While at it... Now that the M-series has been out for a while. Does anyone have an opinion on if it would have been better to stick with Intel? I miss being able to select an i7/i9 for my Mac.
The M2 Pro/Max will be released later, nothing surprising here.
And no I don't think anyone misses having to choose between an overheating and throttled 6 or 8-core i7/i9.
Having said that, I feel like I'm definitely in a tiny minority here.
Edit: almost nobody
I don't see having an obsolete model as being a huge issue because I don't see anything major Apple has in the pipeline. The actual performance improvements are modest and a major design or addition of new functionality isn't expected. The m2 Pro probably will exist mostly because of having to deal with Zen4/Raptor lake competition. When the laptop comes out, Apple is likely to charge a premium over the m1 model and continue to offer the m1 model.
I would probably just buy if I needed a laptop, and wait if I didn't.
Apple is two or three CPU generations ahead of the rest of the industry. It's an objective fact that the most performant personal computing equipment in the world is made by Apple, and its power consumption is such that Apple laptops beat PC laptops on battery life by a factpr of 1.5-2 or more.
The laptop/configuration: XPS 17", i7-12700H, 32Gb of RAM, 1TB, and 4K touch-screen (never thought I'd like that).
Heat/Battery life: The computer might get hot, but I don't feel any heat, might have to do with the carbon fiber instead of metal. The battery life is 10-12 hours for normal use and 6-7 hours for software development. Not Apple's territory but it's a pretty good range.
Other advantages: Touch Screen / 4K (I find myself constantly using it, works out of the box with Sway/Linux), Dual SSD with Raid-1 (fake RAID), works out of the box with Linux, no drivers issues (though have disabled the Nvidia GPU), great and huge trackpad and keyboard, small laptop size/weight relative to screen size,quite customizable and configurable boot settings and finally a nice minimal design,
Finally, running this
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output bs=64k count=100k; rm -f /tmp/output > 6710886400 bytes (6.7 GB, 6.2 GiB) copied, 1.32435 s, 5.1 GB/s
This is sort of like how Apple made the best small music player: exclusivity agreement with the enabling makers of small hard-drives so no other companies could use them in music players. Not exactly high engineering from Apple, just savvy business.
In this case it is timed exclusivity with TSMC on the latest process nodes. Apple do do the chip layout design, I'm talking only about the process part of the chip.
The i7 is hot, loud, and can barely last 4 hours on battery (and it has a brand new battery in it). With a 4k monitor hooked up there's also a noticeable amount of lag when doing stuff like moving windows around, and opening my various apps after a reboot takes ~3 minutes before my computer is useable again. The RRP of this device was around $3800AUD for i7/16GB/512GB.
On the other hand, the M1 doesn't make a sound and lasts ~12-16hrs on battery. Even playing a 3d game on it for hours, it's inaudible and only warm to the touch (and gets very acceptable performance). Starting up all my apps takes maybe 20 seconds or so and while doing that there's no lag or hitching. The RRP of this was $2799AUD for M1/16GB/1TB.
(and for the record, the M1 has 8 threads while the i9 has 16, counting hyperthreads. Not sure if that has anything to do with C++ compilation performance)
If I’m not getting it until late august, I’m just going to keep waiting for M2 Max.
Most of the performance advantage of the M-series comes from exclusivity on the latest nodes; a significant part of the rest could have been done by asking Intel/AMD to put RAM in the package.
I’m not sure adding “and, by the way, we’ll switch manufacturers at will if we can get faster gear elsewhere” will help there.
On the M1 and M2 machines, however, this is not quite as fair a characterization. After all, the battery life is ~2x that of the Intel MBPs. So you can definitely plug in your iPhone into one port and an external HD into the other and do a backup without worrying about the MBP running out of juice.
Still, I think it's pretty silly that the new MBA has MagSafe + 2x USB-C and the base MBP is still scraping by with just the USB-C. Even the original Touchbar MBPs had more connectivity than that! (The base MBP didn't have the TB, blessedly, so it was only the 4-port machines that had this 'upgrade'.)
Perhaps you're used to MacOS, but functionally, day-to-day there are not many practical differences with Windows unless there is some specific Mac only app you need.
Otherwise I would say Mac laptops are not especially good value, if you just look at the specs at face value.
I recently built a PC for ~$750 with an i7, 16GB ram, 1TB SSD and 3060 ti GPU. Something similar on Mac would cost maybe 3x more.
*G* sorry, only kidding. The alternatives are really that bad.. it'd actually be kind of amusing except this is my real life.
Waiting 30s for a 500MB app to copy into the Applications directory is the usual, whereas those Samsung SSDs can do 3,500MB/s.
What gives?
What I don't get is why they have to be that slow.
It takes time to ramp up a new CPU. It takes time to promote new CPUs with new features.
It takes time for Apple to walk the marketing they want in order to direct folks to the kinds of machines they want to make.
Does NO ONE have any patience?
Not cool, Apple.
For me, the question is: What will the MBAs have? Will the 512 MBAs have better performance, like the 512 MBP does? Or will they neuter all the MBAs to make them comparatively less attractive than the high-end (and very expensive) MBPs?
Up until recently, Apple had been fairly immune to the supply troubles other vendors have been suffering from, since they lock in components on a long term contract.
I guess the pandemic supply chain problems lasted longer than their component contracts did.
> ran the Disk Speed Test app on the 512GB model and the SSD's read/write speeds were similar to all M1 models
At least for me what exactly base model meant / the fact that any SSD upgrade would eliminate this issue wasn’t clear from the title.
