New Macs With M1 Chips

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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Xan » Sat Nov 14, 2020 1:08 pm

I wouldn't recommend it, from a computing freedom perspective:

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Sat Nov 14, 2020 1:11 pm

Xan wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 1:08 pm
I wouldn't recommend it, from a computing freedom perspective:

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.

It turns out that in the current version of the macOS, the OS sends to Apple a hash (unique identifier) of each and every program you run, when you run it. Lots of people didn’t realize this, because it’s silent and invisible and it fails instantly and gracefully when you’re offline, but today the server got really slow and it didn’t hit the fail-fast code path, and everyone’s apps failed to open if they were connected to the internet.
Ah yeah, I saw that being discussed on Reddit. I may have to dust off Linux...

I wonder what Steve Jobs would think about the state of privacy as it relates to Apple these days. His last interview at the D conference before he passed away had him championing privacy.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by pmward » Sat Nov 14, 2020 2:37 pm

Smith1776 wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 12:49 pm
I will probably treat myself to a new MacBook when I graduate and find full-time work in industry. The computer will be an appropriate reward to myself since I'll be using it for dev work anyway. Frustrating homework aside, I have really taken a liking to programming.

I am taking the same approach to the new Playstation and Xbox game consoles. The early units of any new game console tend to have the highest failure rates. The game libraries at the beginning tend to be limited too. I'll wait at least 6 months... maybe even a year.

The one thing that I find a little sad as time passes is the integration of once discrete hardware components into SOCs. A lot of that of course has been driven by the increasing ubiquity of mobile computing. Speccing out all the individual components in a computer was once a very enjoyable pastime. Now the cost efficiency of integrated systems and the need to be mobile has made desktops take an unfortunate backseat.
I bought my first MacBook Pro when I was still in college (also a computer science major). One thing I will say, is whatever company you go to work for you will likely be issued a laptop, so you won't really be coding on your personal MacBook. There are security issues with using a personal laptop, so it's quite rare to find a company that will allow that. But having a MacBook is still a fun toy. For daily (or student) use, the new ARM MacBook Air is a pretty sweet value for the money. I'm tempted, but my current MacBook Pro just doesn't need to be replaced yet.

Also, if you do want the joy of building your own computer, it can still be had if you build a gaming PC instead of buying either of those new consoles. You can get all the benefits of Xbox, including all exclusives and GamePass, on a gaming PC. Costs a lot more though...

And yeah, even if you don't use Linux on your own, I do highly recommend you get to know Linux well. I was kind of forced to have to learn Linux in the last few years, with containers, cloud, and serverless programming coming to the forefront. It really pays off to know your way around the differing popular Linux versions via command line really well.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by vnatale » Sat Nov 14, 2020 3:15 pm

pmward wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 2:37 pm
Smith1776 wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 12:49 pm
I will probably treat myself to a new MacBook when I graduate and find full-time work in industry. The computer will be an appropriate reward to myself since I'll be using it for dev work anyway. Frustrating homework aside, I have really taken a liking to programming.

I am taking the same approach to the new Playstation and Xbox game consoles. The early units of any new game console tend to have the highest failure rates. The game libraries at the beginning tend to be limited too. I'll wait at least 6 months... maybe even a year.

The one thing that I find a little sad as time passes is the integration of once discrete hardware components into SOCs. A lot of that of course has been driven by the increasing ubiquity of mobile computing. Speccing out all the individual components in a computer was once a very enjoyable pastime. Now the cost efficiency of integrated systems and the need to be mobile has made desktops take an unfortunate backseat.
I bought my first MacBook Pro when I was still in college (also a computer science major). One thing I will say, is whatever company you go to work for you will likely be issued a laptop, so you won't really be coding on your personal MacBook. There are security issues with using a personal laptop, so it's quite rare to find a company that will allow that. But having a MacBook is still a fun toy. For daily (or student) use, the new ARM MacBook Air is a pretty sweet value for the money. I'm tempted, but my current MacBook Pro just doesn't need to be replaced yet.

Also, if you do want the joy of building your own computer, it can still be had if you build a gaming PC instead of buying either of those new consoles. You can get all the benefits of Xbox, including all exclusives and GamePass, on a gaming PC. Costs a lot more though...

And yeah, even if you don't use Linux on your own, I do highly recommend you get to know Linux well. I was kind of forced to have to learn Linux in the last few years, with containers, cloud, and serverless programming coming to the forefront. It really pays off to know your way around the differing popular Linux versions via command line really well.
Curious for those of you with organization issued computers...are they Windows or other?

My organization is all Windows except catering to two individuals who use Apple computers.

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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Kbg » Sat Nov 14, 2020 4:51 pm

I’ve always stuck with Windows due to a program I use for backtesting. I’ve got way too much of my life in associated code to walk away. What do you guys recommend if I gotta stick with some windows functionality (that needs to stay snappy)?
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Xan » Sat Nov 14, 2020 9:33 pm

Virtualbox works very well for me.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mark Leavy » Sat Nov 14, 2020 11:35 pm

Kbg wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 4:51 pm
I’ve always stuck with Windows due to a program I use for backtesting. I’ve got way too much of my life in associated code to walk away. What do you guys recommend if I gotta stick with some windows functionality (that needs to stay snappy)?
Up until around 2015 I used to run bootcamp for any apps that required windows and it worked extremely well. No experience since then. I'm not sure how the newer non Intel macs would handle it though. That seems like a very big "if".

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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by pmward » Sun Nov 15, 2020 8:09 am

vnatale wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 3:15 pm
pmward wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 2:37 pm
Smith1776 wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 12:49 pm
I will probably treat myself to a new MacBook when I graduate and find full-time work in industry. The computer will be an appropriate reward to myself since I'll be using it for dev work anyway. Frustrating homework aside, I have really taken a liking to programming.

I am taking the same approach to the new Playstation and Xbox game consoles. The early units of any new game console tend to have the highest failure rates. The game libraries at the beginning tend to be limited too. I'll wait at least 6 months... maybe even a year.

The one thing that I find a little sad as time passes is the integration of once discrete hardware components into SOCs. A lot of that of course has been driven by the increasing ubiquity of mobile computing. Speccing out all the individual components in a computer was once a very enjoyable pastime. Now the cost efficiency of integrated systems and the need to be mobile has made desktops take an unfortunate backseat.
I bought my first MacBook Pro when I was still in college (also a computer science major). One thing I will say, is whatever company you go to work for you will likely be issued a laptop, so you won't really be coding on your personal MacBook. There are security issues with using a personal laptop, so it's quite rare to find a company that will allow that. But having a MacBook is still a fun toy. For daily (or student) use, the new ARM MacBook Air is a pretty sweet value for the money. I'm tempted, but my current MacBook Pro just doesn't need to be replaced yet.

Also, if you do want the joy of building your own computer, it can still be had if you build a gaming PC instead of buying either of those new consoles. You can get all the benefits of Xbox, including all exclusives and GamePass, on a gaming PC. Costs a lot more though...

And yeah, even if you don't use Linux on your own, I do highly recommend you get to know Linux well. I was kind of forced to have to learn Linux in the last few years, with containers, cloud, and serverless programming coming to the forefront. It really pays off to know your way around the differing popular Linux versions via command line really well.
Curious for those of you with organization issued computers...are they Windows or other?

My organization is all Windows except catering to two individuals who use Apple computers.

Vinny
My work gives us a choice, and pretty much my whole team is on MacBooks. I think we have 2 or 3 people on Windows. I have Docker and Parallels for those times I need virtualization, though these days it's quite rare I need to boot up a Windows VM. Even our .NET Core API's can run on Mac or on a Linux Docker container these days. So since even the Microsoft stack can be fully run on Mac or Linux, there really is no reason any dev needs Windows anymore. Microsoft has done a good job opening up in recent years. I'm not sure if this changes any for the M1 MacBooks though. As long as Docker works though, one can always spin up a lightweight Linux container. We will have to see. And of course all the non-Microsoft languages are all cross platform.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by pmward » Sun Nov 15, 2020 8:22 am

Kbg wrote:
Sat Nov 14, 2020 4:51 pm
I’ve always stuck with Windows due to a program I use for backtesting. I’ve got way too much of my life in associated code to walk away. What do you guys recommend if I gotta stick with some windows functionality (that needs to stay snappy)?
Docker is very performant, but it's console only, so do you need the GUI or can you run the code through the command line or through API? Running a full on VM (like in Parallels or VMWare) is an option, but it can be slow to run 2 full OS's simultaneously. You also could spin up a Windows cloud machine in either AWS or Azure to get the full Windows GUI, if it's something you can just spin up or down as needed to run your backtesting it's quite cheap to do this and you literally can spin this up to be as powerful as you want.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Sun Nov 15, 2020 9:45 pm

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1 ... benchmark/

Apple Silicon M1 Emulating x86 is Still Faster Than Every Other Mac in Single Core Benchmark

rosetta-2-m1-benchmark-single-core.jpg
rosetta-2-m1-benchmark-single-core.jpg (140.49 KiB) Viewed 3184 times
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mark Leavy » Sun Nov 15, 2020 9:54 pm

Okay, Damn it.

I generally upgrade every other year. My mac one year and then my phone the next year.

But this year, I need the new phone for work (ToF) 3D sensor. And I *really* want the new MacAir. The Windows emulation speed clinches it.

Grrrr...
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Tue Nov 17, 2020 11:34 am

Mark Leavy wrote:
Sun Nov 15, 2020 9:54 pm
Okay, Damn it.

I generally upgrade every other year. My mac one year and then my phone the next year.

But this year, I need the new phone for work (ToF) 3D sensor. And I *really* want the new MacAir. The Windows emulation speed clinches it.

Grrrr...
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Tue Nov 17, 2020 11:35 am

The excellent Marques Brownlee review of the new M1 m̶o̶r̶t̶a̶r̶ Macbook is now live!


https://youtu.be/f4g2nPY-VZc
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Dieter » Tue Nov 17, 2020 7:58 pm

WiseOne wrote:
Thu Nov 12, 2020 12:08 pm
Thanks for the assessment Smith!

I'd heard about this, but now I'm really excited to try this out. I had delayed replacing my laptop, but it's now really starting to show its age (it's a 2013). Gaming isn't my issue but I do need to run some intense mathematical software on large datasets. My current laptop just plain can't do it.

On the todolist....along with a ton of other things but hope to order new macbook pro soon. It's only the 13" that has the M1 chip, right? That's the size I want, as it happens.
Not sure if you are aware, but generally the best sales for Apple computers are the day after Thanksgiving.

10 days to make a decision.

No pressure. :)
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Dieter » Tue Nov 17, 2020 8:44 pm

Definitely has me thinking about getting a laptop. Currently just have an old 2012 Mac Mini that is fine for most things, but shared with others and likely to be off helping my dad more.

10 days till the expected Apple sale to figure out if I go iPad or MacBook, Air or Pro.

I foresee spending way to much time reading reviews and user reports until then....

Pro differences vs Air, $300.00 gets you:

* Better performance:
- Better cooling (Fan)
- Faster SSD? (Ugh, I thought I saw a benchmark, but can't find it right now; not a major difference)
- Better GPU - 8 vs 7 cores vs entry level Air

* Brighter Screen (500 vs 400 nits)

* Longer battery life (+2 hours listed)

* Better speakers and mic
(TBD on the speaker; Apple site lists differently; MacRumors review says the same)

* Touch Bar on Pro, not Air (any opinions on this?)

* Faster charging (?)

Air does offer the Gold color option and is a little lighter; probably quieter (and warmer) without a fan.

Any other diffs I'm missing?

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-s ... cbook-pro/

[Edit: I think the main reason I'd consider the Pro is screen brightness, although nothing concrete that the 25% increase in brightness would matter to me]
Last edited by Dieter on Wed Nov 18, 2020 1:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mark Leavy » Wed Nov 18, 2020 12:40 am

I'm seriously looking at the Air right now. I like the "no fan" even though it may mean that I might be thermally throttled at times.

Load it up with memory and disk storage...
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mark Leavy » Wed Nov 18, 2020 1:32 am

Dieter wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 8:44 pm
* Touch Bar on Pro, not Air (any opinions on this?)
The Touch Bar will compete with the Edsel for the worst design flaw in American history.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mountaineer » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:57 am

Mark Leavy wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 1:32 am
Dieter wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 8:44 pm
* Touch Bar on Pro, not Air (any opinions on this?)
The Touch Bar will compete with the Edsel for the worst design flaw in American history.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2018. Touch bar is basically worthless for my needs. Rarely use it for anything other than adjusting speaker volume.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by dualstow » Wed Nov 18, 2020 7:35 am

Dieter wrote:
Tue Nov 17, 2020 8:44 pm
Definitely has me thinking about getting a laptop. Currently just have an old 2012 Mac Mini

Mac minis are what I use. Extended keyboard, mouse made of wood, magic desktop trackpad.

I should use my old Mac mini for some fun project.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by pmward » Wed Nov 18, 2020 8:49 am

The CPU is the same in the Air and the Pro. Do you need the better GPU for anything like video editing or gaming? Are you doing any large tasks on it that require the cooling? Most of the population would be a no to both. For average daily use (internet, streaming, Office, etc) the Air would be the much better fit.

I've also put some consideration, whenever I do actually update my MacBook, into potentially going the iPad Pro route. But the iPad Pro is actually more expensive when you add the keyboard and everything into the mix. Until the prices go down there, I would still probably tend to lean MacBook Air. Not to mention that while the iPad Pro would be basically the best portable streaming video player on the planet, iPad itself is still more limited than a MacBook in a lot of ways. Like, I would never even think of attempting to code on an iPad, even with a keyboard, lol.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Wed Nov 18, 2020 2:18 pm

I am still on a 2015 15" Macbook Pro (purchased in 2016). Going on 4 years and don't currently see a need to upgrade. Though the new Apple silicon definitely has me questioning what otherwise would have been a planned move away from Apple's high prices. Right now that M1 chip has made Macbooks a phenomenal value, even without a change to their lineup's overall pricing structure.

I am just thankful that I bought this laptop before apple "upgraded" the line to those horrific 1st gen butterfly keyboards. That's another story though.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mountaineer » Wed Nov 18, 2020 2:26 pm

Smith1776 wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 2:18 pm
I am still on a 2015 15" Macbook Pro (purchased in 2016). Going on 4 years and don't currently see a need to upgrade. Though the new Apple silicon definitely has me questioning what otherwise would have been a planned move away from Apple's high prices. Right now that M1 chip has made Macbooks a phenomenal value, even without a change to their lineup's overall pricing structure.

I am just thankful that I bought this laptop before apple "upgraded" the line to those horrific 1st gen butterfly keyboards. That's another story though.
Those keyboards are indeed horrific! I still have a mid-2009 MacBook Pro - drastically better keyboard. Much of what I type on the 2018 MBP has errors that take a lot of time and effort to fix - way more problematic than the 2009.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Mark Leavy » Wed Nov 18, 2020 2:52 pm

dualstow wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 7:35 am
Mac minis are what I use. Extended keyboard, mouse made of wood, magic desktop trackpad.
Sounds ideal for a home machine. I'm imagining a couple of giant monitors with that. Probably wouldn't fit very well in my pack.
Nice setup, though.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by Smith1776 » Wed Nov 18, 2020 3:10 pm

If only the M1 Mac mini supported 3 displays, then I would be sold. Alas, maybe the next generation.
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Re: New Macs With M1 Chips

Post by dualstow » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:43 pm

I’ve just got the one Compaq display that i bought for a Windows xp tower in the mid-late aughts.
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