7 ms·

While there’s plenty of “told you so” -> “no you didn’t” being flung around here quite childishly, my read on this is: Apple surprised people by what these act

While there’s plenty of “told you so” -> “no you didn’t” being flung around here quite childishly, my read on this is: Apple surprised people by what these actually turned out to be. They’re better than folk expected. We’ll have to wait and see how that plays out in the long run, but I don’t really think it’s something to get worked up over. Yay, new cpus that don’t suck on a laptop that doesn’t suck. I know it’s a low bar to clear, but it still makes me happy.

genewitch 5y ago
I have a 4800H with a 1070 mobile GPU, 32GB ram, 512 nvme and 1TB sshd. I paid about $1000 all in for that ($800 laptop plus ram and storage). The m1 stuff has "tensor" cores and allegedly a faster GPU - that is, it's faster at some things my GPU handles for me, such as h264/h265 encoding. Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? Ignore the 140W PSU!
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? You probably shouldn't. Your laptop is more than adequate for your tasks. It may even be better in some respects (you can play some AAA games if you want).
- qaq 5y ago
  well I would guess screen is way nicer on MBP which might be something one cares about having to stare at it all day (not saying you should switch)
  - qayxc 5y ago
    If the machine is used primarily with external monitors that point becomes much less important, though. Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag. You can get a nice portable monitor and a very good stationary monitor for just the price difference.
    - qaq 5y ago
      Thats def a personal choice for me it def. is :)
    - matwood 5y ago
      > Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag For me, yes! It's how interact with the machine for hours and hours each day. This is also why the keyboards over the last few years were such a travesty - they are the primary input method.
- brainbag 5y ago
  That seems like a lot of laptop for sub-$1000! Where did you buy/spec it?
- _kbh_ 5y ago
  The M1 Max / Pro is likely faster in every way compared to the $1000 laptop you bought, mostly by significant amounts.
  - qayxc 5y ago
    It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?" 1. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space-gray-8-core-cpu-14-core-gpu-512gb# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space... configured with 32GiB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2599
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      > It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?" Wrong question. You're comparing different values. Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference.
      - elzbardico 5y ago
        Exactly. If your time is expensive (as it is for most senior developers in first world markets), even 15% more productivity could easily pay the price premium in very little time.
      - qayxc 5y ago
        That depends entirely on the circumstances (whether the performance increase of the local machine can get you that, that is). It's really a very specific niche that's targeted here: namely mobile(!) video editing and -production. There are very few use cases these days that benefit from a high-performance mobile (cannot stress this enough) solution. So unless your specific use case benefits at all from local processing power, I'd argue that it'd be hard to even get a 5% productivity increase that cannot be reached by other means (better/bigger display, more ergonomic peripherals, optimised workflow, etc.). I'm not denying the fact that even a 5% improvement may justify the price difference. I'm just questioning whether the improvement in performance can meaningfully contribute to that in most use cases.
- ido 5y ago
  for me the biggest reason is that i can't (locally) compile to ios on anything but a mac.
- jbc1 5y ago
  Macbook trackpads blow all others out of the water. At least they did up until two years ago when I was in the market last.
  - toqy 5y ago
    This is still the main thing that sends me back to mac every time I try to switch to a linux daily driver.
- Slippery_John 5y ago
  Hey, if what you have works for you then by all means keep using it. Less e-waste is always a good thing. If this new machine can save you time, maybe it's worth an upgrade. My last upgrade brought my compile times down more than five minutes, which makes it absolutely worth the cost. It looks like one of these new MBPs might do that again, so I'm going to get one. Another thing to consider is that it may be marginally easier on you to develop on an ARM machine if you're planning on deploying to ARM servers, though this depends heavily on your workload.
- dayvid 5y ago
  From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time. I bought a Zephyrus G14 a year ago with high stats, but I often get weird issues where I have to restart my computer or find some fix online. And there are some build/design quirks that are a little annoying. I already want to replace it. I also have a Macbook Pro from 2015 that I only switched because I wanted a better GPU. It still works fine and looks great. I don't think the G14 will be so great after 6 years.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    > From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time. I agree. If you know how to hack, of course hardware lasts longer. I think i have a Motorola PPC[0] mac somewhere that boots BSD [0] totally 603e
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    My wife has been using Macbook Pro 15" 2015 that we bought in 2016 rather heavily. The only significant problem is overheating due to dust accumulation that requires to bring it a local non-apple repair shop for cleaning once in a year. Another problem is that after 4 years the speakers started to produce clicking sounds and had to be replaced. It was about 100 Euro in the same shop. We also have Macbook 13" 2018. The famous butterfly keyboard on it got broken after a year. It was repaired cost-free, but it took for Apple reseller 2 weeks to do that. And then overheating was terrible even after a dust cleanup. It was necessary to use a cooling pad under a heavy use. When I got a newer laptop on my job I tried to sell it for a reasonable price, but it turned out the resale value was much lower than I expected. So we keep it as a sort-of spare/guest machine.
- abc_lisper 5y ago
  Wrong comparison . You are comparing old M1 (that laptop is around 1000 bucks). Here’s the comparison with M1 max https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-max-vs-amd-ryzen-7-4800h https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-max-vs-amd-ry...
jpgvm 5y ago
I think people are excited because it's been many years since any large manufacturer has shown they care about things professionals care about in laptops. IBM used to take care of us but after they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo it really wasn't ever the same. Apple used to take care of us but then the "March of Thin" happened. There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al. There are also some near-misses from Dell with their XPS line, they designed them for consumer and tried to adapt them. This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC). So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  A similar thing happened with the Mac Pro. The old 2012 era Mac Pro was much loved. Then the "trash can" came out which was form over function. Then Apple eventually admitted their mistake and went back to a tower design. Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    I wish they had went for a design that scaled down better with the Mac Pro. It's an amazing machine and it's great for professional video production which is it's reasons d'etre but it would have been nice if it scaled down well enough for software engineers. Sort of like how the old G5 did, it was an "pro" machine, rather than a "professional video editing rig".
    - zarzavat 5y ago
      I suspect the M1 Pro will eventually find its way into a Mac Mini since they certainly have the thermal headroom for it, and the new Mac Pro will get some kind of M1 Supermax.
ksec 5y ago
It is always interesting to look back. It is clear Intel barely made any improvement since 2016. And the jump from 2014 to 2016 wasn't that spectacular in terms of IPC. PCI-E also happened to stuck at PCI-E 3.0 for a long time. DDR (5) improvement slowed to be point all resources went to LPDDR. ( Although one could argue LPDDR was more in demand ). DRAM and NAND price rise because of Supply and Demand cycle for 3 years. Crypto causes GPU price hike. HDD price only went back to normal in 2016 after the Thailand flood. And HDD roadmap such as HAMR, MAMR were all 5+ years behind. Wireless 802.11ax suffered 3-4 years delay compared to original schedule. Took a long time to agree on NBase-T. We basically have a 5+ year gap of little improvement in PC Industry. ( Comparatively speaking ).
- laurent92 5y ago
  In parallel: 7 year gap, during which Apple also experimented with the trashcan, the emoji touchbar, the shallow keyboard, the non-magsafe non-SD connectors. It was like a pause on personal computing. 7-year gap from 2013 to 2020 where social media became political machines, and all companies became cloud-first.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Oh Yes. It is interesting to look back now. Strange decade indeed. Unless you are in US and the financial disaster hit hard, then I think I look back in 2010 that 2000s were comparatively uneventful.

genewitch 5y ago

I have a 4800H with a 1070 mobile GPU, 32GB ram, 512 nvme and 1TB sshd. I paid about $1000 all in for that ($800 laptop plus ram and storage). The m1 stuff has "tensor" cores and allegedly a faster GPU - that is, it's faster at some things my GPU handles for me, such as h264/h265 encoding. Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? Ignore the 140W PSU!

perryizgr8 5y ago
> Why should I get rid of my laptop and use the apple instead? You probably shouldn't. Your laptop is more than adequate for your tasks. It may even be better in some respects (you can play some AAA games if you want).
qaq 5y ago
well I would guess screen is way nicer on MBP which might be something one cares about having to stare at it all day (not saying you should switch)
- qayxc 5y ago
  If the machine is used primarily with external monitors that point becomes much less important, though. Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag. You can get a nice portable monitor and a very good stationary monitor for just the price difference.
  - qaq 5y ago
    Thats def a personal choice for me it def. is :)
  - matwood 5y ago
    > Another question is whether the undoubtedly much better screen is worth the >2x price tag For me, yes! It's how interact with the machine for hours and hours each day. This is also why the keyboards over the last few years were such a travesty - they are the primary input method.
brainbag 5y ago
That seems like a lot of laptop for sub-$1000! Where did you buy/spec it?
_kbh_ 5y ago
The M1 Max / Pro is likely faster in every way compared to the $1000 laptop you bought, mostly by significant amounts.
- qayxc 5y ago
  It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?" 1. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space-gray-8-core-cpu-14-core-gpu-512gb# https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space... configured with 32GiB RAM and 1TB SSD for $2599
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    > It also costs at least 2.6x as much¹ so the question becomes "do you get a 2.6x productivity gain as well?" Wrong question. You're comparing different values. Even 5-10% productivity gain can offset the 2.6x difference.
    - elzbardico 5y ago
      Exactly. If your time is expensive (as it is for most senior developers in first world markets), even 15% more productivity could easily pay the price premium in very little time.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      That depends entirely on the circumstances (whether the performance increase of the local machine can get you that, that is). It's really a very specific niche that's targeted here: namely mobile(!) video editing and -production. There are very few use cases these days that benefit from a high-performance mobile (cannot stress this enough) solution. So unless your specific use case benefits at all from local processing power, I'd argue that it'd be hard to even get a 5% productivity increase that cannot be reached by other means (better/bigger display, more ergonomic peripherals, optimised workflow, etc.). I'm not denying the fact that even a 5% improvement may justify the price difference. I'm just questioning whether the improvement in performance can meaningfully contribute to that in most use cases.
ido 5y ago
for me the biggest reason is that i can't (locally) compile to ios on anything but a mac.
jbc1 5y ago
Macbook trackpads blow all others out of the water. At least they did up until two years ago when I was in the market last.
- toqy 5y ago
  This is still the main thing that sends me back to mac every time I try to switch to a linux daily driver.
Slippery_John 5y ago
Hey, if what you have works for you then by all means keep using it. Less e-waste is always a good thing. If this new machine can save you time, maybe it's worth an upgrade. My last upgrade brought my compile times down more than five minutes, which makes it absolutely worth the cost. It looks like one of these new MBPs might do that again, so I'm going to get one. Another thing to consider is that it may be marginally easier on you to develop on an ARM machine if you're planning on deploying to ARM servers, though this depends heavily on your workload.
dayvid 5y ago
From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time. I bought a Zephyrus G14 a year ago with high stats, but I often get weird issues where I have to restart my computer or find some fix online. And there are some build/design quirks that are a little annoying. I already want to replace it. I also have a Macbook Pro from 2015 that I only switched because I wanted a better GPU. It still works fine and looks great. I don't think the G14 will be so great after 6 years.
- genewitch 5y ago
  > From my experience, Apple has a premium on overall quality and longevity. It's hard to quantify or benchmark, but it adds up over time. I agree. If you know how to hack, of course hardware lasts longer. I think i have a Motorola PPC[0] mac somewhere that boots BSD [0] totally 603e
- _0w8t 5y ago
  My wife has been using Macbook Pro 15" 2015 that we bought in 2016 rather heavily. The only significant problem is overheating due to dust accumulation that requires to bring it a local non-apple repair shop for cleaning once in a year. Another problem is that after 4 years the speakers started to produce clicking sounds and had to be replaced. It was about 100 Euro in the same shop. We also have Macbook 13" 2018. The famous butterfly keyboard on it got broken after a year. It was repaired cost-free, but it took for Apple reseller 2 weeks to do that. And then overheating was terrible even after a dust cleanup. It was necessary to use a cooling pad under a heavy use. When I got a newer laptop on my job I tried to sell it for a reasonable price, but it turned out the resale value was much lower than I expected. So we keep it as a sort-of spare/guest machine.
abc_lisper 5y ago
Wrong comparison . You are comparing old M1 (that laptop is around 1000 bucks). Here’s the comparison with M1 max https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-max-vs-amd-ryzen-7-4800h https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-max-vs-amd-ry...

jpgvm 5y ago

I think people are excited because it's been many years since any large manufacturer has shown they care about things professionals care about in laptops. IBM used to take care of us but after they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo it really wasn't ever the same. Apple used to take care of us but then the "March of Thin" happened. There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al. There are also some near-misses from Dell with their XPS line, they designed them for consumer and tried to adapt them. This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC). So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.

zarzavat 5y ago
A similar thing happened with the Mac Pro. The old 2012 era Mac Pro was much loved. Then the "trash can" came out which was form over function. Then Apple eventually admitted their mistake and went back to a tower design. Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.
- jpgvm 5y ago
  I wish they had went for a design that scaled down better with the Mac Pro. It's an amazing machine and it's great for professional video production which is it's reasons d'etre but it would have been nice if it scaled down well enough for software engineers. Sort of like how the old G5 did, it was an "pro" machine, rather than a "professional video editing rig".
  - zarzavat 5y ago
    I suspect the M1 Pro will eventually find its way into a Mac Mini since they certainly have the thermal headroom for it, and the new Mac Pro will get some kind of M1 Supermax.

ksec 5y ago

It is always interesting to look back. It is clear Intel barely made any improvement since 2016. And the jump from 2014 to 2016 wasn't that spectacular in terms of IPC. PCI-E also happened to stuck at PCI-E 3.0 for a long time. DDR (5) improvement slowed to be point all resources went to LPDDR. ( Although one could argue LPDDR was more in demand ). DRAM and NAND price rise because of Supply and Demand cycle for 3 years. Crypto causes GPU price hike. HDD price only went back to normal in 2016 after the Thailand flood. And HDD roadmap such as HAMR, MAMR were all 5+ years behind. Wireless 802.11ax suffered 3-4 years delay compared to original schedule. Took a long time to agree on NBase-T. We basically have a 5+ year gap of little improvement in PC Industry. ( Comparatively speaking ).

laurent92 5y ago
In parallel: 7 year gap, during which Apple also experimented with the trashcan, the emoji touchbar, the shallow keyboard, the non-magsafe non-SD connectors. It was like a pause on personal computing. 7-year gap from 2013 to 2020 where social media became political machines, and all companies became cloud-first.
- ksec 5y ago
  Oh Yes. It is interesting to look back now. Strange decade indeed. Unless you are in US and the financial disaster hit hard, then I think I look back in 2010 that 2000s were comparatively uneventful.