Apple Silicon

yek said:
But the fan alone (and Touch Bar) doesn’t explain the price difference.
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bigger battery too. i'm guessing the fan will allow the M1 chip to do even more, less restrictions maybe.

i ordered a Mini and the MBP. tempted to try the Air instead, but i like the bigger form factor of the body. i'll chime in when i receive them hopefully in 2 weeks or so.

my main iMac at home is from 2012 and doesn't allow certain external monitors and has some other issues of being "so old." so the mini should replace that well. i'm anticipating OBS and other video programs to not work immediately, but i hope they do soon!

i also use a 16" MBP now and miss the size of a 13". i'm interested to see if i can get the 16's performance out of the 13. probably eventually sell the 16", or return the 13 M1 if it doesn't perform well.

we'll see. i do think this will be a great change for the future. just having the iOS App store available will create a lot of opportunity.
 
chris said:
my main iMac at home is from 2012 and doesn't allow certain external monitors and has some other issues of being "so old." so the mini should replace that well.
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So you already have an separate display?
 
yek said:
So you already have an separate display?
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yeah i got one of those wide screen things recently for use with my 16" MBP. it's great, but when running OBS and doing 2 screens, the fan goes pretty high and slows everything down in the kernel. so i couldn't use it for live streaming. for regular work it's great to see so much.

so i'd put the Mini with that wide screen and should be good to go. the 2012 iMac doesn't support that resolution, and i need a new computer at my day job, so it will go there perfectly.
 
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plexi59 said:
So I looked at their "buy" page, and the RAM tops out at 16GB it looks like. It's a bit of a joke for now, if that's the case. At that price I expect 16GB stock and then go up from there. The machine I'm writing this on has 64GB of RAM. That's my DAW and Lightroom machine. My workstation on which I do work has 32 cores and 128GB of RAM, and I have an option to double both the core count and the RAM.
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Your workstation seems like a cool machine. Is that a Mac? Whatever it is, it must be a pretty pricy box. What sorts of work do you do on it?
 
yek said:
But the fan alone (and Touch Bar) doesn’t explain the price difference.
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No, partly I think it's marketing. As far as I can see there's no mention of clock speed either. That 7 core GPU for the air model is also a strange option to have. Surely that's going to disappear very quickly.

I've recently bought solar panels for my house that I'm renovating. Solar panels are rated for different wattages, and I got panels rated for 395W. What I was told was that the factory just makes the panels the best that the can, and then afterwards they test the panels and just divide them in different batches according to what the tests show they can deliver. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's what Apple is doing as well. At the end of the production line, they test the M1's and the ones with the best performance will go into the Pro and the lesser will go to the Air, some of the lesser ones gets one of the GPU cores neutered to produce less heat and lower than some benchmark they'll get tossed.

And yes, I think the M1 MacBook Pro is a bit of an outlier that's likely going to disappear from the lineup pretty soon. My guess would be that the next thing that gets updated is the iMac and the 16" MacBook Pro sometime next year. Both of them would need more RAM, at least as an option, so that will happen when they release the M2 chip (or M1+ or whatever). Hopefully by then we'll see a 13 (or 14) MacBook Pro, 16" MacBook Pro and an iMac with M2 processor and up to 64GB of RAM.
 
hippietim said:
I just ordered a Mac Mini - I like Final Cut Pro (I'm assuming it will be available for M1 Macs). Maxed the RAM but went for smallest drive - external SSDs will augment it just fine for way, way less money.
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Let us know your experience on the Mini with Final Cut Pro - curious to hear.
 
Johan Allard said:
No, partly I think it's marketing. As far as I can see there's no mention of clock speed either. That 7 core GPU for the air model is also a strange option to have. Surely that's going to disappear very quickly.

I've recently bought solar panels for my house that I'm renovating. Solar panels are rated for different wattages, and I got panels rated for 395W. What I was told was that the factory just makes the panels the best that the can, and then afterwards they test the panels and just divide them in different batches according to what the tests show they can deliver. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's what Apple is doing as well. At the end of the production line, they test the M1's and the ones with the best performance will go into the Pro and the lesser will go to the Air, some of the lesser ones gets one of the GPU cores neutered to produce less heat and lower than some benchmark they'll get tossed.

And yes, I think the M1 MacBook Pro is a bit of an outlier that's likely going to disappear from the lineup pretty soon. My guess would be that the next thing that gets updated is the iMac and the 16" MacBook Pro sometime next year. Both of them would need more RAM, at least as an option, so that will happen when they release the M2 chip (or M1+ or whatever). Hopefully by then we'll see a 13 (or 14) MacBook Pro, 16" MacBook Pro and an iMac with M2 processor and up to 64GB of RAM.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
 
Dave Merrill said:
Your workstation seems like a cool machine. Is that a Mac? Whatever it is, it must be a pretty pricy box. What sorts of work do you do on it?
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Not a Mac. It's a Threadripper-based box. Has four 2080Ti GPUs in it as well. And yes, it's pricy, but I get to write it off as a business expense. I do lots of C++, deep learning, stuff like that. It runs Linux, so it's borderline useless for serious media work though.
 
AlbertA said:
I think it makes sense for a Macbook air product. I'm not so sure about the Macbook Pro line or the mac mini - and you can already see the dimished I/O on the mini.
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I think it makes sense for them across the board. Some benchmarks show the new chip outperforms Core i9. Apple has the best CPU expertise in the world, and had it for close to a decade now. They also have the volumes which make it worthwhile. But this is a v1. Before I seriously consider it, it needs to be v3 at the very least, and all the software I might need must run well on it. Until then, I'll let other beta test it and scream at devs to get them to port.
 
The terms of the DTK prohibit developers from running public benchmarks which is why there haven't been any, but the first geekbench numbers are filtering in today and they look impressive, if they're to be believed.

One note for DAW users: you'll need to have ARM versions of your plugins before you can use them in a ARM-capable DAW.
 
Got a new Macbook a year ago - kinda wish I'd waited, though I'm never keen on purchasing 1st gen
 
Joe Bfstplk said:
Me too, about 8 months ago. Glad I got one which still had UNIX under the shell and mature apps available before the changeover....
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It's not going to be 'nix under the hood anymore? That's an even bigger change (unless it's been that way for 10 years, and I didn't know because I'm not a Mac guy and mostly don't care).
 
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