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> 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 rev

> 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.
- scns 5y ago
  > Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s This. They wrote that M1 takes second place after Ryzen, while needing way less power.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  I feel that the M1 still has the real distortion field working for it. But on the other hand I just bought the new iPad Air (my original Air still works fine but I thought 10years was enough). The fact that a decent pro laptop class or mini desktop class CPU fits in a tablet with no cooling and gives me over 10hrs of useful work is kinda crazy.
zhdc1 5y ago
> 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. I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance. They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor. Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.

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.

scns 5y ago
> Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s This. They wrote that M1 takes second place after Ryzen, while needing way less power.
2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
I feel that the M1 still has the real distortion field working for it. But on the other hand I just bought the new iPad Air (my original Air still works fine but I thought 10years was enough). The fact that a decent pro laptop class or mini desktop class CPU fits in a tablet with no cooling and gives me over 10hrs of useful work is kinda crazy.

zhdc1 5y ago

> 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. I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance. They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor. Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.