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The M1 forum is no longer needed.

Xenobius

Xenobius

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 10, 2019
193
475
All Macs will have Mx processors soon, so the M1 forum is unnecessary - it just creates confusion.
There should be an 'Intel legacy/retired products' forum instead.
 
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Xenobius said:
All Macs will have Mx processors soon, so the M1 forum is unnecessary - it just creates confusion.
There should be an 'Intel legacy/retired products' forum instead.
Click to expand...
"soon" is the keyword here, but still I am not sure I agree with you. I think there could still be room for at technical Apple Silicon forum, even when Apple Silicon are the norm. Maybe not isolated to Mac.
 
cupcakes2000 said:
They’re still selling intel stuff, and if rumours are true even releasing new ones! Intel Macs are still relevant and indeed the vast majority for now.
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It is absurd. If these rumours are confirmed, Apple will launch products that are obsolete. Yes, they will be bought, but only because there will be no choice.
Intel in Macs is dead. Ok, zombie yet.
 
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Xenobius said:
It is absurd. If these rumours are confirmed, Apple will launch products that are obsolete. Yes, they will be bought, but only because there will be no choice.
Intel in Macs is dead. Ok, zombie yet.
Click to expand...
I agree with you, but eventually - they’re not dead yet.
 
Xenobius said:
All Macs will have Mx processors soon, so the M1 forum is unnecessary - it just creates confusion.
There should be an 'Intel legacy/retired products' forum instead.
Click to expand...
I fully agree.
As far as I can see a lot of discussions there really belong to the Big Sur forum instead.
In my opinion, sub forums or tags/prefix within the relevant forums would serve the purpose better.
 
Wando64 said:
I fully agree.
As far as I can see a lot of discussions there really belong to the Big Sur forum instead.
In my opinion, sub forums or tags/prefix within the relevant forums would serve the purpose better.
Click to expand...
Isn't it always the case that there is overlap between OS and hardware issues? Take the ever-popular thread on excessive SSD writes, where Big Sur and M1 both stand accused.
And this is already a sub-forum of Macs, and no doubt it can be branched as further Apple Silicon computers emerge over time. I just can't see that there is a problem to be solved.
 
I don't agree, there's a lot of info in here about running M1 Macs that we'd lose. You might be able to merge it with the main forums, but it wouldn't be easy.
 
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Xenobius said:
It is absurd. If these rumours are confirmed, Apple will launch products that are obsolete.
Click to expand...
Which doesn't change the simple fact that Apple are still selling them (I'm skeptical about any more significantly new Intel Macs and suspect people are just finding product IDs that have got copied over with Intel or AMD driver code - but a new CPU or GPU option for the Mac Pro wouldn't be a huge surprise) .

The Apple Silicon equivalents of the high-end 13" MBP, the i5 and i7 Mini, the 5k iMac and the Mac Pro - not to mention the CPUs that are going to power them - are still in the realms of rumour... and we're only guessing that these machines will get 1:1 replacements. At the moment, a lot depend on what those new CPUs will offer.

Just because the M1 can beat/match most of the Intel Macs at single-core GeekBench doesn't mean that it fits everybody's needs.

How Apple are going to tackle the RAM issue (2 LPDDR chips soldered directly to the CPU won't cut it at the higher end) or whether there will still be a Mac Pro-like machine with PCIe/MPX is yet to be seen.

Subjects like how to run Windows and Linux on M1 are still evolving (yes, Parallels is out, but the only Windows option is a not-officially-supported "insiders" build - we're waiting on Fusion, no news on VirtualBox, Multipass etc., last I looked QEMU, UTM etc. were working but still evolving ) and all that is M1-related, and very distinct from the discussion about x86 BootCamp and virtualisation in the "WIndows, Linux and Others" forum.

Then there's all the stuff about RAM usage, swap etc. which is an important discussion (even if not everything there is... high quality, there are genuine issues) which is firmly applicable across M1 Macs.

Even in the future, when the transition is complete, I think there will be discussions about Apple Silicon that cut across all Macs & iPads. Apple now makes processors, so there are going to be discussions about M3, M4 and why ARM is better/worse than RISC-V that belong in the Apple Silicon forum.

If what you are saying is that maybe it's time for the discussions about the colour of the new iMac's chin to move to the iMac forum, then I don't disagree. (Except... that chin is the computer folks, courtesy of the M1 - Intel needed the 'baby bulge' behind the screen to fit the heatsink...)
 
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At this point, there are some things unique to the M1-both in operation and in issues that arise(like my 5% bite of SSD life since March).

In addition, Intel Macs will remain relevant for at least a few years. If we look at Apple's last CPU transition, the first Intel Macs switched January 2006 and PPC had been completely replaced by August of the same year. As it stands now, we are 6 months in to M1, and it's only made its way into a handful of products(the Air, lower end MBPs, Mini, and now the iMac) with several more to go(high end MBPs, the big iMacs, and the Mac Pro). I expect several of those won't transition until the next generation of CPUs.

PPC had 100% OS support until 2009 when Snow Leopard was released, and even at that there was a scattering of support that hung around for a few more years. A high end G5, for example, was still a perfectly useable system in 2009. Heck, when I first came here, PPC was showing its age for sure and starting to get into "work around" territory for a lot, but was still useable for a decent amount. When MR was still on vBulletin, I'd often browse and post from my 9600/200MP just because...why not, but Xenforo killed that.

Intel, in the big picture, is a different landscape than PPC as well. Apple was the only company that ever invested seriously in consumer level POWER architecture(IBM did a bit, but they were kind of useless thanks to almost no software). Otherwise, the POWER architecture was-and really still is(it's not dead by any means) in the realm of supercomputers and other definitely non-consumer applications. x86 probably isn't going anywhere any time soon, so I see Intel support hanging around even for macOS as long as Apple will still let xCode compile for it.

I know that's a lot of rambling, but at this point M1 is new enough that to me it makes sense to keep it separate. Give it another year and that may not be the case, but it is now.
 
The forum should remain at least until the number of M1 Macs in active use > the number of Intel Macs in active use.

Since most people keep their Macs for many years, I suspect we're a ways off from that point.
 
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