therefore the results aren't impressive.

 

In the "M1 benchmarks continue" thread we now have someone trying to dismiss all benchmarks currently released because apparently you can not trust any review out right now because:  

8 hours ago, CarlBar said:

I'm saying receiving special early access isn't the same as a regular review sample. In exactly the same way as when the RTX 3k series launched and one tech news site got an early sample everyone said to wait till they where confirmed by people with just regular do whatever you please review samples.

and:  

12 hours ago, CarlBar said:

It's only when you get units in the hands of people with no strings attached from apple that the benchmarks numbers become trustworthy. And even then you should be looking long term at multiple different benchmarks.

 

So apparently benchmarks posted at launch or near launch doesn't count now.

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

Still use my Windows Phone hahahahahaha

I will light up a candle and include you to my thoughts and prayers for the salvation of your sanity for using a phone without proper apps instead of getting an iPhone 11 or Galaxy S20 on sale.