M1 Mac mini overtakes entire Japanese desktop market in less than 2 weeks

[like_ooh_ahh]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

that's the part that makes Apple/Rossetta 2/M1 so much better. It's actually in hardware in the memory controller, Qualcomm doesn't have it.

 

Microsoft must be scrambling right now. They probably have learned their lesson to not underestimate Apple when releasing a successful product line (iPhone, iPad and AS). Windows Phone flopped. Windows 8/10 as a tablet OS is a hit or miss and WinRT/WoA crashed and burned.

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Windows 8/10 as a tablet OS is a hit or miss

I'm not sure where it hits at all? lol. Microsoft/Windows as a mobile experience of almost any kind couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

[like_ooh_ahh]

16 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I'm not sure where it hits at all? lol. Microsoft/Windows as a mobile experience of almost any kind couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

Windows 8 is their attempt for a touch optimized UI especially with the start screen instead of a start menu Metro-style apps with live tiles. The problem with Windows 8 is that it’s way too inconsistent to be used as a touch only device unlike iOS and Android. 

• changing screen brightness and screen time out alone requires many steps if using the touchscreen only (Start screenDesktop tiledinky batter icon at the bottom rightPower options) 
• App switching requires many steps (drag from the left then back, and it can only display 5 recent apps)
• The share and search charm for the most part never works, 

[gabrielcarvfer]

People love to hate msft...

 

Msft could fix Windows by dropping support to old software/hardware like Apple does all the time. Would you like to have that experience? I don't think so.

 

Windows phone was great, except for the lack of apps. They gave up on Astoria (support for Android apps), which was a huge mistake and put the final nail on the coffin.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

29 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Windows 8/10 as a tablet OS is a hit or miss and WinRT/WoA crashed and burned.

Windows 8 for tablets was ahead of its time in many ways, but no one cared enough to make apps for it so it died. Windows 10 and Windows 8 are not even on the same playing field when it comes to tablets. Its more like using iPadOS vs having macOS run on an iPad. Sometimes it feels like Windows 7 with a slightly better OSK.

 

Windows RT flopped partly because Windows 8 flopped, but mostly because Microsoft was so stingy and forced all apps through the Windows Store, the same store that was so limiting no one wanted to do business on it. I honestly believe Microsoft could've really done something that early in 2012 to bring ARM PCs to the mainstream, or at least had done it better than they really did, if they just said "Hey, this is Windows RT. Its like Windows 8, but on ARM because X,Y,Z". Not only would that have made ARM builds of apps standard on Windows, but it would've made Qualcomm and Nvidia take ARM more seriously and develop more powerful cores, cores that would've eventually trickled down into the low-power SOCs that could've given Apple a run for it's money on the iPhone. It would've completely reshaped the idea of the "Sub-$500 Windows Laptop" at the time, using actually decent chips, not the Cherrytrail/Baytrail rubbish that was in all the "straight-to-walmart" plastic/disposable laptops, and might have actually done OK. It's not like the Tegra 3 and 4 (Used in the 2 RT Surfaces) were useless, hell they were compiling builds of Windows 10 that were compatible with the 2012 Surface RT up until as late as 2018. Maybe I'm looking back too optimistically, but honestly the decision to lock down the desktop mode of Windows RT is what killed it.

 

And as for Windows on ARM, it's "flopped" because it's only shipped on what seems like 2 and a half machines. Now that ASi is out and companies like HP actually have to compete with the numbers Apple has, they're going to look at (and consider) Lakefield or WoA for "always connected PCs". I wouldn't call it dead yet, especially if the rumors that it could be getting Android app support soon are true. But it does look hazy. Maybe Microsoft merges Windows 10X and WoA together or something, I wouldn't put dumb ideas like that past them.

[Dracarris]

19 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Msft could fix Windows by dropping support to old software/hardware like Apple does all the time. Would you like to have that experience? I don't think so.

Yeah sure. Giving up on old Apps would've made Win8, Vista and WoA an absolute GREAT experience that would completely smoke the whole Apple ecosystem.

 

Btw: When it comes to supplying old HW with OS updates, Apples track record is quite flawless and outstanding.

19 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Windows phone was great, except for the lack of apps.

Good one. Other than lack of apps, there was only the horrendeous UI that looked like a 12yo drew some rectangles and the horrible cheap plastic handsets and a ton of other issues besides needlessly creating a third player in the smartphone market, fragmenting it and adding a ton of compatibility and maintenance issues for developers.

  

5 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

And as for Windows on ARM, it's "flopped" because it's only shipped on what seems like 2 and a half machines.

And because the experience was actually horrible. They didn't even come near the realm of Rosetta2 level of emulation performance and user experience. But sure, not Microsofts fault at all, I guess?

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

4 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

But sure, not Microsofts fault at all, I guess?

To be fair, it has to be a complete collaboration between Qualcomm (or insert X company here) and Microsoft, and it seems like both sides are half-assing this opportunity.

 

Qualcomm needs to do what Apple did in terms of memory store/load (or whatever Apple did to mimic x86 memory behavior) and Microsoft needs to work with them to make sure the emulation layer performs at its best. This isn't Intel, Qualcomm is not releasing 50 chips a year, I'm sure they can collaborate and make 1 chip together that's good. That's what the SQ1 was supposed to be, but it was just a rebadged 8cx, they didn't even care about it. 

8 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Yeah sure. Giving up on old Apps would've made Win8, Vista and WoA an absolute GREAT experience that would completely smoke the whole Apple ecosystem.

I don't know, but Microsoft need's to figure out something and quick about this. Looking forward, they really cannot keep supporting Windows 1.0 and MSDOS apps on current versions of Windows in the face of "compatibility". I assume the clean start Microsoft is opting for would be Windows 10X, but considering that literally missed every release date this year, that doesn't seem to be going well.

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

37 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

changing screen brightness and screen time out alone requires many steps if using the touchscreen only (Start screenDesktop tiledinky batter icon at the bottom rightPower options) 

You could actually change the brightness straight from the Charms bar throughout any application, under the "Settings" charm, and changing screen timeout was in the modern "PC Settings", just like on the iPad or an Android Tablet.

 

What's worse for iOS was that at the time the latest version out was iOS 6, and if you think Charms was bad, then imagine using an OS with no "charms" equivalent. The Command Center didn't come until the next year, so if you wanted to change screen brightness, every time you would have to completely quit the app you were in, find the Settings app, then navigate to brightness and change it.

42 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

• App switching requires many steps (drag from the left then back, and it can only display 5 recent apps)

I didn't actually know this. I guess I just never opened up 5 Metro applications ever at a given time...

[like_ooh_ahh]

13 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I honestly believe Microsoft could've really done something that early in 2012 to bring ARM PCs to the mainstream,

I don't think the single core performance of ARM chips in 2012 alone would be enough for something as a high overhead OS such as Windows 7 or 8/RT. That is where Apple succeeded with the iPad by using a low overhead OS even though both Mac OS X and iOS share the same Darwin kernel.

 

 

 

[like_ooh_ahh]

4 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

You could actually change the brightness straight from the Charms bar throughout any application, under the "Settings" charm, and changing screen timeout was in the modern "PC Settings", just like on the iPad or an Android Tablet.

If memory serves me right, what you're mentioning is the free Windows 8.1 update, and not the first release of Windows 8.

[Zodiark1593]

10 hours ago, TetraSky said:

If I didn't play games (which really, I barely do anyway these days, still waiting on being able to snag a GPU), I would certainly be tempted by the mac mini as well. So it's no surprise to me.

It's a neat little machine that can handle most/all of your daily needs all while being very low on the power consumption.

 

Disclaimer : I am 100% saying this because I have a vested interest for Apple's stock to rise *cries at $128 average*

*giggles at $109 average*

 

*Maniacally laughs at my shares of TSLA bought at $400*

 

*now crying over the realization that I’m now paying for YouTube Premium for the sake of my sanity*

 

As far as gaming goes, the M1 is probably somewhere in between the Xbox One and PS4, so it should be quite competent. Not mind blowing mind you, but I think it should be sufficient for some pretty visuals. 

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

4 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

I don't think the single core performance of ARM chips in 2012 alone would be enough for something as a high overhead OS such as Windows 7 or 8/RT. That is where Apple succeeded with the iPad by using a low overhead OS even though both Mac OS X and iOS share the same Darwin kernel.

I thought Windows RT was a lot lighter due to them cutting out all the unnecessary legacy stuff. I had a Surface 2, and it was pretty snappy for a 2013 Windows experience. Of course, Windows 8 itself was much faster and lighter than its predecessor, or at least took advantage of the hardware better.

 

As for performance, this is the Tegra 4 in a Tegra Note 7 (Same processor as the Surface 2 but on Android so forego grains of salt and just get a handful for this), the T4 isn't that far off of the Atom (which was used in this class of laptops at the time). A next-gen laptop Tegra would most likely outperform whatever Atom Intel had next, if you believe Geekbench is a worthy testament to computer performance, especially across processor architectures. Granted you mentioned 2013 and the Tegra 3 was awful, and it shows with the Tegra 4 literally having double the single-core and multi-core score, but I don't think it would've taken that long for ARM chips from both Qualcomm and Nvidia to start seriously pushing into the low-power SOC area for laptops.

23 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

If memory serves me right, what you're mentioning is the free Windows 8.1 update, and not the first release of Windows 8.

As far as I can see, Windows 8.0 had this functionality.

 

If I recall correctly, Windows 8.1 didn't change much other than making the Metro/Modern UI much more desktop friendly, like adding a power button to the Start Screen and the return of the Start Button (the only one to have a custom animation if I recall).

[like_ooh_ahh]

22 minutes ago, NotTheFirstDaniel said:

I thought Windows RT was a lot lighter due to them cutting out all the unnecessary legacy stuff. I had a Surface 2, and it was pretty snappy for a 2013 Windows experience.

Reviews of the Surface RT especially in the software side had been quite lukewarm at best. You can find reviews in 2012 to confirm.

 

Edit: Also, the Windows Store's app selection is quite scanty so it's really hard to tell which apps will push it to the limits

 

[NotTheFirstDaniel]

5 minutes ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Reviews of the Surface RT especially in the software side had been quite lukewarm at best. You can find reviews in 2012 to confirm.

 

Edit: Also, the Windows Store's app selection is quite scanty so it's really hard to tell which apps will push it to the limits

 

Yes, that's why I said Windows RT's fate was sealed when they decided to lock-down the desktop mode of the OS. But using Office and (sadly) IE, it wasn't terrible. When jailbroken, stuff like Paint.NET, 7-Zip, and Notepad++ ran fine, defiantly a lot better than the Netbooks of the XP and 7 era, which I assume most people would be upgrading from. Based off of the experience of using desktop apps when jailbroken (that weren't really even optimized for an ARM chip, just recompiled with the binaries) I still do hold that position.

[CarlBar]

Apple can get away with dropping support for older software because it's user-base isn't heavily biased towards people that care about that. Microsoft on the other hand has a much larger and more diverse customer base that, (particularly on the lucrative business side), cares a lot about backwards compatibility. If they released a version of windows that dropped the majority fo support for older software a massive percentage of their customer base would refuse to upgrade. And that would cost Microsoft a fortune in income.

[Spindel]

16 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Apple can get away with dropping support for older software because it's user-base isn't heavily biased towards people that care about that. Microsoft on the other hand has a much larger and more diverse customer base that, (particularly on the lucrative business side), cares a lot about backwards compatibility. If they released a version of windows that dropped the majority fo support for older software a massive percentage of their customer base would refuse to upgrade. And that would cost Microsoft a fortune in income.

And the other side of this coin is that Apples model encourages active application development which gives business to developers and means that companies relying on Macs for their business have a higher chance of having active app support because you stick to application with active developers. 

 

Microsofts biggest problem is that they paint themselves into a corner, the longer they keep legacy support the harder it is to try and clean up their codebase and drop legacy support. Also a theoretical scenario where you might need some app from 1995 the chances are that a modern system would be able emulate it since the hardware requirements for that application probably aren't that steep with moderna standards and it probably can't make use of moderna bells and whistles in CPUs anyway. Microsoft could offer this as a service for big companies that don't want to move on with the times and clean up their mess for the rest of the world.   

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Also a theoretical scenario where you might need some app from 1995 the chances are that a modern system would be able emulate it since the hardware requirements for that application probably aren't that steep with moderna standards and it probably can't make use of moderna bells and whistles in CPUs anyway.

Hardware requirements aren't the issue, for example we have some software that will only run on Windows 32bit and the latest OS with that is Server 2008 (not R2). Sure 64bit Windows can run 32bit apps but this particular one just will not run on a 64bit OS. It's also much harder to actually emulate certain things especially when hardware interaction is involved, even more so when clock timing is critically important.

 

Hell there's even some software that was clocked to the CPU frequency and cannot function on anything faster than which was available at that period of time, it also used a PCI (maybe even ISA I forget) that was also clocked to the CPU and itself and if the timing was out no go, you'll never emulate that or even run it on modern hardware. Issue is it works and controls something far far more expensive so it's not a case of just finding a newer software and hardware replacement of that computer and many businesses that are not at their core IT operate on "if it's not broken don't fix it".

[Spindel]

8 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Hell there's even some software that was clocked to the CPU frequency and cannot function on anything faster than which was available at that period of time, it also used a PCI (maybe even ISA I forget) that was also clocked to the CPU and itself and if the timing was out no go, you'll never emulate that or even run it on modern hardware. Issue is it works and controls something far far more expensive so it's not a case of just finding a newer software and hardware replacement of that computer and many businesses that are not at their core IT operate on "if it's not broken don't fix it".

But software like this you wouldn't run on a modern machine with Windows 10 (or whatever) anyway. In this case you are locked to old hardware that can not run newer versions of windows anyway. In this case if MS has legacy support in a new OS or not is irrelevant so for software like this MS might as well drop legacy support and move away from the old codebase. 

[RejZoR]

58 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

Apple can get away with dropping support for older software because it's user-base isn't heavily biased towards people that care about that. Microsoft on the other hand has a much larger and more diverse customer base that, (particularly on the lucrative business side), cares a lot about backwards compatibility. If they released a version of windows that dropped the majority fo support for older software a massive percentage of their customer base would refuse to upgrade. And that would cost Microsoft a fortune in income.

The word you're looking for is " version fragmentation". With anything Apple, most people run latest versions of everything, be it MacOS or iOS. On Windows, just look how many people are still clinging to Windows XP or even Windows 7 even though they were offered FREE Windows 10 for like whole frigging year or was it even more...

 

Apple can afford dropping support for old version because only tiny fraction of users are still on them. Mostly on prehistoric devices that didn't get them anyway.

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Spindel said:

But software like this you wouldn't run on a modern machine with Windows 10 (or whatever) anyway. In this case you are locked to old hardware that can not run newer versions of windows anyway. In this case if MS has legacy support in a new OS or not is irrelevant so for software like this MS might as well drop legacy support and move away from the old codebase. 

True but this is a rolling systemic issue that isn't really going away. So it's not really irrelevant, just older examples of things that still exist today. Even with things that are supposed to be portable and extensible designed to remove these problems i.e. Java I have software that will not work correctly unless I use the specific version of the Java runtime shipped with the software/software update for it. And then you can get in to an issue where that Java runtime stop working because of a security update to fix a flaw and the only solution is to use a newer version of Java runtime, yay rock and hard place.

[Spindel]

29 minutes ago, leadeater said:

True but this is a rolling systemic issue that isn't really going away. So it's not really irrelevant, just older examples of things that still exist today. Even with things that are supposed to be portable and extensible designed to remove these problems i.e. Java I have software that will not work correctly unless I use the specific version of the Java runtime shipped with the software/software update for it. And then you can get in to an issue where that Java runtime stop working because of a security update to fix a flaw and the only solution is to use a newer version of Java runtime, yay rock and hard place.

God I hate Java. 

 

(I'm not a programer by trade, but I've done my share of programing when I was younger and had infinite spare time)

[Video Beagle]

 

Another day, another M1racle!

 

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

I'm thinking that now that Apple/M1 has the included x86 memory semantics Microsoft may also ask for the same in a custom chip for their devices, never a bad thing to copy a good idea 

I've wondered if there might be some deal between Apple and Microsoft in the works (mainly due to some actual call outs from Apple execs to MS rather than more vague corporate speak).  Something along the lines of some kind of M1 variant for a "Softbook" or something for Microsoft to toy with in the hardward side again, with them opening the licensing for their ARM variant.

 

9 hours ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

. If Apple wants they can even bring back Xserve.

You mentioned this idea in another thread, which prompted me to go looking at Xserves on ebay. 1) I wonder if you could do something with one today, upgrade it to make it usefull and 2) man, was the XServe a great looking server box.

[porina]

9 hours ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

I'm not aware of any Intel or AMD chip with a built in memory module. Even Atom chips doesn't seem to have a built in memory.

Intel Lakefield, although it depends on your definition of "built in", since it is a tightly integrated chiplet design and not monolithic.

 

7 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Msft could fix Windows by dropping support to old software/hardware like Apple does all the time. Would you like to have that experience? I don't think so.

They do, at least on the hardware side. Just the gap might be a lot longer than Apple. I have some CPUs that wont run recent versions of Windows 10 because they lack certain instructions. New Win10 versions are no longer offered in 32-bit.

[Dracarris]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

Intel Lakefield, although it depends on your definition of "built in", since it is a tightly integrated chiplet design and not monolithic.

Which is exaclty what the M1 is. The term SoC is very misleading, basically wrong, for the M1.

[Laborant]

6 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Which is exaclty what the M1 is. The term SoC is very misleading, basically wrong, for the M1.

I guess, this is a matter of definition. Is a multi-die Ryzen CPU "one chip"? Its dies are sometimes referred to "chiplets". Maybe the term "System on Module" would fit better - but then the M1 competes with a Nvidia Jetson, which only needs 12V supply voltage and even controls all its CPU and GPU voltages on its own. 

It is a multi-die design on a single chip substrate. 

How the naming is done, is basically irrelevant.