New Macs With M1 Chips

[Smith1776]

By never purchasing warranties/apple care I figure I save enough money to afford a replacement if ever on the off chance one of my devices kicks the bucket prematurely.

[vnatale]

Three or four years ago I bought for $500 this used computer with an i7 and 16GB RAM with a four output monitor video card (and I do have four monitors connected to it). What would it cost me now to buy an equivalent used Apple computer?

Vinny

4 monitors is awesome! Hehe, so I have to admit though, I really like having an odd rather than even number of monitors. I like having one monitor in the center and the same number of monitors on either side. Having an even number of monitors either means a given setup will have you staring right at the bezel between two monitors or something otherwise lopsided.

I am always using two computers. Four monitors are are on this one and two are on the other one (though one of them is hidden). Therefore, effectively, I am using an odd amount - five. When I am doing payroll for our organization I am using both computers and all five monitors. No scrolling around or opening and closing windows for me!

Vinny

[Smith1776]

One of my best friends just bought the Macbook Air today. 1TB and 16GB of RAM! Here it is next to a 2015 15" Macbook pro.

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Will be running some fun benchies soon.

[Hal]

Looking forward to the benchmarks.
Will be interesting to see how far things have progressed from 2017

Still remember my Winstone 97 benchmark of 33 for a 200Mhz Pentium classic back in the dinosaur days.....

[Smith1776]

I'm currently investigating the GPU performance delta between the low end MBA and the high end MBA. The high end machine has 8 cores active while the low end machine has 7.

People on forums have been benchmarking the different units, but I have yet to see a thorough comparison from a very reputable source. By most accounts the performance difference should be about 5 to 10%, but there's one fellow in this thread who has been clocking fairly substantial double digit performance deltas. The community seems to suspect that this is due to a difference in thermal throttling rather than the discrepancy in core count per se. It's possible that thermal throttling impacts the 7 core machine more substantially than the other.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ho ... 457/page-2

All told, the difference in price between equally specced 7 vs 8 core machines is 50 bucks or so in most markets. I would take the 8 cores.

[vnatale]

I'm currently investigating the GPU performance delta between the low end MBA and the high end MBA. The high end machine has 8 cores active while the low end machine has 7.

People on forums have been benchmarking the different units, but I have yet to see a thorough comparison from a very reputable source. By most accounts the performance difference should be about 5 to 10%, but there's one fellow in this thread who has been clocking fairly substantial double digit performance deltas. The community seems to suspect that this is due to a difference in thermal throttling rather than the discrepancy in core count per se. It's possible that thermal throttling impacts the 7 core machine more substantially than the other.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ho ... 457/page-2

All told, the difference in price between equally specced 7 vs 8 core machines is 50 bucks or so in most markets. I would take the 8 cores.

I regularly use what I find here to make extremely quick decisions as to whether or not I want to buy a given computer. My main interest is in the actual power rating of the CPU.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Vinny

[Smith1776]

Geek Bench scores. Just to reiterate, this is the MacBook Air with 8 active GPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD.

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[Hal]

For comparison
For fun https://www.redhill.net.au/ig.html

[Smith1776]

Holy crap.

[Mark Leavy]

Okay. I'm sold. I've setup my apple cart with a mac air 16gigs of ram and 2Tb of storage.
Now, I just have to figure out where I will be mid December so that I can place the order.

[Smith1776]

Okay. I'm sold. I've setup my apple cart with a mac air 16gigs of ram and 2Tb of storage.
Now, I just have to figure out where I will be mid December so that I can place the order.

YES. ALL HAIL APPLE SILICON.

[Hal]

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macb ... -late-2020
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks