M1 Apple Silicon

Soo, Apple held their yearly Mac event. Three new Macs using the new MI SoC (CPU is soo '00s). One little thing that irked me, but maybe only me, was that each presenter repeated faster over and over again. 3x faster than latest, 5x faster than any Windows PC, 4x faster MLI. Are we in such a dire need for speed?
The machines were looking good though.

 

I’m excited to see how these perform in the real world. Had we not just been gifted an old iMac I’d be very tempted to buy a Mac Mini.


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Haha, well count me in as someone with a beef this particular graphic:

(Apple)


It implies that the M1 chip's performance at ~10W already surpasses anything an Intel ULV processor could achieve at any input power level...

C'mon Apple, we know you're proud of the M1, but lighten up on drinking your own koolaid before making your slides please.

 

Apple throwing down the dumbed down 2x, 5x times better etc is how they’ve always advertised more powerful specs. I always take those with a grain of salt.

That being said...overall I was hoping Apple would have been a little more ambitious, with even a minor redesign of some sort (to differentiate from Intel Macs) but this is what was expected. Kind of wish the rumor of the lower end option being $799 came true, instead we got the $999 Air. The $699 Mini however does look interesting for its price point.

One thing I do find very interesting is the Specs of all 3. The current Intel MacBook Air has a Core M equivalent chip running at 6-8 watts...the 13inch Intel MacBook use 15w ULV’s on the lower end and 28w on the higher end configuration. And the current Intel Mac mini uses 6 core 45w. With all 3 having an M1 option...the only discernible power difference I can tell from the specs is 8 instead of 7 graphics cores. And the Pro and Mini have active cooling so they should perform better from a thermal perspective, but for the most part it seems all 3 are relatively equal in power. A stark contrast to the Intel offerings.

one weird thing between the Intel and M1 options...all the M1 options only have 2 USB-C ports. Seems like a weird omission, especially on the Mini.

The Pro’s only real advantages over the Air is active cooling, a larger battery and the touchbar. Given the lack of enthusiasm over the touchbar itself, and since the power difference is far more marginal, the Air looks like the better value to me.

But I have to admit, the lack of touch/pencil support, as much as that was expected, I still find a bit unfortunate. Opening up the MacBooks to the iPad App Library is a great compromise until all Mac apps can port over properly....but from my own use of the IPad Pro and the Magic Keyboard...I’m not sure how pleasant using iPad apps with only the touchpad will be. On top of that, Apple is also letting developers opt out from letting their iPad Apps be used on the Apple Silcon macs. Google specifically has already opted out. It just feels like the overall benefit from having IPad apps might not be as much a benefit as most would hope.

Ideally I would rather they just make Mac OS bootable on the iPad Pros (which of course they would never do).

But as is....the real question becomes if they will bring a redesign to the table or offer pen/touch in the near future. The 16 MacBook Pro is rumored to get its refresh next year and that might get a redesign, if they do offer a MacBook next year with Touch/Pencil and a redesign, the products announced today will look real old real fast. If anything it makes the Mac Mini look like the best buy of all three since touch/pencil compatibility will be a non-issue for that product.

I haven’t made up my mind, but I am contemplating either the Air or the Mini.

 

Incidentally, for those wondering about Clip Studio Paint, the most recent MacOS build update now supports Apple Silicon. Meanwhile still nothing but silence from them on any Windows on Arm/Surface Pro X support.

 

Apparently the Apple silicon Macs do not support eGPUs over thunderbolt atm, but does anyone know whether they would work with thunderbolt docks? For example could I hook up a Mac mini to my current Lenovo thunderbolt dock and get full functionality?

Edit: partial answer, a commenter on Ars claimed "... we got some off the record warnings that Thunderbolt devices are going to need firmware updates to work properly."

 

Caveat emptor #1: It does, but their USB 4.0/Thunderbolt implementation is only supporting up to one external monitor for the MacBooks (the M1 has just two display channels, one consumed by the internal display in the case of the MacBooks). Kiss your multi-monitor setups goodbye.

Caveat emptor #2: Virtualization works but within the confines of some locked down, black box framework which, in my estimation, will produce a host of problems for developers who need access to all the hardware functionality. Ubuntu works, but getting access to a hardware device when Apple drivers are a proprietary, closed-source nightmare is a pipe dream.

 

They cherry picked and cherry picked to the point of the odds of finding a five-leaf clover in a field of four-leafed ones. The GPU comparisons were head-to-head against old and outdated Kaby Lake UHD Graphics, for example, not Intel Xe or AMD RX Vega. The CPU comparisons was a product of software choice (Safari browser) in a non-sustained short-term or "bursty" browser test. Like for like, if you were running Chrome on the same machine in the very specific workload they had chosen, that supposed gargantuan gap would be smaller or even non-existent in the case of Zen 3. They also had a false claim: the MacBook is not the only 3-lbs laptop capable of playing back 8K footage in DaVinci Resolve without dropping any frames. The paid Windows version of Resolve enables full hardware decoding support, and AMD's Ryzen 4000 processors (found in ~3 lbs. and sub-3 lbs. laptops) officially support up to 8K decoding. AMD probably will not go after them for it because they have much bigger fish to fry, but it was blatant false advertising.

 

Any clues on how the M1 gpu might compare to Iris Pro?

 

Presumably you could disable the built-in display and drive two external monitors, right? At least the mac mini is supposed to be able to drive two displays over TB3 with some unknown limits on pixel count.