There was that moment when a friend had a Dual G5 PowerMac only to have it trampled in performance by the new Core Duo Mac Mini. That was when we knew Apple had made the right move. I called the G5 tower (Steve's shame), you could just tell that every time those fans kicked into top gear that there was a sense of shame that that thing even shipped.
The M1 felt like that all over again. I didn't really get that feeling during the 68K to PPC era but that also wasn't handled as gracefully.
Didn't Apple start shipping water cooled overclocked CPUs just to get some sort of a speed bump when the CPUs topped out? Was that the G5 you mentioned?
Yes, Apple shipped the top tier PowerMac G5s with water cooling, including the top-of-the-line quad-core (2 x dual core) models. I don't think they were overclocked, they just ran extremely hot at stock speeds.
And the M1 MacBook was quieter, lighter and I could actually sit it on my lap without worrying whether it would prevent me from having little Scarface74’s.
Apple didn’t come out with high end ARM Mac laptops until later. Yes from a laptop - a portable computer - I loved being able to plug it in overnight and to use it all day at a customer’s site without worrying about battery life.
> And the M1 MacBook was quieter, lighter and I could actually sit it on my lap
Yeah this is key. In a laptop that’s meant to be used as a laptop, designing for maximum power at all costs isn’t the winning move. M1 was nice in that it’s plenty powerful while also not making the laptop’s fans scream and being able to survive away from an outlet for several hours despite doing “real work”.
In short, balance, which is still surprisingly hard to come by in x86 laptops. If you want a 10lb monster desktop replacement, gaming laptop that does the 2016 Apple thing and crams too many watts into too thin of a chassis, or a really weak ultraportable with mediocre battery life you’ve got plenty of options. If you want reasonable performance with great battery life and silence however you’re restricted to a tiny handful of options.
I feel like most people with those needs aside from a handful of corporate purchasers are going to be building their own towers anyway, which Apple is going to have a hard time competing with even if they fixed the current issues with the Mac Pro towers.
It would be interesting if Apple took a crack at an M-series HEDT variant that’s allowed to chug electricity freely though, even if that’d be extremely niche.
I don't disagree with anything you said. If you not the comment to which I was replying, I am addressing the specific point that the M1 was a revolutionary boost in performance, which it was not. Apple's Pro stuff (Intel) at the time was a year behind everyone else on specs. When their Pro stuff came out - sorry, but even the M2 isn't "Pro" anything.
What I am doing is comparing top of the line from Apple, to top of the line period. And consistently, Apple is always behind on workhorses, to get work done. They are better in your "light quiet slightly longer battery" category. At 50% more cost. The free laptop from work - I want the most powerful portable thing available. For personal life, now way I'm paying the Apple tax. So - no use case in my life. I do always get my wife iphones and macbooks though. She teaches languages to little kids and I don't want to spend my time helping her with tech stuff, so the Apple tax is worth it. But never for the hardware - just for the walled garden and fisher-price UI for kids.
The Precision is not light, but that's because it's thick metal that you can run over with a car, and extremely durable. No one complained about a thinkpad being built sturdy. For the use case you describe, an XPS with an I7 at the time was super light, got about over 10 hours of battery life if you just did regular office work (no compiling or large data processing), and has similar specs. I used to take that with when I'd go internationally. It absolutely did not get hot - the key was to turn off turbo boost if on battery by setting max CPU at 99%.
The thing is, if we compare pricepoints, you could have a Precision for the cost of an M1, and now you have desktop power on the go. It's not super-light, but it's still light and thin enough to put in a shoulder bag and not get neck pain.
No one complained about a laptop pre 2020 that had bad battery life, was loud and hot because both Macs and Windows were using x86 laptops.
Just like no one complained about the clunky Nomad before the iPod was introduced. Then only CmdrTaco complained (deep cut. It’s a 20+ year old reference)
> an 8-core Xeon,
> and the battery went about 8-10 hours
I find that very hard to believe. Also how much did this "laptop" weight and how thick was it? Presumably it was in an entirely different market segment and not competing with the MacBook Pro. It's almost like comparing the M1 to a desktop...
The XPS was the equivalent Dell product and I don't recall it being particularly better than a Mac back in the 2018-2019.
The M1 felt like that all over again. I didn't really get that feeling during the 68K to PPC era but that also wasn't handled as gracefully.