MAC M1

[LunarMist]

The MAC M1 ARM is supposed to be the hot stuff lately, but what do you think? Supposedly Apple is ditching iNTEL like they did the IBM 15 years ago and for good reasons. Their little NUC would not do it for me now, but maybe in a couple of years there will be more powerful versions that would replace the AMD desktop PC.
I don't want to be rolling around with the casters or skates, etc. between displays so that complicates everything.

 

[Chewy509]

We've got a few M1 based systems at work, and they operate well for their intended purpose. Performance wise, they perform better than previous Apple laptops, in both CPU performance and battery life.

We've found Rosetta to be performant with x86 to ARM, no issues with application compatibility, they "just work". If you used one you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an Intel based macbook and an M1 based one.

The only downside we've found is the lack of RAM in current offerings (topping at 16GB RAM).

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Other issue with M1 is limited support for external monitors when compared with their Intel counterparts. Presumably will be fixed with M2 etc.

 

[sedrosken]

Say what you will about Apple, I think they lost some originality when they ditched PowerPC back in the day. So I'm happy to see them doing something a little out of the box, even if it is just kinda tapping into the design chops of their mobile teams. ARM is very common these days but not in machines intended to replace rather than supplant current PCs. It makes me very excited to see what someone like Qualcomm could make in the same category, if they could also have some sort of x86 translation acceleration ASIC for some hypothetical JIT emulation under Linux or Windows. The Surface RT may have died in vain but it might just be time to see what such a thing could look like some ten years down the line with better engineering and planning.

16GB is awful sparse for a machine somewhat intended for content creation and creative types in general, yeah? I remember when Apple machines could take nutso amounts of RAM for the day -- the PowerMac G5 tops out at 16GB itself, I believe. Now in the day of soldered memory, I'm bummed to see them topping out at that, still. 16GB is still generally what's recommended for a gaming/general use machine today, and I don't doubt macOS still holds some claim to being lighter on memory than Windows [citation needed] but for that to be the maximum? Ouch. I hope their Pro offering doesn't suffer from the same issue.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a couple (literally 2) M1 Macs at work because the graphics/CAD/print production guy we work with uses them, one Macbook and one iMac. He's also been annoyed by the RAM limit on the iMac, although he's only actually had an issue with it a couple times and only while working on personal projects. It may not be an issue all that often, or at least not yet. Apparently the big plus for him is that the Macbook performance is basically identical to the desktop, which is a more or less 40% jump over what his old one did.

One of my devs wants a MacBook as a status thing, since she's the one who goes to client meetings, but her Thinkpad , but she has a P-series Thinkpad for a reason and that reason is crap tons of RAM.

 

[Handruin]

I ended up getting another Macbook Pro 16" and it's a disappointment all the way around. They end up being glorified terminals for the way my new job wants us to work and keep all IP off the system. I really loathe that stupid touch bar. The laptop display panel also has a lot of refresh lag that makes web scrolling not smooth (which there's a huge thread of people complaining about similar things). I dislike that these things fetch the premium they do because people/companies keep buying them.

I like the M1 chip as it is, but the entire platform with MacOS keeps me distant. I would like to see the Google Tensor SoC pivot from mobile into a similar realm for a high performance notebook some day to compete with the M1 but google still has more work to do there.