16 ms·

Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and ev

by jmkni 5y ago

Pre M1, I've always preferred a PC. When I'm using a laptop, especially doing real work, they heat up, the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down. It almost makes you anxious. You're wondering if it's about to crash or go on fire. I've always kept a Desktop PC on the go for this reason, a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues. With a laptop, I always feel like I'm compromising a bit. I got an M1 Macbook Pro recently and it just doesn't have these issues, I fire up my whole dev environment and get busy, and it's still quiet and (mostly) cool, and I can't notice anything slowing down. I don't care so much about the architecture differences, x64 vs ARM etc, but the fact that I can finally use a laptop like a desktop is massive.

rambambram 5y ago
Must be nice, using a fresh machine that's so silent. I recently switched from a powerful desktop PC with noisy fans to a passively cooled RPi4 running Ubuntu Mate. I just feel my productivity and focus going up now I don't hear the equivalent of a small fighter jet taking off. The RPi4 is still a fighter though, very quick and powerful for it's size, price and specs.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I like my 15” MBP, but the fans are extremely annoying. I had to switch IntelliJ to power save mode so I can hear what I’m thinking. It’s quite surreal the big Xeon server (an actual server, with optional rackmounts) with lots of spinning rust under the desk is still much less distracting.
  - rsfinn 5y ago
    You might want to look into [Turbo Boost Switch](http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com), which in my experience does a pretty good job of keeping the CPU cool enough that the fans stay pretty quiet, with a minor impact on performance. (It's easy to turn it on and off from the menu bar, in case you need to turn the knob up to 11 and are willing to hear the fans again.)
    - mthoms 5y ago
      This worked well for me also.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        Thanks for the tip, folks. I passed it to my IT department for checking (PII, sensitive client data, etc) and, hopefully, approval.
RandomWorker 5y ago
Same here, it’s like a freaky experience. I run mostly from the browser but have a couple of things going at the same time. One thing I noticed is the blazing fast typing on the Mac. There is an ever so small lag on windows in perceptible when using it. But, when you type on the Mac you notice it, and the brain just feels good using it. I have no idea if this is a real thing, but it’s similar with scrolling, you touch the track pad and things move. Independent of the load I’m running. Now, that many applications are moving to M1 compatible I’m thinking of replace my windows box with a mini+two external hard drives. I can’t imagine what will happen when they release a new processor. This one does more than enough.
- lukevp 5y ago
  One of the reasons iOS feels smoother than Android is because the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app. The apps aren’t allowed to introduce jank, so if you’re scrolling a webpage and stuff is loading simultaneously, iOS will be way smoother. I think this is also why they can have such low latency on inputs, for example with the Apple Pencil which is much lower latency than the surface pen or the android stylus. I had a 120hz android phone for over a year, and while the frame rate when scrolling is slightly worse on iOS, overall the OS feels more fluid to me. On a 120hz iPad it’s no comparison. I am speculating here as I don’t know for sure, but I remember iOS started as a derivation of OSX so this may be the case for macOS as well. So I think it’s not your imagination, it’s a different input and render architecture than windows or android.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    >the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app Can you elaborate on this? If you do too much work on the main thread in iOS, it's going to hang the UI. Isn't the main thread the "render thread"? Do scroll views have some kind of special escape hatch to get off the main thread for continuing to scroll if the main thread is blocked with loading the content?
    - ubertoop 5y ago
      I believe the point is that the "main thread" for your iOS application, is not the main thread of the OS. They're totally decoupled.
enlyth 5y ago
A bit of a tangent but I am quite impressed how Apple's marketing campaign was so effective that they've managed to redefine what PC (personal computer) means
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).
  - enlyth 5y ago
    The only reason I mentioned it is because OP's usage caught me off guard. Most of the time in colloquial usage I've seen PC used as an acronym to mean "computer with Windows installed as the OS", especially when being compared to Apple's products. But in this case it was used as "desktop computer", which sounded strange to me as I consider laptops, however portable, to be personal computers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hollerith 5y ago
      I agree with all of that -- and regret the recent trend of using "PC" to mean desktop as opposed to laptop -- but what does any of that have to do with Apple's marketing? You don't think Apple's marketing is behind the aforementioned recent trend; do you?
      - enlyth 5y ago
        My understanding was that Apple's marketing created the initial deviation from the original meaning which led to the current one, but yes seeing what other people are commenting now it's not that simple and I was wrong on my assumption
  - reaperducer 5y ago
monkaiju 5y ago
I've been on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme for almost 2 years (gen 2 with the i9) and never had any noise or throttling issues. I sit next to my partner (also a dev) and their i9 macbook pro regularly spins up then throttles the cpu a ton. We've seen it regularly throttle down by 70-82% (measured with pmset -g thermlog) Just saying, I definitely get the feeling Apple values form over function. His biggest issues happen when he's using Docker (the annoying Docker for Desktop version) but I also use Docker all day and dont have any issues...
porknubbins 5y ago
As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback to a more mechanical age, like a manual transmission vehicle where you can judge when to shift by engine speed.
- wumpus 5y ago
  ... and then you get an electric car, and the only time you have any auditory feedback is when it's very hot out and you supercharge.
- thelopa 5y ago
  When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    And it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)
    - samplatt 5y ago
      I could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    At the same time, we are losing disk access LED.
- skavi 5y ago
grumpyprole 5y ago
I think this is an Intel "feature". They can't upsell you faster CPU's without trading heat and noise. Glad to see Apple is following a much more sensible approach.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Rd6n6 5y ago
I just looked up some benchmarks. Apparently a m1 is 2-4x faster at many tasks than my wife’s gaming desktop from 5 years ago. It’s comparable in many benchmarks to my ryzen cpu as well? What’s the catch?
- Retr0id 5y ago
  The only real catch is that you're currently limited to only 16GB of RAM.
  - minusf 5y ago
    and big sur and up... unfortunately the quality of the OS is not keeping up with the quality of the hw.
    - Rd6n6 5y ago
      How so?
      - minusf 5y ago
        let's not go there :} life is too short to compile bug lists for macos.
        toxik 5y ago
        I feel like the critical bug list being short is basically THE reason power users would go for Apple laptops.
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      The best OS of existing.
      - seanalexander 5y ago
        Surely you're joking here.
alienalp 5y ago
M1 mac is also my first Apple product. And now i bought magic mouse 2 and fuck Apple. It is like laggy.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The default mouse settings are always too slow for my liking; I always speed up the tracking speed. I haven't used a Magic Mouse on a regular basis for a while (had both the v1 and v2), but once I updated the setting, it was as snappy as I wanted.
  - alienalp 5y ago
    I already set tracking speed to highest but this is really one of the worst mouse i have ever used. Only reason i am still using it my other bluetooth mouse is seriously laggy when i use with m1 mac.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Is this a "hardware have gotten fast enough" situation? My latest laptop (Ryzen 7) takes a lot of beating before putting the fans at an audible speed. I've never seen this happen in laptops before either. (But well, my last one didn't slow down either, it just started making some noise.)
- johnebgd 5y ago
  My Core i9 laptop has fans on just about as soon as it boots.
forrestthewoods 5y ago
Same. The problem is now my work desktop is a 32-core Threadripper w/ huge GPU and way too much ram. It’s kinda nice knowing that if my computer ever slows down it’s because of bad programming and not having a too slow computer. I want to like laptops. I really really do. But they’re slower, have bad keyboards, and have tiny screens. Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. That said, I can’t fricken wait to see Apple build a beast of a desktop with their silicon. I just really really hope the GPU doesn’t suck. Lack of good GPU on Mac is a huge problem for certain lines of work.
- moreira 5y ago
  > Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. You might be underestimating the value in that. I’ve been working off of MacBooks since 2011, and for almost all of that time I’ve had them docked and hooked up to multiple monitors, and working just like a desktop. But if I ever need to go anywhere, meet a client, travel, go to another room/office, I just unplug and go. If power goes, I don’t lose anything, the laptop is still running. Whatever happens, it’s all there with me, always. It’s not as comfortable when it’s on laptop mode but it’s better to have a less comfortable experience than not having it available at all. It’s a portable desktop. And I love it. But yeah if you’re looking for workstation-level specs, then yeah, a laptop is never going to be enough.
  - forrestthewoods 5y ago
    My primary home computer for several years was a docked laptop. Overall I was disappointed and went back to a full desktop. > If power goes, I don’t lose anything, the laptop is still running. What kind of monster doesn’t use a UPS!? =P I mostly work in games and VR. Maybe someday there will be a laptop that doesn’t suck for game development. Sadly that day has not yet come.
  - qudat 5y ago
    I have a desktop dev machine that I ssh into via zerotier and it has been a fantastic dev experience. As a result my entire world needs to be in the terminal, which for me, was pretty easy (tmux+neovim). `tmux a` and I'm right back where I left off and it doesn't matter what front-end computer I use. I can now use my ipad as my front-end cpu which is a great in-the-bed machine. The only catch is I need to make sure my dev machine is online. Now with neovim 0.5 with support for LSP and treesitter, neovim is on par with visual studio code.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
The uncomfortable heat/fan issue is what ultimately pushed me over the edge to become familiar with Kubernetes. Now I just offload the compute heavy tasks to a desktop in a different room.
seanalexander 5y ago
I'm eager to see what can be done with the desktop tower workstation post-M1. I don't think anyone actually wants to have a slim laptop and use "the cloud" to "download more memory" but here we are in 2021 where people are saying 16gb max ram is good.
- skydhash 5y ago
  Tell that to my friends whose main softwares are chrome, office and vlc.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  >but here we are in 2021 where people are saying 16gb max ram is good. No amount of memory will be good. The problem is not memory but inefficient programming. Desktop apps consume as much memory as possible. The only way to have a good experience is to have more memory than the average user. But then the average user catches up and you need even more memory. Right now I have ms teams running in the background purely to receive notifications and it is using over 1GB of memory and 8% of my cpu to show me a notification window when I get a message. MS teams on my 3gb ram iphone does exactly the same job and uses no memory and no power because it doesn't even have to run to show me notifications. I have 32GB on my laptop and I am only just above the average now but in a few years electron will have ballooned so far that 64 is the new minimum. While my 3gb iphone and 8gb ipad feel more than enough.
gerdesj 5y ago
"the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down." So you installed Gentoo, what's your problem? 8)
jrockway 5y ago
> a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues Kind of depends on the steady state and your target turbo frequency. I have my fans basically idle when temperatures permit it, but aggressively ramp them to full speed to keep the CPU as cool as possible so as to allow the frequency to scale up beyond spec. This results in a similar effect as a laptop fan -- under heavy load, the machine is loud. I don't really have a problem with this, at idle my computer is using ~100W, at full load, it's nearly 1000W. That's a lot of heat to get rid of, and it has to go somewhere. Having a large water cooling loop can help with the noise, but since I really only use the CPU that heavily for bursts that measure in the minutes at worse, I think it's fine. It doesn't make me anxious but I do kind of like the feedback that things are under load. (I have the ramp-up time set pretty long, so something like "go build" that only uses all 32 CPUs for a second doesn't really trigger anything. There's enough inertia to prevent that from raising temps much.)
tbrock 5y ago
I dont understand why they sell the pro. The touchbar is rubbish and the air has 99% the same performance. Yeah the pro can go faster for longer without throttle but its heavier and doesnt have those physical f-keys. Its more expensive too… not sure why anyone would buy it over the air. Two more usb-c but you can only hook in one external monitor! Also 200 more nits on screen but… is it really that important? I cant wait for the 14/16 with the m1x. These are already barn burners.
- cletus 5y ago
  The Touch Bar makes me so angry. Why? Because it's a less reliable laptop with a worse keyboard that exists for no other reason than to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macs. That's it. Go back 5+ years and you had the (2010+) Macbook Air, which was fantastic. A good compromise of size and power at a really low price. Like competitors just couldn't compete. The only problem? By 2015 or so the display was pretty outdated. It needed a thinner bezel and a retina display and it would've been perfect. But no, Johnny Ive came along with his war of thinness and foisted the butterfly keyboard on us and added the Touch Bar to increase the price. There's no other reason for it to exist.
- SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
  Obviously, to people who choose to pay for it. I produce video news and the Touch Bar is integral to my workflow. Just because something is not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s useless.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    The touch bar should have been in addition to the function row really. On the 16" mac there is plenty of space for both. Few people hate the touch bar, they hate the lack of function keys.
    - baggy_trough 5y ago
      I hate it because it’s too easy to accidentally press a “key” and trigger some potentially large scale event.
_nobody_243212 5y ago
Well, depends of course on your Windows Laptop. I had a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with no heat or noise issues at all. Now a Surface Pro 7 with also no heat issues. It's not the fastest around, but for a tablet really impressive (typical dev setup running Postgres in Docker, Goland, Webstorm with no problems). Still I likely buy a M1 Air soon. Not because of the M1 CPU, but because it's almost half the price of a comparable Thinkpad. And I hate the bloatware shipped with basically every non-Microsoft Windows laptop.
code_duck 5y ago
Sitting in front of a laptop, the fan coming on at max speed makes me feel like I am stressing the machine and need to be gentle with it. When using the same machine through VNC I feel completely insulated from that effect. It’s a more pleasant feeling. I’ve considered getting a desktop and just using my Macs as remote terminals.
cosmojg 5y ago
The hardware is beautiful! As soon as it becomes trivial to delete macOS and install Linux (with reasonable support), I'm buying an M1 Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I'm in too deep with the Linux ecosystem to switch over before then. Fortunately, Asahi Linux appears to be making fast progress, and there are even (spurious) rumors of official support on behalf of Apple Inc.
bjoli 5y ago
My old clevo laptop has an i7 in it with fans that sound like hair dryers. It never throttles. I would never buy a laptop where throttling was a presumed solution to thermal issues, because I want to get work done. Pre-m1 macbooks were awful. Even worse than top of the line dell laptops. I have always felt like a minority for expecting a 2k laptop to actually be able to get work done. If I would ever be able to run Linux as a first class citizen on an M1 (not going to happen) I would buy one in a flash. I have been playing with my mother in law's MacBook air and the thing is pretty darn amazing.
- quenix 5y ago
  FYI, the one M1 MacBook which throttles under heavy load is the MacBook Air, which is actually a 1k laptop ($999). The MacBook Pro has fans and basically never throttles as I understand from others.
  - drevil-v2 5y ago
    Absolutely untrue. My M1 Air does not skip a beat at all even under sustained load. Barely gets warm.
    - quenix 5y ago
      I know. I have an M1 and and it hardly ever throttles. I was making a point to the OP though
    - zaudo 5y ago
      It’s not untrue. It has been demonstrated in dozens of reviews that the M1 Air throttles under heavy load. Just because it hasn’t done so for your workload, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening for others. Besides, when it throttles, it’s not a huge slowdown, so most people wouldn’t notice it “skipping a beat” anyway.
    - deergomoo 5y ago
      An MS Teams video call with 4+ people will get my M1 Air very toasty (because Teams is shit). However, it's not as hot as my old 16" MBP got (which would get too hot to have on your lap), it doesn't noticeably get slower, and it's of course totally silent.
SergeAx 5y ago
There is actually one reason to do a software development on a laptop: if I don't have a good enough place for work. Laptop is essentially a set of compromises: between computing power and battery life, between screen size and weight, between sense of pressing keys and thikness, between using mouse and forgetting to take one on the go.
jangrahul 5y ago
My experience is just the opposite, when I run even to projects on intelliJ on a mac m1 8gb, the whole system just starts lagging to the point that I cant even scroll the code. This has not been a good experience for me.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  That's probably because 8GB is not enough to run Intellij comfortably and the system starts swapping things in and out of memory constantly. Another thing that happens when intellij uses up its heap is garbage collects including frequent stop the world varieties of that. The solution is to configure it to have more heap. Either way, that's a memory problem and not a CPU problem. 8GB for a development laptop is not a great idea in 2021. I've been using 16GB since 2013. I'll get more with my next laptop, which may or may not end up being the 16" M2?
- jmkni 5y ago
  There was a bug with Android Studio (and I think IntelliJ as well) on M1, not sure if there still is. You can fix it by setting 'Prefer Tabs' to never - https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jtbl4m/has_anyone_updated_to_macos_big_sur_and_is/gc5s29d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jtbl4m/has_anyo...
api 5y ago
The only thing I've been able to do to get an M1 to spin up the fan noticeably and get warm is to max out both the CPU and the GPU by playing Minecraft Java in a huge world or running other 3D-heavy things. The same things on an Intel laptop will turn it into what my friend comically calls a "weenie roaster" (for what it does when it's on your lap). Things like JetBrains CLion don't even make the M1 warm. That will make any Intel laptop start cookin'.

by jmkni 5y ago

rambambram 5y ago

Must be nice, using a fresh machine that's so silent. I recently switched from a powerful desktop PC with noisy fans to a passively cooled RPi4 running Ubuntu Mate. I just feel my productivity and focus going up now I don't hear the equivalent of a small fighter jet taking off. The RPi4 is still a fighter though, very quick and powerful for it's size, price and specs.

rbanffy 5y ago
I like my 15” MBP, but the fans are extremely annoying. I had to switch IntelliJ to power save mode so I can hear what I’m thinking. It’s quite surreal the big Xeon server (an actual server, with optional rackmounts) with lots of spinning rust under the desk is still much less distracting.
- rsfinn 5y ago
  You might want to look into [Turbo Boost Switch](http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com http://tbswitcher.rugarciap.com), which in my experience does a pretty good job of keeping the CPU cool enough that the fans stay pretty quiet, with a minor impact on performance. (It's easy to turn it on and off from the menu bar, in case you need to turn the knob up to 11 and are willing to hear the fans again.)
  - mthoms 5y ago
    This worked well for me also.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Thanks for the tip, folks. I passed it to my IT department for checking (PII, sensitive client data, etc) and, hopefully, approval.

RandomWorker 5y ago

Same here, it’s like a freaky experience. I run mostly from the browser but have a couple of things going at the same time. One thing I noticed is the blazing fast typing on the Mac. There is an ever so small lag on windows in perceptible when using it. But, when you type on the Mac you notice it, and the brain just feels good using it. I have no idea if this is a real thing, but it’s similar with scrolling, you touch the track pad and things move. Independent of the load I’m running. Now, that many applications are moving to M1 compatible I’m thinking of replace my windows box with a mini+two external hard drives. I can’t imagine what will happen when they release a new processor. This one does more than enough.

lukevp 5y ago
One of the reasons iOS feels smoother than Android is because the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app. The apps aren’t allowed to introduce jank, so if you’re scrolling a webpage and stuff is loading simultaneously, iOS will be way smoother. I think this is also why they can have such low latency on inputs, for example with the Apple Pencil which is much lower latency than the surface pen or the android stylus. I had a 120hz android phone for over a year, and while the frame rate when scrolling is slightly worse on iOS, overall the OS feels more fluid to me. On a 120hz iPad it’s no comparison. I am speculating here as I don’t know for sure, but I remember iOS started as a derivation of OSX so this may be the case for macOS as well. So I think it’s not your imagination, it’s a different input and render architecture than windows or android.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  >the render loop of the OS is decoupled from the app Can you elaborate on this? If you do too much work on the main thread in iOS, it's going to hang the UI. Isn't the main thread the "render thread"? Do scroll views have some kind of special escape hatch to get off the main thread for continuing to scroll if the main thread is blocked with loading the content?
  - ubertoop 5y ago
    I believe the point is that the "main thread" for your iOS application, is not the main thread of the OS. They're totally decoupled.

enlyth 5y ago

A bit of a tangent but I am quite impressed how Apple's marketing campaign was so effective that they've managed to redefine what PC (personal computer) means

alisonkisk 5y ago
PC originally meant "IBM PC desktop clone". Apple was different because it's hardware wasn't compatible with PC software (for mainstream users).
- enlyth 5y ago
  The only reason I mentioned it is because OP's usage caught me off guard. Most of the time in colloquial usage I've seen PC used as an acronym to mean "computer with Windows installed as the OS", especially when being compared to Apple's products. But in this case it was used as "desktop computer", which sounded strange to me as I consider laptops, however portable, to be personal computers.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hollerith 5y ago
    I agree with all of that -- and regret the recent trend of using "PC" to mean desktop as opposed to laptop -- but what does any of that have to do with Apple's marketing? You don't think Apple's marketing is behind the aforementioned recent trend; do you?
    - enlyth 5y ago
      My understanding was that Apple's marketing created the initial deviation from the original meaning which led to the current one, but yes seeing what other people are commenting now it's not that simple and I was wrong on my assumption
- reaperducer 5y ago

monkaiju 5y ago

I've been on a ThinkPad X1 Extreme for almost 2 years (gen 2 with the i9) and never had any noise or throttling issues. I sit next to my partner (also a dev) and their i9 macbook pro regularly spins up then throttles the cpu a ton. We've seen it regularly throttle down by 70-82% (measured with pmset -g thermlog) Just saying, I definitely get the feeling Apple values form over function. His biggest issues happen when he's using Docker (the annoying Docker for Desktop version) but I also use Docker all day and dont have any issues...

porknubbins 5y ago

As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback to a more mechanical age, like a manual transmission vehicle where you can judge when to shift by engine speed.

wumpus 5y ago
... and then you get an electric car, and the only time you have any auditory feedback is when it's very hot out and you supercharge.
thelopa 5y ago
When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.
- laurent92 5y ago
  And it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)
  - samplatt 5y ago
    I could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.
- fomine3 5y ago
  At the same time, we are losing disk access LED.
skavi 5y ago

grumpyprole 5y ago

I think this is an Intel "feature". They can't upsell you faster CPU's without trading heat and noise. Glad to see Apple is following a much more sensible approach.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Rd6n6 5y ago

I just looked up some benchmarks. Apparently a m1 is 2-4x faster at many tasks than my wife’s gaming desktop from 5 years ago. It’s comparable in many benchmarks to my ryzen cpu as well? What’s the catch?

Retr0id 5y ago
The only real catch is that you're currently limited to only 16GB of RAM.
- minusf 5y ago
  and big sur and up... unfortunately the quality of the OS is not keeping up with the quality of the hw.
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    How so?
    - minusf 5y ago
      let's not go there :} life is too short to compile bug lists for macos.
      - toxik 5y ago
        I feel like the critical bug list being short is basically THE reason power users would go for Apple laptops.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    The best OS of existing.
    - seanalexander 5y ago
      Surely you're joking here.

alienalp 5y ago

M1 mac is also my first Apple product. And now i bought magic mouse 2 and fuck Apple. It is like laggy.

bdcravens 5y ago
The default mouse settings are always too slow for my liking; I always speed up the tracking speed. I haven't used a Magic Mouse on a regular basis for a while (had both the v1 and v2), but once I updated the setting, it was as snappy as I wanted.
- alienalp 5y ago
  I already set tracking speed to highest but this is really one of the worst mouse i have ever used. Only reason i am still using it my other bluetooth mouse is seriously laggy when i use with m1 mac.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Is this a "hardware have gotten fast enough" situation? My latest laptop (Ryzen 7) takes a lot of beating before putting the fans at an audible speed. I've never seen this happen in laptops before either. (But well, my last one didn't slow down either, it just started making some noise.)

johnebgd 5y ago
My Core i9 laptop has fans on just about as soon as it boots.

forrestthewoods 5y ago

Same. The problem is now my work desktop is a 32-core Threadripper w/ huge GPU and way too much ram. It’s kinda nice knowing that if my computer ever slows down it’s because of bad programming and not having a too slow computer. I want to like laptops. I really really do. But they’re slower, have bad keyboards, and have tiny screens. Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. That said, I can’t fricken wait to see Apple build a beast of a desktop with their silicon. I just really really hope the GPU doesn’t suck. Lack of good GPU on Mac is a huge problem for certain lines of work.

moreira 5y ago
> Or I’m docked and the fact that it’s a laptop isn’t meaningful. You might be underestimating the value in that. I’ve been working off of MacBooks since 2011, and for almost all of that time I’ve had them docked and hooked up to multiple monitors, and working just like a desktop. But if I ever need to go anywhere, meet a client, travel, go to another room/office, I just unplug and go. If power goes, I don’t lose anything, the laptop is still running. Whatever happens, it’s all there with me, always. It’s not as comfortable when it’s on laptop mode but it’s better to have a less comfortable experience than not having it available at all. It’s a portable desktop. And I love it. But yeah if you’re looking for workstation-level specs, then yeah, a laptop is never going to be enough.
- forrestthewoods 5y ago
  My primary home computer for several years was a docked laptop. Overall I was disappointed and went back to a full desktop. > If power goes, I don’t lose anything, the laptop is still running. What kind of monster doesn’t use a UPS!? =P I mostly work in games and VR. Maybe someday there will be a laptop that doesn’t suck for game development. Sadly that day has not yet come.
- qudat 5y ago
  I have a desktop dev machine that I ssh into via zerotier and it has been a fantastic dev experience. As a result my entire world needs to be in the terminal, which for me, was pretty easy (tmux+neovim). `tmux a` and I'm right back where I left off and it doesn't matter what front-end computer I use. I can now use my ipad as my front-end cpu which is a great in-the-bed machine. The only catch is I need to make sure my dev machine is online. Now with neovim 0.5 with support for LSP and treesitter, neovim is on par with visual studio code.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

The uncomfortable heat/fan issue is what ultimately pushed me over the edge to become familiar with Kubernetes. Now I just offload the compute heavy tasks to a desktop in a different room.

seanalexander 5y ago

I'm eager to see what can be done with the desktop tower workstation post-M1. I don't think anyone actually wants to have a slim laptop and use "the cloud" to "download more memory" but here we are in 2021 where people are saying 16gb max ram is good.

skydhash 5y ago
Tell that to my friends whose main softwares are chrome, office and vlc.
SilverRed 5y ago
>but here we are in 2021 where people are saying 16gb max ram is good. No amount of memory will be good. The problem is not memory but inefficient programming. Desktop apps consume as much memory as possible. The only way to have a good experience is to have more memory than the average user. But then the average user catches up and you need even more memory. Right now I have ms teams running in the background purely to receive notifications and it is using over 1GB of memory and 8% of my cpu to show me a notification window when I get a message. MS teams on my 3gb ram iphone does exactly the same job and uses no memory and no power because it doesn't even have to run to show me notifications. I have 32GB on my laptop and I am only just above the average now but in a few years electron will have ballooned so far that 64 is the new minimum. While my 3gb iphone and 8gb ipad feel more than enough.

gerdesj 5y ago

"the fans go crazy, the laptop is hot to the touch and everything slows down." So you installed Gentoo, what's your problem? 8)

jrockway 5y ago

> a well cooled desktop just doesn't have these issues Kind of depends on the steady state and your target turbo frequency. I have my fans basically idle when temperatures permit it, but aggressively ramp them to full speed to keep the CPU as cool as possible so as to allow the frequency to scale up beyond spec. This results in a similar effect as a laptop fan -- under heavy load, the machine is loud. I don't really have a problem with this, at idle my computer is using ~100W, at full load, it's nearly 1000W. That's a lot of heat to get rid of, and it has to go somewhere. Having a large water cooling loop can help with the noise, but since I really only use the CPU that heavily for bursts that measure in the minutes at worse, I think it's fine. It doesn't make me anxious but I do kind of like the feedback that things are under load. (I have the ramp-up time set pretty long, so something like "go build" that only uses all 32 CPUs for a second doesn't really trigger anything. There's enough inertia to prevent that from raising temps much.)

tbrock 5y ago

I dont understand why they sell the pro. The touchbar is rubbish and the air has 99% the same performance. Yeah the pro can go faster for longer without throttle but its heavier and doesnt have those physical f-keys. Its more expensive too… not sure why anyone would buy it over the air. Two more usb-c but you can only hook in one external monitor! Also 200 more nits on screen but… is it really that important? I cant wait for the 14/16 with the m1x. These are already barn burners.

cletus 5y ago
The Touch Bar makes me so angry. Why? Because it's a less reliable laptop with a worse keyboard that exists for no other reason than to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macs. That's it. Go back 5+ years and you had the (2010+) Macbook Air, which was fantastic. A good compromise of size and power at a really low price. Like competitors just couldn't compete. The only problem? By 2015 or so the display was pretty outdated. It needed a thinner bezel and a retina display and it would've been perfect. But no, Johnny Ive came along with his war of thinness and foisted the butterfly keyboard on us and added the Touch Bar to increase the price. There's no other reason for it to exist.
SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
Obviously, to people who choose to pay for it. I produce video news and the Touch Bar is integral to my workflow. Just because something is not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s useless.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  The touch bar should have been in addition to the function row really. On the 16" mac there is plenty of space for both. Few people hate the touch bar, they hate the lack of function keys.
  - baggy_trough 5y ago
    I hate it because it’s too easy to accidentally press a “key” and trigger some potentially large scale event.

_nobody_243212 5y ago

Well, depends of course on your Windows Laptop. I had a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with no heat or noise issues at all. Now a Surface Pro 7 with also no heat issues. It's not the fastest around, but for a tablet really impressive (typical dev setup running Postgres in Docker, Goland, Webstorm with no problems). Still I likely buy a M1 Air soon. Not because of the M1 CPU, but because it's almost half the price of a comparable Thinkpad. And I hate the bloatware shipped with basically every non-Microsoft Windows laptop.

code_duck 5y ago

Sitting in front of a laptop, the fan coming on at max speed makes me feel like I am stressing the machine and need to be gentle with it. When using the same machine through VNC I feel completely insulated from that effect. It’s a more pleasant feeling. I’ve considered getting a desktop and just using my Macs as remote terminals.

cosmojg 5y ago

The hardware is beautiful! As soon as it becomes trivial to delete macOS and install Linux (with reasonable support), I'm buying an M1 Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I'm in too deep with the Linux ecosystem to switch over before then. Fortunately, Asahi Linux appears to be making fast progress, and there are even (spurious) rumors of official support on behalf of Apple Inc.

bjoli 5y ago

My old clevo laptop has an i7 in it with fans that sound like hair dryers. It never throttles. I would never buy a laptop where throttling was a presumed solution to thermal issues, because I want to get work done. Pre-m1 macbooks were awful. Even worse than top of the line dell laptops. I have always felt like a minority for expecting a 2k laptop to actually be able to get work done. If I would ever be able to run Linux as a first class citizen on an M1 (not going to happen) I would buy one in a flash. I have been playing with my mother in law's MacBook air and the thing is pretty darn amazing.

quenix 5y ago
FYI, the one M1 MacBook which throttles under heavy load is the MacBook Air, which is actually a 1k laptop ($999). The MacBook Pro has fans and basically never throttles as I understand from others.
- drevil-v2 5y ago
  Absolutely untrue. My M1 Air does not skip a beat at all even under sustained load. Barely gets warm.
  - quenix 5y ago
    I know. I have an M1 and and it hardly ever throttles. I was making a point to the OP though
  - zaudo 5y ago
    It’s not untrue. It has been demonstrated in dozens of reviews that the M1 Air throttles under heavy load. Just because it hasn’t done so for your workload, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening for others. Besides, when it throttles, it’s not a huge slowdown, so most people wouldn’t notice it “skipping a beat” anyway.
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    An MS Teams video call with 4+ people will get my M1 Air very toasty (because Teams is shit). However, it's not as hot as my old 16" MBP got (which would get too hot to have on your lap), it doesn't noticeably get slower, and it's of course totally silent.

SergeAx 5y ago

There is actually one reason to do a software development on a laptop: if I don't have a good enough place for work. Laptop is essentially a set of compromises: between computing power and battery life, between screen size and weight, between sense of pressing keys and thikness, between using mouse and forgetting to take one on the go.

jangrahul 5y ago

My experience is just the opposite, when I run even to projects on intelliJ on a mac m1 8gb, the whole system just starts lagging to the point that I cant even scroll the code. This has not been a good experience for me.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
That's probably because 8GB is not enough to run Intellij comfortably and the system starts swapping things in and out of memory constantly. Another thing that happens when intellij uses up its heap is garbage collects including frequent stop the world varieties of that. The solution is to configure it to have more heap. Either way, that's a memory problem and not a CPU problem. 8GB for a development laptop is not a great idea in 2021. I've been using 16GB since 2013. I'll get more with my next laptop, which may or may not end up being the 16" M2?
jmkni 5y ago
There was a bug with Android Studio (and I think IntelliJ as well) on M1, not sure if there still is. You can fix it by setting 'Prefer Tabs' to never - https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jtbl4m/has_anyone_updated_to_macos_big_sur_and_is/gc5s29d/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/jtbl4m/has_anyo...

api 5y ago

The only thing I've been able to do to get an M1 to spin up the fan noticeably and get warm is to max out both the CPU and the GPU by playing Minecraft Java in a huge world or running other 3D-heavy things. The same things on an Intel laptop will turn it into what my friend comically calls a "weenie roaster" (for what it does when it's on your lap). Things like JetBrains CLion don't even make the M1 warm. That will make any Intel laptop start cookin'.