11 ms·

I wonder how many of those who got an M1 mac recently are aware of what exactly that means, besides that it's new and fast. I could imagine a large part of thos

I wonder how many of those who got an M1 mac recently are aware of what exactly that means, besides that it's new and fast. I could imagine a large part of those sales to fall into the "I need a new computer, I'll get another Macbook Air" category. Those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway; I guess you'd have to do pretty specialized work to really notice a big difference besides "cool" and "fast".

smilekzs 6y ago
I would imagine opinion from early adopters (and tech media in general) have non-trivial influence over even said buyers' decisions.
- btown 6y ago
  Right, even if it's distilled down to "I've heard great things about these new Macs" that's still reflective of an incredible technical and marketing accomplishment.
- krrrh 6y ago
  My parents got an M1 mba a few days ago. When they asked my advice about getting a new laptop they got an earful, and then the favour was returned when I listened to my flabbergasted dad explain to me how his bank website now renders instantly compared to 15 seconds on his old mba. It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends. It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.
zippergz 6y ago
It's a testament to how well it was done that these people can buy the computers and not have to know anything except that it's new and fast.
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  Definitely. That's absolutely huge.
iMark 6y ago
I wouldn't overlook the impact of battery life. I've never squeezed more than 4 or 5 hours out of my two year old Macbook Pro. A 20 hour battery life in addition to the speed gains make upgrading a tempting prospect.
- aidos 6y ago
  I spent the whole day on zoom on battery yesterday and still had 35% left to play with.
  - f6v 6y ago
    MBP 2019 with a sub-100 cycles battery burns almost half the battery over one hour Zoom call.
    - intergalplan 6y ago
      My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA. Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps. I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are). If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem. [EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.
bayindirh 6y ago
I'm using an M1 MacBook Air right now. It's more nuanced than speed. That thing's responses are insane. It's an insanely fast computer which wakes up like an iPhone and has an endurance like a vintage, entry level Nokia phone. It's ready to work before I finish opening up the screen and, they forgot to tell the battery that it needs to deplete after some time. It doesn't matter for ordinary people to know all the cool tech and architectural stuff running below that keyboard, because at the end of the day, your ordinary applications are running, using way less power and it responds so fast that you can't even think. This matters way more for end users than for us, developers. Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast, and the ordinary users have unmoored expectations (and it's not a bad thing TBH). I have a personal intel Mac and office gave me an M1 one. I reach for M1 without even knowing.
- gigatexal 6y ago
  I’ve a tax return waiting for whatever M2 or M1X pro laptop they come out with. I simply can not wait.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    Just assume that M1 doesn't exist. It'll be much easier. It'll worth the wait. :)
    - rvz 6y ago
      Exactly. It is sooner than you think. You won't be the M1 early adopters in 2020 that had their software break in front of them this time when getting an M1X or M2 device this year. Not only it will be a lot faster thanks to it being possibly going down to 4nm, the software ecosystem will be much improved and supported by it from day 0. You will thank me later.
      - gigatexal 6y ago
        Do we know if the silicon shortages will affect the M2 or what comes after? I wonder if they booked enough volume with TSMC to get to 4nm or whatever the next process shrink is or if they will be trying to shove M1s into everything.
chrisfinazzo 6y ago
In some ways, it reminds me of the Intel transition in that regular consumers might not have been aware that this move was coming until they saw it in front of their eyes. I often see that transition dated to 2006 at MacWorld, but the reality is that it was previewed at WWDC the previous year and there was only a minor spec bump to - I think - one model before the iMacs appeared to kick things off. On a related note, I was not surprised - but definitely disappointed - to hear them describe the iMac changes as "making the computer disappear." Such 'appliances' have always seemed cheap and purposefully limited (not in a good way), yet this is what the market seems to want. Regular people continue to not understand how computers work and they probably never will.
- stetrain 6y ago
  Regular people also don't really understand much about how cars work, and they love that modern ones start with the push of a button and that they don't have to fiddle with the carburetor or the choke to get it going.
  - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
    Yes, however... The problem space is much smaller and with each big shift in hardware and software, we've missed the opportunity to do this well. A rough timeline: Desktops, the Internet, Laptops, and - for probably the last decade - Mobile. Is "Ambient" next?, I'm not sure, that seems like it carries other baggage along with it. It may look like an appliance, but it certainly doesn't work like one, and if users had just a bit more knowledge about it, I wouldn't feel like we're going back to square one with each step forward in technology.
  - jaegerpicker 6y ago
    I understand how both work and I LOVE both push button starting modern cars and computing appliances. I'd rather have an iPad and all the extra time it saves me to learn new things than fuddle with a desktop PC. Just like owning a Tesla will save me time vs owning/repairing an older car.
mumblemumble 6y ago
ARM Windows laptops have been around for a while, and have not taken off. Some of that could be that these computers don't represent a shift in the wind - x86 remains the primary architecture for Windows. But I think that another big part of it is that every review of a Windows ARM laptop is full of caveats. Some programs will run slower, some programs won't run at all. Knowing which is which requires technical knowledge that a lot of people don't have, such as the ability to distinguish native executables from Java or .NET apps, or the ability to distinguish 32-bit programs from 64-bit ones. Apple, on the other hand, really outdid themselves here. The story for most consumers is just, "It will run all your old apps, no problem." The worst-case-scenario story for a certain niche is, "Docker may be flaky until later this year." IOW, the fact that "those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway" represents an enormous accomplishment on Apple's part.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  Unfortunately, Windows ARM laptops were and are poorly executed. Apple is carrot and stick, where the carrot is performance and the stick is obsolescence. With Windows, there's neither carrot or stick. ARM isn't that much more performant, the battery life isn't that much better, and they're certainly not abandoning Intel. OTOH, Microsoft could invest a huge amount of their money on making ARM attractive, but the Wintel ties clearly run deep.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > and the stick is obsolescence Does this really apply? My gf and I each earn FANG salaries and could upgrade a,couple of times a year if we were so inclined but haven’t bothered until the M1 arrived. IPhone 6s & 7, watch 0 & 3, 2016 Macbook + 2017 MacBook Air (TBF she has a big 2019 Intel MBP from work though)...upgrading that old gear didn’t seem worth it. Patches and upgrades continued to arrive (except for the watch 0). But we finally upgraded everything and now I’ll upgrade my 2014 ipad that I’m typing on now. I doubt most people upgrade simply because something new has arrived. Apple doesn’t really drive you to it.
    - valesco 6y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Friend of mine just got a new M1 13-inch MBP. He "likes" it, as opposed to "loves" it; because he doesn't actually care that much (he's not a tech nerd). He likes his iPad a lot more. He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. It's just not that important to him. Computers are a "necessary evil." He's a musician, and he asked my advice, so he got a Mac. For myself, I am waiting on the M1X/M2, later this year. I have a couple of big external monitors, and I know the M1 has issues with those. I've already weaned myself off of my BlackMagic eGPU Pro, in anticipation.
- Insanity 6y ago
  That's interesting, how big are those monitors exactly? Regular 4k or something more?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    I have a 49-inch LG Ultrawide (Split into 3440 X 1440, 1680 X 1440), and a 4K monitor that I use for presentations and classes (so it is not on all the time). I have become addicted to the vast real estate of this big honker. I did have it set up, once, using the whole screen width (5120 X 1440), but that was too wide for me (also, Apple does not yet natively support that resolution. I had to use a third-party screen res tool).
- zitterbewegung 6y ago
  I have a Pro Display XDR hooked up to a MacBook Air and the only glitches I have had would be unplugging and plugging in the display while in sleep mode which just requires me to unplug the XDR and plug it back in.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dustinmoris 6y ago
  > He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. Not sure if this was ever true for someone who used a Mac before. Going to a Dell or Lenovo feels like a huge downgrade. Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. Also the track pad and other screen on the Mac is so much better. Even if some Windows laptops come with a crazy high resolution, the OS looks shit on it and the user has to go into the Windows menu and play around with all the UX controls until the proportions of the start bar, windows and other UI elements somehow make sense on the high resolution again. Of course there is a million Windows apps still out there which don't scale at all. I cannot imagine that a user who was on Mac for more than a year could go back to Dell or Lenovo and feel excited about it. Now with the M1 the contrast is even worse. I have an M1 and Intel MBP and even going back to the Intel MBP feels really crappy because I need to charge my device when working for a full day. I got so used to the M1 not needed a single charge during the day that it's really odd to think about how other laptops still do. I treat my M1 like my iPhone. I plug it in over night, that's all it needs.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
You can't really buy an equivalent since Apple focused on price, performance, absolute silence and battery life with virtually no deck flex due to the aluminum unibody. You can get laptops that can almost match it on price and performance but the responsiveness and battery life is going to be extremely hard (including the MacBook Pro and reviews have stated that you can get it to above 18 hours with light use. Also, the MacBook Air is totally silent with great performance and I can't find many silent laptops at all. The biggest downside to the new M1 Macs are probably that they rely on swapping from RAM to disk but we have to see when those parts will wear out.
kalia35 6y ago
I bought a Macbook Air M1 a few months ago. It does not take specialized work to notice the difference between this laptop and every other intel based laptop. The Tinkpad X1 Carbon which I bought multiple time over the years would run hot, make noise and the battery would deplete fast when watching youtube videos. Before M1 this was just normal laptop behavior and the X1 is a great laptop. With the M1 though, it's now been 2 hours of watching youtube and you're at 95% in a perfect silence and the laptop is cool to the touch. Also I don't find a Macbook Air to be "cool". To me it feels mainstream just because it's an obvious choice.
908B64B197 6y ago
More than that, I always assumed that the base models were the most popular. Since they are all M1 now, it would make sense.

smilekzs 6y ago

I would imagine opinion from early adopters (and tech media in general) have non-trivial influence over even said buyers' decisions.

btown 6y ago
Right, even if it's distilled down to "I've heard great things about these new Macs" that's still reflective of an incredible technical and marketing accomplishment.
krrrh 6y ago
My parents got an M1 mba a few days ago. When they asked my advice about getting a new laptop they got an earful, and then the favour was returned when I listened to my flabbergasted dad explain to me how his bank website now renders instantly compared to 15 seconds on his old mba. It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends. It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.

zippergz 6y ago

It's a testament to how well it was done that these people can buy the computers and not have to know anything except that it's new and fast.

dividedbyzero 6y ago
Definitely. That's absolutely huge.

iMark 6y ago

I wouldn't overlook the impact of battery life. I've never squeezed more than 4 or 5 hours out of my two year old Macbook Pro. A 20 hour battery life in addition to the speed gains make upgrading a tempting prospect.

aidos 6y ago
I spent the whole day on zoom on battery yesterday and still had 35% left to play with.
- f6v 6y ago
  MBP 2019 with a sub-100 cycles battery burns almost half the battery over one hour Zoom call.
  - intergalplan 6y ago
    My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA. Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps. I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are). If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem. [EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.

bayindirh 6y ago

I'm using an M1 MacBook Air right now. It's more nuanced than speed. That thing's responses are insane. It's an insanely fast computer which wakes up like an iPhone and has an endurance like a vintage, entry level Nokia phone. It's ready to work before I finish opening up the screen and, they forgot to tell the battery that it needs to deplete after some time. It doesn't matter for ordinary people to know all the cool tech and architectural stuff running below that keyboard, because at the end of the day, your ordinary applications are running, using way less power and it responds so fast that you can't even think. This matters way more for end users than for us, developers. Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast, and the ordinary users have unmoored expectations (and it's not a bad thing TBH). I have a personal intel Mac and office gave me an M1 one. I reach for M1 without even knowing.

gigatexal 6y ago
I’ve a tax return waiting for whatever M2 or M1X pro laptop they come out with. I simply can not wait.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  Just assume that M1 doesn't exist. It'll be much easier. It'll worth the wait. :)
  - rvz 6y ago
    Exactly. It is sooner than you think. You won't be the M1 early adopters in 2020 that had their software break in front of them this time when getting an M1X or M2 device this year. Not only it will be a lot faster thanks to it being possibly going down to 4nm, the software ecosystem will be much improved and supported by it from day 0. You will thank me later.
    - gigatexal 6y ago
      Do we know if the silicon shortages will affect the M2 or what comes after? I wonder if they booked enough volume with TSMC to get to 4nm or whatever the next process shrink is or if they will be trying to shove M1s into everything.

chrisfinazzo 6y ago

In some ways, it reminds me of the Intel transition in that regular consumers might not have been aware that this move was coming until they saw it in front of their eyes. I often see that transition dated to 2006 at MacWorld, but the reality is that it was previewed at WWDC the previous year and there was only a minor spec bump to - I think - one model before the iMacs appeared to kick things off. On a related note, I was not surprised - but definitely disappointed - to hear them describe the iMac changes as "making the computer disappear." Such 'appliances' have always seemed cheap and purposefully limited (not in a good way), yet this is what the market seems to want. Regular people continue to not understand how computers work and they probably never will.

stetrain 6y ago
Regular people also don't really understand much about how cars work, and they love that modern ones start with the push of a button and that they don't have to fiddle with the carburetor or the choke to get it going.
- chrisfinazzo 6y ago
  Yes, however... The problem space is much smaller and with each big shift in hardware and software, we've missed the opportunity to do this well. A rough timeline: Desktops, the Internet, Laptops, and - for probably the last decade - Mobile. Is "Ambient" next?, I'm not sure, that seems like it carries other baggage along with it. It may look like an appliance, but it certainly doesn't work like one, and if users had just a bit more knowledge about it, I wouldn't feel like we're going back to square one with each step forward in technology.
- jaegerpicker 6y ago
  I understand how both work and I LOVE both push button starting modern cars and computing appliances. I'd rather have an iPad and all the extra time it saves me to learn new things than fuddle with a desktop PC. Just like owning a Tesla will save me time vs owning/repairing an older car.

mumblemumble 6y ago

ARM Windows laptops have been around for a while, and have not taken off. Some of that could be that these computers don't represent a shift in the wind - x86 remains the primary architecture for Windows. But I think that another big part of it is that every review of a Windows ARM laptop is full of caveats. Some programs will run slower, some programs won't run at all. Knowing which is which requires technical knowledge that a lot of people don't have, such as the ability to distinguish native executables from Java or .NET apps, or the ability to distinguish 32-bit programs from 64-bit ones. Apple, on the other hand, really outdid themselves here. The story for most consumers is just, "It will run all your old apps, no problem." The worst-case-scenario story for a certain niche is, "Docker may be flaky until later this year." IOW, the fact that "those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway" represents an enormous accomplishment on Apple's part.

DrBazza 6y ago
Unfortunately, Windows ARM laptops were and are poorly executed. Apple is carrot and stick, where the carrot is performance and the stick is obsolescence. With Windows, there's neither carrot or stick. ARM isn't that much more performant, the battery life isn't that much better, and they're certainly not abandoning Intel. OTOH, Microsoft could invest a huge amount of their money on making ARM attractive, but the Wintel ties clearly run deep.
- gumby 6y ago
  > and the stick is obsolescence Does this really apply? My gf and I each earn FANG salaries and could upgrade a,couple of times a year if we were so inclined but haven’t bothered until the M1 arrived. IPhone 6s & 7, watch 0 & 3, 2016 Macbook + 2017 MacBook Air (TBF she has a big 2019 Intel MBP from work though)...upgrading that old gear didn’t seem worth it. Patches and upgrades continued to arrive (except for the watch 0). But we finally upgraded everything and now I’ll upgrade my 2014 ipad that I’m typing on now. I doubt most people upgrade simply because something new has arrived. Apple doesn’t really drive you to it.
  - valesco 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Friend of mine just got a new M1 13-inch MBP. He "likes" it, as opposed to "loves" it; because he doesn't actually care that much (he's not a tech nerd). He likes his iPad a lot more. He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. It's just not that important to him. Computers are a "necessary evil." He's a musician, and he asked my advice, so he got a Mac. For myself, I am waiting on the M1X/M2, later this year. I have a couple of big external monitors, and I know the M1 has issues with those. I've already weaned myself off of my BlackMagic eGPU Pro, in anticipation.

Insanity 6y ago
That's interesting, how big are those monitors exactly? Regular 4k or something more?
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I have a 49-inch LG Ultrawide (Split into 3440 X 1440, 1680 X 1440), and a 4K monitor that I use for presentations and classes (so it is not on all the time). I have become addicted to the vast real estate of this big honker. I did have it set up, once, using the whole screen width (5120 X 1440), but that was too wide for me (also, Apple does not yet natively support that resolution. I had to use a third-party screen res tool).
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I have a Pro Display XDR hooked up to a MacBook Air and the only glitches I have had would be unplugging and plugging in the display while in sleep mode which just requires me to unplug the XDR and plug it back in.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dustinmoris 6y ago
> He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. Not sure if this was ever true for someone who used a Mac before. Going to a Dell or Lenovo feels like a huge downgrade. Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. Also the track pad and other screen on the Mac is so much better. Even if some Windows laptops come with a crazy high resolution, the OS looks shit on it and the user has to go into the Windows menu and play around with all the UX controls until the proportions of the start bar, windows and other UI elements somehow make sense on the high resolution again. Of course there is a million Windows apps still out there which don't scale at all. I cannot imagine that a user who was on Mac for more than a year could go back to Dell or Lenovo and feel excited about it. Now with the M1 the contrast is even worse. I have an M1 and Intel MBP and even going back to the Intel MBP feels really crappy because I need to charge my device when working for a full day. I got so used to the M1 not needed a single charge during the day that it's really odd to think about how other laptops still do. I treat my M1 like my iPhone. I plug it in over night, that's all it needs.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

You can't really buy an equivalent since Apple focused on price, performance, absolute silence and battery life with virtually no deck flex due to the aluminum unibody. You can get laptops that can almost match it on price and performance but the responsiveness and battery life is going to be extremely hard (including the MacBook Pro and reviews have stated that you can get it to above 18 hours with light use. Also, the MacBook Air is totally silent with great performance and I can't find many silent laptops at all. The biggest downside to the new M1 Macs are probably that they rely on swapping from RAM to disk but we have to see when those parts will wear out.

kalia35 6y ago

I bought a Macbook Air M1 a few months ago. It does not take specialized work to notice the difference between this laptop and every other intel based laptop. The Tinkpad X1 Carbon which I bought multiple time over the years would run hot, make noise and the battery would deplete fast when watching youtube videos. Before M1 this was just normal laptop behavior and the X1 is a great laptop. With the M1 though, it's now been 2 hours of watching youtube and you're at 95% in a perfect silence and the laptop is cool to the touch. Also I don't find a Macbook Air to be "cool". To me it feels mainstream just because it's an obvious choice.

908B64B197 6y ago

More than that, I always assumed that the base models were the most popular. Since they are all M1 now, it would make sense.