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What is revolutionary about it? We still haven't seen Zen in the same node as the M1. Zen still scores higher in absolute terms (albeit at higher power). It's

What is revolutionary about it? We still haven't seen Zen in the same node as the M1. Zen still scores higher in absolute terms (albeit at higher power). It's evolutionary. The power efficiency is great, and the core design is great (wouldn't expect less from those who were Intel's and Qualcomms most talented staff), but calling it revolutionary is an overstatement.

nwienert 6y ago
Using an M1 Air, coming from a 16" Pro, here's the diff: - Cost: $1400 vs $4000 (nearly 1/3) - Speed: Air feels significantly faster, and more apps move to native, will be even moreso - Battery: At least double, if not 3x - Size: Less than 1/2 the weight The revolutionary thing is doing all of those at once. Nearly tripling battery life while making a huge leap in performance, at 1/3 the cost and half the weight is simply incredible.
- p1necone 6y ago
  Comparing it to previous gen Apple devices doesn't really tell the whole story. You can get a machine from a different manufacturer with similar hardware for much much less than $4000, and it wont have totally broken cooling[0]. [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Core-i9-slower-than-Core-i7.396971.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Core-i9-s... Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that the m1 macbooks aren't a really compelling option. I'm just saying this is evolutionary, not revolutionary. (Making other laptop/desktop manufacturers and OS devs wake up to non x86 architectures could be revolutionary for competition and pricing though, we'll see.)
  - nwienert 6y ago
    For years we've been evolving. I've owned ~6 laptops over the last 10 years, all Intel Macs. Each year you get about ~20% ~performance increase for the same "costs" (weight, battery, price). This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap. If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...
    - sagarm 6y ago
      AMD laptops are also crushing this generation of Intel laptops. AnandTech's comparison shows that M1 vs AMD is mostly a power/performance trade-off at the moment. Not that the M1 isn't exciting especially in the ultrabook segment.
      - nwienert 6y ago
        What's the watt / battery comparison?
  - dangus 6y ago
    Why are you using Apple’s discontinued 15” model as a benchmark here? The 16” MacBook Pro most certainly does not have those same cooling issues. But that’s the thing: Apple had to make their flagship performance laptop bigger including a larger battery than its original design in 2016 because Intel was never able to hit their roadmap goals. That doesn’t sound like progress to me, it kind of sounds backwards. In other words, Apple couldn’t give you a reason to buy their performance laptop four years later without making it physically larger. Because if they didn’t do that their customers would only have minimal incremental improvement to compel them to consider a newer system after four years. In contrast, a four year old iPhone is over twice as slow from a raw performance perspective than the current model. So yeah, I could buy a much cheaper PC laptop with proper thermals and cooling for much cheaper than a 16” MacBook Pro to get that fantastic performance. Maybe it’d even be a lot better than the M1 Macs. But I can’t buy a Windows laptop, for any price, that has no fans at all and manages performance and battery life of the MacBook Air. Apple’s throwing a CPU into their *cheapest laptop that is marketed for basic usage (students, home users) that benches faster than basically all but AMD’s most performant chip, a chip that would probably get you pretty terrible thermals and battery life in a 16” MacBook Pro. A lot of evolutionary products were, in retrospect, revolutionary. Was the guts of an iPod or Walkman or iPhone or IBM PC or Honda Civic all that different from conventionally available parts? No, consumer electronics almost never have anything particularly exotic going on. But it’s the whole package that can be revolutionary. The Civic was a dirt cheap car with excellent fuel economy and reliability. Is it all that different from other cars? No, not really, but the entire Japanese auto industry was a disruptive product in the 1980s. The rumor mill is already telling us that the 16” MacBook Pro may ship with a 12 core (8 big, 4 little) “M1X” or “M2” chip. If the tech media landscape is head over heels for the M1, this new chip is going to make serious waves, because if you double the performance cores in the M1 it’s basically going to be untouchable by anything that can remotely be considered a laptop. If Apple doesn’t touch the form factor of the 16” MacBook Pro it’s going to have similar results: it’s going to run quieter, cooler, and longer. In short, it’s just my own opinion that calling this bit of incremental improvement evolutionary rather than revolutionary is something of an understatement.

nwienert 6y ago

Using an M1 Air, coming from a 16" Pro, here's the diff: - Cost: $1400 vs $4000 (nearly 1/3) - Speed: Air feels significantly faster, and more apps move to native, will be even moreso - Battery: At least double, if not 3x - Size: Less than 1/2 the weight The revolutionary thing is doing all of those at once. Nearly tripling battery life while making a huge leap in performance, at 1/3 the cost and half the weight is simply incredible.

p1necone 6y ago
Comparing it to previous gen Apple devices doesn't really tell the whole story. You can get a machine from a different manufacturer with similar hardware for much much less than $4000, and it wont have totally broken cooling[0]. [0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Core-i9-slower-than-Core-i7.396971.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Core-i9-s... Bear in mind that I'm not arguing that the m1 macbooks aren't a really compelling option. I'm just saying this is evolutionary, not revolutionary. (Making other laptop/desktop manufacturers and OS devs wake up to non x86 architectures could be revolutionary for competition and pricing though, we'll see.)
- nwienert 6y ago
  For years we've been evolving. I've owned ~6 laptops over the last 10 years, all Intel Macs. Each year you get about ~20% ~performance increase for the same "costs" (weight, battery, price). This year you get about 100% performance increase and the costs are all halved. Ok, so... we'll call it a "huge" evolution. All I know is I've been waiting since the air came out for this laptop to exist: fast enough to handle all my work, with decent battery life. It's been almost a decade of waiting, and not only did it finally come, but it somehow is much faster than even the biggest of last generation and super cheap. If you made a graph showing (price * perf * battery-life * weight) you'd see a nice evolutionary curve over the last decade, and then this generation you'd see a huge jump - way more than double. You're ignoring the fact this is a 10W CPU doing more than 28W, fanless! And the diff in subjective performance isn't small, it feels bigger than any previous generation jump by quite a lot...
  - sagarm 6y ago
    AMD laptops are also crushing this generation of Intel laptops. AnandTech's comparison shows that M1 vs AMD is mostly a power/performance trade-off at the moment. Not that the M1 isn't exciting especially in the ultrabook segment.
    - nwienert 6y ago
      What's the watt / battery comparison?
- dangus 6y ago
  Why are you using Apple’s discontinued 15” model as a benchmark here? The 16” MacBook Pro most certainly does not have those same cooling issues. But that’s the thing: Apple had to make their flagship performance laptop bigger including a larger battery than its original design in 2016 because Intel was never able to hit their roadmap goals. That doesn’t sound like progress to me, it kind of sounds backwards. In other words, Apple couldn’t give you a reason to buy their performance laptop four years later without making it physically larger. Because if they didn’t do that their customers would only have minimal incremental improvement to compel them to consider a newer system after four years. In contrast, a four year old iPhone is over twice as slow from a raw performance perspective than the current model. So yeah, I could buy a much cheaper PC laptop with proper thermals and cooling for much cheaper than a 16” MacBook Pro to get that fantastic performance. Maybe it’d even be a lot better than the M1 Macs. But I can’t buy a Windows laptop, for any price, that has no fans at all and manages performance and battery life of the MacBook Air. Apple’s throwing a CPU into their *cheapest laptop that is marketed for basic usage (students, home users) that benches faster than basically all but AMD’s most performant chip, a chip that would probably get you pretty terrible thermals and battery life in a 16” MacBook Pro. A lot of evolutionary products were, in retrospect, revolutionary. Was the guts of an iPod or Walkman or iPhone or IBM PC or Honda Civic all that different from conventionally available parts? No, consumer electronics almost never have anything particularly exotic going on. But it’s the whole package that can be revolutionary. The Civic was a dirt cheap car with excellent fuel economy and reliability. Is it all that different from other cars? No, not really, but the entire Japanese auto industry was a disruptive product in the 1980s. The rumor mill is already telling us that the 16” MacBook Pro may ship with a 12 core (8 big, 4 little) “M1X” or “M2” chip. If the tech media landscape is head over heels for the M1, this new chip is going to make serious waves, because if you double the performance cores in the M1 it’s basically going to be untouchable by anything that can remotely be considered a laptop. If Apple doesn’t touch the form factor of the 16” MacBook Pro it’s going to have similar results: it’s going to run quieter, cooler, and longer. In short, it’s just my own opinion that calling this bit of incremental improvement evolutionary rather than revolutionary is something of an understatement.