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Unity is slow on any machine. With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. It reminds me of the 64-bit ARM hype when someone benchmaked encryption (because A

by zibzab 5y ago

Unity is slow on any machine. With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. It reminds me of the 64-bit ARM hype when someone benchmaked encryption (because ARMv8 has AES instructions) and everyone were made to belive that the new iPhone would be 3-4 times faster.

BoorishBears 5y ago
I've seen little to no hype based on synthetic benchmarks. M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage. My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling.
  - kllrnohj 5y ago
    And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....
    - gcanyon 5y ago
      100 watts? That implies that with serious use you could burn the battery to zero in an hour. Apple's graphs don't show more than 60 watts at peak, and no one is reporting heavy fan output even when running extended benchmarks.
      - sz4kerto 5y ago
        There are reviews where they actually burn through the battery in an hour. This is not surprising: the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts, plus the display consumes tens of watts in HDR mode.
        masklinn 5y ago
        > the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.
        sz4kerto 5y ago
        You're correct (I couldn't look it up and wanted a safe figure that still proves my point :) )
      - aroman 5y ago
        1. Yes, about 100 watts. From Anandtech[0]: > Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power. 2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work. 3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
      - em500 5y ago
        The 14-inch MBP with M1 Pro (not Max) burns 69W under full load (including GPU), so it does run through its 70Wh battery in 1 hour and 9 minutes[1]. (The 16-inch Notebookcheck review is not published yet.) [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-Pro-Laptop-in-Review-How-much-Pro-do-you-get-with-the-base-model.576665.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.
    - aroman 5y ago
      Totally agree. And so many of the changes that people are enjoying about the new MacBooks (namely reverting Apple's failed experiments like TouchBar, only USB-C ports, and the butterfly keyboard) were all introduced alongside Apple Silicon. Not saying I blame them — it makes a ton of sense from a business/product marketing perspective, especially bundling the new display too.
    - mnadkvlb 5y ago
      I am sorry, i have a 10th gen dell precision for work. an absolute horror. if i am working on anything development, the fans are just so loud. absolute crap battery life. if i run same vscode dotnetcore workload on m1 air, that thing lasts atleast 10hours on battery and no heat whatsover. better, the compile time is usually faster than 3800 bucks worth dell precision (on a 1200 bucks laptop)
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's…. The previous setup was closer to 200W SoC (100W each for CPU and GPU) than 100W total.
    - BoorishBears 5y ago
      Lol what is this vaguely accusatory tone? First off the M1 Air has no fans. Second the MBP 16" was the one with the improved cooling, so it wasn't throttled randomly by using the wrong charging port. And finally the whole reason the M1s are so well cooled is there's no 100W SoC, or 200W probably when you consider the additional dedicated GPU in my 16". My M1 has a 10W TDP! 10! I don't think the GPU alone in my 16" could have been cooled by a solution handling 10W. - Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, my 16" would have had higher wall power than my M1 Air by far. Even the M1 Mac Mini maxed out at like 30W from the wall: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png And my M1 has a lower rated version of that (10W vs 24W) For desktops I don't care about TDP but a laptop is the exact opposite.
      - kllrnohj 5y ago
        > First off the M1 Air has no fans. Your M1 Air doesn't have an M1 Pro or Max, either, which I clearly specified. Why are you talking about M1 power draw in your response when that's not the SoC in question? > Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, Power in == heat out. CPUs don't do mechanical work, all power is converted to heat. If the 'TDP' is less than peak power draw (and is actually respected in some form), it simply means the SoC is intended to power throttle after a duration. But that's so far not the case for any of the M1's, so claimed TDP is fully irrelevant as it's seemingly not enforced in any way. Which isn't unique to Apple fwiw, AMD's claimed TDPs are equally irrelevant.
        BoorishBears 5y ago
        Because the thread was about why even an M1 not pro is beating a 16"? You're free to bring in your third option which clobbers it even further, but an $800 fanless machine also clobbers it so it's a perfectly valid comparison when trying to counter weird claims that Apple only just now started working on proper cooling... tl;dr: How can you claim the old 16" is only being beat because Apple just now started to care about cooling when a fanless machine also beats it? - Also TDP is an advertising figure but when you're talking about orders of magnitude it's a perfectly fine way to talk about parts as long as you stay consistent in TDP vs wall draw Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W. In both cases it should be obvious why cooling is less of an issue...
    - BigJ1211 5y ago
      The 16" MBP already had the thermal design improvements, there was a firmware issue for a short time after release that caused the thermal throttling, after they fixed that it was on par with the XPS with the same chip. The older ones got really toasty, but it's not like the XPS faired better in the thermal design department. Both these had their own quirks, (I returned the XPS I got from my place of work twice because I couldn't stand the insane amount of coil whine) Been running the 2019 MBP since it was released and it's been a pretty pleasant experience overal. Only issue I've had was with external displays drawing too much power, which was fixed by forcing the refresh rate to 59.98Hz.
  - pram 5y ago
    What a load of shit lol. The XPS 15 9570 has similar throttling issues, down to the same fixes as a MBP 16 (undervolting, disabling HT, putting pads on the VRMs, redoing the paste)
  - f6v 5y ago
    > Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling. One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.
    - MikusR 5y ago
      One visit to Louis Rossmann YouTube channel Louis was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying Apple laptops. It's almost like people that have no problems don't go around saying that (except for Apple users)
      - EricE 5y ago
        I love Louis, but a lot of his complaints are overblown. Not all of them mind you - I agree with him far more than I don't.
  - iSnow 5y ago
    I was considering an XPS and read through the Dell subreddits. People were constantly complaining how their machine was throttled and even opened it up to apply better cooling paste, undervolted it and so on. I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...
    - PolCPP 5y ago
      The 13" one (9310) is a freaking toaster. Keyboard can easily reach 43ºC+ on the left side
  - ssijak 5y ago
    The one thing where M processors absolutely excel compared to competition is what you call "general responsiveness in UI", and it is not just the hardware but how they optimised it with their OS because now they have control over the whole stack.
  - joconde 5y ago
    My XPS' thermals are a disaster. After 5 minutes of any remotely intensive game, the UI became a slideshow, unusable even for basic browsing for a few minutes after closing the game. I hope they improved in 2019, mine was only from a year before that.
midrus 5y ago
It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.
- Maakuth 5y ago
  Saying "absolutely zero heat" is not effective in refuting claims of fanboyism. By quick google these chips have 90W maximum TDP. That is not zero.
- aroman 5y ago
  Do you have one of the M1 Pros? Mine very much does gets hot and I can definitely hear the fans when I'm building a project, but both fronts are certainly improved vs the Intel Macs. Honestly, it gets about as hot and as loud as the Intel version, just far less frequently.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Huh, I made a comment about this issue just the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835) and had 5 commentators telling me that it has now been fixed, almost made me order a M1. But now you're saying it actually still runs as hot as before?
    - Toutouxc 5y ago
      You need to rephrase your question. Does M1 (any M1) still hit 90+°C at full utilization? Yes it does. Does the machine itself get warm/hot when working hard? The Air, yes (plain M1 but no fan). The 13" Pro, not really (plain M1 and has fan). The larger Pros, yes (have fans, but more powerful M1s). Do the machines get unbearably hot? Depends on what you consider unbearable. For some people, apparently not.
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    I have a m1 max and before it a 2020 m1, I still use an Intel i9 for work. With the M1s my fans only go on if Im gaming or using apps that are CPU intensive through Rosetta 2. My intel machine sounds like a leaf blower by comparison To get the most energy efficiency out of the M1s is to use binaries/programs that have been specifically compiled for the M1.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine. You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache. They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. I mean, yes, somewhat, in (almost comically) high power desktop configurations, depending on which benchmark you believe. This is of cold comfort to anyone who wants a fast laptop, though.
- f6v 5y ago
  > You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    Apple selling you mid-range-3-year-old-intel CPUs (that are known to thermal throttle quite badly) at 50% markup, then robbing you slightly less hard on a product is not jaw dropping, it's merely you falling for their marketing three times in a row.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Out of curiosity which laptop should I be looking at if I dont want to be robbed by the apple on a M1?
nvarsj 5y ago
Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would affect my productivity.
- ebawho44 5y ago
  https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
  - nvarsj 5y ago
    Yeah I'm familiar with what is in OS X, I have had to use it a few times for work. The fullscreen approach is very clunky. And the window animations are incredibly slow. I'm used to dynamically moving windows around and tiling things quickly. I tried using yabai but it was so slow and buggy there was no point. I think magnet/rectangle helps but it is still a subpar experience.
    - howinteresting 5y ago
      I tried getting Macs to work for years with yabai etc and came to the same conclusion as you. It's garbage for my workflows. Linux is a million times better.
      - nvarsj 5y ago
        I decided to get a fully spec'd out Thinkpad X13 AMD 2nd gen instead - 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, 8/16 cores, 16:10 2k screen. All for the whopping price of 1k GBP, a third the price of a similarly spec'd MBP.
- mrctte 5y ago
  This app changes everything https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12
Zababa 5y ago
> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.
- Filligree 5y ago
  They pretty much do. The M1 macbook is, unironically, the first laptop I've had that doesn't have any glitches. It's less powerful than a modern desktop, but not by much. More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    > More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail. UI scaling is also a big one. I have a Dell XPS 15 in 2014/2015 with Windows 8.1 and the UI scaling wasn't great.

by zibzab 5y ago

BoorishBears 5y ago

I've seen little to no hype based on synthetic benchmarks. M1 macs are just really damn fast for daily usage. My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" out of the water in every conceivable way. I'd elaborate but there seriously isn't any dimension of it that isn't an improvement. Maybe the smaller display?

perryizgr8 5y ago
> My M1 Macbook Air blows my 16" That is the issue though. Intel macbooks were notoriously badly cooled. That hurts the performance a lot. If all you have used is that, of course you find the new one a lot better. However, compared to any other high end Intel/AMD laptop, you would not perceive this much difference in speed. Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling.
- kllrnohj 5y ago
  And weirdly one of the major design changes for the new M1 Pro & Max machines were significantly improved cooling. Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's....
  - gcanyon 5y ago
    100 watts? That implies that with serious use you could burn the battery to zero in an hour. Apple's graphs don't show more than 60 watts at peak, and no one is reporting heavy fan output even when running extended benchmarks.
    - sz4kerto 5y ago
      There are reviews where they actually burn through the battery in an hour. This is not surprising: the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts, plus the display consumes tens of watts in HDR mode.
      - masklinn 5y ago
        > the M1 Max model can consume 70 watts In a 16” at least, the Max can go up to 92W per anandtech’s initial test, and display + ram + rest brings the wallplug draw to 120.
        sz4kerto 5y ago
        You're correct (I couldn't look it up and wanted a safe figure that still proves my point :) )
    - aroman 5y ago
      1. Yes, about 100 watts. From Anandtech[0]: > Finally, stressing out both CPU and GPU at the same time, the SoC goes up to 92W package power and 120W wall active power. 2. Yes, you can burn the battery quickly under heavy use. I've killed it easily in about 2 hours during heavy Unity work. 3. When I was doing that, I did experience heavy fan output, about as loud and as hot as my 2018 15" MacBook Pro. After the heavy utilization stopped, it cooled down much more quickly than the older Intel machine. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
    - em500 5y ago
      The 14-inch MBP with M1 Pro (not Max) burns 69W under full load (including GPU), so it does run through its 70Wh battery in 1 hour and 9 minutes[1]. (The 16-inch Notebookcheck review is not published yet.) [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-Pro-Laptop-in-Review-How-much-Pro-do-you-get-with-the-base-model.576665.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-M1-P... , in the "Battery Runtime" and "Power Consumption" sections near the bottom.
  - aroman 5y ago
    Totally agree. And so many of the changes that people are enjoying about the new MacBooks (namely reverting Apple's failed experiments like TouchBar, only USB-C ports, and the butterfly keyboard) were all introduced alongside Apple Silicon. Not saying I blame them — it makes a ton of sense from a business/product marketing perspective, especially bundling the new display too.
  - mnadkvlb 5y ago
    I am sorry, i have a 10th gen dell precision for work. an absolute horror. if i am working on anything development, the fans are just so loud. absolute crap battery life. if i run same vscode dotnetcore workload on m1 air, that thing lasts atleast 10hours on battery and no heat whatsover. better, the compile time is usually faster than 3800 bucks worth dell precision (on a 1200 bucks laptop)
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Weird how suddenly Apple cared about airflow when it was their 100w SoC in the machine instead of Intel's…. The previous setup was closer to 200W SoC (100W each for CPU and GPU) than 100W total.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    Lol what is this vaguely accusatory tone? First off the M1 Air has no fans. Second the MBP 16" was the one with the improved cooling, so it wasn't throttled randomly by using the wrong charging port. And finally the whole reason the M1s are so well cooled is there's no 100W SoC, or 200W probably when you consider the additional dedicated GPU in my 16". My M1 has a 10W TDP! 10! I don't think the GPU alone in my 16" could have been cooled by a solution handling 10W. - Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, my 16" would have had higher wall power than my M1 Air by far. Even the M1 Mac Mini maxed out at like 30W from the wall: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16252/119344.png And my M1 has a lower rated version of that (10W vs 24W) For desktops I don't care about TDP but a laptop is the exact opposite.
    - kllrnohj 5y ago
      > First off the M1 Air has no fans. Your M1 Air doesn't have an M1 Pro or Max, either, which I clearly specified. Why are you talking about M1 power draw in your response when that's not the SoC in question? > Also note: in your other comments you keep mixing TDP and wall power draw, Power in == heat out. CPUs don't do mechanical work, all power is converted to heat. If the 'TDP' is less than peak power draw (and is actually respected in some form), it simply means the SoC is intended to power throttle after a duration. But that's so far not the case for any of the M1's, so claimed TDP is fully irrelevant as it's seemingly not enforced in any way. Which isn't unique to Apple fwiw, AMD's claimed TDPs are equally irrelevant.
      - BoorishBears 5y ago
        Because the thread was about why even an M1 not pro is beating a 16"? You're free to bring in your third option which clobbers it even further, but an $800 fanless machine also clobbers it so it's a perfectly valid comparison when trying to counter weird claims that Apple only just now started working on proper cooling... tl;dr: How can you claim the old 16" is only being beat because Apple just now started to care about cooling when a fanless machine also beats it? - Also TDP is an advertising figure but when you're talking about orders of magnitude it's a perfectly fine way to talk about parts as long as you stay consistent in TDP vs wall draw Wall draw to wall draw, my M1 Air draws under 30W and beats a 16" drawing over 100W TDP to TDP my M1 is 10W to a 16" closer to 100W. In both cases it should be obvious why cooling is less of an issue...
  - BigJ1211 5y ago
    The 16" MBP already had the thermal design improvements, there was a firmware issue for a short time after release that caused the thermal throttling, after they fixed that it was on par with the XPS with the same chip. The older ones got really toasty, but it's not like the XPS faired better in the thermal design department. Both these had their own quirks, (I returned the XPS I got from my place of work twice because I couldn't stand the insane amount of coil whine) Been running the 2019 MBP since it was released and it's been a pretty pleasant experience overal. Only issue I've had was with external displays drawing too much power, which was fixed by forcing the refresh rate to 59.98Hz.
- pram 5y ago
  What a load of shit lol. The XPS 15 9570 has similar throttling issues, down to the same fixes as a MBP 16 (undervolting, disabling HT, putting pads on the VRMs, redoing the paste)
- f6v 5y ago
  > Pick up a Macbook 16 and XPS 15 from 2019 with the same specs (CPU/RAM) and the XPS absolutely runs circles around the macbook when it comes to general responsiveness in UI. All because of cooling. One visit to XPS owner’s subreddit was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying it.
  - MikusR 5y ago
    One visit to Louis Rossmann YouTube channel Louis was enough for me to stop entertaining the idea of buying Apple laptops. It's almost like people that have no problems don't go around saying that (except for Apple users)
    - EricE 5y ago
      I love Louis, but a lot of his complaints are overblown. Not all of them mind you - I agree with him far more than I don't.
- iSnow 5y ago
  I was considering an XPS and read through the Dell subreddits. People were constantly complaining how their machine was throttled and even opened it up to apply better cooling paste, undervolted it and so on. I have a hard time believing that one company is doing miracle work in a small and light laptop. That's also true in the other direction - I don't really believe that Apple's machines deliver desktop performance on battery remaining cool and quiet over longer times...
  - PolCPP 5y ago
    The 13" one (9310) is a freaking toaster. Keyboard can easily reach 43ºC+ on the left side
- ssijak 5y ago
  The one thing where M processors absolutely excel compared to competition is what you call "general responsiveness in UI", and it is not just the hardware but how they optimised it with their OS because now they have control over the whole stack.
- joconde 5y ago
  My XPS' thermals are a disaster. After 5 minutes of any remotely intensive game, the UI became a slideshow, unusable even for basic browsing for a few minutes after closing the game. I hope they improved in 2019, mine was only from a year before that.

midrus 5y ago

It is not an "HN thing". These machines are damn fast in day to day use. Absolutely zero heat, zero usage of fans and incredible battery life too. I see a lot of hype and fanboys around here regarding certain techs, but these machines are objectively on a whole different league.

Maakuth 5y ago
Saying "absolutely zero heat" is not effective in refuting claims of fanboyism. By quick google these chips have 90W maximum TDP. That is not zero.
aroman 5y ago
Do you have one of the M1 Pros? Mine very much does gets hot and I can definitely hear the fans when I'm building a project, but both fronts are certainly improved vs the Intel Macs. Honestly, it gets about as hot and as loud as the Intel version, just far less frequently.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Huh, I made a comment about this issue just the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988835) and had 5 commentators telling me that it has now been fixed, almost made me order a M1. But now you're saying it actually still runs as hot as before?
  - Toutouxc 5y ago
    You need to rephrase your question. Does M1 (any M1) still hit 90+°C at full utilization? Yes it does. Does the machine itself get warm/hot when working hard? The Air, yes (plain M1 but no fan). The 13" Pro, not really (plain M1 and has fan). The larger Pros, yes (have fans, but more powerful M1s). Do the machines get unbearably hot? Depends on what you consider unbearable. For some people, apparently not.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  I have a m1 max and before it a 2020 m1, I still use an Intel i9 for work. With the M1s my fans only go on if Im gaming or using apps that are CPU intensive through Rosetta 2. My intel machine sounds like a leaf blower by comparison To get the most energy efficiency out of the M1s is to use binaries/programs that have been specifically compiled for the M1.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. The main thing driving this is that people are comparing a new M1 to their Intel Mac laptops with processors from ~2016 and then naturally it's a marked improvement because it's being compared to a five year old machine. You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system and they're competitive. They win some and lose others. Much was made about the M1 Max taking the single thread performance crown; for less than a month. Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. It's plausible that it will be AMD's again in a couple months when we get Zen 3 with 3D V-Cache. They're all within single digit percentages of each other and the winner is whoever released their top end processor most recently.

rsynnott 5y ago
> Golden Cove from Intel just took it back. I mean, yes, somewhat, in (almost comically) high power desktop configurations, depending on which benchmark you believe. This is of cold comfort to anyone who wants a fast laptop, though.
f6v 5y ago
> You compare them to a modern Intel or AMD system I compared my 2014 MBP to 2019 MBP and there was no marked difference. It was running hot and eating battery very fast. 2019 Intel Mac and 2020 M1 Mac are two completely different animals. Also, the price drop for a better-performing machine was jaw-dropping.
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  Apple selling you mid-range-3-year-old-intel CPUs (that are known to thermal throttle quite badly) at 50% markup, then robbing you slightly less hard on a product is not jaw dropping, it's merely you falling for their marketing three times in a row.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Out of curiosity which laptop should I be looking at if I dont want to be robbed by the apple on a M1?

nvarsj 5y ago

Don't you think it's deserved? I haven't seriously used a macbook in nearly a decade now but the M1 is making me consider buying one. Desktop class performance in a laptop with very long battery life is just amazing. The only thing stopping me is OS X. Using it is super painful for me - it doesn't even have basic snap to edge or split window functionality. My workflow is heavily dependent on tiling WMs and it would affect my productivity.

ebawho44 5y ago
https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I haven't used it myself however and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204948
- nvarsj 5y ago
  Yeah I'm familiar with what is in OS X, I have had to use it a few times for work. The fullscreen approach is very clunky. And the window animations are incredibly slow. I'm used to dynamically moving windows around and tiling things quickly. I tried using yabai but it was so slow and buggy there was no point. I think magnet/rectangle helps but it is still a subpar experience.
  - howinteresting 5y ago
    I tried getting Macs to work for years with yabai etc and came to the same conclusion as you. It's garbage for my workflows. Linux is a million times better.
    - nvarsj 5y ago
      I decided to get a fully spec'd out Thinkpad X13 AMD 2nd gen instead - 32gb ram, 1TB ssd, 8/16 cores, 16:10 2k screen. All for the whopping price of 1k GBP, a third the price of a similarly spec'd MBP.
mrctte 5y ago
This app changes everything https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/magnet/id441258766?mt=12

Zababa 5y ago

> With that said, there is a huge M1 hype on HN. I wonder how much of that is due to a "finally, a good laptop" sentiment. I have used a lot of laptops over the years, and each and every one of them have been terrible in lots of ways, especially recently. If M1s "solve" the laptop problem, that would be great.

Filligree 5y ago
They pretty much do. The M1 macbook is, unironically, the first laptop I've had that doesn't have any glitches. It's less powerful than a modern desktop, but not by much. More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > More importantly, none of the power management, suspend, wifi, whatever... ever seems to fail. UI scaling is also a big one. I have a Dell XPS 15 in 2014/2015 with Windows 8.1 and the UI scaling wasn't great.