7 ms·

I got an Air last spring, and yeah--it is really quick. Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about. I a

by cmckn 5y ago

I got an Air last spring, and yeah--it is really quick. Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about. I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1, because the world just isn't ARM-centric (yet). It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction. I recently built a 12th-gen Intel workstation for my main dev machine, because x86 is still the path of least resistance for the type of work I do. It's got a ton more cores, a higher memory ceiling, and faster storage than the MacBook. I'd choose this over a Mac Studio, too; because I built it for a third of the price. I love my Macs, but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do). Different strokes, etc.

2143 5y ago
Have you tried AMD? I don't know if they're suitable for your work, but I personally think AMD is great. Works well with Linux. They're definitely more open than Intel. And I felt (perhaps incorrectly) that you get more horsepower for your buck with AMD. Of course, M1 is pretty cool too.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Love me some AMD, running them on all my machines currently. However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.
  - eertami 5y ago
    I don't disagree, but it is worth pointing out that Alder Lake released Nov 2021, one year after Zen 3 (Nov 2020). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the fight between Zen 4 and Raptor Lake. Right now feels like an awkward time to build a PC.
    - MrFoof 5y ago
      Add in ATX 3.0, ATX12VO 2.0, the new ATX12VHPWR connector, the I_PSU% feature, the beginning of PCIe 5.0, and the beginning and relative immaturity of DDR5… … right now I say to wait until the end of 2022 for a build. Let Zen 4 and Raptor Lake come out. Then realize Zen 5 and Comet Lake are likely another very real step above that the following year, though at least you’ll be able to take your new PSU, memory and GPU along with. Never mind the reality that Apple is just getting started. Granted, you can’t wait forever. I did a build last year, and now get to see how things shake out as all the new stuff comes available over the next few years.
- dontlaugh 5y ago
  Currently, AMD is more expensive for the same performance. Also, the AM4 socket is at the end of its life. Intel’s LGA 1700 is expected to be used for two more CPU generations, so there’s an upgrade path.
  - InvaderFizz 5y ago
    That would be a departure from the norm for Intel. Do you have any sources? I was unable to find any info on Meteor Lake and board compatibility. That said, AM4 is a dead end socket, so building right now is a coin toss between the 12900k and the 5950x as far as price and performance. I'm not sure the 13900k is going to be much of an upgrade.
    - dontlaugh 5y ago
      No solid information on that third generation https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-12th-gen-Alder-Lake-S-will-use-a-larger-LGA-1700-socket-that-may-last-for-three-generations.463763.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-12th-gen-Alder-Lake-S-wi... I just bought a 12400 mostly because it was 15% cheaper than the 5600x and it comes with an iGPU. You're right that it's unclear whether 13th or 14th gen will be an upgrade or possible, respectively.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  I always buy AMD, but for another reason altogether. The process market could very easily become a single-player monopoly. Maybe less today, but that was certainly the case for a very long time. Thus, I always try to buy from the second- or third- place market leader. Diversity in hardware, just like software or biology, is good for the environment as a whole.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about. Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster. It’s almost as fast as a modern AMD/Intel desktop, which is really amazing in a laptop form factor. But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there. Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster. You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures. Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate. > But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there. More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company. The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life. > Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims. We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers. It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.
  - 5y ago
Nursie 5y ago
> I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1 Interesting. What is that you dev? I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless. My Air is my secondary machine, but that's only really because my workstation is a 16 core/64GB AMD machine and does our product build and test run in about half the time the Air does, which itself is half or less the time previous laptops did. But in the few months that this machine was in transit, the Air did a great job.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Once again it pays off to work in a Java shop :).
- zhdc1 5y ago
  > Interesting. What is that you dev? I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment. If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.
  - Nursie 5y ago
    Can I ask for specifics on what the limitations are? Early on there was docker weirdness for some of my work, but after a few components got updated it’s been great, better than any x86 laptop I’ve used.
    - zhdc1 5y ago
      Library compatibility issues, in particular with Julia and R. It's gotten much better over the last year, but I still run into enough problems that I try to keep all of my actual development work on a remote machine.
      - peatmoss 5y ago
greggman3 5y ago
I ran into some of these. Many npm projects that use native plugins to node don't (or didn't) work on M1. Had to spend a bunch of time finding alternatives. For my needs though things are now working.
sofixa 5y ago
> but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do). Same. Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be upstreamed, it'd be a great combination of price/performance/battery life/usability.
jckahn 5y ago
Would you be willing to share the details of your PC? I’d really like to build a custom Linux machine with the latest Intel CPUs, but I’ve never built a PC before and I don’t know which components are Linux-friendly.
- chronofar 5y ago
  Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.
  - peatmoss 5y ago
    I have two PCs at home, one with an AMD card and one with an NVidia card. I'd characterize the NVidia card on Linux as "Windows-level hassle" (i.e. small, but present) while I think about the AMD card about as often as I'd worry about USB mouse compatibility (i.e. haven't given it a thought). EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu
    - chronofar 5y ago
      Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.
  - jckahn 5y ago
    That's really good to know! I assumed that it was generally hit-or-miss. I'm relatively new to using Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) as a daily driver and would like to keep things as turn-key as possible. At least with laptops, you seem to only get that if you're selective with which configuration you purchase.
thathndude 5y ago
The real beauty of M1 architecture isn’t the raw speed, but the computing power per watt. This allows apple to throw a decent bit of wattage for solid performance. And very little wattage for perfectly acceptable performance (and amazing battery life). But it’s not blisteringly fast.
teilo 5y ago
> It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction. I moved 100% of my python web development to my M1 Max. Everything is running native. Zero downside. I run Debian ARM in Parallels VMs for my test suite, and deploy to both Graviton and Intel AWS instances.

by cmckn 5y ago

2143 5y ago

Have you tried AMD? I don't know if they're suitable for your work, but I personally think AMD is great. Works well with Linux. They're definitely more open than Intel. And I felt (perhaps incorrectly) that you get more horsepower for your buck with AMD. Of course, M1 is pretty cool too.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Love me some AMD, running them on all my machines currently. However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.
- eertami 5y ago
  I don't disagree, but it is worth pointing out that Alder Lake released Nov 2021, one year after Zen 3 (Nov 2020). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the fight between Zen 4 and Raptor Lake. Right now feels like an awkward time to build a PC.
  - MrFoof 5y ago
    Add in ATX 3.0, ATX12VO 2.0, the new ATX12VHPWR connector, the I_PSU% feature, the beginning of PCIe 5.0, and the beginning and relative immaturity of DDR5… … right now I say to wait until the end of 2022 for a build. Let Zen 4 and Raptor Lake come out. Then realize Zen 5 and Comet Lake are likely another very real step above that the following year, though at least you’ll be able to take your new PSU, memory and GPU along with. Never mind the reality that Apple is just getting started. Granted, you can’t wait forever. I did a build last year, and now get to see how things shake out as all the new stuff comes available over the next few years.
dontlaugh 5y ago
Currently, AMD is more expensive for the same performance. Also, the AM4 socket is at the end of its life. Intel’s LGA 1700 is expected to be used for two more CPU generations, so there’s an upgrade path.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  That would be a departure from the norm for Intel. Do you have any sources? I was unable to find any info on Meteor Lake and board compatibility. That said, AM4 is a dead end socket, so building right now is a coin toss between the 12900k and the 5950x as far as price and performance. I'm not sure the 13900k is going to be much of an upgrade.
  - dontlaugh 5y ago
    No solid information on that third generation https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-12th-gen-Alder-Lake-S-will-use-a-larger-LGA-1700-socket-that-may-last-for-three-generations.463763.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-12th-gen-Alder-Lake-S-wi... I just bought a 12400 mostly because it was 15% cheaper than the 5600x and it comes with an iGPU. You're right that it's unclear whether 13th or 14th gen will be an upgrade or possible, respectively.
dotancohen 5y ago
I always buy AMD, but for another reason altogether. The process market could very easily become a single-player monopoly. Maybe less today, but that was certainly the case for a very long time. Thus, I always try to buy from the second- or third- place market leader. Diversity in hardware, just like software or biology, is good for the environment as a whole.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about. Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster. It’s almost as fast as a modern AMD/Intel desktop, which is really amazing in a laptop form factor. But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there. Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.

kergonath 5y ago
> Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster. You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures. Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate. > But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there. More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company. The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life. > Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims. We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers. It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.
- 5y ago

Nursie 5y ago

> I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1 Interesting. What is that you dev? I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless. My Air is my secondary machine, but that's only really because my workstation is a 16 core/64GB AMD machine and does our product build and test run in about half the time the Air does, which itself is half or less the time previous laptops did. But in the few months that this machine was in transit, the Air did a great job.

barrenko 5y ago
Once again it pays off to work in a Java shop :).
zhdc1 5y ago
> Interesting. What is that you dev? I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment. If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.
- Nursie 5y ago
  Can I ask for specifics on what the limitations are? Early on there was docker weirdness for some of my work, but after a few components got updated it’s been great, better than any x86 laptop I’ve used.
  - zhdc1 5y ago
    Library compatibility issues, in particular with Julia and R. It's gotten much better over the last year, but I still run into enough problems that I try to keep all of my actual development work on a remote machine.
    - peatmoss 5y ago

greggman3 5y ago

I ran into some of these. Many npm projects that use native plugins to node don't (or didn't) work on M1. Had to spend a bunch of time finding alternatives. For my needs though things are now working.

sofixa 5y ago

> but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do). Same. Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be upstreamed, it'd be a great combination of price/performance/battery life/usability.

jckahn 5y ago

Would you be willing to share the details of your PC? I’d really like to build a custom Linux machine with the latest Intel CPUs, but I’ve never built a PC before and I don’t know which components are Linux-friendly.

chronofar 5y ago
Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.
- peatmoss 5y ago
  I have two PCs at home, one with an AMD card and one with an NVidia card. I'd characterize the NVidia card on Linux as "Windows-level hassle" (i.e. small, but present) while I think about the AMD card about as often as I'd worry about USB mouse compatibility (i.e. haven't given it a thought). EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu
  - chronofar 5y ago
    Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.
- jckahn 5y ago
  That's really good to know! I assumed that it was generally hit-or-miss. I'm relatively new to using Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) as a daily driver and would like to keep things as turn-key as possible. At least with laptops, you seem to only get that if you're selective with which configuration you purchase.

thathndude 5y ago

The real beauty of M1 architecture isn’t the raw speed, but the computing power per watt. This allows apple to throw a decent bit of wattage for solid performance. And very little wattage for perfectly acceptable performance (and amazing battery life). But it’s not blisteringly fast.

teilo 5y ago

> It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction. I moved 100% of my python web development to my M1 Max. Everything is running native. Zero downside. I run Debian ARM in Parallels VMs for my test suite, and deploy to both Graviton and Intel AWS instances.