If your main concern is running Zoom and OneNote for the next 6 months, maybe sit out M1 for now.
> If your main concern is running Zoom and OneNote for the next 6 months, maybe sit out M1 for now.
There is very little information out there about how M1 fits into developer workflow. It is not just Zoom and OneNote but app compatibility is very important for developers and I think most developers(except iOS devs) would perhaps want to sit out the release. There is no docker. VirtualBox will probably never work on Apple M1, so an escape to Linux VM is not available if you need. Parallels and Vmware Fusion may work someday but you will end up paying for those and someone should do performance/battery comparison if I am going to run a VM all day. Things like Emacs don't work yet and only information available about this is from obscure twitter threads.
After 12 years on Macs I picked up a touchscreen PC and would simply never go back to a non-touch machine, it is not essential, but it is incredibly convenient. Why shouldn't it be possible to touch rather than tap when appropriate? After a few months selecting an appropriate option for any particular input is totally natural and subconscious. I have no idea why noting the lack of touch on a Mac should be considered "biased".
Those are features of other laptops. And Apple already ships the technogy to support both.
This is a huge plus in my opinion.
It’s no longer my primary machine but my 2009 MBP is still running just fine (new memory and disk 5 years back, battery is a bit shagged at this stage) and I use it all the time for storing and casting media, light dev work, office apps etc.
Something you'll not be able to do with Apple Silicon hardware. I am interested in the longevity of the new devices, but they'll definitely age faster since the configuration you get today is it.
Macs cost a lot and promise long life. That's a long time to not have a feature with increasing desirability. M1 enables merging MacOS with iOS. A touchscreen is an important aspect of that merge.
>The point I would make is you have to weigh the app experience in Nov 2020 against your expected experience for the rest of the life of the machine.
So much for the "It just works" marketing that Apple used to push a couple of years ago.
ECC, ZFS, function keys
I'd like to get a Pro but the Air is very very good and I don't find anything that I really value on the Pro. Yes, the Pro is faster than the Air but the Air is fast and faster apparently requires a fan.
I’m sure the Pro has the same throttling logic as the Air since they’re identical apart from the fan and case/peripherals but it’s going to be very difficult to get it to throttle. I would think you’d need to run a microbenchmark of vector instructions in a very tight loop just to get the fan to spin fast enough to be audible. Under normal use it may never happen unless the fan fails.
Not going to happen. It almost happened around 2007, when Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announced it on his blog. Then Apple conceded the development, sticked with HFS+ for another decade, only to eventually roll out APFS.
I'd probably pay 200 euro extra for a "real pro" edition that changes nothing else except remove the dumb bar.
Come on Apple, take my money. I cannot be the only one who wants this.
(I guess I could just disable the bar in software though, but where's my esc key then...)
Adobe reader and edge... I agree have better alternatives that come shipped with Mac.
So it is an unusual choice on an Apple laptop, but also I expect it to be supported in time, and it is unsurprising that it is not amongst the first apps ported to a new architecture.
What if your company's email and calendar server is Outlook? And what if everybody's writing docunents with Word and sheets with Excel?
Furthermore a web developer probably wants to test in Edge even if I assume Chrome is enough.
Edge is based on Chromium now, and nobody uses it on the Mac, so there's not much point in testing rendering on a Mac (better to test on Windows Edge).
However if you're really bought into the MS ecosystem (or much of your company is), and can't do without outlook or old Windows programs like winzip (!) I'd agree with the author that you should wait, though I don't agree that it's a big problem to do so or this is somehow a failing of the new Macs.
Pretty sure this isn't going to be a problem for longer than a few weeks anyway, as MS have already announced the office suite working fine on early betas of M1 and new beta builds for the architecture:
https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/microsoft-office-big-sur-m1-...
In fact on checking I see the betas have already arrived:
I'll sum up his unique complaints... Lots of old Microsoft specific software still doesn't work well at the moment. If you are an enthusiastic Edge browser user, this laptop probably isn't for you.
Firefox is extremely buggy right now, even if it claims to be Universal (where art thou Rust tooling?), so perhaps the wait-and-see approach is right.
On the MacBook Air I have here (8 GB RAM / 512 GB SSD), it’s quite clear that Apple is onto something here.
You can argue that this could have been avoided by calling this particular device the MacBook. But that might have made people think it was the default choice, where Apple probably expects you to start with the Air.
Naming is hard.
Now they are stuck with a 13" pro that stopped being Pro.
1) keep expectations low in terms of compatibility. Most non apple apps will take time before they are ported to run natively on M1
2) related to point 1, the great battery life being marketed is not applicable if your apps arsenal is not native yet.
These two might sound trivial to some but i did not think of them initially. I was ready to get the M1 if there’s a good deal next weeks. But now i’m not sure.
What are your thoughts?
https://isapplesiliconready.com/
I personally have not experienced any issues and the M1 is a marvel. Also, the return window is through January. I sure as hell am not going to return mine.
2- claim seems slightly dubious as it depends on the app. Some translated software is more cpu intensive than others. So maybe? Just like the native stuff will be.
This has been true for at least the last 15 years, MacOS upgrades always screw something up. Usually iLok
I suspect the number of Edge users in the Mac ecosystem is not high. Acrobat might be more of a problem, but it's still not quite the mainstream MacBook Air use case.
The question isn't so much "Do these apps work?" but "When will they work?" MS and Adobe will be distributing Apple Silicon builds within the year - most likely within six months, and possibly by early next year.
So these are showstopper problems if you need these applications on a Mac right now, but not so much if you're planning to wait and see a while.
Honestly, Catalina and Big Sur broke far more applications than the M1 move did. If you're doing the prudent thing and running a year or so behind it's very likely there will be fewer problems.
So ultimately there aren't many reasons beyond novelty and a percentage of natural replacement why most people who lean heavily on Office and Acrobat are going to need a Macbook Air right now.
Maybe this question would be better phrased, does Parallels fall into the category of software that runs poorly on the new M1 chipset?
It does for most use cases where you want to run images meant for different CPU architectures, like amd64. It shouldn't if you want to run something meant for the same CPU architecture, which isn't going to be a thing for a long long time.
Why not? If you consider there are 3 main desktop OSes, these are Windows, macOS, and Linux. MacOS and Linux already work on ARM64.
For Windows software, CrossOver for Mac runs on M1.
Apple did not promise anything wrt. 3rd party apps, so talking about “broken promise” is downright dishonest. But that’s just the usual from the Forbes Contributor Network and Clown Car Testing Facility.
Of course they did: "With the introduction of Rosetta 2, M1 and macOS Big Sur seamlessly run apps that haven't yet transitioned to Universal versions. So without updating, you can keep working on Fusion360 projects or reach the next level in your favorite game."
Rosetta 2 (and Rosetta before it) may be an amazing technical accomplishment, but it's entirely fair for a reviewer to say it doesn't cut it for him. As funny as some of his choices are (Edge on a Mac, on purpose?), he's not reaching; this is what he uses everyday. It's also fair to point out that if your favorite game doesn't happen to be Rise of the Tomb Raider, your mileage may vary.
I think the reviewer is a little unfair in his emphasis on "Apple-chosen" reviewers, but this frankly is the kind of thing I look for. Five-star reviews are rarely as useful to me as three-star reviews.
Every single day we hear of at least one well known app adding support for M1 Macs. It's all a matter of time. I'd wager we'd have a robust ecosystem of apps once the Pro Macs launch (higher end 13" and the 16")
App crashes were not reported elsewhere. Aside from some subjective commentary, there's a genuinely different side shown in the review.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/m1-macbook-closed-lid-d...
That's just bizarre and makes me question this reviewer's comprehension of technology. He doesn't understand hotspots? He things hes maxing out a home wifi+ISP connection but LTE can handle the load?
If you use 4G not only do they get a faster connection in the first place but they also avoid contending with other family users also on the slower broadband.
Doesn’t seem bizarre or technically ignorant to me?
The 5G bulletpoint will become true. Probably sooner than later.
Listening to Horace Dediu (Asymco) alerted me to 5G's impact. (I just didn't care enough, so wasn't paying attention.)
The 5x5 CriticalPath episode recapping the iPhone 12 launch. I don't understand Dediu's analysis well enough to repeat it. But the punchline is Apple put everyone on notice that 5G is the next thing.
The rationale is something about renewed partnerships with carriers, the return of carrier discounts, and giving the 5G guy so much time on the soapbox.
FWIW, I definitely want cell baseband in my future laptops. Using my phone or pad hotspot sucks.
DSL is still a thing in some places. 1gig ethernet, 2.4 GHz wifi, and various other "old" protocols are still widely used. this will not change quickly, because they work. 5g currently doesn't.
maybe this will improve in the next 5 years, but who knows if there isn't something better then? i don't even buy the premise that equipment with a current 5g modem is future-proof. this is what happens when technology becomes a marketing tool, and not something that solves a genuine problem (or the biggest problem i currently face).
maybe it'd be different if i lived in a country with poor internet infrastructure, with 5g being my only hope for decent speeds? but even that is more of a prayer, because if decent wired internet doesn't exist, will decent 5g coverage exist? (by that i mean coverage with meaningfully faster speed and latency than LTE, with a choice of providers for competition?)
Maybe I should have wrote "5G will displace wifi".
If I had to guess, Apple's notion for personal networking will be multi protocol. Bluetooth, wifi, 5G, UWB, NFC, etc. In combination. And Dediu's point is the 5G will finally be able a viable wifi replacement for a large fraction of Apple users.
Like all tech, wifi will peak, plateau, then long slow decline.
Question related to your point:
Will self-hosted 5G be an option? eg Will Microsoft be able to (feasibly) run their own campus 5G network?
Zero trust networking and software defined networks, for both consumer and enterprises, will definitely become the preferred solution. So me running my own LAN becomes less important. In that world, maybe self-hosting becomes "virtual".
How has the experience been for software developers across the board? Would love to hear personal accounts since all I'm finding is very generic articles like this one (talking about fan speed, performance charts, etc. but nothing specific targeting specialist areas)
x86 windows virtualisation is probably going to be the biggest issue for most people, and I don’t see working (maybe wine + qemu, but not full os).
In other words, will people continue to use Macbooks to develop on? Therefore forcing things like Docker to switch to more architecture-agnostic ways of running? Or will people just use more remote VMs and container services?
I am also wondering how much of a hold the OS X UI has on people. Because I really enjoy using iTerm2, and having Homebrew and all the UNIX applications just a terminal away is great. They're also closer than the Microsoft WSL way of doing things because you don't have 2 home directories, multiple network addresses like you do with the latest WSL2 in Windows 10. (not to diss WSL2, it's great, and can run many things much closer to a true Linux/UNIX "experience")
I guess, along with winning the lottery and a pony, I want the underpinning of Linux, the games and Microsoft development effort of Windows, and the UI of OS X.
The only reason against M1 itself I can think of is the tight grip Apple is going to have over entire stack (including memory). They will be creating all possible configurations and you are going to have to pay whatever premium Apple thinks they are able to impose on you which, extrapolating from the past, is going to be hefty.
But,
I think M1 is amazing piece of technology and would switch in no time if not for other reasons.
I also think competition is going to take a hint and we can expect more of this in the future.
Nothing written here is surprising.
The M1 models have been out for just over a week. No one expected all apps to work perfectly on a completely new architecture, but the fact that Rosetta 2 works SO well is extraordinary. As it is, MS Office is already native in the beta channel. So is Chrome and Firefox. Many popular apps were released native on day one. Microsoft has released a native OpenJDK 16 port. This is a remarkable level of adoption after just one week.
Lack of USB ports? How is that different from the existing models they replace, which, I might add, have far worse batter performance? These are not replacements for the top-tier pro machines. This was intentional. Apple intended these machines to be the foundation upon which the entire line is built, and to give developers the motivation to port their apps. And they are. Quickly.
I just setup a new Air for the chairman of the board at my company. He keeps texting me, raving about the thing. The best Mac he's ever owned (and he's owned nearly every Macbook there ever was).
A good reminder of how everyone has an agenda when they are writing.
A good early M1 user experience will be had by those entirely in the apple software ecosystem.
If you are venturing out of the ecosystem, use a good Remote Desktop application and a powerful plugged in computer to get the best of both worlds.
> New chipset with new architecture means old apps won't run or will be slow
Wow, you don't say. I been watching a few review videos[0] (not sure if they're from the "Apple-Choosen Press") and the results are absolutely astonishing.
But the thing is, this shouldn't be surprising. This is the final form of the Apple Ethos of full vertical integration, from OS all the way down to (now) the frikking processor.
I think they're afraid, and I don't care if my new Apple M1 Macbook doesn't run Office well, it's Logic/FinalCut/etc. that matters to me and most people.
Because of this article I've started to put my must have apps list together. Apps like Chrome, VS Code, Node (and the packages I use), Hyper Terminal, Slack, Postman, and Edge (just kidding).
I've compared my list against this wonderful site: https://isapplesiliconready.com/
Overall, my only concern is Postman.
Everything Apple does is automatically a huge plus for some people. may be, just may be, it's not for everyone