Beyond the M1 hype and why the fairy dust needs to settle.

[hans1972]

Can Apple still claim that their M1 processor is still the worlds fastest because they only make combined CPU and a GPU included on the same chip? which is like saying i'm the worlds fasted man! umm fastest 3 legged man!

They can if that is the claim they made.

If you state "I am the fastest man with three nipples" that would still be a true statement even if there were 3 billion men with 0, 1, 2, 4 or more nipples who ran faster than you.

"This is the fastest Mac we have ever made" is still true even if there exists hundreds of millions of faster Windows PCs.

"OS X is immune to PC-virus" is also true since PC-virus in Apple parlance is Windows-virus and OS X can't run those. Usually Windows-fans point to some Mac Trojan horse which make the statement even more true. Apple never said it was immune to Trojan horses, only viruses, and only PC-viruses, not Mac-viruses.

When you read statements from Apple you have to consider every word in the sentence.

 

[MBAir2010]

They can if that is the claim they made.

we cleared this Allllllll up days ago!
i am fine now and happy now- and typing on a MacBook air!
how are you?

 

[mi7chy]

So I assumed this is supposed to be a trick question. I can't find any solid information, but... 128GB dimms do exist and that's the spec on the chip.

Better off getting an Epyc SP3 socket motherboard since Epyc and Threadripper CPU prices are comparable while Epyc has more CPU options.

I've had good experience with Supermicro motherboards and would go with something like this for ~$500 that supports 2TB RAM plus 10GB NICs.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/H12SSL-NT

For RAM, Samsung has 256GB DDR4-3200 registered ECC module part #M386ABG40M51-CAE. Eight of them gives you 2TB.

With 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes you can have three x16 lane GPUs plus plenty leftover for x16 10GB NIC, x4 NVMe SSDs, etc.

 

[Fomalhaut]

Have you owned a Mac recently? With the way they are built now with everything soldered in, if it’s out of warranty a normally easily replaceable component now requires replacement of the motherboard, which is insanely expensive. It’s even worse now with the advent of the M1 chip in which the entire system is on one chip. Windows PCs are incredibly easy to repair.

Maybe some Windows desktops / towers are easier to repair, but increasingly Windows laptops are following the same trend of soldered components (especially RAM), non-removable batteries and very few user-serviceable parts.

Sure, there is a repair path in some laptops, but it's not always straightforward, e.g. SSD removal in compatible Surface devices - Microsoft Docshttps://docs.microsoft.com › Docs › Surface

 

[Fomalhaut]

Really? Have you tried repairing or upgrading a Microsoft Surface Laptop?

SSD removal in compatible Surface devices - Microsoft Docshttps://docs.microsoft.com › Docs › Surface For example!

 

[dave_kor]

For $920 on the Windows side you can get a HP ENVY x360 with a FHD screen(1080p), Ryzen 7 4700U, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD(user upgradable) and a 1000 NITS display with touch.

Before I bought my M1 Mac, I had an Asus Zenbook 14 with Ryzen 4700U for 1000 Euro. That computer has several issues making it a lot worse than the M1. The processor that you think is so great isn't as good as the M1. In the Asus, it would draw up to 35W for short bursts, giving it about 7000 CB R23 points in a single run. In a 10 minute loop, the chip would drop down to about 13W, which would give it a score of about 6000 points. My M1 Air draws about 13W when it's not throttling and has about 7500 CB R23 single run score.

DO NOT forget a lot of the performance comes from Apple bullying developers into optimizing their apps well, which isn't the case on windows. Also the processor has a bunch of extra silicon like the Neural Engine, H264/H265 encoders/decoders that make it perform above average for its class in video editing and other creative work.

Besides the processor performance, the M1 has many other advantages. High power efficiency and scaling mean that under most normal loads like word, webpages, video streaming etc. the whole M1 package consumes under 1W of power. An x86 processor would consume multiple watts doing the same. This means that the M1 Air with a 17Wh smaller battery lasts miles longer than the Asus. With the Asus set to low power/quiet mode, I would lose 20-30% after 1 hour of MS Teams. On the M1, I lose that much after 3-4 hours. Granted some of that is also due to me having to run the Asus at 100% screen brightness because it only had 250 nits like most windows laptops at this price, but that would shorten the life by maybe an hour max.

The laptop you list specifically comes with a terrible display. 1000 nits means nothing, as the privacy filter makes it horrible to use and gives it awful viewing angles. It also doesn't support 10-bit color (DCI P3) like the M1 Macbooks. A terrible display is the biggest weakness of cheap windows laptops. Where I live if I want to get a Windows laptop with a comparable display to the M1 Air, I have to shell out 500 euro more for a base model XPS 13.

However, you are completely correct about the upgradeability, most windows manufacturers make it easy to get replacement parts from suppliers and a replaceable SSD is a massive advantage over the M1.

The M1 macs also beat many cheap windows ultrabooks in: speaker quality, construction quality (flex), webcam quality, microphone quality, touchpad quality and sometimes keyboard quality.

 

[Bandaman]

Maybe some Windows desktops / towers are easier to repair, but increasingly Windows laptops are following the same trend of soldered components (especially RAM), non-removable batteries and very few user-serviceable parts.

Sure, there is a repair path in some laptops, but it's not always straightforward, e.g. SSD removal in compatible Surface devices - Microsoft Docshttps://docs.microsoft.com › Docs › Surface

People keep bringing up the horrific to repair Surface.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

So Nvidia just announced Grace for datacenters (and I assume workstations), a CPU that is ARM based and combined with their GPUs. Based in the numbers they've thrown around in comparison to x86 there's only one thing to say "RIP AMD and Intel".

It remains to be seen how these really perform, but if any close to what they claim, there's little point to buy x86 for datacenters/workstations anymore. Pretty much every system out there combined with Nvidia GPU is running Intel or AMD CPUs so far. Time to get rid of x86.

 

[robco74]

The only problem with declaring x86 dead is that for consumer products, it requires a great deal of coordination. It's different when you can roll your own Linux and put it in a datacenter with hardware you specify. It's a similar end-to-end level of control Apple has with M1. But if you're Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. trying to cobble together a device from off-the-shelf components and then make it all work with a third-party OS, it's a bit more challenging. For all the bashing Windows gets, for all the different configs it has to support, I'm surprised it works as well as it does.

To really compete. MS would need an API for on-device ML (if they don't already have one), and AMD, Intel, et al. would need to implement it so that third-party devs know that capability is present and can write their code accordingly. But for iOS, and now Mac devs, it's not an issue. Ditto with things like ISPs, video encoding, etc. Just one example though of how Apple can implement a new feature without requiring collaboration from partners who all want credit and a sticker on the machine.

I'm sure OEMs would love to be able to spec out their own SoCs like M1, but they can't do that without software support. This is less of an issue in the datacenter where if you're big enough, you can just roll your own.

 

[GrumpyCoder]

The only problem with declaring x86 dead is that for consumer products, it requires a great deal of coordination.

Yes and no, people don't care about running something on x86, they care about running their current x86 software. Rosetta 2 showed that's possible, in many cases (not all). Same can be said here. As long as people can keep running their software, the CPU won't matter. Many offices run MS Office... if that works on a ARM CPU, problem solved.

I would at least expect to be able to run any Nvidia SDK in Grace+GPU vs. Xeon/EPYC+GPU. This is really huge for research/universities/prototyping. The gamer at home won't buy $50k workstations anyway, nor servers starting at $100k going up to millions. It won't happen over night though.

 

[robco74]

Yes and no, people don't care about running something on x86, they care about running their current x86 software. Rosetta 2 showed that's possible, in many cases (not all). Same can be said here. As long as people can keep running their software, the CPU won't matter. Many offices run MS Office... if that works on a ARM CPU, problem solved.

I would at least expect to be able to run any Nvidia SDK in Grace+GPU vs. Xeon/EPYC+GPU. This is really huge for research/universities/prototyping. The gamer at home won't buy $50k workstations anyway, nor servers starting at $100k going up to millions. It won't happen over night though.

Right, but this is a market Apple has never really pursued and what keeps Windows bloated. Apple has no interest in users looking to pay the least amount possible to run legacy software. They will put in carrots like Rosetta 2 to ease the transition, but make no mistake, it wont be around forever. The expectation is for developers to port their apps to run natively. Eventually, those apps that aren't updated won't run anymore, just like 32-bit apps on macOS. MS is still working to get users off of W7. So not only does MS need to keep supporting the cruft on x64, but some will expect them to support in on ARM in perpetuity.

Oddly enough, MS released native Office for macOS more quickly than they did for their own OS.

 

[mgymnop]

I had a Surface Book 13.5 with 16 MB RAM and 1TB SSD. Costs 2600 bucks. It was the worst machine ever. Got hot and had re-occuring black screens for 10-20 seconds and MS wasn't able to fix it in a year. probably driver issue with external Nvidia card. My friend at MS said they are all plagued by that bug. Before that I had a Yoga 920 from Lenovo. Constantly issues with drivers for touchpad and sound card. I am done with PCs and switched to the M1 MBP and never looked back.

 

[bobcomer]

I had a Surface Book 13.5 with 16 MB RAM and 1TB SSD.

I had one of those too. One of my worst purchases ever, but it lasted for 6 years before the batteries expanded and made it unusable.

 

[JMacHack]

I’m enjoying how this thread got thoroughly derailed into hypothetical PC builds that are better than the Mac Pro and the repaiability of different brands of PC laptops.

 

[mi7chy]

I had a Surface Book 13.5 with 16 MB RAM and 1TB SSD. Costs 2600 bucks. It was the worst machine ever. Got hot and had re-occuring black screens for 10-20 seconds and MS wasn't able to fix it in a year. probably driver issue with external Nvidia card. My friend at MS said they are all plagued by that bug. Before that I had a Yoga 920 from Lenovo. Constantly issues with drivers for touchpad and sound card. I am done with PCs and switched to the M1 MBP and never looked back.

What both devices have in common is Intel. Intel is what's holding back the Surface line. Hoping they switch to AMD for Surface Pro 8. My $500 Lenovo Yoga 6 with AMD 4650U has been perfect with zero issue unlike the MBA M1 that has broken trackpad palm rejection, broken memory management that uses up all 16GB RAM and creates a swap file during extended sleep that shortens SSD life, can burn out any day with kernel panic that's happened to others, etc.

 

[mgymnop]

What both devices have in common is Intel. Intel is what's holding back the Surface line. Hoping they switch to AMD for Surface Pro 8. My $500 Lenovo Yoga 6 with AMD 4650U has been perfect with zero issue unlike the MBA M1 that has broken trackpad palm rejection, broken memory management that uses up all 16GB RAM and creates a swap file during extended sleep that shortens SSD life, can burn out any day with kernel panic that's happened to others, etc.

Sorry to hear. I have zero issues with my MBP M1. I have it since January and no hardware issues at all.

 

[Ethosik]

we cleared this Allllllll up hours ago!
i am fine now and happy!
how are you?

No we didn't. You replied with the exact same argument that Apple shouldn't say things like that.

im back!
Apple did state
"The Apple M1 chip gives the 13‑inch MacBook Pro speed and power beyond belief"
and
"And it brings the world’s fastest integrated graphics in a personal computer, delivering a ridiculous 5x boost in graphics horsepower."
Now if ANY other manufacture claimed this, there would be 80 pages of comments instead the 8 here.

I read that the Ryzen and other gaming laptops are getting faster results now.

You are still comparing CPU instead of GPU. Ryzen and other gaming laptops do NOT have integrated GPU. Therefore, Ryzen and other gaming laptops are getting faster results due to the NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

 

[Ethosik]

Threadripper is great for what it is, and in PC land you'd be mad to buy intel

Intel still has compatibility and supportability where AMD still lacks. I have a few friends that have AMD systems and they ALL experienced the recent USB fiasco with AMD.

AMD Locates 'Root Cause' of USB Issues on B550, X570 Motherboards

A patch will arrive through the upcoming AGESA 1.2.0.2 update, which motherboard vendors will likely start rolling out in early April via beta BIOS updates.

www.pcmag.com

I would rather sacrifice a BIT of performance than deal with some random USB issues when I need it most.

 

[Ethosik]

That IBM study wasn't anything to do with hardware failure, it was to do with service desk tickets.

i.e., it took into account application usability issues, patching, software crashes, user problems, configuration problems, device setup problems (can't print, print output not right for example), malware, etc.

As an IT pro if 20+ years with about 1800 boxes under my care, i'd vouch for it still being relevant. Mac software is just far nicer and has less problems in general. I mean jeez.... Windows update lately causes all manner of hell.

Yes, Windows 10 has become a MASSIVE mess. Literally blue screen when you attempt to print.

Windows 10 KB5000802 (March) update is crashing PCs with BSOD

Windows 10 KB5000802 (March 2021 update) has been going seriously wrong for some PC owners in the last twelve hours, with several users reporting that the botched update is causing Blue Screen of Death errors when they use printers. To make matters worse, KB5000802 is an automatic security...

www.windowslatest.com

This was a massive MASSIVE issue, and the March update was a security update, so it was not those feature updates.

 

[NotTooLate]

What both devices have in common is Intel. Intel is what's holding back the Surface line. Hoping they switch to AMD for Surface Pro 8. My $500 Lenovo Yoga 6 with AMD 4650U has been perfect with zero issue unlike the MBA M1 that has broken trackpad palm rejection, broken memory management that uses up all 16GB RAM and creates a swap file during extended sleep that shortens SSD life, can burn out any day with kernel panic that's happened to others, etc.

Not tired yet ? You just posted your 8 highest rated brands in the world in response to apple being first , apple was not even on your list while AMD were number 1 and Microsoft 2 , your agenda is clear , and your FUD spreading needs to stop , as mods won’t do it for some Reason and the fact you are doing it in EVERY single thread I am reading on this forum , I feel I must do it my self .. have a good working day posting in MR

 

[Kung gu]

What both devices have in common is Intel. Intel is what's holding back the Surface line. Hoping they switch to AMD for Surface Pro 8. My $500 Lenovo Yoga 6 with AMD 4650U has been perfect with zero issue unlike the MBA M1 that has broken trackpad palm rejection, broken memory management that uses up all 16GB RAM and creates a swap file during extended sleep that shortens SSD life, can burn out any day with kernel panic that's happened to others, etc.

I disagree on the trackpad rejection, my 16" MBP has the best trackpad palm rejection I have ever used on any laptop
and I am very picky on the my trackpads. I would say that this is majorly agreed upon by 99% people.

Yes, there is broken memory management, we have to see if Apple optimises it or is it due to the unified memory of the M1 Macs. Maybe M1X will be different memory arch? we have to wait and see.

I had issues with Lenovo products and I had issues with Apple products. No company is perfect. I would say majority experience have a great experience with their M1 Macs just as they do with Yoga 6. You are in a Mac forum so are bound to find a lot of issues. Go to Windows forums and lenovo forums. You will things like windows issues and loose broken hinges and popping screens on Lenovo forums.

 

[throAU]

Intel still has compatibility and supportability where AMD still lacks. I have a few friends that have AMD systems and they ALL experienced the recent USB fiasco with AMD.

I've had plenty of problems with intel over the years (SATA corruption anyone?) too, this is unfortunately what you get sometimes being an early adopter.

btw, we aren't talking about a "bit" of performance here though. Even current gen you can be giving up 50% or more in some cases.

For what its worth, I've got a B550 board and have had zero issues with it. But the only USB devices I use with it are a wireless mouse/kb, xbox controller and USB storage. Oh and my Oculus.

 

[bobcomer]

This was a massive MASSIVE issue, and the March update was a security update, so it was not those feature updates.

Not massive, none of the PC's I control had that problem, though Microsoft does occasionally have updates that can cause crashes, but it's usually a very small percentage of PC's that fell outside the testing. Really, I haven't had a MASSIVE issue with Windows for a very long time, maybe 10 years. There was an update that maybe some Thinkpads not bootable. (easy to fix, but it was a pain)

 

[jinnyman]

You know. I'm most critical of Apple on how Apple has !@#$ed up Mac Pro for enthusiasts. But I still admire what Apple has done with M1 for portable sector.

For a laptop, there is really no promising alternative to M1 if Mac ecosystem suits one's needs. If battery life is non issue (aka you are looking not for portable, but "portable" desktop like laptop that you always plug to wall), I guess Intel and AMD are good enough. If what you do requires Windows, there's no option, and I'm one of them also. I've decided to use multiple machines, but I know my solution is not fit for other people.

Sometimes, it's so tiresome to see people here bashing windows machines for no reason. My family member also use Surface Pro 7 with i7 and it's really a wonderful machine to use and own. I love my P1 Gen2. My personal built desktop still owns most of tasks I throw at. At the same time, I also love Apple's build quaility, and I really do enjoy my personal enclave I set up on my MBP and iMac. I wished iMac was to be Mac Pro, but Apple put **** on every enthusiasts' mouth with 7,1. I love my M1 mini that I hooked up to my TV.

All are great machines, and yes all, including windows machines, do have some minor issues. My P1 Gen2 was plagued with unstable firmware and power management issue with 9th gen Intel CPU. It had a keyboard problem where single key stroke registers as multiple strokes. After a year or so, Lenovo pretty much solved this issue. My MBP 16 still heats up too much when I connect it to a second monitor and leave a lid open. My previous intel Mac mini had bluetooth issues so I had to put a USB extension cord in addition to my hub connection in order to remedy the issue. My M1 Mini has a weird issue with monitor not waking up (not happen all the time which irritate me more). My personal built desktop is pretty much problem free except I had to flush out bad memory when building it. I pretty much has no issue with iMac 2020 running with 64 gig ram. I wish this was Mac Pro where I can add more internal storage, but oh well.

You know I rambled a lot, but all machines are good for some purpose, and I know enough that Mac are not perfect. Currently, M1 rules battery life, so on that matter, there is still fairy dust flying around, and I don't see them settled any time soon. But eventually I know this superiority will be surpassed by other competitors, and I'm glad there will be more improvement coming in all other players by raised competition Apple has set upon.

 

[BigPotatoLobbyist]

Some good points here, but MS never heralded the Surface Pro X as the future of Surface. MS still offers other laptops
with intel and AMD cpus, MS offers users choice and does not force people.

Apple needs to offer a better product than the surface pro X because if it does not its transition will be seen as a failure
but my point still stands Windows laptops still offers better value than M1 macs contrary to what most people saying otherwise.

>Windows laptops offer better value





lol