Thanks. I don’t think in Markdown so I was editing the font, not the layout.
As always, I appreciate good editor.
Jim
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I will admit that it threw me for a few seconds as well, since I was expect that you’d somehow put a # sign in, which Markdown uses for headings as well. But once I saw the characters around where the bold formatting started in the preview, it made sense.
TidBITS Talk: The best formatted discussion group on the Internet!
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Thanks for the hint. I usually put spaces between dashes when I want to create a separation:
Which, in Discourse, appears to create a horizontal line across the entire message (see above).
Putting a lot of spaces between the dashes does the same thing:
If I prefix the dashes with a backslash, then I get actual dashes:
-—
- - - - -
The joys of using a system that tries to combine pieces of several partly-incompatible formatting systems (Markdown, BB-Code and HTML). 
Thanks for the follow-up. Sometimes I wonder if I should get an Apple Card, but between the infrequent Apple spend, the opportunity cost, and the bother of having another card, I haven’t.
Well, it’ll require less memory since things like GPU processing are done using unified memory - unlike the old high performance model where GPU requests were packaged up, compressed, and sent out over PCIe to a graphics coprocessor.
But memory is memory, and it’s still macOS. A lot of the performance you see even when the system is under stress can be credited to fast swap and/or demand paging.
This means that under stress M1 systems are using fast access to the SSD, and that means writes. And nothing can age your SSD more than a high quantity of writes for paging or swap. If I were buying an M1 system, I’d go for 16 GB and at least a moderate large SSD (which would tend to supply more spare frames).
Really I think most people are looking at these first Apple Silicon Macs wrong - these aren’t Apple’s powerhouse machines: they’re simply the annual spec bump of the lowest end Apple computers with DCI-P3 displays, Wifi 6, and the new Apple Silicon M1 SoC.
They have the same limitations as the machines they replace - 16 GB RAM and two Thunderbolt ports.
These are the machines you give to a student or teacher or a lawyer or an accountant or a work-at-home information worker - folks who need a decently performing machine who don’t want to lug around a huge powerhouse machine (or pay for one for that matter). They’re still marketed at the same market segment, though they now have a vastly expanded compute power envelope.
The real powerhouses will probably come next year with the M1x (or whatever). Apple has yet to decide on an external memory interconnect and multichannel PCIe scheme, if they decide to move in that direction.
Other CPU and GPU vendors and OEM computer makers take notice - your businesses are now on limited life support. These new Apple Silicon models can compete up through the mid-high tier of computer purchases, and if as I expect Apple sells a ton of these many will be to your bread and butter customers.
In fact, I suspect that Apple - once they recover their R&D costs - will be pushing the prices of these machines lower while still maintaining their margins - while competing computer makers will still have to pay Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and nVidea for their expensive processors, whereas Apple’s cost per SoC goes down the more they manufacture. Competing computer makers may soon be squeezed by Apple Silicon price/performance on one side and high component prices on the other. Expect them to be demanding lower processor prices from the above manufacturers so they can more readily compete, and processor manufacturers may have to comply because if OEM computer manufacturers go under or stop making competing models, the processor makers will see a diminishing customer base.
I believe the biggest costs for a chip fab are startup costs - no matter what processor vendors would like you to believe. Design and fab startup are expensive - but once you start getting decent yields, the additional costs are silicon wafers and QA. The more of these units Apple can move, the lower the per unit cost and the better the profits.
So … who should buy these M1 Macs?
If you’re in the target demographic - the student, teacher, lawyer, accountant, or work-at-home information worker - this is the Mac for you.
If you’re a heavy computer user like a creative and don’t simply want a light and cheap computer with some additional video and sound editing capability for use on the go - I’d wait for the M1x (or whatever) next year. You’ll probably kick yourself next year when the machines targeted at you finally appear.
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I’m not sure about that. Most pros understand that these are limited machines and will be eclipsed next year with newer models. The non-pros will be getting a great machine that will meet their needs for years to come.
But the fact is that regardless of their “low-end” nature, the $999 M1 Air is faster than the $3500 16" MBP with 8-core i9 – that’s huge. If you need that kind of speed now, or need an M1 for development, and you can live with the other limitations of these machines, they’re a great bargain.
If not, wait for the next model.
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True, but if you do it be very careful to insure that the drivers for your devices, plugins, editing tools, and libraries are available - which I assume they would be by the time M1x is released.
As a supplemental machine - Sure, go for it. For a production machine, make sure it handles all your workflows before tossing or trading in that old beast you’ve become sick of.
Me? I’m riding out the transition on a 2020 iMac 5k, Radeon Pro 5700 XT, 4 TB SSD, 10 gb ethernet, 128 GB OEM RAM and a late 2019 16" MacBook Pro similarly but less heroically speced. I’ll sit on these machines waiting for all you gracious early adopters to find and fix all the bumps in the road. I’ve already installed a Windows 10 2004 boot camp - maybe I’ll play a few Windows games while I’m waiting.
I’m pretty sure M1 will outperform my 5K at a lot of tasks, and M1x will probably blow it away, but for right now I’m pretty comfortable and am fairly sure I’m not trashing SSD frames with swap and demand paging writes, and am pretty sure these machines will last as long as I want them to, and am also pretty sure Apple will support them far longer than they did PPC machines in the last transition.
After all, Apple is a lot more prosperous company than they were in the last transition, and they’ve got all those enterprise customers they want to keep happy who have old legacy x86/x64 software they need to run, and those users who bought those ultra-expensive Mac Pros.
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I think that’s so obvious it goes without saying. 
Even beyond the radical M1, Big Sur is too new for a production machine.
I’m using my M1 Air as a lightweight writing machine (where I have no need for extra ports, screens, etc.). I’ve still got plenty of Intel Macs for “real work” – though with the M1 so fast, I’m already finding it very useful for certain tasks.
I’m mainly delighting in just how much fun it is just because it’s so spritely. It seems like that shouldn’t make that much of a difference, but it does. Native apps launch from zero as fast as I can switch to an already-running app on an Intel Mac.
Just something as simple as instant wake from sleep is a huge improvement. I had never even noticed, but I was previously in the habit of waking my MBP up just before doing some other short task (like taking a sip of tea) so I’m not just sitting there waiting the 5-10 seconds for it to fully wake. With the M1, I can literally be typing within a second of opening the lid (and that includes TouchID authentication). For a writer, that’s inspiring as there’s no delay between thought and writing it down.
It’s definitely already changing my workflow. I can’t wait to see what it’s like a year from now.
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FYI, iFixit seems to have confirmed this assumption. On the M1 systems, the RAM is stored in two distinct chips. Part of the M1’s package, but separate from the processor die.
(Scroll down about halfway to get to the part about the M1).
And they point out that this isn’t new to the M1. Apple did the same thing on the 11" iPad Pro’s A12X SoC:
So, RAM will not be user-replaceable, but it seems that Apple should be able to sell M1’s with more RAM in the future and someone with sufficient microsoldering skills (in this case, meaning possible, but not something many repair shops will be able to pull off successfully) could replace faulty RAM.
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Jason Snell just posted a link to this article, which explains at a lower level why the M1 gets such good performance and why Intel and AMD may never be able to catch up.
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Remember the PowerBook G3 steamroller ad?
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It was another great Apple ad from back in the days when “Intel inside” was plastered across every Windows PC and it was included, along with their “ding dong,” in just about every PC broadcast and print ad. Back in those days, ads for PCs ran more frequently than beer commercials. Once again, Steve Jobs was the only CEO who would take Intel on, even with a comparatively tiny ad budget:
I also loved the “Burning Bunny” Power Mac ad in the series:
Their next set of ads can be a series of ever lengthening “OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoO…”s.
Very interesting post Adam, the mystery got lifted a bit there.
Yeah, I’m retired now so I don’t have to make the daily trudge to an office hostile to Apple hardware - though towards the end I did get an iMac for my desktop.
I got my 16" MacBook Pro in 2019 for a holiday trip to New Orleans when I realized that my 2011 17" wasn’t going to cut it since its fastest current interconnect was ethernet or USB 2. Gone were the days when the Expresscard/34 was still getting support, and Thunderbolt 1 devices are few and far between (and really really old). The hardware on the 17" still worked, and it still had some pretty speedy interconnects, but the world had moved on. The 16" would’ve been a great machine to take to work though.
After Apple stopped making 17" laptops, I moved on to iMac 5Ks. My 2014 was glorious, and when my 2014 needed a new hard disk and lord knows what else in late 2018 and still no core-i9 model with better graphics was showing up, I needed something to take over as my primary when the 2014 went into the shop. So that that point, I ordered a 2017 which really wasn’t much better than the 2014. Naturally, a couple of months later Apple dropped the 2019 with a core-i9 and much better graphics. Thanks Intel.
When the 2020 came out I had to have it - the SSDs were bigger and capable of replacing my 3 TB fusion drive and were now affordable by a mere mortal (well, just barely), I could still stick in my own memory (though my 128 GB of OWC memory has had to be replaced), and this thing could boot camp and the all my old software should still run (though I hadn’t counted on abandonware and Big Sur). I didn’t think the 5K replacement would come until much later in the transition - at least a year into it.
But yeah, that Firestorm core is really impressive with it’s eight wide processor, massive reorder buffer, and 690 instruction execution queue. AMD can push ahead a bit by boosting clocks, but if that’s their strategy going forward they’re going to join Intel running into Moore’s Wall.
Who’d a thunk they could take what is essentially a 5nm A14Z, boost the clocks to 3.2 ghz, and get these results? Makes me shudder when I think what M1x will do with 8 Firestorm cores. Also make me glad I don’t own any Wintel alliance stocks, though God knows what my mutual funds are doing - too bad you can’t micromanage those things.
So … enjoy your new computer - it’s just going to get better as more things go native. I’m a bit jealous - though truth to tell not as jealous as I was over that 2019 iMac 5K. At least for this I had no solid idea how well the M1 would do - whereas I knew exactly what the 2019 would be.
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I did get the 2019 with the i9 and Radeon Pro Vega 48 last year and it will serve me another five or more years. While probably still just above the M1 I am all too aware that the next chip version will comfortably exceed it.
I keep wondering what kind of conversations are they having at Dell/Lenovo/etc… when the M1 macs are raised. “So this is their entry level first offering…”
I’ll bet that right now they are frantically ramping production up in overdrive to get competitive ARM Windows boxes out the door to put the kabosh on reviews such as this:
Their current ARM boxes don’t come remotely close to the new Mac speed and power consumption levels, and Windows software developers weren’t exactly interested in optimizing software, or building new stuff, for them. I don’t remember reading anything about Windows ARM smoking any of their other devices in terms of speed or battery life, which didn’t exactly give Windows users a reason to pay more to upgrade their stuff. Nothing about super cool fanless, ultra lightweight models either. So they haven’t delivered any “we’re best of the class” reasons for their Windows users to upgrade or for Mac users to switch to Windows, though some of them they have been selling ARM for a while now.
And I don’t remember any of the Windows box builders saying anything about developing their own chips that will do new or better than what Intel has cranking out. Samsung and others do have the capacity to do so. So it’s the same guys building the same stuff that’s not very differentiated from one another, except maybe by price.
The Windows box manufacturers really dropped the ball here. If they had incentivized MS and app makers to develop ARM stuff so they could give buyers a reason to upgrade, they would probably have responded. Apple was very vocal about their reasons for dumping Intel and rolling their own chips, and about how they were developing their own software, and emphasizing that they would work with any other software companies to facilitate ARM upgrades and new products for Macs. It’s a good example of how a very focused hardware/software/services company can move quickly and efficiently to develop new chips that enable them to release a new wave of best in class products.
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They didn’t do this quickly. It took years of processor and system-on-a-chip design work to get here.
Creating another Windows ARM computer won’t make it remotely comparable to what Apple has released in terms of speed, battery life and fanless design, and the previous paragraph explains why. The reason nobody was really interested in Windows on ARM wasn’t really the lack of software as much as the fact that it was not performant.
I think you’re going to be disappointed. Just make sure you never go anywhere near an Apple Silicon machine during that time or the comparison will crush you.
One year ago I bought a decked out MBP 16” with i9 and the works. Now my $999 M1 Air is faster even running Intel software via Rosetta. Blew my mind.
Here’s a simple benchmark I did. I used the Finder’s built-in Compress command to create a zip file of a 2.5GB folder. This took 1m5s on the M1. Seemed like forever. Surely the 8-core i9 would be way faster, right? It took 1m20s on the MBP! I couldn’t believe it.
Yes, there are some things where the i9 wins: heavy multi-core situations and heavy GPU, both for extended lengths where the fanless Air has to throttle. Those are things I hardly ever do. For my day-to-day tasks, the Air is way faster — and guess what? It’s more fun to use. The way apps launch instantly is a game-changer. I don’t keep apps loaded any more — I just launch them when I need them.
In every metric — speed, heat, battery life, weight — the Air is better than the MBP. The only thing is has better is the bigger screen. In other words, the Air M1 has ruined every other Mac I own. 
I can tell you exactly how they are going to react: denial. They’re going to pretend the M1 doesn’t exist, that the benchmarks are a lie, that the differences are not so big, and mostly that their customers want windows and would never consider another OS just because it’s faster.
Their lunch is going to get eaten. Maybe not overnight, but over the next two years. Just watch.
I’m afraid this is true.
@tommy, you can always sell off your ‘old’ Intel Mac and use that money towards a new AS iMac once they come out. Somebody is bound to be looking for a powerful Intel Mac because they absolutely need Bootcamp or similar.
I know that’s what I’m doing with my fully decked out 2020 13" MBP as soon as the high-end 13" MBP goes AS (fingers crossed for thinner bezels and 14" display). I was initially on the fence about this. Lots of my work has to do with compiling obscure specialized code originally written for x86 Linux (how does machine translating F77 to C sound to you guys?). But with this dramatic leap in performance, much better power usage, and the fact that even emulated things run faster, I was sold. In my little world, Intel is done.
Ugh, they will say that anybody doing ‘serious work’ needs some obscure Excel function or macro that only exists on the Win version and without Bootcamp and Parallels the M1s will be doomed from the start. Typical Apple failure. Bla bla yada yada.
Remember the Palm guy that said they had been working on phones for years and the PC guys weren’t just going to swoop in and take over? Yeah, those PCs guys sure weren’t going to.
What I’d really like to hear is what Dell/Lenovo/HP conversations with Intel are like these days. 
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