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Experience with M1 (ARM) Macs?
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 26, 2021 at 10:10 AM
Heh, yes – even the base model with 7 instead of 8 GPU cores is ridiculously quick. One reviewer (I’m trying to remember which one) simultaneously loaded all 53 of the apps he had installed (including some heavyweight graphics apps, from memory), and found it made absolutely no difference to the MBA’s rapid responses or overall performance. Support for non-Apple Silicon apps is astonishingly good (via Rosetta 2); there are just a few exceptions. The machine remains cool all the time, and the processor only degrades very gradually, according to reviewers who’ve been experimenting with video transcoding and other processor-intense operations. The MacBook Pro does have a fan, but is apparently very quiet even so.
The *base-level* MacBook Air is actually quicker than tooled-up MacBook Pros running on Intel’s i7 (and even i9) processors, despite having only 8GB of RAM. Some of the figures shown in real-world tests of graphics apps in particular are jaw-dropping. The exceptional battery life is the cherry on the icing.
The one thing to be aware of is that currently, an M1 machine can’t run Windows in any shape or form. That’s bound to change – I’m sure a new version of Parallels Desktop is already on the skids – but it’s a consideration.
Posted by Luhmann
Feb 26, 2021 at 11:50 AM
I love my M1 MBP. For me the most amazing thing is battery life. I can use it all day without being plugged in, and I still have 2-6 hours left on it when I turn in for the night. My old MBP, doing the same things, would only give me about 3.5 hours of solid use. Speed is great too, but it is the battery life that I really notice.
Some people, however, have had strange kernel panics, connecting to some thunderbolt displays or things like that. Not seen this myself, but worth mentioning. My thunderbolt Drobo won’t work until they update the firmware, so I don’t know if it would cause problems or not.
Posted by Listerene
Feb 26, 2021 at 01:22 PM
Keep in mind that this is a first-gen Apple product and, historically, those have always been problematic a few years down the road. I’d listen to history and wait for the next gen. One problem on the horizon is that M1 machines have been writing data to the SSD at an alarming rate which—if Apple doesn’t fix the issue—likely will shorten the SSD’s life-span significantly. Since that drive is soldered, that’s an issue ... probably just after the Apple-Care warranty expires. There are other issues which have been cropping up, too.
Need multiple displays? You can’t get them on the 1st-gen M1. Need Windows? That’s unavailable, too. Then there’s the lack of ports and the 5 year-old design of the current M1’s—Apple simply dumped their new tech for this gen into machines designed in 2016. That design wasn’t great in 2016 and it hasn’t aged well, at all. The next gen machines will surely fix that, together with offering much better displays.
If you can’t wait, I’d get the least expensive M1 MBA I could find now and plan on upgrading in a few years. Don’t sink any more money into this than you absolutely have to.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 26, 2021 at 02:19 PM
I’d agree with @Listerene – don’t get a specced-up MBA. You don’t need to! Here’s the review I mentioned before (found it in my collection of odd articles; it was 57 apps, not 53):
And a couple of extracted paragraphs:
...
Enough theory: what’s it like to use? In a word, fast. In two, stupidly fast. There’s a level of snappiness that you simply don’t see on other laptops. Open the lid and the desktop is already there. Click on an app icon to start it and it loads – Microsoft Excel takes about one third of an ‘icon bounce’ to get running. For sheer silliness, we tried loading some 57 apps at the same time – the entire macOS app platform, plus all of Microsoft Office, and Logic and Final Cut Pro, and Blackmagic DaVinci and a pile of benchmark utilities. It took around 15 seconds.
...
The benchmark results speak for themselves. We tested the M1 MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM, and compared it against a five-month-old MacBook Pro with an eight-core Core i9 processor and 64GB of RAM, a two-month- old Mac mini with a six-core Core i7 processor and 64GB of RAM, and a 2013 Mac Pro desktop with a Xeon processor and 64GB of RAM, as well as to the M1 MacBook Pro. In all of our tests, the MacBook Air was at the head of the pack, but it was in the Geekbench 5 single-core tests where it really shone, demonstrating a 36.7% lead over the Core i9 MacBook Pro with an astonishing score of 1,724. A result of 7,476 in the multi-core test was similarly stonking, although the gap between it and the rest of Apple’s stable isn’t quite so broad here, with a lead of less than 5% over the i9 Pro.
...
Posted by Andy Brice
Feb 26, 2021 at 08:05 PM
Listerene wrote:
>One problem on the horizon is that
>M1 machines have been writing data to the SSD at an alarming rate which
>—if Apple doesn’t fix the issue—likely will shorten the SSD’s
>life-span significantly. Since that drive is soldered, that’s an issue
>... probably just after the Apple-Care warranty expires.
I had seen reports of that. But apparently some people think the numbers that this are based on are wrong. I guess we’ll find out who is right soon enough.
The performance certainly sounds impressive. I am curious to try it out with my Easy Data Transform app, which is very memory and processor intensive for big datasets (e.g. joining 2 CSV files with several millions rows each).
Has anyone seen benchmarks of how much slower an x86 app running in Rosetta is than the same app built for ARM?
—
Andy Brice
https://www.hyperplan.com