I want to love Apple, but they’re making it hard

[DANK_AS_gay]

Just now, HenrySalayne said:

The Microsoft Surface Pro 2 from 2013 will win 4 out of 5 gaming benchmarks. You know why? Because a lot of games don't run on the M1.

 

I hope this makes the absurdity of this kind of discussion obvious. You cannot compare the M1 line-up even to older x86 Macs. All you performance and efficiency gains came at the cost of a complete compatibility annihilation.

GPU in the Surface Pro 2 2013: Intel HD Graphics 4400, while more compatible, can't play any games. That is literally the worst example possible. The M1 can play more games than those graphics can, even with the gimped library.

[HenrySalayne]

14 minutes ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

GPU in the Surface Pro 2 2013: Intel HD Graphics 4400, while more compatible, can't play any games. That is literally the worst example possible. The M1 can play more games than those graphics can, even with the gimped library.

Not the point and probably not true considering the backlog of tens of thousands of games I have on CDs from gaming focused magazines from the early 2000s. I chose the Surface Pro 2 especially as an pathetic example.

[DANK_AS_gay]

1 minute ago, HenrySalayne said:

Not the point and probably not true considering the backlog of tens of thousands of games I have on CDs from gaming focused magazines from the early 2000s. I chose the Surface Pro 2 especially as an pathetic example.

I can emulate all of those games on M1, especially with the single core performance being among the most expensive highest end desktop processors. In a thin-n-light.

[Paul Thexton]

4 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Because a lot of games don't run on the M1.

A lot of games don't run on macOS full stop, regardless of chip set.  Things get a tiny little bit better if you downgrade to Mojave to get 32-bit support back, but I can't really comment on how much better as I don't have (and am not interested in finding) a comprehensive list of those 32-bit macOS games.

 

Funnily enough though, any games that do run through Rosetta, absolutely run way better on M1 than a lot of previous Intel + iGPU based Macs.

 

Edit: To be clear, the above is entirely Apple's fault for sticking with older generation Intel chips, and designing chassis so thin as to nobble the cooling solution that those chips clearly needed to be able to get the best out of them.

[HenrySalayne]

1 hour ago, Paul Thexton said:

A lot of games don't run on macOS full stop, regardless of chip set.  Things get a tiny little bit better if you downgrade to Mojave to get 32-bit support back, but I can't really comment on how much better as I don't have (and am not interested in finding) a comprehensive list of those 32-bit macOS games.

But before M1 you could install Windows and just don't care about MacOS compatibility. This path is no longer viable.

 

It is getting really, really, really hard to objectively compare performance nowadays. LTT and especially Anthony were heavily criticized for their M1 ProMaxUltra coverage. But how should something like the ProRes encoders objectively be factored into a review? Apple thought this was a really important point and emphasized it strongly in their presentation. Users would need to use ProRes AND use software utilizing the encoders AND have a huge number of parallel video streams to profit from it. But all these "ANDs" leave just a tiny number of costumers to utilize this feature. Software compatibility and optimizations or a lack of it makes it more and more challenging to come to a universal verdict about a product.

IMHO comparing Macs and Windows machines is no longer feasible. Performance and efficiency have increased with M1, but the range of applications has dramatically narrowed.

 

[Paul Thexton]

2 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

IMHO comparing Macs and Windows machines is no longer feasible.

I think that's a valid argument. If it is still feasible then it's certainly not simple. For years I've known that I could get a far more performant machine in terms of raw horsepower for the same money, especially if a key consideration is playing games (it isn't for me), but the down side for me is that then implies having to run Windows. Which I just simply don't want to do, I fell out with it a long time ago, I even spent 4 years writing software for it in my job and I saw nothing to tempt me back. (Actually that's not quite true, the under-the-hood security model of NT kernel using tokens and ACLs is very good and not well taken advantage of by the non-kernel teams IMO).

 

The other option would be to install Linux. Which I used to do ... and became so much like a busman's holiday of constantly having to fiddle with settings or fix broken package updates that I simply gave up and switched to Mac.  Unix OS, with a native shell, but an OS that has never gotten in my way of doing what I want to actually do at that moment.

 

On the point of making use of hw acceleration for video editing, it's not just ProRes that's there, there's also hw acceleration of h264/hevc. If there are studios out there who do use Macs (and specifically Final Cut Pro), but would prefer to shoot footage in different codecs and not have to deal with converting it, then really it's on them to give that feedback to Apple about what they want.

 

Like it or not, for workflows that need to process enormous volumes of data there will always be the requirement for specialised silicon to speed up those processes, or otherwise enormous power hungry GPUs that can provide the acceleration. Attempting to do all of that from general purpose CPU cores is one approach but I'm not sure it's really sensible.

 

Apple having hardware support for h264/hevc/ProRes is literally no different to Intel announcing hardware acceleration for AV1, NVENC on Nvidia GPUs, and so on.  The advantage in the PC space of course is that you can swap out a GPU for something more capable after 5 years rather than having to replace the entire system, that's a very valid criticism of Apple's consumer devices.  What Apple are going to do with the to-be-announced Mac Pro nobody seems to really know right now, will be interesting to see.

 

2 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

but the range of applications has dramatically narrowed.

I think that's rather over stating things personally. Can you point to any Intel specific software on Mac that flat out doesn't run on M1, even via Rosetta2?  I'm sure there must be some software that doesn't play well with it, but I don't recall seeing any reviews anywhere that called any out.

[HenrySalayne]

20 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

I think that's rather over stating things personally. Can you point to any Intel specific software on Mac that flat out doesn't run on M1, even via Rosetta2?  I'm sure there must be some software that doesn't play well with it, but I don't recall seeing any reviews anywhere that called any out.

The No. 1 complaint of a-particular-group-of-people-who-shall-not-be-named-but-they-don't-know-any-other-god-but-the-manufacturer-of-the-device-they-use about the LTT reviews was about the software They complained that software which is not running natively and is optimized for the platform should not be part of the testing because it is an unfair disadvantage. That gave me the impression that any software not showing huge improvements on M1 should be treated as "non-existent" on the platform.

Besides that, the set of identical software running on Windows AND MacOS as well, is quite small. Industry standards like ACAD or the office suite are completely independent builds with different features on their respective platforms. And with M1 I only see this trend continue.

 

20 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

On the point of making use of hw acceleration for video editing, it's not just ProRes that's there, there's also hw acceleration of h264/hevc. If there are studios out there who do use Macs (and specifically Final Cut Pro), but would prefer to shoot footage in different codecs and not have to deal with converting it, then really it's on them to give that feedback to Apple about what they want.

Like it or not, for workflows that need to process enormous volumes of data there will always be the requirement for specialised silicon to speed up those processes, or otherwise enormous power hungry GPUs that can provide the acceleration. Attempting to do all of that from general purpose CPU cores is one approach but I'm not sure it's really sensible.

If you do these kind of things, it's great. If you don't, you are probably part of the majority of costumers.

A faster CPU is always a faster CPU. But versatility comes at the price of inefficiency and compromises.

[Paul Thexton]

54 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

The No. 1 complaint of a-particular-group-of-people-who-shall-not-be-named-but-they-don't-know-any-other-god-but-the-manufacturer-of-the-device-they-use about the LTT reviews was about the software

Yep that's true. Not me though, there's no point arguing with me about what other Apple/Mac users have said

 

54 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

They complained that software which is not running natively and is optimized for the platform should not be part of the testing because it is an unfair disadvantage.

Never agreed with that take myself. Reviewers can only report on benchmark figures and general usage performance of products as they are at the time of release. Sure, they can say "we expect this can or will get better in time, but that's not set in stone", but the same is true of any software on any platform so it's kind of a moot point.

 

56 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Besides that, the set of identical software running on Windows AND MacOS as well, is quite small

And even when it does look the same, there's a reasonable chance that under the hood it's anything but if the software's dependant on system provided libraries.

 

57 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Industry standards like ACAD or the office suite are completely independent builds with different features on their respective platforms. And with M1 I only see this trend continue.

 

I've never used ACAD so I honestly can't comment on that, my understand is that ACAD on macOS has always had virtually non-existent support, happy to be corrected on that though.

 

As far as there being a difference on M1 vs had they stuck with Intel though that doesn't wash with me. People seem to be under this unusual notion that writing macOS software for ARM is fundamentally different to writing it for Intel hosts.  That's simply not true.

 

Unless you're doing something incredibly specific (like writing the ASM yourself), the chances are you simply need to tell Xcode to compile your software for both Intel and ARM architectures.  Sure, there can be further optimisations made regarding getting the most performance, but usually that's about ensuring your tasks are dispatched on correctly chosen qos threads to make sure the system chooses an appropriate core (e-core or p-core), which if people had been following Apple's guidelines before M1, they would have already done anyway.

 

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

If you do these kind of things, it's great. If you don't, you are probably part of the majority of costumers.

 

If you don't do those kind of things and you buy an M1Pro/M1Max equipped laptop, you've chosen wrong - presumably out of FOMO.  The Pro/Max have higher memory bandwidth (especially useful for me as a software developer as it makes a big difference to code compilation times), but other than that anybody who could otherwise get along perfectly fine with the original M1 won't see much difference because they literally use the same general purpose cores.

 

The only reason I can think of that a general consumer would buy a Pro or Max rather than the base level M1 is because they want better performance in games compatible with Mac.  And again, for me, where that's the case they've made the wrong choice. They'd be better off spending that money on a PC or a Console if they prefer using macOS for general computing.

 

[Jaesop]

On 4/15/2022 at 2:34 AM, DANK_AS_gay said:

Name a slimmer alternative with the performance of an M1

Why? What I said was that not all performant Windows laptops are gaming laptops. Why are you pretending I was saying that there are price comparative Windows laptops to the M1 Air/Pro/whatever?

[UniqueNameIdentifier]

Someone on MacRumors just got it working. It appears the NAND flash boards have a "master" and "slave" configuration of sorts, so they need to be inserted in the correct slot to work.

 

The user upgraded the base model 512GB to 4TB and restored BridgeOS with the Apple Configurator successfully with another Mac.