This thing is mindblowing. If it has half the capability as claimed it’s a game changer and will reinvigorate the entire MacIntosh line up.

Thing is we don’t know that much about their actual performance yet. Time will tell. And it’s only the first one.

A fair review and synopsis here:

I was literally coming to the forum now to start this exact thread. I'm interested in these computers, but their claims seem a bit vague and too good to be true at the moment. Only a couple of days before we get the first hands on reviews though. There also seems to be some concern that Apple have a habit of the first generation being something of an experiment and the second generation being the one that's actually good. I guess that's true for most technology though. I bought an Asus recently that's been nothing but trouble and I'm thinking of trading it in for one of these. But I used Adobe, and it's not gonna be fully supported until next year, so I might hold off for a while and check the reviews first. Luckily, it's not gonna be out in Malaysia until a couple of months after America, so I won't be tempted to splurge loads of cash on a product I know nothing about.

Going back to their roots of being a gated community - nothing to see here, these are not the hype driven chips you want, wait for the clones from the folks who believe in open markets at intel etc

aufbahrung wrote:Going back to their roots of being a gated community - nothing to see here, these are not the hype driven chips you want, wait for the clones from the folks who believe in open markets at intel etc

I’ll wait for comments from people who actually know what the fuck they’re talking about.


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I'm With Stupid wrote:I was literally coming to the forum now to start this exact thread. I'm interested in these computers, but their claims seem a bit vague and too good to be true at the moment. Only a couple of days before we get the first hands on reviews though. There also seems to be some concern that Apple have a habit of the first generation being something of an experiment and the second generation being the one that's actually good. I guess that's true for most technology though. I bought an Asus recently that's been nothing but trouble and I'm thinking of trading it in for one of these. But I used Adobe, and it's not gonna be fully supported until next year, so I might hold off for a while and check the reviews first. Luckily, it's not gonna be out in Malaysia until a couple of months after America, so I won't be tempted to splurge loads of cash on a product I know nothing about.

This isn’t their first rodeo with ARM or developing their own chip though, and they’ve learned a lot when it comes to the iPad and ARM processors. When Jobs mapped out the future of Apple when he became CEO again I’m sure this was the goal they’ve been working toward, Apple hardware top to bottom.


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felltoearth wrote:

I'm With Stupid wrote:I was literally coming to the forum now to start this exact thread. I'm interested in these computers, but their claims seem a bit vague and too good to be true at the moment. Only a couple of days before we get the first hands on reviews though. There also seems to be some concern that Apple have a habit of the first generation being something of an experiment and the second generation being the one that's actually good. I guess that's true for most technology though. I bought an Asus recently that's been nothing but trouble and I'm thinking of trading it in for one of these. But I used Adobe, and it's not gonna be fully supported until next year, so I might hold off for a while and check the reviews first. Luckily, it's not gonna be out in Malaysia until a couple of months after America, so I won't be tempted to splurge loads of cash on a product I know nothing about.

This isn’t their first rodeo with ARM or developing their own chip though, and they’ve learned a lot when it comes to the iPad and ARM processors. When Jobs mapped out the future of Apple when he became CEO again I’m sure this was the goal they’ve been working toward, Apple hardware top to bottom.

Well yeah, but there are still clearly limitations to it. The Macbook Pro only has 2 USB ports, for example, even though their Intel ones have 4. It also currently maxes out at 16GB of RAM, which is fine for most people, but it's not unusual for video and photo editors to upgrade to 32 or even 64GB. But it seems like they're starting at the bottom end of their range and working their way up, so presumably those upgrades will come when they switch their higher end products across.

Memory management on the Mac is different from windows. The video touches in this however it seems to be proprietary anyway.

As for USB ports, I dunno. I barely use one. Everything I have is wireless or cloud based.


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felltoearth wrote:Memory management on the Mac is different from windows. The video touches in this however it seems to be proprietary anyway.

Well it is, but pretty much every serious video or photo editor I've heard of that uses a Macbook upgrades to at least 32GB currently, so it depends on whether it can perform the same tasks just as well with less RAM. I suspect when we see the 16" one switching to the new chips, the maximum RAM will also be upgraded.

felltoearth wrote:As for USB ports, I dunno. I barely use one. Everything I have is wireless or cloud based.

Well again, for people who use these devices for any sort of editing, be it photo, video or music, there's a good chance they're using external hard drives and external monitors too. So with only 2 ports, that's them gone straight away. And most of us are still in a situation where getting photos from the camera to the computer means physically removing an SD card and putting it into a reader (sure in theory most of these cameras are wifi enabled, but they're generally slow and/or unreliable compared to the old-fashioned way). It's not the end of the world, but I suspect professional users will wait a bit for the higher end versions to be moved across. Also because Adobe's software other than Lightroom hasn't been coded for it yet. For me, I only use Lightroom and sometimes a bit of Da Vinci Resolve, so I'd probably be happy with one of these new ones.

aufbahrung wrote:Going back to their roots of being a gated community - nothing to see here, these are not the hype driven chips you want, wait for the clones from the folks who believe in open markets at intel etc

Their bread and butter has always been rooted in tight configuration control. You do know that they are currently running on Intel chips, don't you? Before that, they ran on Motorola chips. They had to move to Intel chips, because they couldn't control the heat from a G5 chip in a laptop. Imagine that, having to re-design your entire product line because of a technical problem a parts supplier can't solve!

There's the real reason for developing their own processor line. They will be able to control all aspects of design, engineering, and production.

I'd expect these new Macs to behave very smartly.

Yeah, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking going on here. It's just that, where there used to be a huge performance advantage for Intel chips, it's been whittled away by ARM ones over time to the extent that the latter are good enough to replace the former in low end applications.

Microsoft already went there with the Surface X, which delivered much better battery life and performance on native apps but has poor performance on legacy Windows apps which need to be emulated. It's had some pushback for not being quite the tradeoff that people were hoping for, but Apple are playing to a somewhat different market so may be able to pull it off a little more seamlessly.

They're not going to transition the high end Macs yet though, so they're not exactly nailing their colours to the mast on this.

I'm With Stupid wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

I'm With Stupid wrote:I was literally coming to the forum now to start this exact thread. I'm interested in these computers, but their claims seem a bit vague and too good to be true at the moment. Only a couple of days before we get the first hands on reviews though. There also seems to be some concern that Apple have a habit of the first generation being something of an experiment and the second generation being the one that's actually good. I guess that's true for most technology though. I bought an Asus recently that's been nothing but trouble and I'm thinking of trading it in for one of these. But I used Adobe, and it's not gonna be fully supported until next year, so I might hold off for a while and check the reviews first. Luckily, it's not gonna be out in Malaysia until a couple of months after America, so I won't be tempted to splurge loads of cash on a product I know nothing about.

This isn’t their first rodeo with ARM or developing their own chip though, and they’ve learned a lot when it comes to the iPad and ARM processors. When Jobs mapped out the future of Apple when he became CEO again I’m sure this was the goal they’ve been working toward, Apple hardware top to bottom.

Well yeah, but there are still clearly limitations to it. The Macbook Pro only has 2 USB ports, for example, even though their Intel ones have 4. It also currently maxes out at 16GB of RAM, which is fine for most people, but it's not unusual for video and photo editors to upgrade to 32 or even 64GB. But it seems like they're starting at the bottom end of their range and working their way up, so presumably those upgrades will come when they switch their higher end products across.

I know that there are video editors who use MacBooks but the serious stuff is done on Mac Pros. Our video editing suite at work runs Mac Pros (I know because I got the bill for them!). But they are turning out broadcast quality motion graphics, which eats processing power like nothing else, so they need really powerful kit. I can't imagine any top end professional video editor being able to work with 16GB of RAM.

The_Metatron wrote:There's the real reason for developing their own processor line. They will be able to control all aspects of design, engineering, and production.

I'd expect these new Macs to behave very smartly.

Well it should hopefully allow them to get more out of specs that might seem fairly ordinary on a PC. I remember when people used to look at the specs of games consoles and compare them unfavourably to some monster gaming PC, and yet somehow both were able to play the same games at roughly the same level. And I've never had a games console suddenly lock me out of a game when I'm halfway through it (personal off-topic bitterness).

Hopefully this won't be a return to the days of incompatibility between Macs and PCs though. I remember back in the day where your Mac-owning friend would hand you a hard drive only to find that it'd formatted in a way that was incompatible with Windows. It seems they're better at that sort of thing nowadays though. I guess it's no different to an iPad in essence and AFAIK they work fine.

Looks promising for video editing, at least on Final Cut Pro.

So I just looked on the Apple Malaysia website today to see if it's available to pre-order here yet and they've bumped the price by over 30% since yesterday. Fuck that. I spoke to the customer service person and they insisted that it's still the old price, but I'm not sure if I believe that, because they didn't seem to know about the price increase on the website. Hopefully it's just a mistake, because I definitely won't be buying one for that price.

ETA: I'm an idiot. Was looking at the Macbook Pro price.

^oops

Mac mini M1 teardown. Look at that logic board!




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Just watched a video where both the Air and Pro struggle to render a long video in FCP without running out of system memory and throwing up an error message, so probably need 16GB if you're editing long-form content on them.

Using native M1 software or x86 via Rosetta?


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felltoearth wrote:Using native M1 software or x86 via Rosetta?


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Final Cut Pro. Apple's own software.



To be fair, no-one's making professional videos with an 8GB machine. The other takeaway from that video is that the Air and Pro have basically the same performance, but the Pro doesn't throttle during heavy tasks. But even when hot, the Air is still faster than most other computers at equivalent tasks. I'm sure there will be other issues as people use them more, but they look really promising so far. Definitely good enough for me, and I have a PC that I could probably sell second hand for the price of the base Air.

I see re 8GB memory.

The point I’m making is that a version pf FCP prior to this release is written for x86 and is emulated on the M1 using Rosetta. Once a version of FCP is available for the M1 (maybe it already is) then we’ll see true performance benchmarks.

Edit: According to this post Apple is showcasing a new version of FCP for the M1 today in a web stream conference

https://www.fcp.co/hardware-and-softwar ... licon-macs


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felltoearth wrote:I see re 8GB memory.

The point I’m making is that a version pf FCP prior to this release is written for x86 and is emulated on the M1 using Rosetta. Once a version of FCP is available for the M1 (maybe it already is) then we’ll see true performance benchmarks.

Edit: According to this post Apple is showcasing a new version of FCP for the M1 today in a web stream conference

https://www.fcp.co/hardware-and-softwar ... licon-macs


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I'm pretty sure they said that FCP was running natively from day one. All of the videos showing it suggest that it's already running natively, not via Rosetta. One also tested Lightroom, and was using Rosetta for that, but not for FCP.

Actually, the Lightroom they were running was Classic too, so I hope that's not an issue, because Classic is the old one that doesn't have all of the latest features. I used to have to use that when I was running a Windows 8 machine because it wouldn't run the CC version.