M1 - wow

[TOS]

in photo editing, m1 macbook pro beats a "beast" of a pc

Intel-based Photoshop, via Rosetta 2, took 50.3 seconds to align the layers and 1 minute, 37 seconds to merge them. I compared that to an exceptionally powerful Windows desktop PC that was built with an AMD Ryzen 9 3950 X CPU, Nvidia RTX Titan graphics and 128GB RAM, specifically to be a beast with editing photos and 8K video. The PC took 20 seconds to align the layers and 53 seconds to merge them — a clear victory for the PC.

However I then ran the same tests on the beta version of Photoshop that supports Apple M1. It took 22 seconds to align the layers and 46.6 seconds to merge them — a faster overall time than my immensely powerful editing rig was able to achieve.

although the pc was still faster for video editing, though the m1 was using intel-optimized software

[wellfleation]

I'm not sure why Apple isn't out there promoting the human waste out of the M1.
Like TV commercials showing the insane performance per watt, noiseless operation, etc.

[Robert B.]

Still waiting on my MacMini. Goddammit FedEx.

[Pariah]

I'm not sure why Apple isn't out there promoting the human waste out of the M1.
Like TV commercials showing the insane performance per watt, noiseless operation, etc.

Because they have flogged that point so many times in the past when it was not true that no one would believe it even though it is true now.
The boy who cried wolf and all that.

[juice]

It would make more sense to do this one the entire platform has migrated.

To do so now would be to call attention to just how inadequate their “pro” offerings have become

[TOS]

It would make more sense to do this one the entire platform has migrated.

To do so now would be to call attention to just how inadequate their “pro” offerings have become

this

[avkills]

Once Apple releases the "real" Pro level M-series chips, it is looking to be some egg in the face of many. Although I would be grumpy to have my large investment MacPro decimated, the writing is on the wall. However I will not be bitter, the MacPro is still a beast of a machine; and by far the best Mac I have ever owned; and the only tower Apple has made that I like better "era of purchase" than when the B&W G3s were released (which I still have)

[wellfleation]

The new M1X is not going to be any faster, just more cores (which I guess is faster depending on what you are doing).

[Robert B.]

Still waiting on my MacMini. Goddammit FedEx.

Looks like the Mini may have been stolen off the truck. Goddammit FedEx. Goddammit Apple. Thanks Joe Biden.

[Aaron_R]

why, what is the tracking # ?

[Pariah]

I hope this ushers in an era where Macs have become bang for the buck competitive. My problem with Macs was always about their weak, over priced hardware. If that has finally changed there might be a Mac in my future, but I will wait a few generations to see where this all goes.

[Aaron_R]

It won't. Qualcomm is already working on a upsized Snapdragon unit for laptops. So once that is released their will be Chromebooks making Apple stay the overpriced hardware it has always been.

[Pariah]

It won't. Qualcomm is already working on a upsized Snapdragon unit for laptops. So once that is released their will be Chromebooks making Apple stay the overpriced hardware it has always been.

It does not bode well that Apple is selling completely not upgradable hardware with only 8GB of ram. 8GB was enough ten years ago, not in 2021, Heck, I regularly am using more than 8GB of ram and I run Linux. I can only imagine how much a Mac actually neds now but I think it is safe to say anything under 16GB is woefully inadequate for a fat, sprawling OS like the MacOS..
And, in typical Apple style they are charging $200 for $45 worth of ram to get to 16GB.

[maurvir]

I would agree that a "pro" machine is silly with less than 16GB of RAM, but 8GB is fine for basic home/office use. However, the lack of upgradeability means that these 8GB machines aren't going to age well.

[wellfleation]

I hope this ushers in an era where Macs have become bang for the buck competitive. My problem with Macs was always about their weak, over priced hardware. If that has finally changed there might be a Mac in my future, but I will wait a few generations to see where this all goes.

Me too! It made me sick my gf two years ago was getting an underpowered MBA for 1199. I told her with the specs it was a ripoff but she got it anyway, and since she was extremely wealthy, I said my piece and let it be. But I have not recommended an Apple laptop, etc., with the cost to specs being so poor in MANY years. I am happy to report this is no longer the case.
APPLE IS BACK BABY, and they ARE FOR REAL!!!! The M1 is a bargain on any machine Apple puts it on. It's insanely that good, and more to come. "Bye for now" Intel - HA.

[wellfleation]

And if you are "waiting a few generations" then you are truly missing out - truly.

[Pariah]

I would agree that a "pro" machine is silly with less than 16GB of RAM, but 8GB is fine for basic home/office use. However, the lack of upgradeability means that these 8GB machines aren't going to age well.

I don't do anything "pro" and I am using Linux which tends to use less ram and I am frequently using 8 to 11GB of ram just with two browsers open, my file manager, an image viewer and an editor. I have 12GB of ram and consider that a bare minimum for comfortable computing.
Heck, if I have either Chrome or Firefox open and busy a long time I will expend all of my ram and end up 2 or 3GB into swap. The next time I find myself in that position I will take a screen shot.

[maurvir]

I would agree that a "pro" machine is silly with less than 16GB of RAM, but 8GB is fine for basic home/office use. However, the lack of upgradeability means that these 8GB machines aren't going to age well.

I don't do anything "pro" and I am using Linux which tends to use less ram and I am frequently using 8 to 11GB of ram just with two browsers open, my file manager, an image viewer and an editor. I have 12GB of ram and consider that a bare minimum for comfortable computing.
Heck, if I have either Chrome or Firefox open and busy a long time I will expend all of my ram and end up 2 or 3GB into swap. The next time I find myself in that position I will take a screen shot.

My MBP caps out at 8, and while it gets close at times, I've never run out of RAM. I also have a Windows VM that I have set at 12GB, and I rarely go beyond about 6GB unless I'm doing a major compile.

[TOS]

I would agree that a "pro" machine is silly with less than 16GB of RAM, but 8GB is fine for basic home/office use. However, the lack of upgradeability means that these 8GB machines aren't going to age well.

I don't do anything "pro" and I am using Linux which tends to use less ram and I am frequently using 8 to 11GB of ram just with two browsers open, my file manager, an image viewer and an editor. I have 12GB of ram and consider that a bare minimum for comfortable computing.
Heck, if I have either Chrome or Firefox open and busy a long time I will expend all of my ram and end up 2 or 3GB into swap. The next time I find myself in that position I will take a screen shot.

either you've misunderstood the way ram works in these chips, or apple is run by morons

[Metacell]

I imagine 8GB with an SSD is potentially faster than 16GB with an old spinning HD, provided the virtual memory is well-managed. After all, the most memory actually ever in play at any given moment is what fits in the chip's registers.

[Pariah]

I imagine 8GB with an SSD is potentially faster than 16GB with an old spinning HD, provided the virtual memory is well-managed. After all, the most memory actually ever in play at any given moment is what fits in the chip's registers.

Ya, but that is a false dichotomy. The choice us between 8GB of ram and an SSD or 16GB of ram and an SSD. Nobody should be using a HDD for a boot drive any more.
Modern OSs bend over backwards to preserve free ram and that misleads people into thinking that small amounts of ram are adequate because there is still ram free but double your ram and you will see ram usage increase because the system really wants more ram, it is just smart enough to run decently with an inadequate amount of ram.
I have always been a advocate for more ram as inadequate ram causes all kinds of hard to reproduce problems. I never used System 7.6 with less than 32meg of ram, never used OS8 with less than 64MB, OS9 got 128MB and I never used OSX with less than 768MB which grew to 2GB over 10 years ago. In 2021 16GB is the number I would want in a new machine. Particularly when talking about a system that absolutely can not be upgraded 16 is the new bare minimum.

[obvs]

Yeah, there's no way I would purchase a machine with 8GB in 2021.

I decided that 16GB was a minimum for my own machines as of the end of 2013/beginning of 2014, when I bought a MacBook Pro.

I think a machine with 8GB machine will generally be usable right now, but it's just barely on the edge of being obsolete. It definitely wouldn't be worth investing in such a machine, and much less for the future. 8GB is not acceptable.

[TOS]

with m1 macs, ram isn't what it used to be

The M1 processor’s memory is a single pool that’s accessible by any portion of the processor. If the system needs more memory for graphics, it can allocate that. If it needs more memory for the Neural Engine, likewise. Even better, because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.

These new Macs are, in their way, kind of alien. The tradition in personal computers was that everything was modular, an outgrowth of the early PC era. Even though the Mac never participated in the build-a-PC ethos, the parts Apple used to assemble Macs came from that industry. Compare that with the smartphone, where Apple has continued to integrate more portions of the system into its single processor package in order to increase efficiency. These new Macs are far more like smartphones than like traditional PCs.

[juice]

in before "laptop parts"

[Pariah]

with m1 macs, ram isn't what it used to be

The M1 processor’s memory is a single pool that’s accessible by any portion of the processor. If the system needs more memory for graphics, it can allocate that. If it needs more memory for the Neural Engine, likewise. Even better, because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.

These new Macs are, in their way, kind of alien. The tradition in personal computers was that everything was modular, an outgrowth of the early PC era. Even though the Mac never participated in the build-a-PC ethos, the parts Apple used to assemble Macs came from that industry. Compare that with the smartphone, where Apple has continued to integrate more portions of the system into its single processor package in order to increase efficiency. These new Macs are far more like smartphones than like traditional PCs.

That is interesting but really does not touch on the problem at hand which is a lack of ram. Are you telling me that Apple has invented some voodoo that will make Firefox or chrome work fine even when one or both of them want 10GB of ram and you only have 8?
Personally I would take anything that Apple said on the subject with a large grain of salt. Apple has a 40 year tradition of using mostly blatherskite techno-babble to promote their stuff. This smells like more of that.

[Mr. T]

No, the RAM limitation is very real. But first-party apps are much less resource-intensive than their competitors. For example, Safari is much better optimized than FireFox and Chrome is uniquely poor. But, I basically agree. If you need more RAM, you need more RAM...

[Mr. T]

To TOS' point, yea, I agree with that. RAM is not what it used to be with the M1. The unified memory model is a revolutionary concept that really hasn't been touted enough. Traditionally, CPUs excel at "narrow-and-deep workflows," while GPUs are best suited for "wide-and-shallow, with SIMD meant to cover some use cases in the middle. That all goes out the window with the M1. Now you can write code that mixes/matches these elements at will without having to shuttle data around, or query the host system to see if it supports the right proprietary graphics API, and so forth.

This a big deal. The story so far from the press has been: "Apple's low-end laptop chip hangs with high-end PC desktops in lightly threaded workloads". Once we start seeing apps start to take advantage of the unified memory architecture, I expect those headlines will change to: "Apple's low-end laptop chip demolishes high-end PC desktop in video editing and CAD".

Looking ahead, the even bigger point about the M1 is that Apple has built a platform that combines ALL elements of a system in a way that can be easily scaled both UP and OUT, from the lowly Apple Watch all the way up to the yet-announced Mac Pro, and they've done so in a way that allows them to get great yields across the board, while cutting out vendors in the middle. At the same time, this platform provides new pathways for optimization that are simply not possible under traditional computing models. Apple's lead on paper might look small, but in reality, Apple is YEARS ahead competitors in the x86 ecosystem. Secretly, they all know this. It's why NVIDIA is acquiring SoftBank, and it's why Microsoft announced their own SoC program.

[maurvir]

Yeah, the understated hero of the M1 is the memory architecture - and it is something only an SoC can realistically do right now. Intel is hosed.

[TOS]

with m1 macs, ram isn't what it used to be

The M1 processor’s memory is a single pool that’s accessible by any portion of the processor. If the system needs more memory for graphics, it can allocate that. If it needs more memory for the Neural Engine, likewise. Even better, because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.

These new Macs are, in their way, kind of alien. The tradition in personal computers was that everything was modular, an outgrowth of the early PC era. Even though the Mac never participated in the build-a-PC ethos, the parts Apple used to assemble Macs came from that industry. Compare that with the smartphone, where Apple has continued to integrate more portions of the system into its single processor package in order to increase efficiency. These new Macs are far more like smartphones than like traditional PCs.

That is interesting but really does not touch on the problem at hand which is a lack of ram. Are you telling me that Apple has invented some voodoo that will make Firefox or chrome work fine even when one or both of them want 10GB of ram and you only have 8?
Personally I would take anything that Apple said on the subject with a large grain of salt. Apple has a 40 year tradition of using mostly blatherskite techno-babble to promote their stuff. This smells like more of that.

all i know is that i have two m1 macs, both with 16gig of ram, and i have never, ever had a problem ... right now chrome has 12 tabs open, one of which is playing a youtube video, others include social media and google docs tabs, plus i have steam running and civilization vi, and i'm flipping back and forth between all that stuff and there's absolutely zero lag, hitch or crashing

often i'll have final draft running in addition to all that, plus an adobe app ... at other times i've used premier to edit 4k footage and it's smoother than any computer i've ever used

i know that it seems completely impossible that 16gig is enough for a modern computer, and i'd normally agree, but however they did it, apple has figured out some way of making it work

please believe me when i say it's not blatherskite ... the question isn't whether or not it's real, because it is; it's how they managed it

[Mr. T]

Well, 16GB is more than 8GB

[Pariah]

with m1 macs, ram isn't what it used to be

The M1 processor’s memory is a single pool that’s accessible by any portion of the processor. If the system needs more memory for graphics, it can allocate that. If it needs more memory for the Neural Engine, likewise. Even better, because all the aspects of the processor can access all of the system memory, there’s no performance hit when the graphics cores need to access something that was previously being accessed by a processor core. On other systems, the data has to be copied from one portion of memory to another—but on the M1, it’s just instantly accessible.

These new Macs are, in their way, kind of alien. The tradition in personal computers was that everything was modular, an outgrowth of the early PC era. Even though the Mac never participated in the build-a-PC ethos, the parts Apple used to assemble Macs came from that industry. Compare that with the smartphone, where Apple has continued to integrate more portions of the system into its single processor package in order to increase efficiency. These new Macs are far more like smartphones than like traditional PCs.

That is interesting but really does not touch on the problem at hand which is a lack of ram. Are you telling me that Apple has invented some voodoo that will make Firefox or chrome work fine even when one or both of them want 10GB of ram and you only have 8?
Personally I would take anything that Apple said on the subject with a large grain of salt. Apple has a 40 year tradition of using mostly blatherskite techno-babble to promote their stuff. This smells like more of that.

all i know is that i have two m1 macs, both with 16gig of ram, and i have never, ever had a problem ... right now chrome has 12 tabs open, one of which is playing a youtube video, others include social media and google docs tabs, plus i have steam running and civilization vi, and i'm flipping back and forth between all that stuff and there's absolutely zero lag, hitch or crashing

often i'll have final draft running in addition to all that, plus an adobe app ... at other times i've used premier to edit 4k footage and it's smoother than any computer i've ever used

i know that it seems completely impossible that 16gig is enough for a modern computer, and i'd normally agree, but however they did it, apple has figured out some way of making it work

please believe me when i say it's not blatherskite ... the question isn't whether or not it's real, because it is; it's how they managed it

LOL, we don't disagree. I also think 16GB of ram is a good amount of ram to have. I am saying 8 is too little.

[macaddict4life]

I almost went with 8 GB ram for my M1 MBA. Lots of research (including real-world benchmarks) suggested that 8 GB would be just fine. My main reason to go for 16 was to be in a position to virtualize Windows for ARM, something it seemed would be a struggle on just 8 GB RAM.

[Pariah]

I almost went with 8 GB ram for my M1 MBA. Lots of research (including real-world benchmarks) suggested that 8 GB would be just fine. My main reason to go for 16 was to be in a position to virtualize Windows for ARM, something it seemed would be a struggle on just 8 GB RAM.

My big point about the new M1 Macs is that, as powerful as they are they should offer a very long lifespan of being usefull. The only thing that I see that would obsolete a M1 Mac would be inadequate ram. Apple may be able to optimize their own apps but I see no sign of things like browsers slowing down their thirst for ram anytime soon.

[wellfleation]

You can't upgrade so always try to go bigger than you think. I never go low-end, usually mid, as I need my laptops to last at least 5 years. 1TB/16GB of RAM seemed right for me.

[TOS]

I almost went with 8 GB ram for my M1 MBA. Lots of research (including real-world benchmarks) suggested that 8 GB would be just fine. My main reason to go for 16 was to be in a position to virtualize Windows for ARM, something it seemed would be a struggle on just 8 GB RAM.

My big point about the new M1 Macs is that, as powerful as they are they should offer a very long lifespan of being usefull. The only thing that I see that would obsolete a M1 Mac would be inadequate ram. Apple may be able to optimize their own apps but I see no sign of things like browsers slowing down their thirst for ram anytime soon.

maybe you should do some research instead of saying how much it baffles you

[Robert B.]

Got the Mini today and am setting it up. Is anyone experiencing Bluetooth not connecting after restart or waking up from sleep? I have to connect wired input to login and reconnect my bluetooth Apple mouse and Logitech keyboard. That totally defeats the purpose of wireless devices.

[macaddict4life]

Robert B, do you have any macOS updates you can install? I seem to recall there was an initial issue, and the newest update resolves it.

[Pariah]

I almost went with 8 GB ram for my M1 MBA. Lots of research (including real-world benchmarks) suggested that 8 GB would be just fine. My main reason to go for 16 was to be in a position to virtualize Windows for ARM, something it seemed would be a struggle on just 8 GB RAM.

My big point about the new M1 Macs is that, as powerful as they are they should offer a very long lifespan of being usefull. The only thing that I see that would obsolete a M1 Mac would be inadequate ram. Apple may be able to optimize their own apps but I see no sign of things like browsers slowing down their thirst for ram anytime soon.

maybe you should do some research instead of saying how much it baffles you

I am not "baffled" I am sceptical.

[Robert B.]

Robert B, do you have any macOS updates you can install? I seem to recall there was an initial issue, and the newest update resolves it.

Running the updates is the first thing I did after the initial setup. Grrr. Goddammit Steve Cook.

[Lombo]

Par: On M1 they have the storage controller integrated into the same SoC that also uses a unified memory scheme so I really think that even a 8gb M1 would swap almost imperceptibly when you run out. Also they are using compression of ram which seems to have a purpose built accelerator for this task. Long story short: I think that you would be blown away by even the crappiest M1 mac