Apple and the saga continues....

[Ellipsis]

Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, the new M1 chip integrates the CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, I/O, and so much more onto a single tiny chip. Combined with the new macOS Big Sur, M1 delivers category-smashing speed, mind-bending graphics, and power efficiency and battery life that defy belief... up to 20 hours of battery life — the longest‑ever battery life in a Mac.

Let the banter begin... any discussion is better then talking about the orange thing.

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[ItsjustMe]

1. A couple of threads on Reddit I've been following

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/jru1ok/apples_new_m1_computers_top_out_at_16gb_of_ram/

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/jrtyxj/looks_like_the_m1powered_13_macbook_pro_only/

[Ellipsis]

2. Thanks.

[ancianita]

3. Here's some pro and con info from Slashdot.

Con
https://apple.slashdot.org/story/20/11/11/2114225/no-the-new-macbook-air-is-not-faster-than-98-of-pc-laptops

So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.

Pro

(3 Facebook commenters)

While I appreciate that Apple's 98% boast was marketing spin, this article is equally vacuous. The MacBook Air ($999) should be compared to other laptops in its price range. The high-end gaming laptops mentioned are double or triple the cost of the MacBook Air. So, Gordon makes the same flawed argument that he lambasts Apple for - he compared the MacBook Air against machines that are not comparable. If you compare the MBA against the Dell XPS 13 (also $999), it's not even a contest. The eight-core MBA will easily excel in compute against the quad-core mobile Core i7 (it's single-core scalar performance is at least 50% better). But, the MBA will also provide double or triple the battery life of the XPS 13. The MBA is a genuinely ground-breaking machine, even if Gordon doesn't want to admit it.

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Geeez snowflakes... make sure it's an apple-to-apples comparison. your "2015 dual I7 64gb" is not in the same class as a macbook air. There are a ton of shitty pcs on the market. HP et al have been selling PCs with 4GB RAM and Windows 10 - which is rediculous. I just saw a PC at Walmart fo $200 with only 2GB RAM. So... think about what 98% means before you start pulling out your outlier comparisons.

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I watched the show too, Apple definitely was alluding to their CPU cores being faster.
Here's where the sticking point is, the x86 architecture in general is super bloated with old instructions that must still be supported. ARM is not.

Comparable programs, compiled 1:1 for x86 and ARM, it's very likely that the ARM counterparts out perform x86 counterparts. This is more the result of the nature of ARM though. Not to mention that their M1 is admittedly fast according to leaks and Geekbench benchmarks out in the wild.
It's also fair to assume that a comparison to "98% of all laptops" is probably pretty accurate. Let's just be honest here, most laptops, probably in excess of 90%, are total shit.
Should Apple release their measurements and how they came up with this number? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Should everyone just assume that Apple is faster than all these shitty laptops out there? Yea, that's honestly a pretty safe bet. I'd bet apples to apples (pun not intended) that this new M1 chip probably does outperform every single budget mobile/laptop CPU out there. I'd also bet it outperforms nearly all mid range mobile CPUs, because, again, let's be honest, most mid range mobile and energy efficient CPUs are pretty trash.

These things are all true, UNLESS you only want to use your laptop to surf Facebook, and post hyperbole on Slashdot of course. If that's what you want to use your laptop for, yea a trash tier laptop is probably fine.

Wanna do some development work? Run a few virtual machines? You can on a cheap laptop, but you're gonna notice it. Ironically though, virtual machines may not work on the M1. No details about virtualization instructions are mentioned.

Overall though, people need to chill, the early results on Geekbench shows this chip is a powerhouse. What will make it a winner or not is features. Can I install virtualbox? Can I install Docker? Can I install VMware? Do I have virtualization extensions?

You can have the fastest CPU on the planet, but if it can't do anything useful, it's pointless. That's really what everyone needs to wait on. Is this M1 chip useful to people beyond surfing Facebook or using App Store apps?
Time will tell.

[Ellipsis]

4. Thanks for posting this.

I haven't looked at Slashdot in many, many, years. There's and individual I know who's been in the industry pretty much since day one, focused on the video and color side, he's normally the guy I talk to. Actually more or less listen to as he paint's the picture. Unfortunately I have not seen him since the Covid thing kicked into gear. I simply won't call him up for a briefing. I imagine that conversation will happen soon enough. Perhaps I'll put something up then.

The real impressive thing for me is the battery time. The Air book config @ $999 with a 256Gig SD Drive and 8 Gig of ram with a suite of software, 15 hours of battery time (with a wireless connection),You can do some serious work, though I'd never buy the first rev.

We've come a long way from waiting for 3 hours for an unsharpened mask to finish on $35,000 dollar workstation But back then you could get an ROI in a week.

[ancianita]

5. No problem.

Yeah, Slashdot's old, a site from the oughties. I still get it, TechDirt and Ars Technica on FB, so when I saw your vid, I just put their recent post out there.

Turn on the fan, they say, and there goes the battery time; but that's likely true for all but gaming computers. (8 Gigs of ram seems pretty standard, imo, but what do I know, I've not used anything but Apple in 13 years, Vaio and Dell before that through the 90's.)

The issue for developers seems to be whether or not it supports virtualization machines.

Anyway, that's all out of my league; I'm just a net surfer. I try my geezer best to have passing acquaintance with new stuff because I don't want to seem like a complete idiot to my millennial son in NM, who has an IT business that services both consumer and commercial systems like the local university and hospital. Once during covid he fixed the Gila Medical Center's obstetrics ward's ultrasound and the next day got calls from hospitals from AZ next door!

[pansypoo53219]

6. i only do desktops, but my fl epal just had her microsoft machine upgrade + took away her solitaire

+ her email capability.

[Ellipsis]

7. Well far be for me to do Microsoft support....

...considering the epithets that I constantly seem to evoke when supporting Mrs. Ellipsis Pc.

When it comes to to Mac verses PC...it boils down to a matter of intuitiveness on the Mac to logic of the PC in reference to the "GUI" The "graphic user interface." It's kinda a left brain VS right brain thinking thingie.

I suggest if you need some support questions answered that you talk to the good folks in the computer users group to reestablish your connections as far as the email is concerned.

In reference to solitaire, in all seriousness, I do not make light of the importance of your "fl epal" having access to it, everyone need to relax and solitaire is a great way to do it... one would imagine that when then machine decided to upgrade itself or you allowed it to... it found that the version of solitaire was incompatible in some way. I would conjecture though... that the same flavor of solitaire exists out there in the ether that would be supported by your "OS" (operating system) and the good people in the computer support group would point you to a version that is compatible. They are always kind and happy to help from my experience.

[pansypoo53219]

8. her hubby is a geek. apple is for luddites like me or non geeks. apple is less anal.