mcdave

MacQuadra840av said:

Finally an article that clearly points out the unfortunate limitations of the M1.  Everyone is so blinded in tunnel vision of 3x performance that they are completely missing out on the fact that the M1 is a low-end base model CPU with less features than the models it replaced.  

It was not long ago that all the commenters were complaining of soldered memory, soldered storage, no upgrades, etc.  All Apple has to do is slap an Apple logo on a pig and the fanatics think it is the best thing in the world.  It wasn't long ago that people were complaining about 16GB RAM in the MacBooks and then they cheered when Apple bumped it up to 32GB and 64GB.  Now suddenly they are all happy that the M1 is capped at 16GB?  Suddenly they are excited that integrated graphics in the M1 are faster than the integrated graphics on the intel Macs, but still much slower than discrete graphics?  WTF?  

Could you imagine if Apple introduced an iMac with only 16GB of RAM (instead of 128GB), 2TB of storage (instead of 8TB), two USB-C (instead of 4 USB/2 Thunderbolt), and integrated graphics driving a 27+" 5K display?  It would be a joke!  Or a Mac Pro with those specs?  Suddenly people think a 16GB M1 can do anything?  Not when you throw a huge graphics file at it.  Let's not forget about the excessive read/writes that is occurring in the M1 Macs, wearing out the flash storage prematurely.

cloudguy said:

Are you kidding me? You believe that these developers should make native M1 Mac ports their #1 priority when these Macs are like 0.5% of the market at best?

Priority list:
iOS apps (2 billion devices)
Windows apps (1 billion devices)
Intel macOS apps (hundreds of millions of devices)
Android apps (3 billion devices)
ChromeOS platform support (according to the latest Statcounter have 2% market share, Google claims that they are almost 5%)
M1 macOS apps (maybe 5 million devices)

I am dead serious here. Apple sold 6.8 million Macs in 4Q 2020. 
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/11/mac-shipments-up-4q-2020-gartner/

M1 Macs were only available less than half that time, plus people and especially enterprises didn't stop buying Intel Macs either. Add in 1Q 2021 and that is 5-6 million people that have bought M1 MacBook Air, Mac Mini and 13' MBPs. And as these machines are limited to 16 GB of RAM, 2 displays and - the point of this article - has software compatibility/availability issues the early adopters are either people using the M1 Mac as a secondary machine (to their Intel Mac or their iPad Pro) or were entry level device types who relied mostly on first party software and web/browser stuff anyway. 

Honestly, what do you believe the job of a software company should be anyway? To make a platform offered by a $2 trillion company look good by shrinking their "not available on M1" list? Or to make money to pay their employees, pay the bills and stay in business by creating software that people will buy? If you realize that the LATTER is the case then it is in the interests of these companies to prioritize development projects that will actually make enough money to justify the coding effort. Right now the tiny subset of the 5 million M1 Mac users won't do it. 

Next year? Sure. Apple will have transitioned all of their lineup except maybe the 26 core Xeon Mac Pro to M1 by then, and the M1 Mac user base will be 20-25 million. Also, despite your "they had the developer kit and 5 months to buy an M1 Mac!" ... er, no. Large outfits with tens of thousands of programmers like Dropbox, Google, Amazon, Adobe etc. didn't get the developer kit, OK? Those went out to small developers. The bigger software companies are probably still in the process of acquiring M1 Macs to armies of developers that need to port huge software packages with millions of lines of code over. Who knows if they've added these devices to their enterprise acquisitions yet. (I bet most companies haven't.) 

Yes, Apple got this done ... but Apple makes several hundred bucks on each M1 Mac sold. They've probably cleared $1 billion in revenue from the M1 Mac line already assuming a margin of $200 per device. But this does not mean that there is much revenue in this yet for the companies that make the software.

cloudguy said:

Also - and I have mentioned this in the past - the Intel Core i5 in the MBP is a quad core chip. Comparing it to the octacore Apple M1 chip is apples versus oranges (pun not intended).

ppietra said:

so, 18% improvement in single core, 27% improvement in multicore! Seems like a bit better than people were led to believe.

What isn’t mentioned is the 70% improvement in Geekbench compute metal score. That is way over what was expected

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/compute/1581541