saarek

titantiger said:

saarek said:

I had planned on buying one of these iMacs, but I have to say I'm massively underwhelmed. £1649 for the model with 512GB SSD and a paltry 8GB of Ram and last years entry level chip.

Real nasty taste in the mouth with the £200 jump from the base model which they deliberately neutered to try and force people into buying the middle model.

I'm with you.  That $1700 model should have 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD in it.  And the entry level one is a joke.  That's the kind of stripped down SKU you'd expect them to sell as an "education version."

8GB of Ram and 256GB of SSD for £600 is daylight robbery, it just insane.

It's such a shame, I'd genuinely planned to buy one but I'm not going to bend over and pay £600 more for the long term solution I was looking for.

cloudguy said:

saarek said:

I hope this isn’t true.

I’m hoping for a true performance king that humiliates AMD & Intel and sets the bar in terms of performance. Primarily GPU based upgrades over the M1 wouldn’t be the big step up in the true “Pro” Macs over the current M1 that I was hoping for.

With all due respect why do you believe that this is even possible? As I have stated numerous times, the idea that ARM is inherently superior to x86 was wishful thinking. If it were true, ARM would have more than 3% of the server market. As I have also stated, most of the benchmarking was skewed: it only compared the M1 to the Intel chips that it replaced in macOS devices. Those were mostly 2 and 4 core "mobile" chips. They were also outdated chips: 9th and 10th gen. There were already 11th gen Intel chips on the market when the M1 Macs were introduced. 

So just because an M1 with 8 cores - granted only 4 of them performance - crushed a 10th gen 2 core mobile CPU doesn't mean that an M1X is going to crush an 11th gen Intel Core i7 or Intel Core i9. Step away from the guys on the "mainstream" tech sites who write all their articles and blog posts on MacBooks and iPad Pros and update Twitter/Facebook/Instagram from their iPhones. Instead go to Anandtech and Ars Technica. Those guys love their MacBooks, iPads and iPhones too but their articles are technical, not "I am going to cheerlead for this product because I use it." Or you can investigate Gordon Mah Ung, the main Windows guy for PC World. On those you will see that the latest Intel chips rival the M1 in single core score, and that the Core i7 and Core i9 beat it handily on multicore score. You will also see that the latest desktop AMD chips beat the M1 in both single core score (slightly) and multicore score (handily). When I tried to point this out to the MacBook Air fans at some of the other tech sites - including one who literally told me that their tech site wasn't going to pay attention Linux because "Linux is hard" !?!? - they would move the goalposts from "power" to "power per watt." One reviewer on that same site stated that the benchmarks that Intel used to defend itself from reviewers like him were flawed because they didn't factor in the better user experience on the M1 Macs. And realize that this particular reviewer is the one assigned by the site to be their main Windows guy! (Meaning machines that he obviously doesn't have any use for outside of being stuck with dealing with them for his job.) But even the main Windows guy at this alleged tech site didn't point out that the M1 Macs were being compared to 9th gen and 10th gen Intel chips with only 2 and 4 cores.

If you are disappointed now, wait until the 12th gen Intel chips come out in September. We have only heard details about 2 so far:

10nm Intel process which is roughly equivalent to an 8nm TSMC process because just as TSMC's foundries achieve better transistor density than Samsung's, Intel's does over TSMC's
14 core chip with 6 performance multithreaded cores and 8 efficiency single threaded cores in a big.LITTLE architecture (for the first time ever with x86, Intel or AMD)
16 core chip with 8 performance multithreaded/8 efficiency single threaded in big.LITTLE

And a couple months later: AMD's Zen 4 chips will come out. They won't have big.LITTLE architecture, but they will be on the same 5nm process as the M1 and M1X from the same foundry. And AMD Zen X performance chips start at 8 performance cores - where Intel's start at 6 - and go up to 16. So yes, in a few months the whole idea of "ARM is better than outdated x86" narrative that were based on terrible comparisons to begin with that never would have been done had they been skewed unfavorably towards Apple will be forgotten and quietly discarded. And we will be back to how Macs have better design, UX/UI, user experience, longevity, support etc. than Wintel. Just like before.