New apple M1 chips - who's buying?

[plasticpig]

ATG said:

Not wishing to piss on anyone's chips, only to inject a bit of realism: people have been building processors and SoCs based on ARM's cores for _years_. At least a dozen firms build processors or SoCs with cores licensed from ARM, and Apple is using something like the 8th generation of the current ARM core design. This is nothing like a new processor built from scratch. It's a new arrangement of a load of tried and tested components. It's like building something out of lego.

The M1 doesn’t use ARM cores. It can’t do because ARM has only recently announced its 5nm core designs. Apple have a licence from ARM for its instruction set architecture so the core design is Apple’s and it implements the ARM instruction set.

[AlexC1981]

thebraketester said:

mathmos said:

ZesPak said:

I thought a single Thunderbolt could easily drive multiple displays through daisy chaining?

Apparently not according to this -

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/11/11/how-app...

"The 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 processor can connect only a single external display at a time in conjunction with the laptop's screen."

Which is all a bit annoying really!

The MBP will allow more displays I am guessing... All part of apples tiered specification to force spending more money

According to the article the MBA and MBP have the same limitation, but the Mac Mini has an additional HDMI port so can support a 2nd monitor.

I could see that being a deal breaker for a lot of people, which is a shame as the MBA sounds like the perfect machine otherwise. Small, light, no fans to clog up, long battery, yet powerful enough to be used as a proper work machine. People are going to buy the MBA/MBP not expecting this and be pretty disappointed.

My Dell at work allows additional monitors to be run from a docking station box via USB. Perhaps Apple will come up with a similar solution. If they bring out an M1 16" MBP they might include the extra port.

[Leithen]

plasticpig said:

ATG said:

Not wishing to piss on anyone's chips, only to inject a bit of realism: people have been building processors and SoCs based on ARM's cores for _years_. At least a dozen firms build processors or SoCs with cores licensed from ARM, and Apple is using something like the 8th generation of the current ARM core design. This is nothing like a new processor built from scratch. It's a new arrangement of a load of tried and tested components. It's like building something out of lego.

The M1 doesn’t use ARM cores. It can’t do because ARM has only recently announced its 5nm core designs. Apple have a licence from ARM for its instruction set architecture so the core design is Apple’s and it implements the ARM instruction set.

IIRC the A6 CPU in the iPhone 5 was the first CPU designed in house. They bought PA Semi a decade ago, and have steadily built up their own silicon design team.

[Phooey]

Does anyone know if the new M1 Air and Pro have the usual USB ports? I'm using a 2011 Air and also a 2015 MBP and have a printer and also a handheld barcode scanner both permanently attached via USB. I'm not very tech savvy so a bit nervous of buying one of these until I find out if it will work as seamless as my old computers. Apart from using the computer for internet browsing the main job is selling on Amazon / ebay so I need to make sure it will be ok with things like my Royal Mail postage account for example - which doesn't work with Safari so have to use Firefox.

[JonChalk]

Phooey said:

Does anyone know if the new M1 Air and Pro have the usual USB ports? I'm using a 2011 Air and also a 2015 MBP and have a printer and also a handheld barcode scanner both permanently attached via USB. I'm not very tech savvy so a bit nervous of buying one of these until I find out if it will work as seamless as my old computers. Apart from using the computer for internet browsing the main job is selling on Amazon / ebay so I need to make sure it will be ok with things like my Royal Mail postage account for example - which doesn't work with Safari so have to use Firefox.

Nope, just Thunderbolt / USB-C.

Already ordered an adaptor from Amazon. There are loads of them ~ £10/15.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Watching the figures yesterday what a load of marketing bks no qualification for any of their claims. All faster than the equivalent laptop etc but what are you comparing it to?

The integration of memory etc is concerning as you have no choice than to buy the most powerful version just incase really I can understand why but it makes me uneasy

Efficiency claims arnt hard to accept as effectively they are phones with keyboards and if you strapped a laptop battery to a phone it could do 20 hours of video


What annoys me is they have intentionally hamstrung the previous generation machines to make these look better

[JonChalk]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Watching the figures yesterday what a load of marketing bks no qualification for any of their claims. All faster than the equivalent laptop etc but what are you comparing it to?

The integration of memory etc is concerning as you have no choice than to buy the most powerful version just incase really I can understand why but it makes me uneasy

Efficiency claims arnt hard to accept as effectively they are phones with keyboards and if you strapped a laptop battery to a phone it could do 20 hours of video

Geekbench scores were out a few days ago - beats 16inch MBP with I9.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317304-bench...

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Geek bench results to be frank are bks

[JonChalk]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Geek bench results to be frank are bks

Fair enough - your preferred measure of performance, seeing as you dismiss one of the most widely-used methods?

And you dismiss the margin of performance improvement, across the board, even given your disdain for the method?

[thebraketester]

JonChalk said:

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Watching the figures yesterday what a load of marketing bks no qualification for any of their claims. All faster than the equivalent laptop etc but what are you comparing it to?

The integration of memory etc is concerning as you have no choice than to buy the most powerful version just incase really I can understand why but it makes me uneasy

Efficiency claims arnt hard to accept as effectively they are phones with keyboards and if you strapped a laptop battery to a phone it could do 20 hours of video

Geekbench scores were out a few days ago - beats 16inch MBP with I9.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/317304-bench...

I wonder how they would compare doing something like 2 hours of 4k video rendering

[Leithen]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

What annoys me is they have intentionally hamstrung the previous generation machines to make these look better

Just a guess, but do a lot of things annoy you...?

It’s no secret that Intel have had issues for some time. Apple producing their own Mac silicon has been on the cards for a while.

[JonChalk]

thebraketester said:

I wonder how they would compare doing something like 2 hours of 4k video rendering

tbf a number of reviewers have made the same comment, given the fanless set up, so there will be temperature / throttling in there somewhere.

Not something I'll be doing often enough to worry about whether it takes 2 hours or a throttled 3 hours.

I suspect that the MBA shouldn't really be seen as replacement for a something capable of doing that day in day out.

Think about it this way; what will a cooled high-end MBP be able to do with that chip in the future?

[ZesPak]

Tbh for most macbooks, and most laptops for that matter, the phrase "2k facebook machine" rings true, for most people if it can browse the internet for next couple of years that's plenty.

Rendering 4k for a stretched period of time is a niche use tbh. Apple has been pretty poor for that "pro" market in the past couple of years. And desktop machines have put laptops to shame since the dawn because of thermal issues.

It's an amazing feat Apple has done, I'm curious to see real benchmarks against the newest gen AMD chipsets. Intel had been dealt hits left and right, if Apple didn't move to their own platform now they needed to move towards AMD to keep up with the competition.

But in reality, if benchmarks really mattered, Apple would have been bankrupt years ago.

[130R]

JonChalk said:

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Geek bench results to be frank are bks

Fair enough - your preferred measure of performance, seeing as you dismiss one of the most widely-used methods?

And you dismiss the margin of performance improvement, across the board, even given your disdain for the method?

Geekbench isn't widely-used at all. Cinebench is though and now supports M1 with R23

[Phooey]

JonChalk said:

Nope, just Thunderbolt / USB-C.

Already ordered an adaptor from Amazon. There are loads of them ~ £10/15.

Thank you. Does most modern kit for example printers now come bundled with USB-C cables as opposed to the regular (old?) USB type cables? The main concern for me is my barcode scanner - i can't have this playing silly games with me

I think it's one of these I have - https://www.thebarcodewarehouse.co.uk/barcode-scan...

[JonChalk]

Phooey said:

JonChalk said:

Nope, just Thunderbolt / USB-C.

Already ordered an adaptor from Amazon. There are loads of them ~ £10/15.

Thank you. Does most modern kit for example printers now come bundled with USB-C cables as opposed to the regular (old?) USB type cables? The main concern for me is my barcode scanner - i can't have this playing silly games with me

I think it's one of these I have - https://www.thebarcodewarehouse.co.uk/barcode-scan...

Sadly not, still mostly USB 2/3 standard size connectors. Seems apart from phones and laptops, most of the world is a bit behind the USB-C curve. Good business for non-OEM adaptor manufacturers!

[Phooey]

JonChalk said:

Sadly not, still mostly USB 2/3 standard size connectors. Seems apart from phones and laptops, most of the world is a bit behind the USB-C curve. Good business for non-OEM adaptor manufacturers!

Cheers. Always confuses me (and winds me up!) the amount of different types of connectors manufacturers use - not just computers but everything electrical we buy has a different type then the other brand. And then just as you get to grips with it all they come out with version 2

[i4got]

I don't think its been mentioned on this thread as a possible downside for some (and it may be considered a little tinfoil headgear) but there are some other impacts to the new chip (including that it won't allow OS pre Big Sur) that Apple have been less talkative about. If you're a Little Snitch user in particular it's worth a read.


https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-y...

[mmm-five]

i4got said:

I don't think its been mentioned on this thread as a possible downside for some (and it may be considered a little tinfoil headgear) but there are some other impacts to the new chip (including that it won't allow OS pre Big Sur) that Apple have been less talkative about. If you're a Little Snitch user in particular it's worth a read.
https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-y...

Hardly unexpected that a new chip architecture would not run older OSes though, is it? I mean, you wouldn't expect System 7 to natively run on a PowerPC or Intel chip.

There's also been plenty of warning (from Little Snitch themselves if you read the warning that came up when Little Snitch gets updated) that the kexts will be locked down and it was being re-written to comply with Apple's more restrictive security measures.

I did know this, and is why I've opted to not upgrade yet. Just like I waited 6 months to upgrade to Catalina when I knew I'd lose access to some 32-bit programs...that everyone claimed they knew nothing about despite it being plastered all over the internet for 2 years previously.

No one is forcing you to upgrade to Big Sur...or to buy a new machine with Apple Silicon in it. Your current machine will not suddenly stop working - and if it's one of the faster recent machines you'll probably get 10 years of service out of it before it needs replacing...assuming you don't go and install the latest & greatest OS on it and then complain that some features aren't supported on your legacy machine, or that it's now slower.

Edited by mmm-five on Saturday 14th November 11:53

[i4got]

mmm-five said:

Hardly unexpected that a new chip architecture would not run older OSes though, is it? I mean, you wouldn't expect System 7 to natively run on a PowerPC or Intel chip.

There's also been plenty of warning (from Little Snitch themselves if you read the warning that came up when Little Snitch gets updated) that the kexts will be locked down and it was being re-written to comply with Apple's more restrictive security measures.

I did know this, and is why I've opted to not upgrade yet. Just like I waited 6 months to upgrade to Catalina when I knew I'd lose access to some 32-bit programs...that everyone claimed they knew nothing about despite it being plastered all over the internet for 2 years previously.

Agreed it was hardly unexpected that a new chip architecture would not run older OS - it's more the impact of that that some people may not have considered. Anyway if people are already aware then thats fine just thought I'd mention it.