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The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes. Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC
by throwaway4good 6y ago
The results seem a little weird but if remotely true then these machines are going to sell like cup cakes.
Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are?
- dbspin 6y agoProfessional use in creative industry - film, TV, videography, audio production, and a million other things. 16GB ram and a souped up integrated GPU won't cut it for many 'Pro' applications Mac has traditionally excelled at.
- seunosewa 6y agoMany apps optimized for the x64 platform won't run as well as the benchmarks.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI think this is an important one to keep in mind. I'm sure most native Mac apps will be compiled to ARM, but a lot of existing apps won't. Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps. I for one really wouldn't mind if Apple would build a native app to replace Electron apps, e.g. a chat app that works as a good client for (what I have open right now in Rambox) Discord, FB Messenger, Whatsapp and multiple Slack channels. Or their own Spotify client. Or a big update to XCode so it can use language servers for VS Code and it's viable to use for (what I do right now) Typescript, PHP and Go development. They have more than enough money to invest in dozens of development teams or startups to push out new native apps. One day I'll switch away from Chrome in favor of Safari as well. Maybe. (I am taking recommendations for native alternatives to apps)
- asdfaoeu 6y agoElectron seems to have support in recent beta releases.
- imtringued 6y agoYou still have to rebuild your software and explicitly support a bunch of different architectures.
- threeseed 6y agoI can't understand why you think Apple should be building apps for their competitors. It's very strange. Use Apple Music, Messages, Safari, Swift if you want first-class support. Or one of the better options now might be to use the iOS apps for Slack, Spotify etc.
- fnomnom 6y agowhatsapp support in native apps is not something that isnt happening because there is no will in teams or companies to do that. its just not possible, there are no APIs. everything you see is a workaround or mashup of the whatsapp web feature
- m4rtink 6y agoNot just the lack of will - hostile action and threats from whatsapp against even just community projects trying to build a client for a platform not supported by the official ones. This might no longer be the case but a couple years ago they still used to do that, so no wonder so little native clients exist.
- armincerf 6y agoMost of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron). I guess there will still be issues for people who need to run VMs or media apps like Adobe CC etc, and also it will take a while for some dev environments to be fully supported (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857 for example shows it will take some time to get to feature parity). Overall though a lot of the hard work has already been done, and I'm sure in 2 years time or whenever the transition is 'complete', mac owners will be getting much more value for money with few drawbacks (the main one being higher walls around the garden)
- Mindwipe 6y ago> Most of the electron apps out there already have native iOS versions which will run natively on AS macs too, that should go a long way to smooth the transition (and will be interesting to see how much extra RAM you gain from not needing slack/spotify/notion etc to run on Electron). They don't have desktop UIs, and will be a big step down for most users. You can't seriously argue the UI doesn't matter on a Mac.
- valuearb 6y agoApple Silicon has integrated floating point hardware specifically designed to run JavaScript super fast, so Electron will be fine.
- jimbokun 6y ago> Plus there's the brouhaha about Electron apps. Won't this be handled by just porting V8 to the M1?
- Fnoord 6y agoThey did mention in a presentation some applications ran even quicker in Rosetta 2 than native. Though Wine isn't an emulator, I've seen the same in Wine numerous times. How many, which, etc, who knows? Interesting to figure out regardless.
- timthorn 6y agoThat happened regularly in the transition from 680x0 to PowerPC.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThis is often because it's translating syscalls rather than emulating them, so for applications that are only asking the OS to do the real work, in those cases it's running native code. And then it's running it on a current day CPU instead of one from two years ago. Unfortunately, although applications like that exist, they're not the common case.
- valuearb 6y agoOne of the most common operations done in MacOS is retain/release of objects. Rosetta2 translated code is TWICE as fast on the M1 as the original code on x86. https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238785181376512 https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoMicrobenchmarks are meaningless. Where are the benchmarks of real-world applications?
- valuearb 6y agoThe M1 running native code can retain/release objects five times faster than x86 processors running native code. X86 code translated by Rosetta2 on the M1 retains/releases objects TWICE as fast as native x86 processors. https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/1326238785181376512 https://mobile.twitter.com/Catfish_Man/status/13262387851813...
- martin_bech 6y agoYou cant run bootcamp on these.. For me atm thats a dealbreaker.. but I still want one
- martin_bech 6y agoI was going to add you cant do Android development on these, as you need Android Studio, but that seems to be on the way — Support for Apple Silicon is in progress
- throwaway4good 6y agoI assume they have the OpenJDK JVM ported at this point so all of JetBrains' products should be working or close to working.
- dutchmartin 6y agoThey have to make the claim ‘millions of devices run Java true’. But anyway. A lot of programming languages are going to have to support Arm now. Interpreters for like php and js must be cross-compiled and then most things can work. Like Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level, see https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2959 https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2959
- Liquid_Fire 6y agoMost popular languages have supported Arm for many years already, on Linux (and more recently, some of them on Android and iOS). > Rust just brought their arm support to the tier 1 support level (for Linux)
- fulafel 6y agoYep, most things were ported in the first wave of linux arm enthusiasm around the netwinder/ipaq craze 20 years ago.
- cesarb 6y agoThe "netwinder/ipaq craze 20 years ago" would be 32-bit ARM (AArch32), while AFAIK this new chip is 64-bit ARM (AArch64); everything has to be ported again to this new ISA (though yeah, most things were already ported for Linux on AArch64).
- raxxorrax 6y agoFar more pluralistic software environments would be a huge factor.
- kmlx 6y ago> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? as a power user I will not be touching anything apple ARM until all my hundreds of software apps are certified to work exactly the same as on x86_64. i will not rely on rosetta to take care of this. i need actual testing. besides this, 8GB of RAM is how much a single instance of chrome uses. i run 3 chrome instances, 2 firefox and 2 safari. and this is just for web. this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus. as such i was looking into a lenovo thinkstation p340 tiny. you can configure it with 64gb ram and core i9 with 10 cores and 20 threads for less $$$ than what an underpowered 6 core mac mini is selling for.
- Tepix 6y ago> this could be a good time to jump the apple ship. it's pretty clear their focus is not their power users' focus. Apple is at day 1 of their two year migration to Apple Silicon. Your judgement seems not just a little premature.
- kmlx 6y agoit depends how you consider it. “two year migration” sounds just about right for a transition to something non apple. we can then re-visit apple in 3 years time.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoI don't replace laptops that frequently, currently.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y agoI jumped ship back to Linux (still sucks). This is the first new computer I’ve bought in almost a decade. I think many professionals who need new hardware will use this as the catalyst to make them move back to PC hardware. The M1 looks amazing, but I need more than just Apple software to do my work. It’ll be a while before all the things I use get migrated.
- ascar 6y ago> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? There are enough people who do not want to deal with MacOS and Darwin regardless the hardware specs. Also the way of least friction is usually to use whatever the rest of your team uses. There are even relevant differences in Docker for MacOS vs Docker for Linux that make cross platform difficult (in particular thinking about host.docker.internal, but there are certainly more). Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions. Going away from x86 makes this situation certainly not better.
- pjmlp 6y ago> Working with C/C++ is another pain point for cross platform, which already starts with Apples own Clang and different lib naming conventions. A walk in the part to anyone that had to deal with coding with C or C++ across UNIX flavours.
- ghaff 6y agoI'm primarily a Mac user but laptops are cheap. If I were working on a team doing Linux development for x86 I'd certainly have a Linux laptop for that even if I preferred a MacBook for other purposes.
- adrian_b 6y agoAs expected, the Apple M1 is a little faster than Inter Tiger Lake in single-thread applications, but it is a little slower than AMD Renoir in multi-threaded applications. So for things like software development where you compile frequently your projects, the new Apple computers are a little slower than similar computers with AMD CPUs. So even when taking only CPU performance into consideration, there are reasons to choose other computers than those with Apple Silicon, depending on what you want to do. Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance. Those who want to use Apple software will buy Apple products, those who do not want to use Apple software will not buy Apple products, like until now, regardless which have better performance.
- Tepix 6y ago> Of course, nobody will decide to buy or not buy products with "Apple Silicon" based on their performance. That's exactly the reason why you would chose Apple Silicon right now where you can choose between Intel and Apple SoC. There are of course other reasons such as battery life and price.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoNot really. Right now Apple Silicon would be translating most code and therefore be slower and possibly have worse battery life. By the time that isn't true anymore, the option of buying Intel from Apple will be gone and your choices will be ARM from Apple or a PC with Intel/AMD. The x64 options from Apple are also uncompetitive with existing PCs already because they're using Intel processors when AMD's are faster.
- greedo 6y agoMost code? I would imagine that most code run on Apple laptops today would start with Safari. And then Slack, some IDEs, etc etc. These will all get ported extremely fast if they haven't already been. There will be a long tail of edge case software that runs in emulation, but that won't affect the majority of users.
- Tepix 6y agoThe Macbook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB isn't really priced competitively here in Germany. It's almost 1600€.
- graycrow 6y ago€1665 in Czechia, and we have much lower purchasing power.
- eru 6y agoTo be honest, you'd expect widely traded good to trade at the same prices, regardless of local purchasing power.
- learnstats2 6y agoThe price seems to be the same except for tax. Germany has a 16% rate (July-Dec 2020) and Czechia 21% for sales tax/VAT.
- eb0la 6y agoBefore Brexit sometimes the you could buy apple stuff for less on amazon.co.uk than in the rest of Europe because the price was fixed in GBP.
- blunte 6y agoI think it often depends on big resellers (like Best Buy, for example). They can provide discounts which Apple will not do directly to the customer, and which other resellers can't do because they don't turn enough units. That's true of many other common goods worldwide. Unless you can buy a locally made item in a lower purchasing power country, you will usually pay a currency exchange equivalent price for the item. Actually you often pay more because the local shop selling the product cannot get bulk pricing and pass along the discount to you. Finally, when you add the local taxes - 23% in Portugal, for example - the price can be much higher compared to Alaska, US (< 2%). That last bit is really not Apple's fault.
- blunte 6y ago
- vbezhenar 6y agoThey are not priced competitive. Cheapest macbook air starts from $999. Cheapest Dell Inspiron starts from $319.
- mehrdada 6y agoAnswer straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAo8gnUCWzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAo8gnUCWzE
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adriancr 6y agoThe recent keyboard fiasco would say otherwise.
- coldtea 6y agoThe cheapest Dell Inspiron doesn't even hold a candle to the MacBook Air. They're not competing in the same class...
- pjmlp 6y agoIt certainly does when the best one can hope to bring home as software engineer is around 1000 euros after taxes.
- raverbashing 6y agoI fully get that the cheapest option might fit your budget and the MBA doesn't. And that's absolutely fine. Been there, done that. Heck, I wish my 1st laptop had cost $300 but in the end it was more around what the MBA cost today. But it's not really an Apples to Apples comparison.
- pjmlp 6y agoI am lucky for having gotten the opportunity to live and work in a country where buying an Apple device is not an issue, and there are plenty of them around the office, but I don't forget my roots nor the monetary possibilities of similar countries that I had the fortune to visit.
- yodelshady 6y agoAsking myself that very same question. I've been booting linux, quite happily I might add, off mid/high-end Dells and HPs for a while. The last time I looked Airs were still dual-core, and much more expensive for 16 GB. I'm not an Apple fan, but the change in value is stunning. I don't need a new laptop currently...
- pjmlp 6y agoBasically anyone not lucky to live in countries with comparable economy to US, aka 80% of world IT.
- moondev 6y ago> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows - virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines - only 2 thunderbolt ports - limited to 16GB RAM - no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards - no AAA gaming - can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static - uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down
- wffurr 6y ago- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.
- blunte 6y agoYou lost me at "good Windows laptops". macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac. Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.
- kube-system 6y agoI bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.
- blunte 6y agoIt's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)
- adriancr 6y agoNo Linux support is a deal breaker. (current versions with Intel included)
- marcan_42 6y agoUntil all software is ported to ARM, it will run in emulation, which is going to be slower in most cases. People invested in plug-in ecosystems, like DAWs or video editing, will likely have an endless long tail of plug-ins that aren't getting ported, or that require a re-purchase to get an ARM version. And due to Rosetta's architecture, you can't mix ARM and x86 plug-ins (in-process, like VSTs - Apple wants you to use AUv3 which is out of process but nobody does that), so you will be running your entire workflow under emulation until you can make the switch hard and all at once. And some of your software will never make it. Mark my words, this is going to be a massive shit show for people using those ecosystems, for 5 years if not 10. It already happened with the PPC transition.
- asah 6y agowon't emulation catch up in those timeframes ? still, 3+ yrs which is a long time...
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThree years isn't that long for CPU performance gains anymore, but even if it was, it isn't the emulation that gets faster, it's the hardware. Contemporary ARM machines emulating x64 would still be slower than contemporary x64 machines natively executing x64. You're also going to be in a bind if Apple decides they don't care about the long tail and stops supporting emulation before all of your plugins have been converted (if they ever are).
- sroussey 6y agoThere is no emulation per se, there is a one time AOT translation of Intel to Arm. Then that native code just runs. So no emulator is running on the cpu while the app is. There is an exception for apps with JIT and those will perform poorly (think Chrome and every Electron app).
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago> So no emulator is running on the cpu while the app is. Nonetheless, the translated code is going to be slower than ordinary native code because a lot of the information compilers use for optimization isn't available in the resulting binary, so the translator has to be extremely conservative in its assumptions.
- imtringued 6y agoWhy would anyone who is not forced to buy a Mac get one of these?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vlunkr 6y agoI think price comparisons depend on what you're looking for. You cheapest model with 16GB of RAM is 1800$. That's pretty steep, especially considering other laptops will let you upgrade the RAM yourself. And along with that you get the touch bar and the garbage keyboard. I'm just one person, but that's why I would never buy one of these.
- jimnotgym 6y agoMaybe they have to run enterprise software which does not get updated every year so they can't use MacOS. Or perhaps they want a fully featured copy of Office? Maybe they want to run an Active Directory network? Maybe they like having ports on their laptop