20 ms·

It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winnin

by dchuk 4y ago

It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open. It’s just perfect. I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone and used it to trickle charge my MacBook overnight and I’m good to go.

gnufied 4y ago
I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop, I still miss the productivity of a Linux laptop (for backend dev work). From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.
- sem000 4y ago
  What is your Linux laptop giving you that your MBP doesn’t? And how does it hurt your productivity? Genuinely curious as I don’t see how it can be any different.
  - justahuman74 4y ago
    Presumably that it's running Linux and can be customized as wanted. Also docker runs without a VM, so the networking and storage performance is good
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    For me: - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) - Built-in package manager - Having (relative) parity between production and development Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up. If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
    - mfer 4y ago
      I have an M1 Pro MBP and Linux running on a Framework laptop. The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system. > - Having (relative) parity between production and development For certain classes of development this is a big deal. For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host. > - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now. On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
      - counttheforks 4y ago
        > The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        I have a 13" Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad model I forget the name of. Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river. > For my container work it doesn't really matter. That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer. > I must have learned to ignore this I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me. > a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros. I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
  - dbeley 4y ago
    Thinkpads will always have better keyboards, better connectivity and the trackpoint for them.
  - lynndotpy 4y ago
    For my experience, as a longtime Linux user who got a MBP: I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off. That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts. On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect. I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python. But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
    - TheKnack 4y ago
      Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution. https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to-a-different-space/10512 https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
      - gspencley 4y ago
        Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment? My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need. I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor. I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command). I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs. I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X. I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things. I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
  - hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
    >32gb of ram
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Others have filled in some of the productivity benefits, but it also avoids a thousand little papercuts. It doesn't have uninstallable crapware like Apple News.
  - nequo 4y ago
    A ThinkPad X1 Carbon is cheaper, lighter, has a better keyboard, and on Linux I can run the DE that has the defaults/customizations and keybindings that I am used to. I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-feature-that-let-apps-bypass-vpn/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
  - gnufied 4y ago
    I work on container stuff, so may be my POV is bit different but: 1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious. 2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably. I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
  - rkangel 4y ago
    There are some really weird things. The only sustained usage of Macs I've had is a Mac Mini (x86) that I had for app development. Even just plugging in a plain old UK layout USB keyboard (not an Apple one) and having it behave itself and give me the right characters was surprisingly difficult.
  - dpz 4y ago
    Biggest things for me - I've never found a good WM that can replace what bspwm can do. - Something as useful as pacman, brew is no where near as good. - Full control over my system. Plus I can run my set up on a £30 chromebook and be nearly as efficient as my ~£1800 Work laptop.
  - Leimi 4y ago
    Some workflows on a linux system can be totally different than what is possible on a mac. Even with apps like BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, Amethyst and others. Customizing window management, advanced keyboard shortcuts, general system behavior in mac is going against the tide. It kinda works, but never as good as you'd want because you can't really get rid of the default window manager and default global behavior. Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want. But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha. I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
  - somethingreen 4y ago
    - window management that is either sane (i.e. restores minimized windows when alt/cmd+tab'ed to) or can be customized - desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized - keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed - option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror
- interpol_p 4y ago
  I have the same complaint about weight I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is
  - Kognito 4y ago
    Agreed, a high end machine in the Air form factor would be great. The M2 is more than enough compute-wise for my SWE workflow, but it's not a great deal once you start bumping the RAM and adding storage when compared to the base 14 inch (+ the extra benefits you get with the 14" screen, etc).
  - walthamstow 4y ago
    I just got my work machine upgraded to the 14in Pro from the 13in M1 Air recently. I think overall the extra screen pixels are worth the weight tradeoff. It's only a little heavier and I don't really notice it on my back when I'm cycling I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.
- _fzslm 4y ago
  iTerm2 and lima [1] with a ARM64 Linux virtual machine w/ Rosetta (so I can still run x86_64 Linux code!) enabled me to fall in love with my MacBook Pro in this regard. i feel more productive than on a Linux machine now. MacOS is not without its developer power tools, if you dig around enough! [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
  - xtracto 4y ago
    For me MacBookPro with M2 chips would be perfect if the 13in model allowed 64GB RAM. My workflow requires me to run Docker (intel images) heavily with several containers. Having a virtualization layer is pretty resource consuming. Usually the Docker + containers I use take around 5GB RAM alone. Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow. As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      What software are you using that doesn't have ARM versions available? I think it goes without saying that a machine with an ARM processor is not going to be ideal if you're frequently working with x86-specific software.
      - mbreese 4y ago
        I've needed some scientific software that still doesn't have ARM64 libraries available, so thus are stuck on x86. RStudio, for example, has a lot of dependencies and only recently starting offering experimental support for aarch64 on Linux.
    - outcoldman 4y ago
      Really don't understand why Apple still selling 13" MBP, as MBP 14 is much better, and you can get it with up to 96GB of memory now. I would assume they keep 13" just for people who still likes TouchBar.
- api 4y ago
  A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop. Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Exactly. My strategy for this for my personal projects is mostly ARM VMs. In a couple of cases I have to run x86, and I run a used HP thin client at home as what I call a “physical VM”. I then use tailscale to connect from anywhere.
  - hra5th 4y ago
    If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)
- jackosdev 4y ago
  I have Asahi Linux installed on mine, it works great including the GPU, I’m mainly developing for ARM64 AWS Lambdas now as well so it’s nice having the same arch. Some things are still missing like webcam, microphone and speakers, but the headphone Jack works and Bluetooth is OK just a bit choppy, incredible project.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    So it works great except half the hardware doesn't work and it's entirely unsupported by Apple, to whom you paid a significant premium for the hardware?
    - smith7018 4y ago
      That tends to be how Linux works outside of standard platforms, yes. It takes time for developers to write drivers.
      - counttheforks 4y ago
        It works great on my custom built PC, and my store bought laptop. Both are perfectly normal pieces of hardware, not apple's weird stuff.
    - grozzle 4y ago
      It's a work in progress, users are generally confident that the remaining hardware will gain Asahi support sooner or later. The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I know this isn't an Asahi Linux thread, but I cannot help to ask about it. Plus I am big fan of Alyssa Rosenzweig's work (and Justine Tunney), so I pay close attention to Asahi Linux (and LibCosmo/politan) progress. First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces. Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because." Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux? Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux? Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system? Is it everything? I am really curious to hear what people think.
- deleted 4y ago
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- isolli 4y ago
  What really pushed me towards Apple is that Lenovo offers a very limited set of configurations to us Europeans. No way to get the best machine from them, even if we're willing to pay for it.
  - yoavm 4y ago
    I have an X1 Yoga that I got here in the Netherlands, and I had plenty of choices when configuring it, including OS. What are you missing exactly?
    - bogantech 4y ago
      When I was looking at getting an X1 Carbon, the US site had better options for things like the screen etc
    - isolli 4y ago
      I was looking to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 3, and I could not get a better screen resolution than 1920 x 1200. I just checked and 3840 x 2400 is now available. They may have had supply chain issues. But it's too late for me. Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
      - citilife 4y ago
        Almost everyone with thinkpad gets the windows version and just puts linux on it. It's relatively easy, depending on your distro.
  - Foobar8568 4y ago
    I have seen the contrary... But for parts, we are screwed.
  - stonecharioteer 4y ago
    I had the same problem with Lenovo here in India. I bought an Asus instead. got a Ryzen 9 6800 machine with 32gb ram and a 3050ti. amazingly good with Fedora.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  I had a P1 Gen 4 and went to a 14” M1 MBP and agree. Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”. That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO. I do miss that machine though.
- firstSpeaker 4y ago
  Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience. All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
    - recuter 4y ago
      What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.
      - rgrmrts 4y ago
        Fwiw you can use nix (the package manager) and the nixpkgs package repository without ever learning or writing a single line of nix (the language). My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point. Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
        recuter 4y ago
        What benefit would joining your cult bestow upon me that brew does not already? My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited. Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly. I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli. Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
- StreamBright 4y ago
  As a heavy Linux user for two decades I disagree. You can't even talk about Linux vs MacOS because the actual distribution you use matters a lot more than the kernel when you talk about productivity. Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels. There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros. This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.
  - jonnycomputer 4y ago
    I've been finding that the Budgie desktop is pretty great. Very Mac-like.
    - StreamBright 4y ago
      I wasn't aware. Thanks for recommending it.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    And Linux keeps failing because of companies like System76 which cannot seem to build, or partner with a company, to be this competition. Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
    - kkielhofner 4y ago
      “Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community” No it wouldn’t. Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users). They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”. The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday. I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches. On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".
- cpuguy83 4y ago
  I doubt the chassis is adding that much weight. MacBooks are largely battery. The MacBook Air is also significantly lighter than a pro despite having the same basic chassis.
  - gnufied 4y ago
    I am not sure. The Thinkpad has 90WH battery and Macbook has 99WH, it is bigger but not 362gm heavier.
goosedragons 4y ago
They aren't though. The fact that they are ridiculously comparing performance to the 3 year old at this point final Intel MacBook (which was a dog turd) in their press release with some very cherry picked benchmarks suggests things aren't quite as good as they could be. Why are they talking about 3+ old parts and not the current competition?
- akmittal 4y ago
  Apple almost never compares with other brands. They are comparing with older chip because that was inside older MacBook pros. Both Intel and AMD has done great job with their processors recently.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  They are trying to drive the replacement cycle quickly for customers who are operating a defective MacBook with a keyboard that will fail. If they convince you to trade in the old one, they take that off the market and make cash.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    The fastest Intel MBP ever made already had the scissor key keyboard and not butterfly.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - bfgoodrich 4y ago
    Eh, this is [literally any company on the planet]. Marketing is to sell a product, not to provide a comprehensive case for competitors.
- ianai 4y ago
  From TA: “With M2 Pro on MacBook Pro: Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation. Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster5 than the previous generation. Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster5 than the previous generation.”
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months. Not happy at all with Apple asking 680 EUR to replace the screen on a M1 Mac I paid... 1 000 EUR. 68% after 13 months to replace their shitty screen. And to get what? Another brittle screen. Sure, it looks nice. But my LG Gram wins, hands down: I can count on that thing.
- jnsie 4y ago
  > For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months. Not being pithy but is this a common issue? It's not one I've previously heard people complain about, the screen on my current gen and prior (2012?) MacBook pros but seem very solid so I'm surprised that this is considered a weak point...
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen Have had an M1 Macbook Pro for 2 years now. Dropped it several times from various heights up to 4ft. Dropped books on it a couple of times. Screen still intact. "ultra-brittle" is nonsense. (And in the 10 years I've owned Macbooks, never have I broken a screen despite dropping, etc.)
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    The M1 Air I'm typing on has been shot down from desk to floor due to a golden retriever tripping on the charging cable running after a ball. It flew about 2m horizontally, and the height of the desk vertically. It has a very noticeable bump on the corner of the case. The screen though, is good as new.
- John23832 4y ago
spenvo 4y ago
> far ahead Losing external GPU support with apple silicon has become a major deal. In the age of AI tools like stable diffusion, performance per watt matters less if you lose the capability to scale up these kind of workloads. Gurman's report about the mac pro tower gave us reason to hope on this (that the upcoming mac pro will have eGPU support), but when it comes to MacBooks, let alone the pros, no one knows when/if the support will arrive and when/if nvidia support will be added.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  You typically wouldn't use a Macbook for that though. If you want to do AI research, buy a gaming rig (< $1000) or rent a cloud GPU instance and then remote desktop or SSH in from the laptop. Then you get the portability and battery life of the laptop, and once you start training you can put it to sleep and the remote instance will just keep humming away.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  Do these work on Linux? Or is it a limitation of the silicon?
- wmf 4y ago
  Apple hates Nvidia and will never support them.
eastbound 4y ago
> It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. Sure, but developing with Java up-to-16 is much slower with M1/M2 due to ports not being available, and Rosetta having to emulate. Datapoint: We develop plugins for Confluence and it’s about 1 minute to load each page. I don’t think developing Java 11 is a corner case of using a Mac.
- thrashh 4y ago
  The Java ARM versions don’t work for you?
- syspec 4y ago
  Hmm, works great here. I use ARM Java
- david_allison 4y ago
  Azul Zulu works great: https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk
- threeseed 4y ago
  ARM builds have been available for a while now even for Java 11. * AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/downloads-list.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/d... * Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11 https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11 * IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/dow... * Oracle GraalVM: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm-22.3.0 https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm...
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Thank you. You saved us dozens of hours.
breck 4y ago
I'm also still on the MacBook Pro M1 and it's amazing. But this new one makes me drool. I am happy to see MagSafe back and the SD card slot and USB-C ports on both sides. Now someone grab my arms before I dump water on this keyboard.
- masklinn 4y ago
  All of that was already on the M1 versions of the same laptops though wasn’t it?
  - breck 4y ago
    No. At least not on this one: MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
    - masklinn 4y ago
      As far as I can see the laptops in TFA are 14 and 16”. The 13” remains a heavier Air, with two ports on the same side and no magsafe: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
      - breck 4y ago
        Ah got it! Yes mine is a 13". Maybe I'll go 14".
        masklinn 4y ago
        They’re great machines but do be aware they’re a fair bit heavier than the 13”, even the 14” is 0.5lb heavier (3.5 to 3). (The 16” is a 4.7lb chonk).
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    IIRC, Apple offered (offers? I haven’t checked) the 13” M1 which was based on the previous chassis, then launched the 14/16” on the new one.
optymizer 4y ago
The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays over USBC. Laptop screen didnt turn on, other monitors did. Unplugged monitors, mashed keys on keyboard, replugged, laptop screen was still off. Hard reset. I give Apple lots of credit for switching to ARM, but the last time I had this many issues that required a hard reset because the OS became unusable was Windows ME. I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.
- gigatexal 4y ago
  Yup. Software is why I am on Linux on a thinkpad. It’s fast enough. And I control everything.
  - throwntoday 4y ago
    As soon as Asahi gets proper GPU support I'm installing linux and relegating macOS to a tiny partition for managing my iPhone.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      I’m surprised there are still people out there using their Mac to manage their iPhone.
      - photonbeam 4y ago
        Is there a way on Linux to backup the photos to the computer without using a cloud service?
kube-system 4y ago
I’ve never had an issue with a 20w Anker Nano charging my non-pro M1. Feels like the future charging my laptop with an adapter the size of an iPhone charger.
- ja27 4y ago
  Yeah my 16" M1 Pro draws 10-12w a lot of the time even with Slack, browser, Docker, and more running.
nvarsj 4y ago
Def the opposite experience for me software wise. Latest joy is chrome hanging whenever tabs are moved. Things randomly seem to crash all the time. Maybe it’s normal for OS X but my Linux experience is pretty much the opposite - rock solid, everything is fast, and nothing breaks. Granted the hardware does seem really good (except for slow anything to do with x86 and a useless GPU that can’t play games or do VR).
- GoldenRacer 4y ago
  For me, it's the WiFi that is completely botched. The status bar will frequently display incorrect statuses and trying to select a network from the status bar hardly ever works. I have to go into system preferences which has a tendency to totally freeze up for minutes at a time when I select the network tab. Then it'll occasionally get into a state where it tells me it's connected to the network but doesn't have Internet access and it must be a problem with the network (I know it's not because I have other devices connected to the same network that work fine). To get out of this, I have to turn WiFi off and back on again but Apple in there infinite wisdom has decided if I turn it off and back on too quickly, I must've done so by mistake and so they don't actually ever turn it off. So I have to turn it off, wait some unknown period of time (I usually wait 30s), and then turn it back on. Drives me crazy. In the end, every morning when I get to work, I expect it to be roughly 5 minutes between when I arrive and when I'm actually online. My personal computer running Linux has never had such a ridiculous issue (it does occasionally have issues but they're usually fixable after a quick Google search) but somehow everyone claims Apple just works and Linux is to much of a pain.
  - astrange 4y ago
    File a bug. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com https://feedbackassistant.apple.com (Or call support, I guess.)
- ggregoire 4y ago
  It's obviously not "normal". I don't have any of the issues you are mentioning.
JLCarveth 4y ago
Look into Gallium Nitride (GaN) chargers. I got a 100W charging brick on Amazon for a little over $100CAD (a bit pricy yes), with 3 USB-C, 1 USB-A. There are cheaper models with less ports / wattage as well. A single brick fast-charges my M2 Macbook Air, my Phone, headphones.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  Those things are crazy compact. I have a tiny Anker 30W single USB-C charger for my M2 Macbook Air and iPhone for when I don't expect to need a charger and it's hard to not lose it because it's so lightweight and small. The cable is a lot heavier and bulkier and I already bought the lightest one I could find.
thefz 4y ago
Do the M* support external displays with are fresh rate greater than 60Hz?
- fcoury 4y ago
  They do. I am on a last gen M1 Pro MacBook 16" using a 240Hz display but it's capped at 120Hz.
  - dachryn 4y ago
    then switch cables or docking station. It should support 240
- samcat116 4y ago
  Apple quotes that the HDMI port in these can do 4k 240hz
- butterlesstoast 4y ago
  Depends on the resolution of your external display. I had a 144hz 1080p monitor working as expected with a usb-c to Display Port connection (It didn't work with an HDMI cable).
- syspec 4y ago
  Yes, I have a 4K 144hz gigabyte monitor that runs perfectly with it. You must get a high quality USB-C cable though. I got Anker brand cable. Previous cable I had lying around the house would only give me 60hz
superkuh 4y ago
Things may be great on the high end of Apple's M1/M2 laptops given they actually have enough ram for simple tasks. But those are also insanely expensive. At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos. My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that the Apple M1 w/8GB uses ~4GB of that just to run the OS and if you happen to install adobe creative cloud there goes another 2GB and if you use some other "darkroom-alike" program to open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing. Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software, cannot even edit photos. They're only good for surfing the web and sending email. Apple selling these as actual functioning general purpose laptops is a fraud.
- wlesieutre 4y ago
  I can’t speak to Adobe’s problems but the M1 8GB has been shockingly fast in my experience, and has no issue at all with image editing.
- abakker 4y ago
  Interesting. I have one of those computers with 8gb and have not had problems with Lightroom, Photoshop, or Autodesk fusion360. I'm not saying that there are no issues, but the m1s in my experience seem to need less RAM to do the same things.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  ... I think your dad got a funky laptop. I've been on an 8GB M1 for two years, running Adobe CC the entire time. I've edited absolutely massive photos - Gigabyte TIFFs, batch processing, etc - and never had any crashes. In fact I've done the above while playing HD video from YouTube with 40 tabs open and not experienced so much as a hiccup.
  - thatfrenchguy 4y ago
    Or they’re using a pirated version of Creative Cloud from before 2020?
eertami 4y ago
>It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open I can say the exact same thing for my Linux XPS, in fairness. My M1 battery will last longer, for sure, but both will last a whole work day. But because the M1 can't run Linux to a good standard, it's mostly just used to test/debug OSX related issues.
justapassenger 4y ago
Battery is NOT whole day. People shouldn’t fall for that. Yeah, battery is great, not arguing that. But if you use heavy web apps and do a lot of VC, half day is best you can get.
- robertoandred 4y ago
  I hope you don't use Chrome for those web apps. Google stuff has terrible power efficiency.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    Same effects both on Chrome and Safari. But that's also irrelevant. Whole day of battery, if you don't use heavy apps is very different from whole day of battery.
- JimRoepcke 4y ago
  It is if you're using Safari. I have two M1 Max MBPs. My personal machine runs Chrome, and my work machine runs Safari. I can run my work machine for well over a day doing iOS development in Xcode with an external monitor attached and not run out of battery. The personal machine will last almost all day (without a monitor attached) but not quite. I'm sure if I used Safari it would last much longer.
  - justapassenger 4y ago
    I've tried both. Safari does some neat tricks to reduce usage when pages are not active. But if you have a heavy webapp - you have a heavy webapp, and power will be used.
nscalf 4y ago
I got an M1 for a recent job change, I've never interacted with one before that and my personal laptop was a relatively old macbook. The thing that amazed me the most was the speed. I would actually get confused because it did things so much faster than I was used to, I would sit and wait for something to happen only to realize it was so fast I had missed it occurring.
throwaway894345 4y ago
I wonder how long until Javon's paradox catches up and degraded software quality eats all of the performance gains afforded by the new hardware. The 2020s version of "Andy giveth and Bill taketh away".
nikeee 4y ago
Enjoy it as long as you can. As soon as this kind of hardware is close to becoming commodity, software will get as slow as it is currently on commodity hardware. It's part of Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- kossTKR 4y ago
  Interesting. So that's why latency seems to have become worse in all aspects of personal computing / smartphones. Time from "push button" to "something happens on screen", was faster 20 years ago in some aspects. Has turned a bit on my M2 Air it seems though.
deepGem 4y ago
Or carry the 60W charger and turbocharge the phone, agreed it's not as portable as the brick.
citrusybread 4y ago
software experience is funky, and I am really disappointed by the lack of support for external monitors... I happen to have 2 identical monitors, and a third I can't use on a macbook pro with m1 pro. They're in H configuration, portrait, landscape, portrait (last two are apparently the same model though different years) The mac constantly confuses the two identical monitors (one is rotated 270 degrees so it ain't great). I've tried two USB video card adapters; one wouldn't work at all, one from Plugable couldn't rotate the missing monitor (rotated 90 degrees). If I asked it to drive the middle horizontal monitor, it mirrors with the matching monitor (again an issue because it's rotated 270 degrees) drives me nuts, there's no fix, it's a gamble which orientation it'll choose. making things worse - it also won't wake from sleep without a lot of trickery with the lid closed (only reliable method I've found is re-attaching the power cable... not great when I need to do this daily). my old intel mac? hit the spacebar on my usb keyboard to wake up. no issues with 3 monitors, and could even drive the internal display with it. I don't care about 2 external 4k screens -- some of us are still on 1080p and don't care. how did we regress like this?
atoav 4y ago
My 2 year old tuxedo notebook costed less than half of what the M1 MBP costs and renders any given blender scene 3 to 4 times faster. I consider getting a MBP, but quite frankly I wonder if I could really let it crunch "pro" workloads over night, because either they have infinitly silent active cooling (doubtful) or they throttle the thing (bad). If I pay for top notch hardware I want to have it crunch at full blast for as long as I desire, if I need it.
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by dchuk 4y ago

gnufied 4y ago

I have both a latest generation Thinkpad P1 Gen5 and Macbook Pro 16 inch M1 pro and while it is true that Macbook comes pretty close to being a perfect laptop, I still miss the productivity of a Linux laptop (for backend dev work). From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.

sem000 4y ago
What is your Linux laptop giving you that your MBP doesn’t? And how does it hurt your productivity? Genuinely curious as I don’t see how it can be any different.
- justahuman74 4y ago
  Presumably that it's running Linux and can be customized as wanted. Also docker runs without a VM, so the networking and storage performance is good
- smoldesu 4y ago
  For me: - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) - Built-in package manager - Having (relative) parity between production and development Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up. If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
  - mfer 4y ago
    I have an M1 Pro MBP and Linux running on a Framework laptop. The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system. > - Having (relative) parity between production and development For certain classes of development this is a big deal. For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host. > - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al) I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now. On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      > The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I have a 13" Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad model I forget the name of. Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river. > For my container work it doesn't really matter. That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer. > I must have learned to ignore this I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me. > a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros. I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
- dbeley 4y ago
  Thinkpads will always have better keyboards, better connectivity and the trackpoint for them.
- lynndotpy 4y ago
  For my experience, as a longtime Linux user who got a MBP: I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off. That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts. On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect. I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python. But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
  - TheKnack 4y ago
    Apps like Keyboard Maestro or BetterTouchTool can resolve almost every Macos usability complaint that I've heard. Keyboard Maestro can move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut, for example, and there are multiple ways to disable mouse acceleration. For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution. https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to-a-different-space/10512 https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
    - gspencley 4y ago
      Can it resolve me not being able to use MATE as the desktop environment? My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need. I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor. I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command). I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs. I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X. I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things. I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  >32gb of ram
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Others have filled in some of the productivity benefits, but it also avoids a thousand little papercuts. It doesn't have uninstallable crapware like Apple News.
- nequo 4y ago
  A ThinkPad X1 Carbon is cheaper, lighter, has a better keyboard, and on Linux I can run the DE that has the defaults/customizations and keybindings that I am used to. I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-feature-that-let-apps-bypass-vpn/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
- gnufied 4y ago
  I work on container stuff, so may be my POV is bit different but: 1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious. 2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably. I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
- rkangel 4y ago
  There are some really weird things. The only sustained usage of Macs I've had is a Mac Mini (x86) that I had for app development. Even just plugging in a plain old UK layout USB keyboard (not an Apple one) and having it behave itself and give me the right characters was surprisingly difficult.
- dpz 4y ago
  Biggest things for me - I've never found a good WM that can replace what bspwm can do. - Something as useful as pacman, brew is no where near as good. - Full control over my system. Plus I can run my set up on a £30 chromebook and be nearly as efficient as my ~£1800 Work laptop.
- Leimi 4y ago
  Some workflows on a linux system can be totally different than what is possible on a mac. Even with apps like BetterTouchTool, Hammerspoon, Amethyst and others. Customizing window management, advanced keyboard shortcuts, general system behavior in mac is going against the tide. It kinda works, but never as good as you'd want because you can't really get rid of the default window manager and default global behavior. Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want. But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha. I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
- somethingreen 4y ago
  - window management that is either sane (i.e. restores minimized windows when alt/cmd+tab'ed to) or can be customized - desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized - keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed - option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror
interpol_p 4y ago
I have the same complaint about weight I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is
- Kognito 4y ago
  Agreed, a high end machine in the Air form factor would be great. The M2 is more than enough compute-wise for my SWE workflow, but it's not a great deal once you start bumping the RAM and adding storage when compared to the base 14 inch (+ the extra benefits you get with the 14" screen, etc).
- walthamstow 4y ago
  I just got my work machine upgraded to the 14in Pro from the 13in M1 Air recently. I think overall the extra screen pixels are worth the weight tradeoff. It's only a little heavier and I don't really notice it on my back when I'm cycling I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.
_fzslm 4y ago
iTerm2 and lima [1] with a ARM64 Linux virtual machine w/ Rosetta (so I can still run x86_64 Linux code!) enabled me to fall in love with my MacBook Pro in this regard. i feel more productive than on a Linux machine now. MacOS is not without its developer power tools, if you dig around enough! [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima
- xtracto 4y ago
  For me MacBookPro with M2 chips would be perfect if the 13in model allowed 64GB RAM. My workflow requires me to run Docker (intel images) heavily with several containers. Having a virtualization layer is pretty resource consuming. Usually the Docker + containers I use take around 5GB RAM alone. Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow. As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    What software are you using that doesn't have ARM versions available? I think it goes without saying that a machine with an ARM processor is not going to be ideal if you're frequently working with x86-specific software.
    - mbreese 4y ago
      I've needed some scientific software that still doesn't have ARM64 libraries available, so thus are stuck on x86. RStudio, for example, has a lot of dependencies and only recently starting offering experimental support for aarch64 on Linux.
  - outcoldman 4y ago
    Really don't understand why Apple still selling 13" MBP, as MBP 14 is much better, and you can get it with up to 96GB of memory now. I would assume they keep 13" just for people who still likes TouchBar.
api 4y ago
A VM on the Mac will run longer on battery with less heat than a Linux installation on a native Linux x64 laptop. Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. My strategy for this for my personal projects is mostly ARM VMs. In a couple of cases I have to run x86, and I run a used HP thin client at home as what I call a “physical VM”. I then use tailscale to connect from anywhere.
- hra5th 4y ago
  If you need to interact with connected peripherals from the linux environment a VM is still usually a much less productive experience. I do a lot of embedded development, and while it is often possible to do USB passthrough to connected boards, lots of things don't work the same as they do when running Linux natively, and I have never found it to be a seamless experience (on VirtualBox or VMWare)
jackosdev 4y ago
I have Asahi Linux installed on mine, it works great including the GPU, I’m mainly developing for ARM64 AWS Lambdas now as well so it’s nice having the same arch. Some things are still missing like webcam, microphone and speakers, but the headphone Jack works and Bluetooth is OK just a bit choppy, incredible project.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  So it works great except half the hardware doesn't work and it's entirely unsupported by Apple, to whom you paid a significant premium for the hardware?
  - smith7018 4y ago
    That tends to be how Linux works outside of standard platforms, yes. It takes time for developers to write drivers.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      It works great on my custom built PC, and my store bought laptop. Both are perfectly normal pieces of hardware, not apple's weird stuff.
  - grozzle 4y ago
    It's a work in progress, users are generally confident that the remaining hardware will gain Asahi support sooner or later. The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I know this isn't an Asahi Linux thread, but I cannot help to ask about it. Plus I am big fan of Alyssa Rosenzweig's work (and Justine Tunney), so I pay close attention to Asahi Linux (and LibCosmo/politan) progress. First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces. Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because." Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux? Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux? Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system? Is it everything? I am really curious to hear what people think.
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isolli 4y ago
What really pushed me towards Apple is that Lenovo offers a very limited set of configurations to us Europeans. No way to get the best machine from them, even if we're willing to pay for it.
- yoavm 4y ago
  I have an X1 Yoga that I got here in the Netherlands, and I had plenty of choices when configuring it, including OS. What are you missing exactly?
  - bogantech 4y ago
    When I was looking at getting an X1 Carbon, the US site had better options for things like the screen etc
  - isolli 4y ago
    I was looking to buy a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 3, and I could not get a better screen resolution than 1920 x 1200. I just checked and 3840 x 2400 is now available. They may have had supply chain issues. But it's too late for me. Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
    - citilife 4y ago
      Almost everyone with thinkpad gets the windows version and just puts linux on it. It's relatively easy, depending on your distro.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  I have seen the contrary... But for parts, we are screwed.
- stonecharioteer 4y ago
  I had the same problem with Lenovo here in India. I bought an Asus instead. got a Ryzen 9 6800 machine with 32gb ram and a 3050ti. amazingly good with Fedora.
CobaltFire 4y ago
I had a P1 Gen 4 and went to a 14” M1 MBP and agree. Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”. That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO. I do miss that machine though.
firstSpeaker 4y ago
Could you elaborate what is preventing it from being the perfect backend dev laptop?
- klodolph 4y ago
  I’m not the person you asked—but a ton of developer tooling just runs better on Linux. Installation is usually easier too—on a Mac, there’s Homebrew, but Homebrew doesn’t have the best user experience. All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
  - recuter 4y ago
    What specific developer tooling runs better on linux? If you're one of those Nix masochists I hear that runs on the Mac as well.
    - rgrmrts 4y ago
      Fwiw you can use nix (the package manager) and the nixpkgs package repository without ever learning or writing a single line of nix (the language). My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point. Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
      - recuter 4y ago
        What benefit would joining your cult bestow upon me that brew does not already? My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited. Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly. I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli. Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
StreamBright 4y ago
As a heavy Linux user for two decades I disagree. You can't even talk about Linux vs MacOS because the actual distribution you use matters a lot more than the kernel when you talk about productivity. Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels. There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros. This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.
- jonnycomputer 4y ago
  I've been finding that the Budgie desktop is pretty great. Very Mac-like.
  - StreamBright 4y ago
    I wasn't aware. Thanks for recommending it.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  And Linux keeps failing because of companies like System76 which cannot seem to build, or partner with a company, to be this competition. Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    “Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community” No it wouldn’t. Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users). They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”. The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday. I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches. On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".
cpuguy83 4y ago
I doubt the chassis is adding that much weight. MacBooks are largely battery. The MacBook Air is also significantly lighter than a pro despite having the same basic chassis.
- gnufied 4y ago
  I am not sure. The Thinkpad has 90WH battery and Macbook has 99WH, it is bigger but not 362gm heavier.

goosedragons 4y ago

They aren't though. The fact that they are ridiculously comparing performance to the 3 year old at this point final Intel MacBook (which was a dog turd) in their press release with some very cherry picked benchmarks suggests things aren't quite as good as they could be. Why are they talking about 3+ old parts and not the current competition?

akmittal 4y ago
Apple almost never compares with other brands. They are comparing with older chip because that was inside older MacBook pros. Both Intel and AMD has done great job with their processors recently.
Spooky23 4y ago
They are trying to drive the replacement cycle quickly for customers who are operating a defective MacBook with a keyboard that will fail. If they convince you to trade in the old one, they take that off the market and make cash.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  The fastest Intel MBP ever made already had the scissor key keyboard and not butterfly.
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- bfgoodrich 4y ago
  Eh, this is [literally any company on the planet]. Marketing is to sell a product, not to provide a comprehensive case for competitors.
ianai 4y ago
From TA: “With M2 Pro on MacBook Pro: Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation. Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster5 than the previous generation. Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster5 than the previous generation.”

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months. Not happy at all with Apple asking 680 EUR to replace the screen on a M1 Mac I paid... 1 000 EUR. 68% after 13 months to replace their shitty screen. And to get what? Another brittle screen. Sure, it looks nice. But my LG Gram wins, hands down: I can count on that thing.

jnsie 4y ago
> For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months. Not being pithy but is this a common issue? It's not one I've previously heard people complain about, the screen on my current gen and prior (2012?) MacBook pros but seem very solid so I'm surprised that this is considered a weak point...
zimpenfish 4y ago
> For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen Have had an M1 Macbook Pro for 2 years now. Dropped it several times from various heights up to 4ft. Dropped books on it a couple of times. Screen still intact. "ultra-brittle" is nonsense. (And in the 10 years I've owned Macbooks, never have I broken a screen despite dropping, etc.)
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  The M1 Air I'm typing on has been shot down from desk to floor due to a golden retriever tripping on the charging cable running after a ball. It flew about 2m horizontally, and the height of the desk vertically. It has a very noticeable bump on the corner of the case. The screen though, is good as new.
John23832 4y ago

spenvo 4y ago

> far ahead Losing external GPU support with apple silicon has become a major deal. In the age of AI tools like stable diffusion, performance per watt matters less if you lose the capability to scale up these kind of workloads. Gurman's report about the mac pro tower gave us reason to hope on this (that the upcoming mac pro will have eGPU support), but when it comes to MacBooks, let alone the pros, no one knows when/if the support will arrive and when/if nvidia support will be added.

nostrademons 4y ago
You typically wouldn't use a Macbook for that though. If you want to do AI research, buy a gaming rig (< $1000) or rent a cloud GPU instance and then remote desktop or SSH in from the laptop. Then you get the portability and battery life of the laptop, and once you start training you can put it to sleep and the remote instance will just keep humming away.
thrtythreeforty 4y ago
Do these work on Linux? Or is it a limitation of the silicon?
wmf 4y ago
Apple hates Nvidia and will never support them.

eastbound 4y ago

> It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. Sure, but developing with Java up-to-16 is much slower with M1/M2 due to ports not being available, and Rosetta having to emulate. Datapoint: We develop plugins for Confluence and it’s about 1 minute to load each page. I don’t think developing Java 11 is a corner case of using a Mac.

thrashh 4y ago
The Java ARM versions don’t work for you?
syspec 4y ago
Hmm, works great here. I use ARM Java
david_allison 4y ago
Azul Zulu works great: https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk https://www.azul.com/downloads/?package=jdk#download-openjdk
threeseed 4y ago
ARM builds have been available for a while now even for Java 11. * AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/downloads-list.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/d... * Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11 https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11 * IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/dow... * Oracle GraalVM: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm-22.3.0 https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm...
- eastbound 4y ago
  Thank you. You saved us dozens of hours.

breck 4y ago

I'm also still on the MacBook Pro M1 and it's amazing. But this new one makes me drool. I am happy to see MagSafe back and the SD card slot and USB-C ports on both sides. Now someone grab my arms before I dump water on this keyboard.

masklinn 4y ago
All of that was already on the M1 versions of the same laptops though wasn’t it?
- breck 4y ago
  No. At least not on this one: MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
  - masklinn 4y ago
    As far as I can see the laptops in TFA are 14 and 16”. The 13” remains a heavier Air, with two ports on the same side and no magsafe: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
    - breck 4y ago
      Ah got it! Yes mine is a 13". Maybe I'll go 14".
      - masklinn 4y ago
        They’re great machines but do be aware they’re a fair bit heavier than the 13”, even the 14” is 0.5lb heavier (3.5 to 3). (The 16” is a 4.7lb chonk).
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  IIRC, Apple offered (offers? I haven’t checked) the 13” M1 which was based on the previous chassis, then launched the 14/16” on the new one.

optymizer 4y ago

The hardware is indeed great. The software experience is getting worse imo, particularly when upgrading. It used to be rock solid for me. The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura: * Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset. * On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset. * I left the laptop plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays over USBC. Laptop screen didnt turn on, other monitors did. Unplugged monitors, mashed keys on keyboard, replugged, laptop screen was still off. Hard reset. I give Apple lots of credit for switching to ARM, but the last time I had this many issues that required a hard reset because the OS became unusable was Windows ME. I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.

gigatexal 4y ago
Yup. Software is why I am on Linux on a thinkpad. It’s fast enough. And I control everything.
- throwntoday 4y ago
  As soon as Asahi gets proper GPU support I'm installing linux and relegating macOS to a tiny partition for managing my iPhone.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I’m surprised there are still people out there using their Mac to manage their iPhone.
    - photonbeam 4y ago
      Is there a way on Linux to backup the photos to the computer without using a cloud service?

kube-system 4y ago

I’ve never had an issue with a 20w Anker Nano charging my non-pro M1. Feels like the future charging my laptop with an adapter the size of an iPhone charger.

ja27 4y ago
Yeah my 16" M1 Pro draws 10-12w a lot of the time even with Slack, browser, Docker, and more running.

nvarsj 4y ago

Def the opposite experience for me software wise. Latest joy is chrome hanging whenever tabs are moved. Things randomly seem to crash all the time. Maybe it’s normal for OS X but my Linux experience is pretty much the opposite - rock solid, everything is fast, and nothing breaks. Granted the hardware does seem really good (except for slow anything to do with x86 and a useless GPU that can’t play games or do VR).

GoldenRacer 4y ago
For me, it's the WiFi that is completely botched. The status bar will frequently display incorrect statuses and trying to select a network from the status bar hardly ever works. I have to go into system preferences which has a tendency to totally freeze up for minutes at a time when I select the network tab. Then it'll occasionally get into a state where it tells me it's connected to the network but doesn't have Internet access and it must be a problem with the network (I know it's not because I have other devices connected to the same network that work fine). To get out of this, I have to turn WiFi off and back on again but Apple in there infinite wisdom has decided if I turn it off and back on too quickly, I must've done so by mistake and so they don't actually ever turn it off. So I have to turn it off, wait some unknown period of time (I usually wait 30s), and then turn it back on. Drives me crazy. In the end, every morning when I get to work, I expect it to be roughly 5 minutes between when I arrive and when I'm actually online. My personal computer running Linux has never had such a ridiculous issue (it does occasionally have issues but they're usually fixable after a quick Google search) but somehow everyone claims Apple just works and Linux is to much of a pain.
- astrange 4y ago
  File a bug. https://feedbackassistant.apple.com https://feedbackassistant.apple.com (Or call support, I guess.)
ggregoire 4y ago
It's obviously not "normal". I don't have any of the issues you are mentioning.

JLCarveth 4y ago

Look into Gallium Nitride (GaN) chargers. I got a 100W charging brick on Amazon for a little over $100CAD (a bit pricy yes), with 3 USB-C, 1 USB-A. There are cheaper models with less ports / wattage as well. A single brick fast-charges my M2 Macbook Air, my Phone, headphones.

dividedbyzero 4y ago
Those things are crazy compact. I have a tiny Anker 30W single USB-C charger for my M2 Macbook Air and iPhone for when I don't expect to need a charger and it's hard to not lose it because it's so lightweight and small. The cable is a lot heavier and bulkier and I already bought the lightest one I could find.

thefz 4y ago

Do the M* support external displays with are fresh rate greater than 60Hz?

fcoury 4y ago
They do. I am on a last gen M1 Pro MacBook 16" using a 240Hz display but it's capped at 120Hz.
- dachryn 4y ago
  then switch cables or docking station. It should support 240
samcat116 4y ago
Apple quotes that the HDMI port in these can do 4k 240hz
butterlesstoast 4y ago
Depends on the resolution of your external display. I had a 144hz 1080p monitor working as expected with a usb-c to Display Port connection (It didn't work with an HDMI cable).
syspec 4y ago
Yes, I have a 4K 144hz gigabyte monitor that runs perfectly with it. You must get a high quality USB-C cable though. I got Anker brand cable. Previous cable I had lying around the house would only give me 60hz

superkuh 4y ago

Things may be great on the high end of Apple's M1/M2 laptops given they actually have enough ram for simple tasks. But those are also insanely expensive. At the low end Apple is actively ripping off users providing computers which can't even edit photos. My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that the Apple M1 w/8GB uses ~4GB of that just to run the OS and if you happen to install adobe creative cloud there goes another 2GB and if you use some other "darkroom-alike" program to open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing. Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software, cannot even edit photos. They're only good for surfing the web and sending email. Apple selling these as actual functioning general purpose laptops is a fraud.

wlesieutre 4y ago
I can’t speak to Adobe’s problems but the M1 8GB has been shockingly fast in my experience, and has no issue at all with image editing.
abakker 4y ago
Interesting. I have one of those computers with 8gb and have not had problems with Lightroom, Photoshop, or Autodesk fusion360. I'm not saying that there are no issues, but the m1s in my experience seem to need less RAM to do the same things.
mandmandam 4y ago
... I think your dad got a funky laptop. I've been on an 8GB M1 for two years, running Adobe CC the entire time. I've edited absolutely massive photos - Gigabyte TIFFs, batch processing, etc - and never had any crashes. In fact I've done the above while playing HD video from YouTube with 40 tabs open and not experienced so much as a hiccup.
- thatfrenchguy 4y ago
  Or they’re using a pirated version of Creative Cloud from before 2020?

eertami 4y ago

>It’s crazy how far ahead Apple is getting in the laptop game with these new chips. I have the first gen MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro (ok maybe they’re not winning the naming game), and it’s a perfect computer. Battery life is literally all day, every single action is instant, I have zero regard for many apps or tabs I have open I can say the exact same thing for my Linux XPS, in fairness. My M1 battery will last longer, for sure, but both will last a whole work day. But because the M1 can't run Linux to a good standard, it's mostly just used to test/debug OSX related issues.

justapassenger 4y ago

Battery is NOT whole day. People shouldn’t fall for that. Yeah, battery is great, not arguing that. But if you use heavy web apps and do a lot of VC, half day is best you can get.

robertoandred 4y ago
I hope you don't use Chrome for those web apps. Google stuff has terrible power efficiency.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  Same effects both on Chrome and Safari. But that's also irrelevant. Whole day of battery, if you don't use heavy apps is very different from whole day of battery.
JimRoepcke 4y ago
It is if you're using Safari. I have two M1 Max MBPs. My personal machine runs Chrome, and my work machine runs Safari. I can run my work machine for well over a day doing iOS development in Xcode with an external monitor attached and not run out of battery. The personal machine will last almost all day (without a monitor attached) but not quite. I'm sure if I used Safari it would last much longer.
- justapassenger 4y ago
  I've tried both. Safari does some neat tricks to reduce usage when pages are not active. But if you have a heavy webapp - you have a heavy webapp, and power will be used.

nscalf 4y ago

I got an M1 for a recent job change, I've never interacted with one before that and my personal laptop was a relatively old macbook. The thing that amazed me the most was the speed. I would actually get confused because it did things so much faster than I was used to, I would sit and wait for something to happen only to realize it was so fast I had missed it occurring.

throwaway894345 4y ago

I wonder how long until Javon's paradox catches up and degraded software quality eats all of the performance gains afforded by the new hardware. The 2020s version of "Andy giveth and Bill taketh away".

nikeee 4y ago

Enjoy it as long as you can. As soon as this kind of hardware is close to becoming commodity, software will get as slow as it is currently on commodity hardware. It's part of Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

kossTKR 4y ago
Interesting. So that's why latency seems to have become worse in all aspects of personal computing / smartphones. Time from "push button" to "something happens on screen", was faster 20 years ago in some aspects. Has turned a bit on my M2 Air it seems though.

deepGem 4y ago

Or carry the 60W charger and turbocharge the phone, agreed it's not as portable as the brick.

citrusybread 4y ago

software experience is funky, and I am really disappointed by the lack of support for external monitors... I happen to have 2 identical monitors, and a third I can't use on a macbook pro with m1 pro. They're in H configuration, portrait, landscape, portrait (last two are apparently the same model though different years) The mac constantly confuses the two identical monitors (one is rotated 270 degrees so it ain't great). I've tried two USB video card adapters; one wouldn't work at all, one from Plugable couldn't rotate the missing monitor (rotated 90 degrees). If I asked it to drive the middle horizontal monitor, it mirrors with the matching monitor (again an issue because it's rotated 270 degrees) drives me nuts, there's no fix, it's a gamble which orientation it'll choose. making things worse - it also won't wake from sleep without a lot of trickery with the lid closed (only reliable method I've found is re-attaching the power cable... not great when I need to do this daily). my old intel mac? hit the spacebar on my usb keyboard to wake up. no issues with 3 monitors, and could even drive the internal display with it. I don't care about 2 external 4k screens -- some of us are still on 1080p and don't care. how did we regress like this?

atoav 4y ago

My 2 year old tuxedo notebook costed less than half of what the M1 MBP costs and renders any given blender scene 3 to 4 times faster. I consider getting a MBP, but quite frankly I wonder if I could really let it crunch "pro" workloads over night, because either they have infinitly silent active cooling (doubtful) or they throttle the thing (bad). If I pay for top notch hardware I want to have it crunch at full blast for as long as I desire, if I need it.

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