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MBA M1 Geekbench

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MBP 16 Geekbench (and yes fans spinning at about 50% complete onwards)

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My MBP 16 is my work issued Mac and score are consistent with other similarly configured MBP. Blows my mind how the Air M1 does better.

And why not - My Windows Gaming Rig

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It's a shame the numbers are so close for all three models.
Feels like APPLE is ripping you off going with the Pro and no justification in the higher price
I'll wait until the M2 or next years models.
want at least 32GB of memory. don't care what they say. 16 too low
 
After looking some evaluations and post here, I am very tempted to get M1 Mini....but yeah, I am still prefer waiting 32GB RAM config and 10GBe option available, just like previous Intel one (space gray is also nice if available on M1 version)

And why not - My Windows Gaming Rig

Oh X299.....I had Asrock X299 Creator board with built in Titan Ridge TB3, but I have difficulties finding chips available at that time, leaving canceled build
 
There are a few big issues. First the Air is throttled after a short period of time so it isn't as powerful as the MBP due to lack of a fan. The MBP has the dreaded and derided Touchbar for which most people find it horrendous. The Mini isn't portable so you can't use it on the go. All of the laptops have chunky bezels from the 1990s.

So each is neutered in some way or another.
If bezels = good speakers, I'm all for bezels.

And Touch Bar is better than no Touch Bar.
 
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Damn, I have an MBA on order. And now you're telling me it's going to be hobbled discovering the next prime number. Thanks a lot Tim Cook! Wah...
throttled equals 5% degradation in performance, that's it.

If you buy an air versus the pro, you probably weren't planning on using it to transcode or render super high res or fps videos which is what would usually throttle it.
 
One really minor thing I haven't heard mentioned...

When using an external monitor with my 13"M1, I can now close and open the lid and there is no blackout on either the monitor(Viewsonic 4K) or the MacBook. My 16" always took a few seconds to initialize and set resolution while it blacked out.

The monitor resolution switches instantly to native when I open the lid, and reverts back to whatever resolution I have the monitor set at when I close the lid. Instantaneously.

The only thing that takes a few seconds with an external monitor is Wake from Sleep. Whenever the lid is closed or open, the monitor takes a few seconds to turn on. The MacBook Pro's screen will turn instantly on, but my monitor takes its time. No big issue, but a slight annoyance after being able activate the laptop's screen as fast as an iPhone.
 
What does the air offer over an iPad (iPad Pro?); or have iPad‘s suddenly become not good enough for “95% what people use a computer for”. What can you do on an Air that you wouldn’t / couldn’t do on an iPad? I appreciate there will be very specific use cases, but for general email, office work, browsing and consumption, what is the appeal of the air?
I have an iMac (2019) and MacBook Pro (2015) for work and an iPad Pro (2019) for fun. The iPad has some great features and as far as Adobe and Microsoft applications are considered, it's a toy compared to the Macs.

There is no way you can say with a straight face and decent level of knowledge, that the iPad is nearly as efficient as the others when it comes to office work applications. They could put a quantum computer in the iPad form factor and make it free, and I'd still choose the Mac for getting work done.
 
After a week of using M1 went back to my Windows gaming notebook but it felt primitive and slow. Look for the most powerful Macs to run multiple M1 processors. Think about future Mac Pros running ten M1 SOC's.
 
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Since I sometimes use swap even with 64GB RAM, I don't think I'd want one until 32-64GB RAM was available.

And even if there's some sort of virtualization possible, do I really want ARM versions of Linux and Windows? Heck, there is no ARM version of some other OSs that I have VMs for.

edit: while Apple silicon systems with more RAM may in time be suitable for replacing all but Intel virtualization functionality for MOST models, I wonder how long it will be before the Apple silicon chip ecosystem is up to something with massive expandability (RAM, I/O, add-on GPUs, storage, etc) - that is to say, a Mac Pro (presently maxing out at 28 cores, 1.5TB RAM, etc). Even if the per-thread performance of the Apple silicon is substantially higher, a monster like that is hard to beat for some tasks, esp. with high-end GPUs too.

The difference is that a monster system can't yet (perhaps, in terms of expandability, ever) be all on one chip; for a really large system, multiple CPU chips that can communicate and coordinate cache coherency are necessary, a heavily ECC design is VERY desirable (cuts down on random glitches), I/O needs to be massively expandable, remote management support may be needed, etc. That's a far cry from a jumped-up phone/tablet chip ecosystem.

edit 2: hmm, looks like the 28-core in the Mac Pro is on a single chip! Pretty good (although other architectures have gone crazier than that in terms of both cores per chip and threads per core). So maybe inter-CPU-chip communications can wait awhile, but all the rest still applies to a moderately large system (a high-end workstation, more or less).
 
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Correct.

In a nutshell, this is why the PC guys ignore Geekbench. The Geekbench test duration is laughably short.

Also, there is no measurement of acoustics. The user experience isn't just a bench score from a pitifully short test.

This is simply bad testing methodology.
Well, it's a test of peak performance. Bursty loads exist too. I'd just rather see both the benchmarks if there's going to be an article rounding them all up. And acoustics and other user experience things require trying it yourself.
 
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After a week of using M1 went back to my Windows gaming notebook but it felt primitive and slow. Look for the most powerful Macs to run multiple M1 processors. Think about future Mac Pros running ten M1 SOC's.
Can they? I'm no expert, but with Xeons the norm was 1-4 CPUs per machine, 8 in extreme cases, so I think the cross-connections are too difficult. On top of that, the M1 has on-chip RAM, which may be harder to share across CPUs. My guess was 1, 2, or maaaybe 4 in a Mac Pro, with each being significantly faster than the ones in the Air. Either way, exciting.
 
There are a few big issues. First the Air is throttled after a short period of time so it isn't as powerful as the MBP due to lack of a fan. The MBP has the dreaded and derided Touchbar for which most people find it horrendous. The Mini isn't portable so you can't use it on the go. All of the laptops have chunky bezels from the 1990s.

So each is neutered in some way or another.
I purchased the M1 MacBook Pro, assuming that the fan would allow for better performance under sustained workloads. In the (almost) week that I have been using it, the fan has not come on once (as far as I have been able to discern).
 
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I’ve just ordered my M1 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. I can’t wait!

Coming from a late 2013 MBP, the difference is going to be phenomenal! I now need to sell the 2014 logic board I was going to use to upgrade the old girl....
 
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Swapped out my Intel Mini to an M1. Got the 8GB of RAM because the shipping time for 16GB pushed it into mid-December, and delayed gratification is not ideal in CoVID times lol Haven't had any issues with the RAM, or speed, or anything, really.

I use my Mini primarily as a home server for Plex, and transferring the folder with all the metadata from the Time Machine back up, with all 17k individual files and 20GB of space, took me about 30 minutes. For comparison, last time I did this into the Intel Mini, it took me an hour and a half.

It's truly a fantastic update.
I really think that our attitudes to RAM has been shaped by general purpose computing - get as much as you can because you’re going to need it. I paid for 16GB MacBook Pro M1 because it was the most RAM I could get, but I honestly think that 8GB would have been fine. Apple has produced a more complete product with the M1, rather than assembling a bunch of components, and the planned optimisation really seems to have made a huge difference. It would be interesting to see if Windows 10 was able to perform so well on the same hardware. My feeing is that there would be performance gain, but not as much as macOS and M1 apps have been able to achieve.
 
Can they? I'm no expert, but with Xeons the norm was 1-4 CPUs per machine, 8 in extreme cases, so I think the cross-connections are too difficult. On top of that, the M1 has on-chip RAM, which may be harder to share across CPUs. My guess was 1, 2, or maaaybe 4 in a Mac Pro, with each being significantly faster than the ones in the Air. Either way, exciting.
There’s a long way to go increasing core count—16? 24? 32? 64?—before multi-CPUs would be considered, I think.
 
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