I wonder how many of those who got an M1 mac recently are aware of what exactly that means, besides that it's new and fast. I could imagine a large part of those sales to fall into the "I need a new computer, I'll get another Macbook Air" category. Those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway; I guess you'd have to do pretty specialized work to really notice a big difference besides "cool" and "fast".
I'm using an M1 MacBook Air right now. It's more nuanced than speed. That thing's responses are insane. It's an insanely fast computer which wakes up like an iPhone and has an endurance like a vintage, entry level Nokia phone.
It's ready to work before I finish opening up the screen and, they forgot to tell the battery that it needs to deplete after some time.
It doesn't matter for ordinary people to know all the cool tech and architectural stuff running below that keyboard, because at the end of the day, your ordinary applications are running, using way less power and it responds so fast that you can't even think.
This matters way more for end users than for us, developers. Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast, and the ordinary users have unmoored expectations (and it's not a bad thing TBH).
I have a personal intel Mac and office gave me an M1 one. I reach for M1 without even knowing.
I've had top of the line Intel/Windows laptops since the dawn of time, and the latency and responsiveness of my Air destroys them all. Simply navigating through the OS is crisp as is dealing with apps.
My XPS always had tiny bits of lag here and there, enough so that I hated using it. I hated doing any intensive work with it because the fans were annoying. My Air completely stomps it in speed and is silent while doing it.
Surfing with Safari is noticeably faster than on any other computer I have, even my much more powerful Ryzen 3700. Even my Ipad Air 4 is much faster than any browser on my Ryzen machine.
Rosetta 2 just works.
Compare the M1 Air to the new ARM Surface (which is 50% more expensive), and you see how far behind MS is. Their ARM cpu is 5 years out of date, and their x86>ARM translation software is flat out broken. Keep in mind MS has been fiddling with ARM devices, so they have zero excuse for being so far behind.
I'm not a platform evangelist, but Apple is firing on all cylinders and nailing execution across the board. MS seems disinterested in software, and Intel is lost at sea.
> Because we the devs & admins know the nature of the beast,
I would not lump all devs under 1 group. While the technological aspects of M1 are impressive, the compatibility issues and Apple "being Apple" for lack of a better word are significant enough for some of us to steer clear away. My work issued MBP just doesn't recognize the external display 80% of the time without me having to plug and replug it or usbc hub back in, and the fact that its an issue is simply unnacceptable when my 5 year old Dell, running Linux, has no issues.
Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis, as the speed that you talk of is something that we have had for the past 3-4 years.
Honestly, I've seen only one application crash on me due to using an M1 Mac. TBH, didn't try to port my scientific applications on M1 though (most of the time, they run on Linux servers, so no rush).
> Especially for the devs that use desktops on a regular basis...
In fact, I'm a desktop first user. Using M1 daily, since we're WFH. Maybe you can be this responsive on a desktop, but I'm talking on the mobile space. If we take out form factor considerations, I can get the same speed and responsiveness from 6-7 year old servers we use at the office.
I watch youtube before I sleep (I know, bad habit :P) and sometimes I forget to put it on charge before I start watching, and when I fall asleep, youtube autoplay continues to play random crap over and over (usually ends up with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKAblynZYhI somewhere in the chain)
OK the point is, more often than not I've woken up in the morning with youtube still playing. Absolutely insane.
In January, I switched completely to Mac from PC, and I did it with an M1 mini. It was time to upgrade my ancient Dell XPS (bought it in 2012 or something), and decided what the heck. I'll give it a go. For only $700, I got probably the best computing experience of my life. Rosetta has been amazing, and a lot of the Mac software I used to use on my top-of-the-line 2019 Intel MBA just fly.
When I first started using it there were some glaring issues that have all disappeared as software has been updated/optimized for the M1 architecture.
Notably back in February I attempted to write a .net core console app, and it would never enter Main() {}. A week later there was an update to .net, and that went away.
I still use my Intel MBA for Parallels. A client of mine is Windows only, and I have to VPN in, then RDP into the development machine, but I'm hoping that Parallels has released the new ARM version officially, it might just work (there were issues regarding connectivity while I was beta testing it).
You won't be the M1 early adopters in 2020 that had their software break in front of them this time when getting an M1X or M2 device this year.
Not only it will be a lot faster thanks to it being possibly going down to 4nm, the software ecosystem will be much improved and supported by it from day 0.
Do we know if the silicon shortages will affect the M2 or what comes after? I wonder if they booked enough volume with TSMC to get to 4nm or whatever the next process shrink is or if they will be trying to shove M1s into everything.
AFAIK the silicon shortages (of high end nodes) are partly because Apple has all the capacity (which they have because they're swimming in cash and have high margins and thus have been able to outbid everyone else).
Apple fused a high performance core to a platform which used to run a latency critical platform, the iPhone. Actually it happened over the years.
- They learned to design a phone platform.
- Then, shoehorned a modified version of macOS on top of it.
- Then, they started to iterate on performance. Added iPad. They increased the performance while keeping latency criticality of iOS platform. Trying to have performing CPU/GPU and trying to keep power consumption low paved the way, year over year.
This iteration over and over resulted in M1. A descendant of iPhone and iPad, but with unbelievable performance. They kept the best parts of every platform since they can design from the processor to the latest bit of the software.
At the end of the day, M1 is greater than sum of its parts. An M1 Air behaves a lot of like an iOS device in some parts. Connect to power, screen comes on, a big battery appears with "XY% charged" message and you hear iOS charging chime. It's funny, yet hints on the heritage.
Apple fused everything together. A unified ARM platform. Variety of OSes with the same roots. One optimization for all. With a big blow, they theoretically reduced the software work they have to do dramatically, so they can build magical software again with last effort and can transfer technologies from one to another virtually with no effort.
See: iPad Pro with M1. iMac with M1, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M1. They are the same device. Same performance. A slightly different OS on iPad. That's just it.
Apple is now able to codesign the software and hardware top to bottom. I have no inside knowledge but using one of these things it's basically obvious what's going on. They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library. So I think they've been really aggressive about making the interactions low friction.
It's not just that the hardware is fast. It's that the sort of hitches, pauses, etc that we're used to are just gone. They've made the way the software and hardware interact a nearly perfectly smooth racetrack. They've done this to such a degree that it must have been a very overt high level goal.
> They only have to write drivers for their own hardware, and for their own GUI library.
They’ve always had limited processor and GPU options though (relative to MS where Windows had to support an insane amount of options), so wouldn’t they have optimized for what they knew would be in the case?
They'd still be constrained by Intel/nVidia's expected API design and almost certainly some key code from them as well. With apple controlling the hardware too, they can make the interface work however they want. That introduces the possibility of making some radical simplifications or optimizations.
ARM Windows laptops have been around for a while, and have not taken off.
Some of that could be that these computers don't represent a shift in the wind - x86 remains the primary architecture for Windows. But I think that another big part of it is that every review of a Windows ARM laptop is full of caveats. Some programs will run slower, some programs won't run at all. Knowing which is which requires technical knowledge that a lot of people don't have, such as the ability to distinguish native executables from Java or .NET apps, or the ability to distinguish 32-bit programs from 64-bit ones.
Apple, on the other hand, really outdid themselves here. The story for most consumers is just, "It will run all your old apps, no problem." The worst-case-scenario story for a certain niche is, "Docker may be flaky until later this year."
IOW, the fact that "those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway" represents an enormous accomplishment on Apple's part.
Microsoft don't control the whole ecosystem unfortunately. They have a much harder time making that architectural shift than Apple does (although they could have done it better). There's all sorts of backwards compatibility guarantees with Windows that Apple doesn't have to care about.
Rosetta is the key piece here to 'fill in the gaps'. IMO, Rosetta only really works because of Apple's silicon and so how insanely fast the machine is compared to the Intel equivalent. The M1 has such a performance advantage over Intel that you can use it up in translation and your options become "x86 version of program running at roughly the speed it always used to" or "ARM version that is lightning quick".
Whereas the Windows ARM machines weren't a performance leap over Intel so even if you had translation it would be "x86 version that is very sluggish" or "ARM version that is just about OK".
Unfortunately, Windows ARM laptops were and are poorly executed.
Apple is carrot and stick, where the carrot is performance and the stick is obsolescence.
With Windows, there's neither carrot or stick. ARM isn't that much more performant, the battery life isn't that much better, and they're certainly not abandoning Intel.
OTOH, Microsoft could invest a huge amount of their money on making ARM attractive, but the Wintel ties clearly run deep.
My gf and I each earn FANG salaries and could upgrade a,couple of times a year if we were so inclined but haven’t bothered until the M1 arrived. IPhone 6s & 7, watch 0 & 3, 2016 Macbook + 2017 MacBook Air (TBF she has a big 2019 Intel MBP from work though)...upgrading that old gear didn’t seem worth it. Patches and upgrades continued to arrive (except for the watch 0).
But we finally upgraded everything and now I’ll upgrade my 2014 ipad that I’m typing on now.
I doubt most people upgrade simply because something new has arrived. Apple doesn’t really drive you to it.
I think the "stick" the GP was referring to is applied to developers, not consumers. Developers who don't get on board with Windows ARM get... to save themselves some effort. Developers who don't get on board with M1 will have their apps running slower than their competitors' apps across the entire ecosystem within another year or two, period.
Whilst you can run Intel code via Rosetta indefinitely(), Apple's strategic position is no more Intel hardware.
I'm typing this on a 2013 MBP. I'm personally waiting for an M2 chip, which I expect will follow Moore's law, albeit for ARM. Which backs up your point.
() indefinitely as defined by Apple is until they change their mind.
Depends on who you’re asking. My 2012 Thinkpad is on the latest Windows 10. It works very well with its SSD and it is really quiet (new thermal paste). Meanwhile, my 2011 MBA cannot even get GarageBand from the App Store because its OS won’t upgrade. Otherwise it’s fine...
The decade of hand wringing about Tim Cook’s deficiencies as CEO compared to Steve Jobs have got to be put to rest by even the biggest skeptics. The timing, execution, and scale of this transition has been so well done.
Jobs was focused on vision and product design. Cook is on operations and execution -- it also shows in his presentations. He follows the relatively safe "Apple-formula" that was put in place in the 2000s. Even the transition to Apple Silicon mirrors that of PowerPC to Intel.
Looking at the products it is hard to see where Cook has made his impression. It feels like it is about refinement and improvements year after year. That isn't a bad thing, because over time those things add up, and Apple is probably a much more well-oil and stable machine behind the facade today than 10 years ago. This is what Cook does (even before he became CEO).
I suspect Cook also knows that this is his strength, and that's where he should focus, but I would like to see something more risky and exciting come out from Apple.
I'd argue that the fundamental worry of the skeptics is correct. Apple hasn't been innovative in the same way. Apple's not brought out any products that created or disrupted an entire market niche since Cook took over, and it's arguably taken fewer risks. Instead, Apple's big wins over the past decade have been things like this: Really impressive operational successes.
Personally, I'm OK with that. But I've never really stayed abreast of the latest trends, anyway. I can also see where people who enjoyed the excitement of those famous "one more thing" moments might feel like some of the magic has been lost.
An old app in Apple's ecosystem isn't the same as an old app in Windows.
You can still run executables compiled under Windows2000 today. Meanwhile, programs as old simply won't work in MacOS (at the time, Apple was shipping OS9).
I have no doubt that a Windows release with legacy components removed can run fast on ARM (it was already demonstrated with Windows 10 mobile).
But that's just the tip of the iceberg: Nobody is shipping a chip comparable to the M1. All the ARM vendors are focused on phone chips, with completely different power optimization goals.
He "likes" it, as opposed to "loves" it; because he doesn't actually care that much (he's not a tech nerd). He likes his iPad a lot more.
He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo. It's just not that important to him. Computers are a "necessary evil." He's a musician, and he asked my advice, so he got a Mac.
For myself, I am waiting on the M1X/M2, later this year. I have a couple of big external monitors, and I know the M1 has issues with those. I've already weaned myself off of my BlackMagic eGPU Pro, in anticipation.
> He would probably feel the same way about a new Dell or Lenovo.
Not sure if this was ever true for someone who used a Mac before. Going to a Dell or Lenovo feels like a huge downgrade. Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant. Also the track pad and other screen on the Mac is so much better. Even if some Windows laptops come with a crazy high resolution, the OS looks shit on it and the user has to go into the Windows menu and play around with all the UX controls until the proportions of the start bar, windows and other UI elements somehow make sense on the high resolution again. Of course there is a million Windows apps still out there which don't scale at all. I cannot imagine that a user who was on Mac for more than a year could go back to Dell or Lenovo and feel excited about it. Now with the M1 the contrast is even worse. I have an M1 and Intel MBP and even going back to the Intel MBP feels really crappy because I need to charge my device when working for a full day. I got so used to the M1 not needed a single charge during the day that it's really odd to think about how other laptops still do. I treat my M1 like my iPhone. I plug it in over night, that's all it needs.
> Everything about these laptops feels cheap in comparison to a Mac. They are bigger, thicker, heavier, more plastic, hotter, and less elegant.
This is completely wrong. For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter than a MacBook Air at 2.8 pounds. It also offers 32GB of ram, does not have a glued-in battery, does not use glass and the keyboard is much less likely to fail. I am tempted by the M1, but from my experience Apple machines are heavier, fragile, less reliable and less user-serviceable. I also don't understand the aversion to plastics. Aluminium makes MacBooks heavy and can attenuate radio signals.
> For example, a Lenovo X1 Carbon is 2.5 pounds, which is lighter than a MacBook Air at 2.8 pounds. It also offers 32GB of ram, does not have a glued-in battery
.. and yet if feels heavier, looks shittier, is less durable, full of Lenovo spyware and overall still much worse quality. I have had so many Lenovo laptops in my life that I can say for sure that there is nothing good that comes out of this company.
It's like buying a Wilkinson razor with 5 blades, plastic covering and which weights only a few grams in total. Yes, on paper it's lighter, has more blades and has super easily replaceable parts and is also much cheaper, but if you buy a thiers issard carbon steal cut-throat straight razor you will only have one blade, it will be much heavier and more expensive but you will still have the best shave in your life with zero irritation and not look like a cheap red faced pig afterwards. That's the difference between Lenovo and Apple in computer hardware.
If the same screen sized laptop has bigger bezels, the grip is bulkier, less sleek overall form factor makes it feel heaver in your hand even if it's a few grams lighter. That's why it's called "feel" and not "is".
> I've heard MacBook keyboards tend to self-destruct when encountering small specks of dust though?
Citation needed. My MBPs haven't self destructed yet despite being daily in use for years.
I agree with you, but one thing that I have learned, is that non-nerds tend to hate "computers."
By "computers," they mean things with screens, mice and keyboards that don't have a simple, fixed user interface. I know that some of the iPad Pros are starting to look a lot like "computers."
Me? I love "computers." But I'm a nerd. We're supposed to love them.
I am really looking forward to getting my grubby little mitts on a new laptop, when they come out.
I have a Pro Display XDR hooked up to a MacBook Air and the only glitches I have had would be unplugging and plugging in the display while in sleep mode which just requires me to unplug the XDR and plug it back in.
I have a 49-inch LG Ultrawide (Split into 3440 X 1440, 1680 X 1440), and a 4K monitor that I use for presentations and classes (so it is not on all the time).
I have become addicted to the vast real estate of this big honker. I did have it set up, once, using the whole screen width (5120 X 1440), but that was too wide for me (also, Apple does not yet natively support that resolution. I had to use a third-party screen res tool).
I've never squeezed more than 4 or 5 hours out of my two year old Macbook Pro. A 20 hour battery life in addition to the speed gains make upgrading a tempting prospect.
My wife has an ~year-old Intel MBA. I have an M1 MBA.
Her battery's dead after 2 hours on Zoom or Discord or any of those battery-hungry web tech multimedia apps.
I've not tried taking it that far, but judging from where the battery on my M1 MBA gets to after a couple hours, I could probably do 6ish hours under that load (it's very dumb that some of these "productivity" programs are high-load and eat battery like crazy, but that's where we are).
If I avoid the webshit (Slack's unavoidable, for me, but I can ditch most of the rest, at least temporarily) I can work a whole day plus another half a workday on battery, no problem.
[EDIT] oh, and it feels faster than my hex-core AMD desktop with the badass graphics card and 64GB of memory does, under Win10 or Linux. Jank, jitter, and pauses galore, when doing basically nothing. Not so on the M1, unless I really abuse it. Granted that's largely the software's doing, but it doesn't really matter why it's better, in the end.
My parents got an M1 mba a few days ago. When they asked my advice about getting a new laptop they got an earful, and then the favour was returned when I listened to my flabbergasted dad explain to me how his bank website now renders instantly compared to 15 seconds on his old mba.
It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends.
It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.
Right, even if it's distilled down to "I've heard great things about these new Macs" that's still reflective of an incredible technical and marketing accomplishment.
You can't really buy an equivalent since Apple focused on price, performance, absolute silence and battery life with virtually no deck flex due to the aluminum unibody.
You can get laptops that can almost match it on price and performance but the responsiveness and battery life is going to be extremely hard (including the MacBook Pro and reviews have stated that you can get it to above 18 hours with light use. Also, the MacBook Air is totally silent with great performance and I can't find many silent laptops at all. The biggest downside to the new M1 Macs are probably that they rely on swapping from RAM to disk but we have to see when those parts will wear out.
I bought a Macbook Air M1 a few months ago. It does not take specialized work to notice the difference between this laptop and every other intel based laptop.
The Tinkpad X1 Carbon which I bought multiple time over the years would run hot, make noise and the battery would deplete fast when watching youtube videos. Before M1 this was just normal laptop behavior and the X1 is a great laptop. With the M1 though, it's now been 2 hours of watching youtube and you're at 95% in a perfect silence and the laptop is cool to the touch.
Also I don't find a Macbook Air to be "cool". To me it feels mainstream just because it's an obvious choice.
In some ways, it reminds me of the Intel transition in that regular consumers might not have been aware that this move was coming until they saw it in front of their eyes.
I often see that transition dated to 2006 at MacWorld, but the reality is that it was previewed at WWDC the previous year and there was only a minor spec bump to - I think - one model before the iMacs appeared to kick things off.
On a related note, I was not surprised - but definitely disappointed - to hear them describe the iMac changes as "making the computer disappear." Such 'appliances' have always seemed cheap and purposefully limited (not in a good way), yet this is what the market seems to want.
Regular people continue to not understand how computers work and they probably never will.
Regular people also don't really understand much about how cars work, and they love that modern ones start with the push of a button and that they don't have to fiddle with the carburetor or the choke to get it going.
The problem space is much smaller and with each big shift in hardware and software, we've missed the opportunity to do this well.
A rough timeline: Desktops, the Internet, Laptops, and - for probably the last decade - Mobile. Is "Ambient" next?, I'm not sure, that seems like it carries other baggage along with it.
It may look like an appliance, but it certainly doesn't work like one, and if users had just a bit more knowledge about it, I wouldn't feel like we're going back to square one with each step forward in technology.
I understand how both work and I LOVE both push button starting modern cars and computing appliances. I'd rather have an iPad and all the extra time it saves me to learn new things than fuddle with a desktop PC. Just like owning a Tesla will save me time vs owning/repairing an older car.
