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I am deeply unimpressed with the thermals for this machine, which basically is a choice between huge fan noise or crazy heat from the underside of the unit.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
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Football is rubbish.
It is a joy to use compared to the 16".
Same Logic session running on both right now.
I've had to disable turbo boost and the 16" is still pushing 80 degrees.
The 15" is running at 50 degrees.
Studio: https://www.voltperoctave.com
Music: https://www.euclideancircuits.com
Me: https://www.jamesrichmond.com
Football is rubbish.
Those 2012 to 2015 ish 15" Retina's really are good laptops though, much quicker than the 13" models.
For content creation like Photoshop and video editing/rendering - which are arguably the main reasons people get Macs, rightly or wrongly - memory bandwidth and latency are way down the list of system features that affect performance.
iPad games can get away with reduced-detail textures and effects because the screen is so small. Bring that up to 13-17", or 24"+ in the case of the Mac Mini, and you're looking at game detail from 2012. Gamer expectations these days are far, far higher than that.
My conclusion is that the overwhelming likelihood is these are going to be premium-priced products with mid-range performance at best, and that's disappointing - because the ARM architecture deserves so much better than that for its mainstream-computing debut.
It's unfortunate that Apple made the decision when they did, because AMD basically solved all of the Intel-related problems they were trying to solve (the commercials of using their own silicon aside) with Zen2 and Zen3, without compromises in performance or flexibility.
GPU-accelerated video and image rendering: it's not designed to do that
Gaming beyond phone and tablet level: it's not designed to do that
Computationally-intensive tasks: it's not designed to do that
Audio recording/creation: it's not designed to do that
Future-proofing through expansion: it's not designed to do that
If you're talking about small parts of the market, that's Apple's entire market positioning! Content creation is their raison d'etre, or at least it has been for many years, and these machines simply aren't going to do that as well as their previous generations (even if you're willing to wait for the software to become available).
The average £999 ultra-portable these days has a Ryzen 4700U or i7-1065 in it, with 4-8 full-speed cores and surprisingly capable GPUs, some even with Optane acceleration, and more connectivity than the M1s are capable of. Literally the only aspect of these machines that's going to beat them is battery life, where you're talking 20hrs vs 13-14hrs. Some of them actually come with a GTX 1050 or 1060 GPU, too.
That's cool, if that's what you're after, but at that point you might as well just get a keyboard for your iPad and have done with it.
For pro level video editing ( mean TV shows rather than You tubers) people gave up on FCP quite some years ago. And from attending broadcast trade shows over the years I was in that industry they seem to give progressively less and less of a toss about it.
If you look at the changes in iPad OS and Big Sur they are clearly gradually migrating the platforms together so Macs will eventually become iPads with a keyboard, but actually useful for doing productivity work..
In terms of what the Air offers I think it is a proposition that you don't get in anything else on the market.
At £999 it's not stupidly expensive for a premium quality laptop. Yes you can get some plastic Acer PoS with an i7 in it for that sort of money, but not something equivalent like a Surface book.
In that package you are getting something:
- Premium aluminium construction
- Very thin and light
- Fanless and silent (This is huge)
- With a very high quality retina screen
- Really excellent battery life
- Excellent graphics performance for something with Integrated graphics
It's essentially a reasonably priced premium ultrabook which is surprisingly good at things like gaming and video editing given the form factor.I that respect I think it's like a better Ford Focus. Yes you can point to a specialised device that will outperform it in some specific metric, but as an overall package it does seem quite impressive.
That said I'm reserving judgement until the reviews actually some in given that my experience of Apple hardware is that it's been getting progressively worse over the last 5 years.
Not sure you are being a beta tester for Apple has had OSX running on ARM for many years, developing in parallel and has been slowly bringing the two systems together these are really Ipad Pro Pro devices but in a laptop format.
Of course the marketing is hyped its Apple but then nobody writes a pitch telling people our new machine is 70% as fast as the best performing PC laptop.
Again the 16gb memory limit argument seems a moot point in my view we will need 32gb in 5 years at work. What 1000 dollar machine is doing real tech work in 5 years. Commercially this kind of gear is done in 2/3 years.
I think like most new Apple products these will be superceeded in 12 months with much improved chips. Apple is always very conservative out of the gate likes to bed stuff in quickly kill it’s first born and then wow you to the next great thing. These three drop into their core sales pockets with enough additional performance to warrant being there.
I don’t think Apple would of finally made the jump to ARM if it could not get some serious advantage from the MAC Air to the big beast MAC pro.
is the AAA games market even a valid target in terms of dollars Microsoft and Sony have been slogging it out for years. Casual gaming done well is a much bigger market I would guess.
As for timing Apple started this project something like 8 years ago. Long before AMD solved the world problems.
Apple has steadily & massively reduced its commitment to & investment into what historically was 'real computing', toward more attractive consumer devices such as iPhones, iPads etc.
Apple are no longer a computer manufacturing firm, they are a imagineering (sic/vomit), futurology, personal lifestyle based device provider.
The innovative technology big computing beast has long since had its day in the Apple ecosystem, unless the marketing department can find a niche that they can exploit.
I am curious when they started their roadmap for making this M1 chip, if they had this in the pipe works around the time the current chassis came out then that would make sense, or perhaps sooner? I would expect the chassis to compliment the M1 chip well without the thermal problems for Intel chips.
all in all I’m looking forward to how it fare in the wild.
The rumours are that they will be releasing a 14" MBP next year which makes me slightly suspicious that this years MBP will just be an M1 shoehorned into the old style chasis and next years will be the one that's been ground up designed for the ARM chips.
It will be interesting if they follow the lead of the phones and bump the processors every year now they are working on in house silicon.
As for the big beast machine is there really any reason why it can’t be designed with some sort of large ARM multi core that has the required hardware to access PCie hardware and the needs of the more advanced user. it won’t be an M1 but I have a gut feeling Apple once it has its bread and butter portable mobile devices up and running which is where it’s main revenue is will look to make the Flagship machine.
One of the things I think is also interesting is that in some ways Apple now has what it wanted all of its business life control over the whole machine from soup to nuts the ever closer integration and control of the whole system.
So maybe interesting times ahead