4 ms·

Exactly like the M1 now

by _chu1 4y ago

santoshalper 4y ago
It's good to see some things never change. The generous interpretation is that Apple knows that their users tend to skew towards "creative" professions like digital audio, video, graphic design etc. and so they pick the benchmarks that those people care about. You can write the ungenerous interpretation yourself.
Maursault 4y ago
PPCs ran hot and sucked power. Apple's machines at release are ordinarily the most performant machines available for consumers, but that lead never lasts long. The G4 at each new release was indeed more performant than the current Intel machines, but only for a few months. Remember, the G4 was considered a "supercomputer," and the US government banned its export, which hurt Apple, though they tried to make hay with it by marketing this, by the end of 1999, they were desperately trying to get that ban lifted. There still seems to be some confusion about Apple Silicon and the M1. When M1 was released, it wasn't the fastest processor. You could actually build a faster Intel machine in 2020, but it would cost a lot more money and use a lot more power. What was and is special about the M1 is how little power it uses for its performance, which is decent but, like all new Apple products, an incremental increase in performance, and how cheap the low end offering still is. And I'm pretty sure that today you still can't beat the 2020 M1 Mac mini performance and features on Intel for 700 bucks. What is amazing about the M1 is that it is a lateral move, a platform shift, without sacrificing performance, and it is incrementally faster than the 2018 Intel Mac mini at less than half the price.
- nobleach 4y ago
  But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use marketing to tell people they don't need features that are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice. Granted, Apple always comes around.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory configurations, 8GB or 16GB. Obviously the product would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory, yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn't affect performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86 VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.

Exactly like the M1 now

by _chu1 4y ago

Exactly like the M1 now

It's good to see some things never change. The generous interpretation is that Apple knows that their users tend to skew towards "creative" professions like digital audio, video, graphic design etc. and so they pick the benchmarks that those people care about. You can write the ungenerous interpretation yourself.

Maursault 4y ago

PPCs ran hot and sucked power. Apple's machines at release are ordinarily the most performant machines available for consumers, but that lead never lasts long. The G4 at each new release was indeed more performant than the current Intel machines, but only for a few months. Remember, the G4 was considered a "supercomputer," and the US government banned its export, which hurt Apple, though they tried to make hay with it by marketing this, by the end of 1999, they were desperately trying to get that ban lifted. There still seems to be some confusion about Apple Silicon and the M1. When M1 was released, it wasn't the fastest processor. You could actually build a faster Intel machine in 2020, but it would cost a lot more money and use a lot more power. What was and is special about the M1 is how little power it uses for its performance, which is decent but, like all new Apple products, an incremental increase in performance, and how cheap the low end offering still is. And I'm pretty sure that today you still can't beat the 2020 M1 Mac mini performance and features on Intel for 700 bucks. What is amazing about the M1 is that it is a lateral move, a platform shift, without sacrificing performance, and it is incrementally faster than the 2018 Intel Mac mini at less than half the price.

nobleach 4y ago
But as often is the case with Apple releases, you DO indeed have to sacrifice things. Apple will often use marketing to tell people they don't need features that are standard on other platforms (copy/paste, MMS on the iPhone, more than 8 Gigs of memory on the first M1). So it's hard to call it a lateral move without sacrifice. Granted, Apple always comes around.
- Maursault 4y ago
  The lateral move was with Macs, not iPhones, which were always ARM. And the 2020 M1 Mac mini had two memory configurations, 8GB or 16GB. Obviously the product would not appeal to users that require 64GB of memory, yet most M1 users report the limited RAM doesn't affect performance. The only sacrifice with switching from Intel that I can think of is no longer being able to run x86 VMs at full speed. It's not like there are sweeping sacrifices everywhere, but instead a nitpick or two.