I bought the Macbook Air with the intention of using it to replace my aging desktop rig, but was pretty surprised to find that it couldn't drive both of my monitors. Now I had to choose between my 1440p monitor which flickered violently when attached to the Macbook, or my 1080p panel which had a much less disturbing pink line in the bottom half of the screen. After a few hours of troubleshooting, I plugged my desktop in and promised that I'd use the Macbook Air to replace my Thinkpad. At that point though, the value proposition of the computer was so diminished that I couldn't really justify using it. I can't use my OS of choice on it, I can't use my software of choice on it, I can't upgrade or fix anything on it, and I can't trust the swap to not shred the SSD.
Am I missing something here? Time and time again I hear people say "you're not the target audience", and I'm getting the impression they're right.
> I can't use my OS of choice on it, I can't use my software of choice on it, I can't upgrade or fix anything on it, and I can't trust the swap to not shred the SSD.
Minimal due diligence would probably have helped you not waste 1000+ dollars on a laptop that pretty apparently wasn't going to meet your needs.
You can't will the laptop into running linux/windows or x86_64 software. You can't will it into having better connectivity or supporting more than one display. These are things that you knew or should have known before purchasing it.
I think the value in a macbook air is that it's relatively powerful for its form factor, has excellent battery life, and is completely silent due to being fanless. A lot of the attractiveness of the product goes away if you _must_ run linux/windows or if you're using it primarily docked.
Everybody knew that Linux support was going to be broken on day 1 and require multiple months of work to get better.
TBH I was surprised at the lack of multi-monitor support, this is something that one just expects "it just works" on 2021. Only discovered it reading the comments here, completely missed it when watching the Keynote and looking at Apple's website.
I think it's understandable devs are confused a bit, it's a flashy new thing and we want to try it, but it's not for power users. Another confusing aspect, at least to me, is it's stand out feature is battery life! We're all stuck at home though, so when is a charger more than 4 feet away from me?
Since they have an apparently amazing thermal headroom and battery life for their entry level machines I think it's safe to hope that whatever powers their 16" MBP will be a barn buster and meet your multiscreen needs.
Not properly driving monitors is a major fail, if that's true. It also ignores the fact early adopters will be technical and have a "basic" technical need like that.
Apple almost always supports the highest-bandwidth ports, precisely to drive large high-resolution monitors.
I've been thinking about M1, but this comment just nixed it. Maybe when it's out of beta.
How long it has been since M1 introduction? 4 months?
I recall the story about Microsoft buying all the available software out there and testing it one by one on the new version of windows and creating workarounds for specific versions of specific software. On the linux side of the things this never happened.
I doubt that Apple is doing it too but it looks like the developers are doing it instead. Probably most of the stuff will iron out within the "2 years of transition period" which we are at about %15.
The stuff that doesn't iron out will simply get obsolete and replaced. Why? Because Apple means "I have better things to do than dealing with this gadget and I am prepared to pay for if you can help me not deal with it".
Whatever software or hardware is broken is some competitors opportunity. Oh, and Rossman has his own agenda. That's why he doesn't care, he will care if there's a scandal or something.
Considering 90% of Linux contributors are paid by Red Hat/IBM/Intel/Linaro/SUSE/Samsung and some I'm forgetting, not that surprising that the focus isn't particularly on the Linux desktop. As for the desktop, AFAIK the only desktop environment with any sort corporate backing is GNOME, so I don't even know how "Linux" could even buy all software and test it out.
> Rossman
Well of course he has his own agenda - which he quite literally spells out pretty clearly every time he has a chance to do so, IMHO. We all have an agenda, what's important is interest and disclosure.
While true, I don't think that alone tells the whole story. It's worth adding that it gets about double the battery life of the last computer Apple made. It's about $1000 less than the last computer Apple made and it's so much quieter it can't really be compared.
When judged on the metrics that really matter to end users, it's a significant improvement from "the last computer Apple made".
This may help you get multiple monitors running https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/24/m1-macs-able-to-run-six...
I am looking with wolf's eyes at the M1 and A14X performance. Desperately want it... in my Android phone, where I can install Firefox with uBlock Origin, and in my Windows laptop, that has a touchscreen and has no problems connecting external displays.
A fanless laptop would be great.
It is just as locked in like an iPhone.
When at least one component of that computer is ruined, as you said it can't be simply swapped out and it time for a trip to the Apple Store if you're using it for the long term. If the SSD in the M1 is dead for some reason, you might as well buy the same model again but with your data lost.
> Am I missing something here? Time and time again I hear people say "you're not the target audience", and I'm getting the impression they're right.
It's true. It's for those who really love the Apple ecosystem and don't care about computers or opening them up. Right now the early adopters are realising the limits of the first generation M1 Macs.
Are they show-stoppers? Not for some of the casual users using Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Word, Chrome and their favourite email client and users that aren't developers or professional creators but for those working in those fields will probably run into more 'incompatible software' complaints and using unstable workarounds.
Really? I would imagine that professional creators and developers would know enough to back-up their data.
Software-wise, it's a lot less locked-in than an iPhone - there aren't technical measures preventing a user from running an arbitrary OS or programs from non-Apple sources. (There is a temporary gap while people write drivers, but Apple's not stopping them, just not actively helping)
This may be the most compelling thing I've read about M1 Macs, and I've read a lot of compelling things...
Battery life and fan is rather annoying now :(
This wipes out the xcode-select installed git (because instead of "patching" the existing system, it just replaces the whole lot of it with whatever is in the archive). It leaves xcode alone (since that's in the Application folder), but any additional xcode command line tools gets wiped out by the OS update, and the system needs that reinstalled.
I ran into this with Intel based Macs running the beta 11.3 as well, so it's not necessarily an M1 issue.
Apps are being updated pretty quickly, and generally makes for a very snappy machine. Comparable to maxed out Corei9/32GB 16"rMBP in performance, but a bit snappier and no fans.
It's frankly surprising to me how many hoops people are willing to jump through to use an Apple machine when Docker, arguably the single most important tool many developers use, is just a crappy experience on that platform (ARM or not).
M1 from a hardware perspective is neat, but I am not holding my breath that the rest of the industry is going to move towards ARM for regular old PCs. The only reason M1 is viable _at all_ is because of reasonably fast x86_64 emulation. And that requires special hardware that non-M1 platforms don't have. I suspect Apple would jealously guard against any attempt by a competitor to build something similar.
I don't even see a contradiction there, never mind "glaring biases".
I had pretty much the same experience as the author of TFA. For example, I wanted to have Docker installed. I went to their website and found the M1 native beta. I installed it and since then it has just worked™, to the point that my Dockerfiles now build ARM-native containers. And apparently it also runs x86 containers, though I haven't tried that.
When it comes to third party software that was one of the "toughest".
When it comes to Apple it always has been an issue if you wanted to play games. On intel macs you could VM or Bootcamp to windows. That isn't an option on a M1 mac. Worse, while some iOS games are coming to M series systems some current developers of games that work on both PC and Mac are not creating Mac versions; the most notable is Blizzard who brought World of Warcraft to Mac but has stated the new Diablo 2 Resurrected, Diablo 4, and other titles, are not planned. Only one company has stated any intention going forward that has a large catalog and that was Feral.
All this means for those of us who like some recreation with our work and every day computer use (email/net/etc) Apple has their work cut out from them even more because now options are more limited.
Macs can play more games now, natively, than they ever could before. I've been exclusively a Mac user my entire life (except for brief periods where I also had to use Windows for work), and I regularly play over a dozen different games, and own hundreds more, which run just fine on my 2019 MBP. Granted, I don't try to play the latest greatest AAA 6k 240FPS competitive shooters, largely because I just don't care for that type of gameplay.
Most—not all, but most—games that run today on an Intel Mac will run on an M1. There's a crowdsourced list[0] that does a decent job cataloguing them. Furthermore, for games that don't run (or don't run well) natively on the Mac, CrossOver does a shockingly good job of making them work without any need for BootCamp or a full VM.
The old saw that "Macs can't play games" is a tired one, it's never been particularly true, and it's never been less true than it is today.
The experience compared to linux is nearly identical (maybe slightly better thanks too a couple shortcuts in the docker for Mac app that are nice for development).
As far as the "laundry list" is concerned... 12 apps were listed. 5 were emulated, 4 were native and only one having a minor issue that was easily fixed. Only one of the apps needed a preview version and that was docker. VSCode worked fine emulated but there was a native version being tested.
I am very confused where you are coming up with there being a ton of hoops or beta software needed for this.
That being said, we are talking about a platform that is 4 or 5 months old at this point. The industry was already experimenting with ARM. Apple has also shown time and time again that they can make a change and it pushes the industry to follow.
Sometimes it takes seconds (10) for docker commands to start to run, which is super slow compared to a linux host.
I had the same experience. The installer has been improved, my grandma could set up Docker on Windows now.
Since forever if you actually try to use it for real development? https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/77
> As far as the "laundry list" is concerned... 12 apps were listed. 5 were emulated, 4 were native and only one having a minor issue that was easily fixed. Only one of the apps needed a preview version and that was docker. VSCode worked fine emulated but there was a native version being tested.
I will quote the relevant parts of the article here since you can't be bothered to read the whole thing.
> One issue I encountered on both my M1 laptop and also a MacStadium MacMini instance that we use for Mac testing is that Brew randomly started to complain about git missing.
> The Docker team advise that QEMU is a best-effort approach and that it is best to run images natively as much as possible. I have encountered myself issues with some binaries when I tried to emulate them via QEMU.
> One thing to note is that Docker-in-Docker is not supported by QEMU (abandoned PR here). So you cannot run an arm64 Docker in an amd64 Docker or vice-versa. However, if you run your natively-supported Docker-in-Docker, the inner Docker can still run multi-platform images fine.
> Another issue that I noticed with the Docker preview on the M1 is that there are currently performance issues with multi-processor use - so much so that performance using a single core is sometimes slightly better than the performance of using 8 cores. Or at least that's what @jasmas claims. I've also seen some benchmarks testing the import of a database like MySQL, and it seems that there are some clear performance issues (~25X) with the Apple virtualization API. I've not seen such a drastic difference in common use, but hopefully these are addressed soon.
> An issue I ran into with the amd64 version was that I did not realize that the terminal was also an amd64 process (Again, Rosetta 2 is just that good). In some situations, this led to some strange issues when running Docker, where QEMU was acting up with segmentation faults. After some head-scratching the issue was resolved by switching to the ARM-based VS Code Insiders edition.
> I ran into issues when using the JVM. After investigating online, it seems that OpenJDK is not yet available for the M1. The way this was manifesting for me was that the JVM process would just hang randomly. By using --platform=linux/amd64 in Docker or in Earthly builds, I was able to get OpenJDK to work most of the time, but I'm still seeing random hangs.
All of these bugs after the author _initially_ wrote:
> All the software I need to use "just works". I found that if an ARM-native version is not available for an application, the emulated one works just fine and there's no performance drawback that I can notice.
> I am very confused where you are coming up with there being a ton of hoops or beta software needed for this.
Reading the article rather than skimming it helps a lot.
To the detractors, you better ask your favorite laptop company to step up their game instead of being jealous at apple and M1 in particular
PS: i'm not talking about microsoft people, or maybe i am :D
Bonus: https://twitter.com/NovallSwift/status/1356111709602160640
Believe me, I'm not jealous. It's baffling to me that anyone would buy Apple's consumer-hostile disposable crap.
i own an iPhone 5 since day 1, and it still works perfectly fine today, even the battery
go ask samsung, acer or toshiba if you want to complain about "disposable crap"
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/5236
We're talking a suite that normally takes 30 seconds taking 10+ minutes.
The one issue that I have is that Intel Vtune crashes when displaying data collected on our servers.
Those who are in the music production industry would say otherwise, especially those who like using Ableton Live. They got burned on the '64 bit-only' software move from Mojave to Catalina and now they are getting burned again for the hardware move to M1. Not surprised why I see them still running Mojave these days.
As for the developer software on M1, I would rather wait until it is optimised for the processor and the software ecosystem fully supports Apple Silicon before making the switch rather than wasting time finding workarounds that 'sort of work' and ends up breaking in a software update.
Until then, no thanks and no deal. (Until M1X or M2 comes out)
God I wish they would support Linux. I understand why they don't however. I would dearly love to leave Windows but Apple is not an option.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/visual-studio-20...
Edit: VSCode Insiders build (referenced elsewhere on this page) is mad fast. Get it!
Honestly very impressed with this thing.
Wow! That’s a huge gotcha that for some reason I didn’t even consider when I was having package issues with numpy among others.
